It is the point that the BBC is under considerable financial pressure to cut costs, primarily by politicians who want to reduce its ability to ask awkward questions.
I appreciate this, but I don't believe that excuses inaccurate reporting. If they couldn't find a photo of the actual crossing they could have simply run the story without a photo. They also have photos and videos of the crossing from earlier reports so I'm not sure why they didn't just re-use one. They re-use photos on update stories all the time, it's par for the course.
The users of this forum may have the detailed knowledge to see the errors, but do you think that the BBC should have a team of experts on railway operation permanently available to check every detail of what is a relatively minor incident? Should it employ the number of staff required to check every minor item in detail?
Well, yes and no. BBC News is a very large organisation and they will have reporters with rail specialism. Either it's a big enough story to make use of one of their specialist reporters, or it's minor enough to just not put a photo up because it'd be better to have no photo than a photo of one which isn't of the actual site, when the specific sites are often quite an important factor in such stories. They also could've taken the somewhat obvious step of asking Network Rail for a comment about the crossing, at which point they may have highlighted the potential drawbacks of certain types.
I don't think it's too much to ask that an organisation like the BBC which strives itself on accuracy should not make simple mistakes. I don't believe it's a simple mistake, particularly given their earlier articles mentioned that it was a user-worked crossing which may be part of the issue, and had photos of the actual crossing. I'm not expecting the BBC to know the calculation of tractive effort, but if the entire story is about a crash at a level crossing, it seems pretty basic to me to use a photo of the actual crossing, or at worst, a photo of a different crossing of the same type with an explanation that it's a similar crossing.
I am fully in favour of accuracy in news reports, but the financial pressure placed on organisations like the BBC means that if you raise the demand too high, they will just have to drop the coverage…just like most of the other news outlets have already done. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
I'm afraid that if news agencies don't have the money to accurately report a story, they simply shouldn't report it. Financial pressures are unfortunately not an excuse. And as mentioned further up, they could've just omitted the photo. That would be avoiding perfect being the enemy of the good while preserving journalist integrity and press accuracy.
To reiterate arguably the main point - the entire story here is about a user-controlled level crossing, which are known to be problematic; it's not a minor detail that the photo they use features an automatic half-barrier crossing with lights and sirens and a yellow box and automatic barriers. Showing the latter in a photo when the crossing is of the former, I think is quite misleading. The differences in crossing types are
very likely to be material to RAIB's findings.
