The broadcast of a racial slur shouted by a Tourette’s campaigner during the BAFTA Film Awards breached the BBC‘s editorial standards, the corporation has ruled.
Despite the findings from the BBC’s executive complaints unit (ECU) on Wednesday, the organization’s chief content officer, Kate Phillips, has maintained that the breach “was not intentional.”
The incident at the BAFTAs in February dominated headlines for weeks as John Davidson, executive producer on I Swear (and whose life growing up with Tourette’s inspired the film), involuntarily said the N-word while Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented the award for best visual effects.
An onslaught of apologies followed, from BAFTA, the BBC, and the then-director-general Tim Davie, who explained that the N-word made it to air — even with the awards show filmed on a two-hour tape delay — because of a mix-up in the edit team truck. It was “a genuine mistake,” he said. He was unable to say why the ceremony remained available to stream on BBC iPlayer 15 hours after the event.
The ECU said it had received “a large number of complaints” about the BBC’s BAFTAs coverage, and upheld those “relating to editorial standards on harm and offence.”
“The ECU found that the inclusion of the n-word in the broadcast (which was also streamed live on iPlayer) was highly offensive, had no editorial justification and represented a breach of the BBC’s editorial standards, but that the breach was unintentional,” the unit said in its report.
Phillips, who also revealed she wrote to Lindo, Jordan, and their Sinners co-star Wunmi Mosaku, who was also exposed to one of Davidson’s outbursts, to apologize directly. She did the same with Davidson.
The content chief said that the production team “did not hear the n-word at the time it was said and therefore no decision was taken to leave the word within the broadcast. The ECU accepted this was a genuine mistake,” she added, “especially as the team did correctly identify and edit out a subsequent use of the same word, in line with the protocols that were agreed in advance of the event regarding offensive and unacceptable language.”
The ECU said leaving the coverage on iPlayer was also a “serious mistake” and breached guidelines. “The fact that the unedited recording remained available for so long aggravated the offence caused by the inadvertent inclusion of the n-word in the broadcast,” according to the report.
Phillips said: “There was a lack of clarity among the team present at the event as to whether the word was audible on the recording. This resulted in there being a delay before the decision was taken to remove the recording from iPlayer.”
She said that the corporation “must learn from our mistakes and ensure our processes are as robust as they can be,” adding that they have set out measures to improve event planning, live production, and the iPlayer takedown processes.
