Full Fact complains to PCC over Mail on Sunday's BBC 'date-gate'

27 September, 2011 - 13:45 -- Patrick Casey

Over the weekend an excellent piece by Tabloid Watch highlighted a rather dubious report from the Mail on Sunday that BBC editorial guidelines meant the days of the Corporation referring to dates as either 'BC' or 'AD' were numbered.

Instead of 'Before Christ or 'Anno Domini' the Beeb would use 'Before Common Era' (BCE) and 'Common Era' (CE). The report was subsequently referenced in opinion pieces by Melanie Phillips and James Delingpole

As Tabloid Watch explained, there was one problem with the story; the response included in the piece from the BBC.

The last two paragraphs of the piece stated: “The BBC said last night: 'The BBC has not issued editorial guidance on the date systems. 

"Both AD and BC, and CE and BCE are widely accepted date systems and the decision on which term to use lies with individual production and editorial teams.”

This statement appeared eight pages into to the paper and, by our count, 40 paragraphs in – way beyond the 'Paragraph 19' problem highlighted by Ben Goldacre.

The clear problems with the Mail on Sunday's piece were also confirmed by Polly Curtis' Reality Check blog.


But is this piece in breach of the Press Complaints Commission's Code of Practice?

The Code states that “the Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.”

It is entirely probable that the Mail on Sunday would argue that the inclusion of the BBC response does give readers the full picture of what had actually happened.

Yet the code states that newspapers need to 'take care' not to publish misleading information.

We would argue that by including this paragraph so late in the piece this does not amount to taking care not to mislead readers.

For this reason we have submitted a complaint about the article to the PCC. We will update when it is resolved.


Update: We have now had an initial response from the PCC. We were told that ours was one of four complaints about the Mail on Sunday, while an additional one had been made about a follow up story in the Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph complaint was made by Jon on the Nothing Special blog.

The next stage of the Complaints is for the Commission to contact the BBC directly. Only once this has been done will the complaints be considered against the Code of Practice.

In the meantime if you are one of the other complainants, get in touch.

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