91²Ö¿â

Bovine TB – NFU submits formal letter of complaint over BBC documentary

13 September 2024

Cows in an isolation unit

The NFU, together with NFU Cymru, has written an extensive complaint letter to the BBC after it aired a programme fronted by Queen guitarist and anti-badger cull campaigner Sir Brian May. 

The documentary, entitled ‘Brian May: The badgers, the farmers and me’, first broadcast on BBC2 on Friday 23 August.

91²Ö¿âhad previously raised serious concerns ahead of the programme’s broadcast.

This resulted in some clarifications being made via the insertion of an end screen to outline the most recent TB herd breakdowns at Gatcombe.

It is the NFU’s view that these breakdowns undermine the premise of the programme that it helped Gatcombe become consistently TB Free, and the NFU remains concerned, notwithstanding the insertion of the end screen.

Programme fundamentally flawed

NFU Director General Terry Jones said: “Despite making extensive efforts to have corrections and clarifications made to the programme to ensure all of the science and evidence on TB, and infection links between badgers and cattle, were included and given due time, this did not happen in either the documentary itself or the surrounding media interviews.

“We have written to the BBC to state our belief that the programme was fundamentally flawed, lacked impartiality, and breached the BBC’s own editorial guidelines.â€

The programme suggested bTB is mainly spread from cattle to cattle via slurry and that badgers are not a ‘significant factor in the spread of the disease’, despite the volume of evidence to the contrary, which, in the NFU’s view, was not properly examined.

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