Complaint
The programme included an interview with a representative of the Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce about the potential impact on the area of the Government’s proposal to award new licences to extract oil and gas from the North Sea.
A listener questioned whether the item was genuinely newsworthy, rather than a reflection of “a calculated industry agenda” with the BBC being used “as a conduit for policies that serve a narrow sector at the expense of the common good”. He complained that the interviewee’s contribution, which was in favour of the proposal, “was not balanced by expert or opposing views”, and that listeners would have been misled by what the interviewee presented as beneficial effects of new extraction. The ECU considered the complaint in the light of the BBC’s editorial standards of impartiality and accuracy.
Outcome
The BBC’s guidelines on impartiality recognise that programme-makers are entitled to produce content about any subject at any point on the spectrum of debate so long as there is a sound editorial reason for doing so. In this instance, the General Secretary of the GMB union’s public statement that Labour’s opposition to the Government’s proposal would be “bad for jobs” and “bad for the environment” provided ample editorial reason for exploring the potential impact of the proposal on the region most directly affected.
As to balancing the interviewee’s views, the ECU noted that it was not a requirement of impartiality that proponents of one viewpoint in a controversial matter should on every occasion be balanced by contributions from other viewpoints, but that it was nonetheless incumbent on the programme-makers to ensure that other viewpoints were appropriately reflected. In this instance, the interviewee was not challenged in a way which would have made listeners sufficiently aware of other viewpoints, and this aspect of the complaint was upheld.
As to accuracy, the ECU recognised that some of the interviewee’s statements could have been contested, but judged that listeners in general would have regarded him as an advocate on behalf of employers and workers in his region rather than a disinterested authority on the issue, and would have evaluated his contribution accordingly. The fault in the item lay not in what he said but in the extent to which it was left unchallenged by reference to alternative viewpoints.
Partly upheld