A BBC News presenter has been upbraided for rolling her eyes while reading the phrase “pregnant people” from a teleprompter, correcting it to “women”, the broadcaster ruling she broke impartiality rules.
BBC News presenter Martine Croxall has had a complaint against her about her delivery of a news report in June of this year on health precautions to be taken during a heatwave. Offered up the phrase “pregnant people” in the script on her teleprompter, Croxall was observed to give a glance of frustration with the eyes before correcting to say “women”. She said: “the aged, pregnant people — women — and those with pre-existing health conditions need to take precautions.”
While her bosses inside the broadcaster were reportedly “intensely relaxed” about this moment and intended to take no further action, the language generated 20 complaints from the public which were assessed by the BBC’s internal Executive Complaints Unit (ECU), which has now decided to rule against her. The presenter is consequently to be censured.
The ECU said it found not only the act itself, but the fact Croxall had received congratulations from other members of the public for daring to say what some might think of as being the obvious was the proof that she had indeed expressed a “controversial view about trans people”. The body said those who had made complaints said they interpreted Croxall’s facial expression as “showing disgust, ridicule, contempt or exasperation.”
Graham Linehan, a comedian who has pursued aggressively by critics and harassed by police including being arrested at an airport over his views on transgenderism called the ruling “absolute astonishing”.
The ECU finding comes at a time of high reputational risk for British state broadcaster the BBC, following the leak of a suppressed internal dossier by its own ethics advisor which criticised it for materially misleading viewers with aggressively edited clips of a Donald Trump speech. The “mangled” footage make it appear that the President was going to go to the Capitol building with supporters on January 6th to “fight like hell”, when he actually told supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.
This scandal has intensified with other revelations of internal criticism for bias, including over programming on the Israel-Gaza war. In one stand-out incident, the BBC’s ‘Verify’ unit — the centre of its present bid to establish the corporation as the ultimate arbiter of truth in the United Kingdom with a world-class fact-checking body — was found to have been forced to delete a whole article on racism after it was found to make “thoroughly wrong” allegations. The internal standards advisor called it “ill-researched”, something of a fatal blow for a body specifically established to fight “disinformation”.
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