THE BBC has offered no apology to Alex Salmond despite its humiliating slapdown by regulator Ofcom and its own internal review findings that false statistics were used in an interview with the former First Minister before the 2017 General Election .
Salmond has not previously commented on the issue of broadcaster Andrew Neil, during a Sunday Politics interview with the former SNP leader, quoting a statistic about Scottish education that was misleading and untrue, The National reported yesterday that Neil’s misleading figures on “functionally illiterate” Scottish schoolchildren had come from a Conservative Party press release.
READ MORE: Ofcom rules that BBC and Neil misled viewers with Tory untruth
Salmond said: “If this had been an exam at his old school Paisley Grammar, Andrew would have got an F minus. I have received no apology from Andrew or the BBC, they haven’t even been in touch.”
Salmond added: “Ofcom was appalled at the BBC’s attempts at obfuscation over a period of two years.
“I had nothing to do with the complaint. It was made by a Scottish teacher who bravely pursued the BBC. I have said nothing about the incident because I wanted it to be dealt with in a proper way and now that it has, I can reveal two things.
“One is that despite the BBC’s own internal ruling which found against the programme and Mr Neil, and now the Ofcom ruling of a breach of the code, no-one from the BBC at any stage has attempted to contact me to apologise or give me an explanation.
“All they did was attempt to obfuscate and delay the decision but luckily enough the Scottish teacher, who I’ve never met, was determined enough to face them down.
READ MORE: No surprise to hear the BBC parrot Tory press release lines
“In my experience of the BBC that is par for the course. If it wants an example of why it is so distrusted by vast numbers of people in Scotland, it only has to look at this case.
“Secondly, the full circumstances of the interview that I was invited at short notice to do can now be told. I was asked to do an interview on the constitution, on independence and how to get there.
“I was at a remote location in Aberdeenshire only to be confronted by an interviewer who I could not see and who made a range of ridiculous assertions that we now know were based on Tory propaganda.
“Nothing has ever been explained by the BBC as to how the circumstances came about and its attempt to cover it up betrays the black heart of the corporation when it comes to Scottish issues.”
Salmond also pointed out that the BBC put the story about the Ofcom decision on one small section of its website. Referring to his own RT programme’s Ofcom ruling, Salmond said: “Compare that with the way it reported a much more minor matter.”
The circumstances of the interview still rankle. Salmond said: “I am perfectly happy to have a ‘square go’ with Andrew on any subject on any occasion, but people like Andrew only want to play if the playing field is tilted in their favour, hence the change of subject, the Tory research.”
Salmond suggested that at the next Scottish independence referendum, General Election broadcasting rules should govern all coverage.
He said: “It is absolutely crucial. It is one of the lessons we have learned from 2014. The idea that you can leave the BBC to display a traditional British sense of fair play is for the birds.”
A BBC spokesman said: “The BBC has already upheld a complaint on this issue in 2017 and we will study Ofcom’s findings.”
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