BBC staff have admitted to digitally altering a photograph of a white hand placing a ballot inside a box to make it look like a black person instead, in a bizarre, racially-motivated alteration to an image attached to a story about elections in Wales.
The original photo first appeared on the BBC’s website in 2018 and shows a white hand putting a piece of paper into a ballot box with the Welsh flag across it. Yet, the latest version – deployed shortly after the Black Lives Matter protests – shows the same image poorly photoshopped to make the hand black.
A spokesman for the BBC announced following the complaints, “although there is no intention to mislead, should not have happened and is not acceptable BBC practice. We will be reminding our staff of this.”
Conservative Member of Parliament Peter Bone asked, “Why on earth would anyone want to change the colour of a hand?” before adding: “The BBC has serious questions to answer. First, they have got to explain why on earth that happened. What was the reasoning for it? What was the thought behind it? What were they trying to say? Why did they falsify the image?”
The BBC has not yet given a reason for its replacement of a white hand with that of a black hand.
Wales – a country within the United Kingdom, sitting to the West of England – is overwhelmingly white, with around 94 percent of the population identifying themselves as “white: Welsh, English, Scottish, Northern Irish, or British.” Black people make up less than one percent of the population, according to demographic statistics from the Welsh government.
The bizarre editorial decision emerged just days after the BBC edited its own report on a convicted pedophile in an effort to hide the fact the man was a prominent drag queen.
