General Election 2019

Dear Hugo7

Thank you for contacting us.

As the BBC’s Political Editor, a significant part of Laura Kuenssberg’s role is to keep our audience up to date with political events and stories as they happen. A key tool for doing this is social media, which allows her to report on breaking stories quickly. As is common journalistic practice, Laura often gains information from off the record sources, as was the case in this instance.

Once the video footage of this incident was available, Laura shared it on her Twitter so that people could see for themselves what had actually happened. She also reflected the Labour Party’s response to this story. Once it became apparent that the information she had been briefed was inaccurate, Laura deleted the initial tweet, clarified what had happened and apologised, as you can see below:
https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1204110491242643457

Thank you again for contacting us.

BBC Complaints Team