BBC defends ‘hyperbolic coverage’ of cuts after chancellor’s criticism 4 Dec 2014: George Osborne tells John Humphrys on Radio 4’s Today that BBC reports are rewind of 2010 cutbacks coverage that wrongly predicted return to ‘George Orwell’ world
4 Dec 2014:
George Osborne tells John Humphrys on Radio 4’s Today that BBC
reports are rewind of 2010 cutbacks coverage that wrongly predicted
return to ‘George Orwell’ world
BBC defends ‘hyperbolic coverage’ of cuts after chancellor’s criticism
George Osborne tells John Humphrys on Radio 4’s Today that BBC reports
are rewind of 2010 cutbacks coverage that wrongly predicted return to
‘George Orwell’ world
John Humphrys in the Today studio. George Osborne told the presenter
that 1930s comparisons with his budget were 'nonsense'. Photograph: Jeff
Overs/BBC/Getty
The BBC has played down the significance of a row with Conservatives after George Osborne accused it of “hyperbolic coverage” of government spending cuts during a Today programme interview. John Humphrys,
the Today presenter who interviewed Osborne on Thursday morning for the
Radio 4 programme, later told the Guardian the chancellor’s comments
were “obviously a joke”.
Humphrys added: “But politicians tend to lose their sense of humour the closer it gets to a general election.”
The chancellor was apparently angry about an earlier Today interview
between Humphrys and Norman Smith, during which BBC assistant political
editor Smith said of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report: “When you sit down and read the OBR report it reads like a book of doom. It is utterly terrifying.”
Smith said that public spending would “have to be hacked back to the
levels of the 1930s in terms of as a proportion of GDP and that is an
extraordinary concept”.
He added: “You’re back to the land of The Road to Wigan Pier,” a
reference to George Orwell’s bleak 1930s book of poverty in the north of
England.
This prompted Osborne to tell Humphrys that when he listened to
Smith’s comments it was like “listening to a rewind of a tape of 2010
with BBC correspondents saying Britain is returning to a sort of George Orwell world”, which was “such nonsense”.
“I would have thought the BBC would have learnt from the last four
years that its totally hyperbolic coverage of spending cuts has not been
matched by what has actually happened,” Osborne said. “What I reject is
the totally hyperbolic BBC coverage on spending cuts. I had all that
when I was interviewed four years ago, and has the world fallen in? No,
it has not.”
Advertisement
It
is understood that no one from the government’s communications team
contacted the Today production team directly about Smith’s comments,
although in the daily briefing with lobby journalists later in the
morning a spokesman for the prime minister said David Cameron agreed
with Osborne’s comments.
A BBC spokesperson said: “We’re satisfied our coverage and analysis
has been fair and balanced, and we gave the chancellor plenty of
opportunity to respond on the programme. We will continue to ask
ministers the questions our audience want answered.”
The government’s director of communications, Craig Oliver, has
previously had an argument with Smith outside No 10 Downing Street in
2012 that was captured on camera, in which he accused Smith of bias over coverage of the Leveson inquiry into press ethics. In December 2012 Oliver texted several BBC News executives to complain about a Today interview between Osborne and Evan Davis, then a presenter on the Radio 4 show, about his autumn statement that year.
Oliver was understood to have been called back by an unnamed BBC
executive who acknowledged that the interview “could have been better
handled”, after he complained about Davis’s repeated interruptions. The
BBC said that it had responded informally to Oliver, that it had
“reviewed the interview” and that there was “no question of any kind of
reprimand” for Davis.
Davis, responding to a suggestion from Tom Newton Dunn, the Sun’s
political editor, that he had been “told off”, tweeted that was not the
case: “There is some confusion around just now, but just to clarify: I
have not been told off for the way I interviewed the chancellor today.”
copy http://www.theguardian.com
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário