Putting Optus’ data breach in the shade came news late last week that Northern Ireland’s Police Service had suffered a mass data breach that publicly revealed the names and addresses of 10,000 of its officers, forcing many to go into hiding for fear of reprisals.
Reporting on the incident on Friday, BBC news anchor Matthew Amroliwala crossed live to journalist Charlotte Gallagher who was reporting from the broadcaster’s Belfast headquarters.
Unfortunately for Gallagher she was unaware she was “live” and had wrongly assumed her piece to camera was a pre-record.
Viewers were then treated to Gallagher stumbling over her report which ended in her own self-assessment, “I can’t get my words out… Fuck,” she blurted.
Someone in the control booth quickly pulled the plug on the sweary hack and returned to Amroliwala in the studio who apologised to viewers “for that confusion, that was our correspondent Charlotte Gallagher, she’s monitoring what’s been happening there at that news conference.
“We will get more on that here in the next little while,” he added with aplomb.
Watch the calamity unravel below:
Presumably following from instructions from his BBC bosses, Amroliwala returned 20-minutes later to apologise for the segment going to air.
“Now, before we move on, I want to apologise for the bad language a little earlier you may have heard in a clip,” he said.
“We were playing you the outcome of the press conference [where] we heard from the chief constable of Northern Ireland’s police force, that data breach, and we went to our correspondent,” he said.
Viewers soon took to social media to side with the journalist and her stumble.
“Bless her – bet she was mortified when she realised that had gone out!” one person tweeted.
“Every live broadcaster’s worst nightmare,” said another.
Another added: “Matthew [Amroliwala], cool under pressure as ever.”
