La BBC y el ministerio de vivienda

DENUNCIAS POR VIVIENDA

Un participante del foro burbuja.info, Mr. Bubble, se decidió a escribir una carta al periodista de la BBC que hizo el reportaje ya famoso en Youtube:

Dear Alex,

Firstly let me introduce myself, I am a member from http://www.burbuja.info/, an Spanish Internet forum were a group of Spaniards in Spain and around the world discuss about housing bubble and the present and future effects on the Spanish economy, apparently we are the only ones that talk about this, and our sources of information usually are foreign media (The Economist, WSJ, Financial Times, BBC, of course…) that advises about our situation as well as you have done with your report.

We are the ones that saw your TV report; we translated and spread through Internet around Spain, and as you saw yesterday and today, it went to the top one of Internet Most viewed videos in Spain and all mass media talk about it, even in “El País” Newspaper.

The Housing Ministry version about your interview is the following ( El País, 26th-July Economy Section):

“En el ministerio quitan hierro al asunto. Dicen que habían avisado al periodista de que disponían de poco tiempo y que, tras una hora de entrevista en la que el responsable de prensa intentaba acortarla, fue la propia ministra la que tuvo que finiquitar el asunto por "exigencias de agenda". "De una hora de conversación se han limitado a emitir la parte en la que la ministra dice que hay que cortar", dicen los responsables de Vivienda”

Translated:

In the Ministry do not give importance to this subject. They say that they advised to the journalist about the short time they had for the interview, and after one hour that the Press Responsible tried to stop it, it was the Minister herself who had to stop the interview because “agenda obligations”. "After one hour of interview they have just broadcasted the part where the Minister says that they have to stop the interview”, says Housing Ministry representatives.

We expect that this is not the truth and we guarantee that if we can have access to the whole interview we will translate it and spread it as well as we did with the previous one. Actually we are the only ones who can do it as you can not expect any official media in Spain to broadcast this interview.

We still think that we can change the mind of a lot of people through our acts and we demonstrate it this week.

Thanks for your report and thanks in advance for providing us with the interview, you are kindly invited to visit us in the website , http://www.burbuja.info(no/ English version, sorry)

Sincerely Yours
A member of burbuja.info

Y he aquí la respuesta del periodista:

Hi ******,

Thanks for getting in touch.

It is simply not true that the interview lasted an hour. I was in the minister's presence for less than half an hour; we were recording for around fifteen minutes. However, most of the recording time was devoted to the prepared statement that the minister wanted to read out. I think the Minister wanted to do this because she was uncomfortable being interviewed in English. However, her statement did not in any way address the two key issues.

Whether there is likely to be a housing crash.

Whether fifty year mortgages are desirable.

When I attempted to to ask these questions, her press officer stepped in and blocked me on each occasion. As such, the "interview" bit of the recording lasted barely a couple of minutes.

While I would like to be able to provide you with the raw footage, I have a problem.

(a) the cameraman who did the recording, Neil Drake is now working in Dubai. We cut the two features in his hotel room in Madrid, and he took the tape away with him.

(b) I'm fairly sure the BBC has a policy of never handing over the "rushes" (raw footage) of any story, to anyone, under any circumstances. This is because if you do it for one story it sets a precedent. I think a formal request would have to be made to the BBC's Editorial Policy unit.

I am in the office for the rest of the day, and then will be away for two weeks.

Do get in touch if you want to know more.

Alex Ritson.