Complaint
A viewer complained that the BBC’s Political Editor, Chris Mason, improperly expressed a personal opinion in the course of an item in this bulletin, and that the opinion was in any event inaccurate because it conflicted with posts on the same matter by the BBC’s Economics Editor, Faisal Islam. The ECU considered the complaint in the light of the BBC’s editorial standards of impartiality and accuracy.
Outcome
The item was prompted comments by Professor David Miles of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in which he told MPs about repeated leaks by the Treasury in the lead-up to the Budget and sought to “set the record straight” in relation to misconceptions about the OBR which had resulted. This was the latest development in a chain of events in which the Chancellor had given a news conference prior to the budget in which she described the state of the public finances as “very challenging”, but the budget itself reflected a more optimistic assessment, with consequent controversy over whether the Chancellor’s earlier statement had been misleading. In that connection, Professor Miles was quoted in the item as saying “I don’t think it was misleading for the Chancellor to say that the fiscal position was very challenging at the beginning of that week. Whether a message was then put out to say, well, it’s less challenging by the end of the week, I don’t know, and I don’t know where that message would’ve come from. It certainly didn’t reflect anything that was news from the OBR being fed into the government”. Mr Mason then said (in the comments to which the complainant took exception) “Well, I can tell you where that news came from. It came from the Treasury. They hoped that that would be sufficiently significant to reassure the markets at the time, but they hadn’t chosen to share it the week before. So, whilst there’s little doubt that the spreadsheets that the Chancellor confronted were grisly, it’s on that specific point that I, alongside others judge that what we had been told in the round was misleading”. In the ECU’s view, the statement that “what we had been told in the round was misleading” was not an expression of personal opinion but a professional judgement rooted in evidence, of the kind which expert correspondents are expected to offer, and was appropriately presented as such. The ECU saw no conflict with Mr Islam’s posts because they focused on the broader fiscal arithmetic (including the implications of limited headroom and the scale of potential fiscal tightening) whereas Mr Mason’s analysis concerned the presentation and timing of information around the Budget.
Not upheld
