BBC To Spend £500,000 Training Editorial Staff

The BBC has announced that its plans to train editorial staff on the distinctions between ‘artifice and deception’ through a workshop scenario will cost around £500,000.
Director of the BBC’s College of Journalism, Vin Ray, is overseeing the initiative ‘Safeguarding Trust’ which the BBC anticipate staff will have completed by spring.
The bill for staff training will include cover for some of the 17,000 employees participating in the sessions.
Each session lasts around two hours and involves 20 people.
The BBC has come under fire in recent months for so called ‘audience deception’ in the controversy surrounding a faked competition winner in Blue Peter and incorrectly edited ‘A Year with the Queen’ and a Newsnight film about Gordon Brown.
Staff taking part in the sessions will be given feedback from the focus groups and told the BBC’s stance on each of the clips that are shown.
So far 4,300 staff have attended the course, with the remaining 12,700 expected to complete it by March.
Anne Morrison, BBC controller of network production, says that the programme is not an honesty course: “We cannot teach people to be honest in two hours. If they are not honest we should not be employing them.”
(DS)