Way back in the halcyon days of April (9th), I had occasion to write to the BBC with a complaint. It concerned an item on one of Radio 4’s most important news and current affairs programmes, PM.

Here is what I wrote:

Incorrect statistic given by expert 

During the item on government reducing red tape on installing chargers, the expert ?Ginnie? ?Buckley? (couldn’t quite hear) wheeled out her killer stat: that there were more chargers in Westminster, than in Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield combined. She said it was shocking. Evan Davies agreed it was indeed shocking.

The trouble is, it isn’t true. The latest data are available at gov.uk and they show that the total public chargers across the five named cities is 3329. Those at Westminster number 2875. The difference is 454 in favour of the five cities. (No, I did not know the numbers. I smelled a rat, and looked them up here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/electric-vehicle-charging-infrastructure-statistics-data-tables-evci – go to table EVCI0102.)

Your listeners have been given a quite wrong impression. Evan was too credulous, and the expert was no expert, despite claiming to be obsessed by the statistics. 

The reason I felt compelled to complain was that Evan Davies and Ginny Buckley had a good old chortle about how shocking her stat was, when it was perfectly natural for this listener to smell not only a rat, but a plaguey scabrid rat the size of a Labrador. It took me a few minutes to pull up the numbers and check them, and to find out that the rat was real.

No doubt the BBC were in a hurry to correct the record? After all, I had alerted them to the issue on the very day it was aired. Well, they came back relatively quickly at least (14th April):

Dear Jit,

Thank you for contacting us about PM broadcast 9 April on BBC Radio 4.

In this edition, Evan Davis spoke to the Editor-in-Chief and founder of electrifying.com, Ginny Buckley to gather an insight into the government cutting EV charging red tape to speed up public network rollout.

We acknowledge some listeners may disagree with aspects of this interview but in a fast-flowing situation we cannot cross-check everything that is said by Ginny Buckley during the programme.

BBC News has been reporting on EV charging points which you can read here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cljev49lzr4t

We very much value your feedback. Complaints are sent to senior management, and we’ve included your points in our overnight reports. These reports are among the most widely read sources of feedback in the BBC. This ensures that your concerns have been seen by the right people quickly and helps to inform decisions about current and future content.

Blah blah blah…

BBC Complaints Team

Well, that was of course not remotely acceptable as a response. So, I pinged back on 3rd May with (you’ll have to forgive the inelegant presentation, as a plain text box was all that is available):

Unresponsive response to my original

In your response to my complaint, you said, “We acknowledge some listeners may disagree with aspects of this interview but in a fast-flowing situation we cannot cross-check everything that is said by Ginny Buckley during the programme.”

I do not disagree with aspects of the interview. The information given was wrong. Your job is to inform the listener, not disinform them. So, it is difficult to catch every mistake in a “fast-flowing situation.” That does not mean you have to be blase [sic. I could not remember how to get an acute] about it. Your listeners were left disinformed. The information provided by the expert was wrong. And both presenter and expert laughed about how shocking the information was. A correction should have been made on the following programme.

Next, I do not think you should be calling on experts who do not know their subject area. Your production staff should rate experts’ performances. Those who give false information in live interviews should not be invited back on. Please, give us experts who know their subject areas.

Finally, when inviting an expert onto your flagship current affairs show, I would suggest that production staff ask them whether they are planning on deploying any statistics live on air. Remember, in this case your expert volunteered the statistic: it was not provided in response to a direct question. (And if it had been, the correct response from an expert who was not 100% sure of their ground, should be either “I don’t know,” or to qualify their response based on their level of certainty.) If the expert is planning on deploying a statistic: your staff can silently check it before the interview takes place. That way, the interviewer would not be laughing about how shocking the (wrong) statistic was in this case, while believing it to be true. A voice in his ear would tell him that the expert was wrong. There is no way any expert should be giving wrong statistics live on PM. You should select the best, and most knowledgeable, disinterested experts in the country.

I had to wait until yesterday (17th July) for the BBC’s response to this suggestion:

Dear Jit

Thank you for getting back in touch with us about PM broadcast on 9 April. Apologies for the rather lengthy delay in replying.

We appreciate that you remained unhappy with the statistic given by Ginny Buckley in our item on the reduction of red tape for installing public EV chargers.

We’ve shared your concerns with senior editors at PM.

As we indicated in our last response, it’s not possible to fact check everything in a live interview, and as this wasn’t main focus of the interview [sic], it’s not a statistic we had looked up before the interview.

However, the programme will pass on your information on to this guest [sic].

We very much appreciate you raising this with us.

Kind regards,

BBC Complaints Team

I think I would prefer it if they stopped pretending that they appreciate my contacting them. However, I’m left with the definite impression that on this (admittedly very minor point) the BBC has rather turned misinformation into disinformation. Which makes a mockery of their highly-produced “fight for truth is on” ad (of which the featured image above is a partial transcript).