Last month your correspondent filed a complaint to the BBC. It was about how the BBC appeared to have predetermined Nigel Farage’s guilt over his “failure” to declare donations in an item of Radio 4’s World At One.
The BBC sent out a fatuous, and probably AI-generated, response refusing to accept that using the word “failure” amounted to misrepresenting Farage’s actions prior to the Parliamentary Commissioner’s decision, replete with a banal citation of the dictionary definition of “failure”.
Your correspondent therefore filed a complaint about the response to the complaint. This was the BBC’s reply:
Thanks for getting back in touch. We are sorry the previous response you received did not address your concerns properly.
We have discussed your complaint with the editorial team in Radio News. They recognise it would have been more appropriate not to have used the world “failure” and to have said instead that Farage was ‘under investigation for not declaring’ the gift.
The wording of the script should have been better, but please be assured there was no intent of bias.
Thank you for taking the time to raise this matter.
A victory then, of sorts. However, the claimed “no intent of bias” masks the fact that it would only have been possible to write the original script if the journalist concerned was operating from the position of assuming Farage is guilty, regardless of the Parliamentary Commissioner’s ongoing investigation.
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Any trained journalist would know not to do what the BBC did. Alas, with the collapse of local newspapers journalists no longer get proper training in the key qualities of accuracy and impartiality. I doubt the BBC even recognise thry exist.
And still the investigation goes on!
Just what are they investigating? He doesn’t deny either the timing or the amount involved, and said he sought advice over what he did.
The only question is whether the advice was wrong or not.
I understand the question is whether he was an active politician at the time. He says he had stepped back from active politics; his opponents claim he was President of Reform and ipso facto active.
On this narrow, technical and subjective point hangs the entire case against him.
We can imagine how promptly and firmly such a question would be decided in the case of a Labour figure.