Don't bother complaining

The BBC finds more ways to let us down

I complained to the BBC a couple of weeks ago.

Yet again they claimed that a male who competed in the women’s category was female despite him having failed gender eligibility tests. Not only that, but they nominated him for the Women's Footballer of the Year award, displacing a woman from her own award category.

Two complaints, then. One for stating that he is female, the other for the bad faith nomination.

I got the same response to both. The beeb had a lot of complaints about this as it turns out:

Which were characterised as

complaints from people who questioned Barbra Banda’s eligibility for the BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year 2024 on grounds of gender.

Complainants were told that he was eligible for the award because he has been playing in women’s football at the highest level for some years. (Which is a bit like saying Lance Armstrong didn’t cheat because he got away with it for ages).

And he’s a worthy winner because he’s quite good at football (although perhaps not quite so good in his correct sex category).

And the vote was conducted in the same way this year as previous years (which is relevant because?)

And OK, he failed a gender eligibility test but some people have questioned that (like who, Auntie?)

And anyway, we already reported on that gender eligibility thing, so it doesn’t count (sorry, what?)

I got to wondering just how many complaints there had been, so I Googled my way over to WhatDoTheyKnow.com to ask. Credit where it’s due, I got an answer within 10 days:

The BBC has determined that some or all of the information you have asked for is held for the purposes of journalism, art or literature, and so the FOI Act does not apply to it. In this case, we are therefore declining to disclose that information.

Well, that was certainly a surprise. It couldn’t be right, could it? How can complaint statistics be protected data when once a fortnight the BBC is obliged to report which programmes have received more than 100 complaints?

I wouldn’t want to claim that the BBC is playing fast and loose with their fortnightly obligations, but I couldn’t help noticing that they only report about programmes, not website articles. Nor would they sum complaints about an error that was made in more than one programme. And whilst the implication is that programmes are reported if the number of complaints exceeds 100, there is wiggle room for only reporting if those more-than-100 complaints fall within a two-week period.

But we can never find out if any of this is the case because the BBC is under no obligation, it seems, to tell us any information about complaints, or anything else they don’t want to share. Amazingly, up to half of all BBC FOI requests are refused on the grounds of journalism, art or literature.

Their statement on the WhatDoTheyKnow website suggests they are aware that this is a very useful brush off tactic:

Don’t bother complaining to the information commissioner, either, because the ICO fully support the BBC here. A decision notice from 29 September 2022 confirms that the Supreme Court also endorses this view and that

“journalism, art or literature” covers the whole of the BBC’s output to the public

Now, I would argue that the number of complaints received on any articles does not comprise any part of the BBC’s output to the public. The fact that nobody can find out the numbers tells you that. However, the BBC have an answer to that too;

the complaints themselves and the information associated with them plays a significant role in helping to inform editorial discussion and decisions

So there you have it. We are required to pay our licence fees, and we are allowed to complain if we don’t like what our money is spent on. But the BBC is not required to tell us anything at all.

It’s such a mystery that trust in the BBC is evaporating.