THE BBC was under fire again yesterday after the SNP’s deputy leader urged it to call a halt to “England-centric” reporting.

Keith Brown’s remarks came after an early online coronavirus briefing on the corporation’s website prompted the party’s head of broadcast media, Erik Geddes, to tweet: “The morning Coronavirus briefing, tweet and subsequent links on PPE fail on the same measure ... the online news health editor’s ‘close look’ makes zero mention of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.”

The BBC report said that while ministers had said “every resource of government” was being dedicated to maintaining the supply of protective kit, NHS staff had indicated they did not have enough to safely treat coronavirus patients.

It added: “Online health editor Michelle Roberts looks closely at the situation.”

Geddes later said the story had been updated on the BBC website and “now has a cursory mention of Scotland, Wales and NI ... Tickbox”.

READ MORE: Rejection of .scot email addresses another baffling incident from BBC

A BBC spokesperson told The National: “Scotland and Wales are mentioned in the graphic in the briefing and Scotland, Wales and NI are mentioned in the story which is linked to it.”

Indeed, the three home nations did merit this mention: “The Department of Health said tens of millions of pieces of PPE had also been distributed by the governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.”

Brown said: “This England-centric reporting from the BBC on TV and online falls well short of what people in Scotland need.

“Audiences across the nations of the UK need relevant information during this time – not selective data that ignorantly conflates England and the UK as the same.

“We have been flagging issues and received promises by BBC bosses in London that this kind of nonsense was going to stop but it is still happening.”

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A senior SNP source commented: “Only yesterday the BBC admitted that the News at 10 had been guilty of this and that they would fix it.

“We continue to monitor the BBC’s news output and will vigorously and respectfully pursue these editorial shortcomings until it improves.”

While The National was researching this story, we came across a disturbing oversight on the BBC’s main website when we tried to contact their media office – the site does not accept emails originating from a “.scot” domain.

To contact the team it is necessary to complete an online form and give an email address.

However, our message stubbornly refused to budge from the screen, until we noticed a series of message in red type, telling us that our @thenational.scot email address was not recognised.

The messages read: “’thenational.scot’ is no valid hostname for email address … ‘thenational.scot’ appears to be a DNS (Domain Name System) hostname but cannot match TLD (Top Level Domain) against known list … ‘thenational.scot’ appears to be a local network name but local network names are not allowed.”

Government, corporations, defence and law enforcement bodies from around the world all accept “.scot” emails, but the BBC cannot.

A BBC spokesperson promised to look into the question for us, but we can only assume they have had a problem emailing us.

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