Complaint
A guest in the Team Talk item referred to racist chanting from the crowd at the Newcastle United ground as “very regrettable…as was the goalkeeping”. A viewer complained that the comment was “clumsy at best, pernicious at worst”. The ECU considered the complaint in the light of the BBC’s editorial standards relating to offence.
Outcome
The ECU agreed that the comment had the potential to cause offence by seeming to trivialise a serious issue, but noted that the viewer had received an apology on behalf of the programme and the guest had offered his own apology on social media. In the context of an off-the-cuff remark made by a guest rather than a BBC commentator, where there had been no intention to offend, the ECU judged that enough had been done to resolve the issue of complaint.
Resolved