The BBC has been fined for making a pretty rudimentary error in its coverage of a remote court hearing.
As any A-level law student will testify, it is contempt of court to record or broadcast any court proceedings unless permission has been granted by the court. Sadly that fact escaped the BBC, with its massed army of overpaid, under-worked lawyers.
On 18th November last year, South East Tonight, the BBC's regional news programme for East and West Sussex, Surrey and Kent, broke the rules by twice broadcasting six seconds of footage from a judicial review hearing.
A reporter working from home had been tasked with reporting on the hearing, which was in relation to a controversial Surrey County Council planning decision.
Technical staff recorded the hearing, with the permission of a news editor who had expressly sanctioned it. The editor and reporter both said that they regularly broadcast footage from virtual meetings, but the rules about court hearings "simply didn't occur to either of them".
The court heard that a producer spent 2 hours trawling through the footage looking for usable material. It ruled that the reporter had no intention of including the footage in her report, but the six second clip was used as an "establishing shot" in the lead up.
Lady Justice Andrews and Mr Justice Warby suggested that the oversight pointed to "serious deficiencies" in the information and training provided to BBC journalists.
The judgment said: "It was an aggravating factor that the BBC is the principal news provider in this country and that this unfortunate sequence of acts in contempt of court was a departure from the high standards that are rightly expected of it and which it sets for itself.
"The broadcast was repeated. The clip was seen by around half a million viewers, though none of them complained about it. The problem could and probably would have been avoided had the BBC taken more proactive steps."
The BBC was fined £28,000 for its glaring oversight and incompetence - the equivalent of 157 TV licences that the public will have to foot the bill for.
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