BBC forced to admit Iran war threat was ‘fake news’

THE BBC was accused of “fake news” yesterday when it tweeted an account of Donald Trump threatening war on Iran after a reporter misheard the US president.

The BBC’S World News Twitter account informed its 24million followers that the president had told the United Nations General Assembly that “war will follow” his decision to reimpose sanctions in the country. In fact, Mr Trump had said “more will follow”.

The member of staff behind the Twitter account was deluged with responses pointing out the error, but the tweet was not deleted for around 20 hours, as the BBC used the hashtag “#ourbad” to admit its mistake.

“It looks like we misheard the president,” it told one tweeter. “It was our bad and we’ve issued a clarification.”

In a second post, it wrote: “We’ve issued a clarification: @realdonaldtrump’s actual words appear to be ‘more will follow’ #ourbad”.

In a third tweet they claimed it was “an #honestmistake”.

The corporation came in for particular criticism for leaving the original message and video up until the next day, as it circulated around the world. It eventually told followers: “Yesterday, we inadvertently misreported a small section of the speech by @realdonaldtrump to the UN General Assembly. We quickly linked a clarification to the offending tweet but the original tweet continues to be shared without our correction. So we have decided to delete it.”

The original message read: “Donald Trump tells UN General Assembly ‘war will follow’ after his decision to reimpose sanctions on Iran, who he accuses of ‘slaughter in Syria and Yemen’.”

A spokesman for the BBC said: “Our approach is to be open and transparent on social media. As soon as we became aware that the tweet was inaccurate, we issued a clarification linked to it explaining our mistake.

“However, as the tweet continued to be shared without our clarification we deleted it earlier today and put out a tweet explaining what we had done.”

The error comes as Lord Hall, the BBC director-general, works to convince the public that it needs more money to continue its output, heavily emphasising its trusted brand. In a speech to the Royal Television Society last week, he said: “We have a duty to provide trusted, impartial news and information about the UK and the world.”