BBC breached editorial standards over BAFTAs racial slur, investigation finds

The inclusion of a racial slur during the broadcast of the BAFTAs was a breach of the BBC's editorial standards, a review has found.

The broadcaster's executive complaints unit (ECU) said the inclusion of the slur shouted by a Tourette's campaigner was "highly offensive" and "had no editorial justification". However, investigators said the breach made during the initial broadcast was unintentional.

John Davidson, who suffers from the neurological condition and was at the BAFTAs ceremony in February to celebrate a film about his life, yelled out the offensive word as the first award of the night was presented by Sinners stars Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo.

The BBC programme was edited down from the three-hour live show filmed two hours earlier that evening, and viewers were able to see the offending racial slur on BBC iPlayer for more than 12 hours before the show was pulled to be edited.

The broadcaster received "a large number of complaints" about its coverage of the awards, the report said, and the ECU upheld those in relation to editorial standards on harm and offence.

In an email to staff responding to the report, seen by Sky News, chief content officer Kate Phillips said she had written to Lindo, Jordan and Davidson since the incident to apologise.

The corporation is now working to improve its planning and production set-up for live events, she said, to include better assessment of potential on-air risks and real-time monitoring of what goes to air.

What went wrong?

In its report, the ECU said members of the production team monitoring the ceremony in an outside broadcast vehicle said they did not hear or recognise the word. Investigators accepted their account, agreeing the word "was extremely indistinct, to the point where it might well not have been recognised".

About 10 minutes later, there was another occurrence of the word which was recognised and "immediately edited out in accordance with the protocols on offensive language", the investigators said.

"There is no reason to conclude they would have applied the protocols in one case while deliberately ignoring them in the other," the ECU report said.

In response to further complaints that the slur should have been edited out of the programme available after the event on iPlayer, the investigators said there was "a lack of clarity among the team as to whether the word was audible", which resulted in a delay of several hours.

This was "a serious mistake, because there could be no certainty that the word would be inaudible to all viewers", they said, adding that the the unedited recording remaining available "for so long aggravated the offence caused by the inadvertent inclusion" of the word during the initial broadcast.

Complaints about speech cut

The report also responded to complaints about a decision to edit out remarks in the acceptance speech of Akinola Davies Jr, which included the words "Free Palestine". Many complaints characterised this as an "instance of censorship," the ECU said.

However, the investigation found the production team's decision "did not hinge on considerations of impartiality", but rather the main consideration was cutting out an hour of the three-hour show to fit the two-hour broadcast.

"As is usual in coverage of events of this kind, cuts were made in some of the longer acceptance speeches, including that of Mr Davies," the report said. The ECU found the editing of the speech did not raise an issue of editorial standards.

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The ECU report noted that complaints about the broadcast "showed a high level of awareness that Mr Davidson's interjection was an involuntary result of his condition, and that no blame [was] attached to him".

The backlash to the broadcast of the slur somewhat overshadowed I Swear's success at the ceremony, with relative newcomer Robert Aramayo, who plays Davidson in the film, taking home the best actor award over the likes of Timothee Chalamet and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Davidson said afterwards that he was "deeply mortified" his involuntary tics caused him to blurt out the offensive language.

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