BBC 'impartiality' – Obama's inauguration speech 'misrecorded'
The BBC has been accused of inserting one part of Barack Obama’s Inauguration Speech into an earlier paragraph in order to strengthen its credentials on global warming. The broadcast by BBC Newsnight’s science editor Susan Watts, has caused outrage on her blog and brought back memories of the ‘Crowngate’ row in 2007, where a documentary about the Queen was edited to make it look as if she had walked outof a photo session with photographer Annie Leibovitz.
At the start of the report, the following audio recording of Obama’s inauguration speech was played: “We will restore science to its rightful place, roll back the spectre of a warming planet. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” However, the phrase “roll back the spectre of a warming planet” came from a different paragraph several minutes earlier and was inserted into a passage replacing the words “wield technology’s wonders to raise healthcare’s quality and lower its cost“.
After the broadcast, there were a number of complaints on Ms Watts’ BBC blog. The first to report the error there wrote:
“Performing ‘dodgy dossier’ antics worthy of Alistair Campbell on a speech heard by a third of the world is pretty stupid, as well as undermining the integrity of the BBC. A complete and very rapid apology is needed…”
The Newsnight editor Peter Rippon wrote on the blog:
“We did edit sections of the speech to reflect the elements in it that referred to Science. The aim was to give people an impression or montage of what Obama said about science in his inauguration speech. This was signposted to audiences with fades between each point. It in no way altered the meaning or misrepresented what the President was saying.“
Now I know that the blog that originally reported the Newsnight splicing isn’t well inclined towards green energy and that the Telegraph isn’t a big fan of the theory of global warming, but it was still a pretty stupid thing for the BBC to do, with a speech heard by a large number of people across the UK and the world, particularly when it is trying to reassert its impartiality.
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