The Voice of Truth? The BBC openly contradicts its own facts.

In Yemen ‘the UN warns that sixteen million people will go hungry this year, including some four hundred thousand children, who will suffer from what it calls severe acute malnutrition,’ declares Huw Edwards as he presents the BBC Ten O’Clock News on February.

Tragic — and it was followed by a harrowing, apparently accurate report.

Yet the tragedy as portrayed on the graphic is somewhat embellished by what the newsreader is proclaiming verbally.

Right behind him on the screen, the caption reads: ‘6m at risk of hunger’, and declares that the source is the United Nations. It also says that four hundred thousand children are ‘at risk’ of severe acute malnutrition.

The fact that so many people and so many children are at risk is terrible enough. But the BBC newsreader used the word ‘will’, not the words behind him ‘at risk’.

In other words, the BBC is hyping up an already tragic story — the visuals contradicting the audio.

When I was a correspondent for the BBC in the Middle East in the early Eighties, the widely used synonym for the BBC was ‘The Voice of Truth’. I’m not sure it was, even then. But today its reputation is truthfully ‘at risk’.

NOTE: Actually, the UN representative of the Secretary-General to Yemen, Mark Lowcock, does indeed talk, at a UN briefing, of sixteen million people who will go hungry, but then adds the rather puzzlingly different five of ‘five million are one step away from famine’. He does also indicate four hundred thousand children are within days of months of starving to death. His news conference actually took place on February the eighteenth, five days before the contradictory BBC summary of what he said.