Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid The Sun has used its front page on Wednesday to try and shame journalists at the national broadcaster, the BBC, who were photographed by a disgruntled colleague apparently sleeping on the job.
Under the headline “Here is the Snooze”, the print and online story quotes an unnamed source that said night-shift workers at the BBC regularly dozed on the job and that in a 12-hour shift some do only “around an hour of work” and all at the taxpayers’ expense. You can read the full Sun story here.
The article includes a string of sleeping staffers apparently taken over a four-year period by their aggrieved colleague. However, it’s unclear exactly what roles the sleepy staffers actually performed at the BBC despite claims they were journalists.
But the BBC press office was having none of it and immediately fired back a tweet that – “even with our eyes closed” – showed a graph that 57 per cent of Brits trusted news produced by the BBC over just 0.3 per cent for The Sun.
While another BBC journalists, Quentin Sommerville, tweeted a powerful image of himself a sleep wearing a flak-jacket in a war zone.
While others took to social media to excuse The Sun of sensationalism and attacking the victim when the real story was probably overworked and underpaid staff.
