WE at The National were left scratching our heads over the weekend when we weren’t offered a sneak preview of the third – and last – episode in the BBC Scotland documentary series Yes/No: Inside The Indyref – Down to the Wire, which airs on the new channel tomorrow.
Ahead of the first the first two episodes, we were asked by email if we would like to preview them which we did – and featured stories about both.
After our story on the second episode, about Nick Robinson criticising BBC Scotland’s James Cook, the broadcaster edited the programme before it was shown on the new channel.
So it was odd that we didn’t receive an email invitation to have a peek at tomorrow’s final episode, in which veteran journalist Alan Little dropped a BBC bias bombshell by saying he was surprised at the attitude of some of his London colleagues, saying they failed “to understand their own assumption that the Yes side was wrong”.
He told the documentary that some BBC journalists had set out to prove that voting Yes was “foolish”.
Big news. So how strange that we weren’t offer a sneak peek of this blockbuster episode but other journalists were. When we inquired as to why that might be, we were told we should have asked them.
How bizarre … or maybe not.
The same episode reveals the government panic that followed an opinion poll 11 days before the indyref, which put the Yes side four points ahead.
It also includes an admission by former BBC political editor Nick Robinson – talking about his public spat with Alex Salmond over RBS – that his script line “wasn’t clever” and if given the chance he would have re-written it.
Read our full story here: BBC removes criticism of reporter in last minute edit to indyref documentary
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