Complaint
The programme in question included a sequence in which the presenter and programme team set out to conduct a doorstep interview, only to find that the person they wished to interview was not there. The person who opened the door complained that their privacy had been infringed because a recording of the encounter had been used in the program despite the presenter’s assurance that they were not being filmed. The ECU considered the complaint in the light of the BBC’s editorial standards of privacy.
Outcome
The BBC’s Editorial Guidelines require that any infringement of an individual’s privacy should by justified by considerations of public interest. Prior to filming, the programme team had come to the view that, in the event of the door being opened by someone other than the person they were seeking to interview, there would be no public interest justification for filming them. When this transpired, the camera (which was filming from outside the gate of the property) was accordingly pointed at the ground, and the presenter’s assurance reflected this. What had been overlooked, however, was that the presenter was on a live microphone, which captured the sound of her exchange with the complainant. When the programme team realised the significance of what had occurred, they decided that the complainant’s voice should not be broadcast, and that their side of the exchange (which contained nothing intrinsically private or capable of identifying them) should be reproduced in captions only. In the ECU’s judgement, the care taken to ensure that the programme itself neither identified the complainant nor breached their privacy was sufficient to resolve the momentary breach in the inadvertent recording of the complainant’s voice
Resolved