Complaint
A listener complained the presenter of this programme made an inaccurate and misleading claim during a discussion about take-up of vaccines against Covid-19. Responding to a challenge, the presenter said he had interviewed the “three top people” involved in the Great Barrington Declaration (an open letter published during the pandemic which argued for “focused protection” against Covid instead of lock-downs) a number of times, including on Talkback. In fact, as already conceded, Mr Crawley had interviewed senior signatories, rather than the authors themselves. The ECU considered whether the programme met the BBC’s Accuracy Guidelines.
Outcome
Although BBC Northern Ireland had accepted that the remark could have been phrased differently, the ECU did not consider it inaccurate in a way which would have materially misled listeners. The presenter was responding to the suggestion that critics of the Government’s policies over lockdown had been ignored by Radio Ulster, and the point of his response (that critics of those policies had appeared on air and put forward their positions) was unaffected by the element of inexactness.
Not Upheld
