Presenter Fiona Bruce called people by clothing colour – but the Black audience member by his skin colour
The BBC edited its Question Time programme broadcast last night to remove footage of Fiona Bruce calling an audience member to speak by the colour of his skin.
A member of the audience recorded the incident live, but the BBC’s broadcast version had the word ‘black’ deleted – and footage of the crowd at the key moment so the edit wouldn’t show:
As one observer – possibly the creator of the unedited footage – pointed out, how hard is it to say ‘the man in the blue top’:
Wolverhampton Twitter user Bertie said he was the man in the audience:
Bruce’s comment sparked a string of criticisms on the social media comment. Bertie later said that she had contacted him to apologise – but the BBC does not seem to have owned up to its surreptitious edit.
It was not Fiona Bruce’s first offensive comment rodeo, however. She infamously dismissed wife-beating by Boris Johnson’s father as a ‘one-off’. Nor is it the BBC’s first time surreptitiously editing footage. When Johnson was a shambles at a Remembrance Day tribute, the BBC ‘accidentally’ published footage of an earlier Armistice event, covering his blushes – and edited out spectator boos against him as he arrived at an event for the late Queen’s jubilee.
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