I’m Worried About BBC News

Since the Cost of Living Crisis began, the BBC News Website has utilised a standard format on a regular basis. In order to illustrate the issues facing the country, every national news story like inflation or rising interest rates has been accompanied by a human interest piece - usually one or more case studies of how the story is impacting normal people.

Today was a prime example:

“Poor guy” you understandably think as you read the story of how the rail strikes mean that he won’t be able to make the journey between Doncaster and Derby to see his autistic son over Christmas. The real human cost of the strikes.

The problem was the story was bollocks.

As people on social media were quick to point out, you could get a bus on the 27th (his date of travel) not as convenient, with changes but the journey is possible¹. More importantly other parts of the story didn’t pass the smell test, his claim he now wouldn’t see his son until the middle of January for example, or the complete silence over the fact his date was the 27th … when the trains are actually running.

The story has now been updated with a slightly meek admission that they’ve removed him as an example, as the strikes don’t impact his journey. Oops.

So a clear case of the establishment BBC spouting right-wing propaganda? Maybe, but this isn’t the first time that a BBC case study story collapsed under scrutiny.

Back in August the BBC ran a story about the rise in bank of England base  interest rate with a headline “'Interest rates rise means I owe £250 a month more on loans'. Gosh, £3,000 a year! Poor guy, as the rate rise was 0.5%, he must owe quite a load of money and all of it exposed to changes in interest rates, but the story continued:

"I have personal loans and credit cards totalling £25,000 so any increase will be hugely noticeable. I have worked out that I will conservatively need to pay another £250 a month to keep up with the debts"

For those of you who passed GCSE Maths, you will notice that 0.5% of £25k isn't £3k, and inevitably, the story was updated to say that he owed an extra £250 a year, not a month. A mistake that could have been avoided if the reporter had picked up a calculator, was published to the most popular news website in the UK, completely exaggerating the impact of the rise in rates.

Those two examples are just the most high profile, there are plenty of others. A food bank volunteer claimed  people in Cardiff are 'eating pet food' because of the cost of living crisis. Except a tin of pet food is much more expensive than the cheapest junk foods, both per gram and per calorie (baked beans in Tesco are about 30p, dog food is not). 

Don’t get me wrong, the man is trying to communicate the searing poverty he is dealing with on a day to day basis; if he needs a bit of hyperbole to get that message across then good on him. But the BBC’s job isn’t to repeat whatever compelling story a talking head gives it.

Then there’s the slightly bizarre stories the BBC has been publishing. On the 30th of November, they published a case study story about the impact of railway cancellations, the main subject being a young girl travelling from Chester to Urmston.²

The issue was, her route was Chester to Urmston via Warington Bank Quay. I happen to know that train line a bit, and my immediate thought was “Why doesn’t she go via Manchester Oxford Road?”. So I looked it up - the trains are more regular, and the trip is  slightly quicker. She’s making her own life a bit harder, so maybe someone could tell her to try altering her route rather than the state broadcaster publishing her story, again without a second of checking if it makes sense.

All this adds up to one conclusion, the BBC website is not following some basic journalistic practices when putting these “case study” stories together, and it is leading to three big problems.

Firstly, taking the subjects of the stories at face value, you are exposing normal people to mockery on the largest scale possible - this is extremely embarrassing and upsetting for them, when their only crime is being bad at multiplication or understanding train timetables. You’d hope journalists take their duty of care seriously.

Secondly, it absolutely craters the faith people have in the rest of the BBC website’s output. If the BBC can’t check basic facts in these stories, why should we believe it on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Or the covid vaccine? I have to say, this initiative is a little embarrassing in this context. When you’ve hired a specialist “disinformation journalist” you don’t really want to be a potential legitimate subject. 

Finally, and to me most importantly, everything above are shitty examples of real problems. The lack of growth in our economy has led to poverty, and  people really do need to use food banks, choose between eating or heating and end up eating crappy meals when they shouldn’t have to.

Our poor infrastructure means that public transport is unreliable, in fact I wrote part of this newsletter on a train I should have been on yesterday, but was cancelled delaying my trip by a day. This has an impact on real people; relatives missed, work lost, and a general feeling things are going in the wrong way.

And the strikes are inconvenient, they will ruin people's Christmases, they’re supposed to, that’s what strikes are for! Whether you agree with strikes or not, take the centrist view, people will be impacted.

By using bad examples which can be hand waved, the BBC is encouraging us to not take these problems seriously. If every problem can be dismissed as an exaggeration, or even as a lie, we will get the outcome of fake news, a lack of trust in society, and we’ll get it from the state broadcaster.

The BBC urgently needs to increase the editorial oversight of these stories, if not just drop the format altogether, if not it is just another example of a once great British institution  that is rotting from the inside out.

1. Originally this said there was a direct bus, which I’ve learned isn’t the case thanks to James West on Twitter; a case of me not checking my facts

2. I’m not linking to it, I haven’t got the heart to mock her because she's young and seems nice