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Fury at BBC sabotage of Tory speech
FURIOUS Tory chiefs have accused the BBC of trying to sabotage their election campaign by sending hecklers equipped with microphones to a meeting addressed by Michael Howard.The Conservatives have made an official complaint to the corporation after the hecklers - who were 'miked-up' by corporation technicians - were caught at a party event last week. The Tories accuse the BBC of a "premeditated" attempt to disrupt the meeting and say the corporation should not be involved in creating news. The BBC last night insisted the filming formed part of a programme on the history of heckling, but the revelation threatened to plunge the organisation into its biggest crisis since the David Kelly affair in 2003. The admission that hecklers were equipped with microphones for a programme that will be viewed before polling day on May 5 leaves the BBC open to allegations that staff showed political bias, in breach of corporation regulations. The row is over a local Tory party rally in Horwich, near Bolton, last Wednesday, at which Howard was the main speaker. Party officials became suspicious when they saw BBC cameras focused on hecklers rather than Howard. Checks on the hecklers - two men and a woman - revealed they were carrying hidden microphones. In a letter to Helen Boaden, the BBC's director of news, Guy Black, the Conservatives' director of communications, said that the "placed" hecklers shouted slogans that were "distracting and clearly hostile to the Conservative Party". The slogans included "Michael Howard is a liar", "you can't trust the Tories", and "you can only trust Tony Blair". Black's letter accuses the BBC of organising an event in order to "generate a false news story and dramatise coverage... intended to embarrass or ridicule the Conservative Party". The letter also claimed that people working for the BBC were guilty of "serious misconduct". His letter added: "It is entirely clear to me that the success of their presence required an element of performance on their behalf, and that this was a pre-meditated event intended to disrupt the course of Mr Howard's speech." A BBC insider said: "I can't believe they allowed someone to pull this kind of a stunt. When you think about all the other hoops the rest of us have to jump through in the name of fairness, this is a disgrace. There is going to be hell to pay over this." The BBC has claimed that the exercise was carried out as part of "a completely legitimate programme about the history and art of political heckling". The BBC added that it had "observed" meetings carried out by other political parties, but refused to say whether it had miked-up hecklers for meetings carried out by other parties. It has been claimed that none of Tony Blair's meetings was infiltrated or disrupted in the same way. The BBC's use of surreptitious recording devices is strictly limited by the corporation's rulebook, the Producer Guidelines. They lay down that plans to use hidden microphones must be approved by senior management within the BBC, and that it should only be used "as an investigative tool to explore matters which raise issues of serious anti-social or criminal behaviour". Posted by: tipper 2005-04-24 |
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