Thread by @orgreavejustice

THREAD
Orgreave & the BBC
1/
35 years ago today June 19 1984 a BBC News and Current Affairs meeting described its own coverage of Orgreave the day before as "not wholly impartial" with a "marginal imbalance" though "not enough to ‘justify the NUM’s view that the BBC was biased"

2/ The BBC's film coverage of events at Orgreave on June 18 1984 had reversed the sequence of events to show police cavalry charge in response to pickets throwing stones. In fact, the opposite was true, as other TV channels' coverage showed.
Credit: Peter Arkell

3/ It was during one of these police cavalry charges that Lesley Boulton was targetted while appealing for help for a badly injured miner. She later recalled hearing the police baton make a whooshing sound as it missed her head by inches.
Credits: John Harris

4/ Miners returning bloodied from Orgreave were amazed and angry to see the BBC version of events on their TVs. A number of them complained to the BBC which made no response when it was discussed months later in an internal BBC meeting about the coverage

5/ In 1991 the BBC finally accepted that the sequence of events at Orgreave on 18 June 1984 had indeed been reversed but issued no apology, explaining that this had been done ‘inadvertently’ in ‘the haste of putting the news together’

6/ In 2015 The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report on Orgreave confirmed that the BBC had reversed their film. But there was still no official admission of responsibility or apology from the BBC

7/ The same IPCC report found that police had "made up an untrue account and exaggerated miners' violence (in particular missile throwing)" to justify their charges of riot against 95 miners. The reversed BBC footage added credence to this 'untrue account' of the police

8/ The July 1985 trial of miners for riot and other serious public order offences carrying potential life sentences collapsed due to lack of credible police evidence. But this injustice - and the role of BBC's reversed footage in it - isn't forgotten in mining communities &beyond

9/ Ex-miner and OTJC activist Paul, attacked and framed at Orgreave, was at a miners march in Wakefield in 2015. Asked by the BBC to be filmed for an interview by the BBC he told them "not if you're going to show me marching backwards"

10/ Read more on the media and miners strike in the new edition of "Shafted: the Media the Miners Strike and the Aftermath" edited by Granville Williams' And in 'Settling Scores' by Nicholas Jones (ex-BBC Industrial Correspondent in 1984), Pete Lazenby and Granville Williams

11/ Discuss these issues and what they mean for us today. Tonight, Wednesday June 19 - exactly 35 years later - at Newcastle's Tyneside Irish Centre at 7pm. nelh.net/event/tyneside… Organised by @cpbf North and @NUJofficial Newcastle

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