Editorial Standards

As has been widely reported, the decision by the BBC to have Alan Dershowitz analyse the Ghislaine Maxwell verdict was dubious and dumb.  Among other things, Dershowitz had been Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer and has himself been accused of being in cahoots with him.  The subsequent statement by the BBC has added to the scorn and ridicule.

This is what journalist David Simon had to say in his brutally eloquent style:

Hate to be an old-timer who chirps about better days. But at my old paper, a disaster this raw and embarrassing required us to shoot a senior editor, burn the cadaver in a newsroom pyre, then mix the ashes with printer’s ink and sent out in the home final as a warning to others.

Arguably, the most striking riposte came from the Sunday Sport- a paper with a reputation for loose fact-checking and which was once described on the BBC as “a diligent exponent of tabloid journalism’s lower reaches.”

That’s putting it mildly. It didn’t even meet OUR editorial standards.