Complaint
A listener complained that a question put by the presenter to an interviewee misrepresented the position of Pat Cullen, the General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, in relation to the Government’s most recent offer on nurses’ pay. The ECU considered the complaint in the light of the BBC’s editorial standards of accuracy.
Outcome
The question was “Is it a fair and reasonable offer? I mean Simon Clarke is right, Pat Cullen herself thought it was, recommended it and it was a sort of narrow majority that voted and rejected the deal. Do you think it’s fair?”. As Ms Cullen had recommended to her members as the best offer the Government was likely to make, and had not described it as either fair or reasonable, the ECU agreed that the terms of the question had given a somewhat misleading impression. However, as BBC News had already made a posting to that effect on the Corrections and Clarifications page of bbc.co.uk, the ECU considered the issue of complaint to have been resolved.
Resolved