Formal Complaint to The BBC

A complaint has been lodged by William Spring, Director of an ecumenical peace group over BBC coverage of the death of Slobodan Milosevic.
A file has been sent to Helen Boaden, including a complaint against Gavin Hewitt currently in Belgrade.
The letter from William Spring to Helen Boaden concentrating on the Gavin Hewitt complaint is pasted below (together with a longer submission sent to Helen Boaden yesterday).
I will be posting emails and addresses later for all those who feel like I do, that the coverage of this weekend's events by the publicly owned broadcaster has been nothing short of a disgrace. It's our BBC, as we are so often told, we pay the licence fee, and we deserve better than being served up with propaganda which Goebbels would have been proud of.


Dear Helen Boaden

Below the line is a statement I made yesterday re BBC coverage of the death of Slobodan Milosevic.

I would like you to explain to me why the BBC chooses to breach its Charter obligations by not maintaining impartiality in the reporting of news.

I have never seen such disgraceful conduct from a broadcaster as evidenced by BBC 24 Hours TV in its biased partisan selection of speakers, who enjoyed demeaning and defaming the dead, while challenging the presumption of innocence, basic to our legal system, and outraging the sentiments not merely of Serbs but of fair minded people throughout the world.

I have just looked again at this same channel.

The disgrace continues.

The midnight news showed Gavin Hewitt in Belgrade, anxious to find someone who didn't like Milosevic.

Finally he located a distraught woman whose son had been killed by a NATO bomb in 1999 and who blamed Milosevic for his death.

But it was Tony Blair who killed her son, not Milosevic.

It is Tony Blair who is the mass murderer, (not just of Serbs, but of Afghans and Iraqis as well) and also Torturer in Chief in this benighted uncivilised country of ours.

Two of my brothers were machine gunned by a German plane in Bournemouth during the last war.

Fortunately they survived.

If they had been killed would I have blamed Churchill?

Tell Gavin Hewitt in my view he is thoroughly despicable.

Where is his journalistic integrity? Does he even understand the concept?

Slavishly following BBC instructions, to dig the dirt on Milosevic, and desperate for a hatchet job, but unable to find the hatchet, like a hyena he prowls around Belgrade seeking out distressed folk so he can then work up their testimony into a story with an anti Milosevic spin.

But the lady's testimony came from a broken heart, and thanks to Blair and NATO there are many broken hearts in Belgrade.

International justice seems to be as bad as international broadcasting BBC variety.

International justice essentially comes down to murder, murder by the Great Powers when someone becomes too inconvenient, the murder of Hess at Spandau, the murder of Milosevic at the Hague.

Please investigate my complaint.

Yours sincerely

William Spring