The BBC coverage is absolutely terrible. It leads on "sharply contested narratives" It has a dramatic skew to the US government It has posted the video but has failed to report on what it shows: it shows the US govt account is untrue
The BBC summary relays false claims but does not prioritise the facts at all
Entries are absurdly unbalanced, to favour US govt false statements, in a scenario where "sharply contested" both sides reporting would be highly inadequate BBC are here being a real time conduit of the misinformation that they say their mission is to verify+counter bbc.co.uk
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That BBC coverage is timestamped 942pm The misinformation it contains was demonstrated to be clearly untrue almost 3 hours before that bsky.app
Federal law enforcement agents shot and killed a man in Minneapolis on Jan. 24 according to local police officials. DHS told Fox News that the man was “armed with a gun”. A video of the shooting appears to show that a gun was taken from the man before the first shot was fired. x.com
How on earth can the BBC still be relaying this demonstrably untrue information into its reporting at 942pm, without even "balancing" the false account, when they have the video footage & the analysis of it
About 75% of entries transcribe the false claims. The small number of counterpoint are in 'he said, she said' fashion It is very much inferior to other outlets & absurd to post 30 seconds of video without putting any of the reporting resource into analysing the source, vs transcribing false claims
Another poster says the news bulletin was different. My comments are about these "live" updates. bbc.co.uk
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That's appalling. At least on the BBC News channel, after showing Bovino's press conference they had this, countering the lies: bsky.app
The New York Times has got two trained reporters to watch the videos & report the sequence in which events take place. If the BBC does this, it has a useful way to compare claims about the sequence of events & threat/risk to the facts its reporters and viewers can see bsky.app
NYT reports of the video confirm the sequence of events. Mr Pretti was shot - many times - while posing no threat. nytimes.com
942pm! "They say the victim was planning a 'massacre' of local law enforcement agents is transcribed unchallenged. The false claims, if reported to show what the government wants to claim, should be directly contracted to the evidence
12 hours later, the BBC now has a more rebalanced "both sides" summary of "she said, he said" claims and counterclaim. It reports the video "contains no evidence" for (and indeed disproves) the core points of the US federal government, under "reignites deepening dispute" headline on Federal v state
"What we know so far" 7am BBC can tell its readers online "conflicting accounts" Dept of Homeland Security vs "Eyewitnesses, local officials and the victim's family challenged that account They don't add here: expert video amalyais refutes DHS narrative + verifies the challenge.
856am, BBC does report that "But videos show no evidence to support the claim he used any armed force to threaten agents, instead showing him pepper sprayed, wrestled to the ground and shot after an agent appeared to remove a holstered handgun from him" "Show no evidence" an inconclusive phrase
This is the BBC online news report, updated overnight. It opens with the conflicting account, including the family saying the DHS account is lies + that video exists. It goes on downpage to give a detailed account of the video, showing that the US govt account is not true.
The detailed reporting is pretty clear. The framing & live reports prioritise contested claims about what happened over verifiable and verified facts about what happened bbc.co.uk
"CNN: what we covered" opens on video footage appearing to show a gun being taken away from a Minneapolis man, Akex Pretti, prior to his being shot dead by a border patrol agent edition.cnn.com
NYT headline "holding a phone, not a gun" reflects that "videos analysed by the NYT appear to contradict federal accounts of the shooting". 'Unrest in Minneapolis: second fatal shooting by federal agents' as thematic context nytimes.com
1030am Sunday: the BBC is still mainly just notifcing "starkly varying accounts" and offering a "recap" which is all "key lines" and always prioritising what people say happened, over what they could now report actually happened to scrutinise the starkly varying accounts
This BBC news report for broadcast (8 minutes) is v different from the BBC online rolling coverage. It tries to get at the facts first, it reports the & mentions the very polarised narratives later on, but doesn't use "competing claims about facts" as its core frame youtu.be
BBC news short clips this lunchtime - eg Radio 2 - get right what BBC online was getting wrong last night & overnight. They compare what was said by describing the video evidence of the shooting (Ros Atkins) instead of saying "sharply contested narratives of black vs white" about a shooting The BBC continues to rebalance the share of voice of "conflicted accounts" but is struggling to do the main reporting job. Point 5: BBC Verified has analysed the footage. That belongs top. But the point is not the process (BBC has analysed) but the outcome (report what this analysis shows).
What happened? 4.14pm Sunday This seems to be avoiding joining the dots to resolve the puzzle. That "for comtext" piece at the bottom!
Here is how RTE, the Irish public broadcaster has handled this clash between the first hand footage and the US government's claims abot the incident rte.ie
This is straight & clear BBC reporting from Ros Atkins: who compares the statement to the facts. bsky.app
BBC New's BBC Verify with Ros Atkins Prove that President Trump and Kristi Noem lied When they both claimed that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist As the video evidence which they present, shows otherwise
Unpicking the second Minneapolis shooting frame by frame (BBC Verify) bbc.co.uk
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Yet this BBC news online "summary" still fails to communicate the core facts 4. "State and federal officials have provided conflicting accounts of the moments prior to Pretti's death on Saturday" 6. "BBC Verify has analysed the Minneapolis shooting frame by frame" bbc.co.uk
There could be many causes of this very patchily variable and inconsistent quality of BBC reporting across different outlets. A news outlet which has declared a mission to stop misinformation is providing significant incentives to supply it by prioritising 'conflicting accounts' over facts "Trump abandons attack mode as Minneapolis shooting backlash grows" "Within 24 hours, as various videos of the shooting circulated online, it became clear that the White House was out of step with public opinion and what Americans could see with their own eyes" - Anthony Zurcher, BBC news
"This time around, the administration's initial response quickly had become difficult for the administration to maintain". "At the moment, both Republicans and Democrats are grappling with how to handle what has become an explosive situation". bbc.co.uk
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While the BBC reports that it was impossible for the Trump Administration to keep sharply contesting narratives - given "what Americans could see with their own eyes" [also: non-Americans + including media reporters], this report is mainly about both sides of the US political divide again
The BBC has responded to complaints about this coverage, acknowledging that it gave too little prominence to the facts against the false claims bbc.co.uk
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