Bartholomew's Notes

From the Daily Express:

Sky News uproar as star ‘tells producers to cut audio’ during Southport interview

Sky News’ Sarah-Jane Mee sparked outrage after she was caught ordering her producer to cut a conversation as she reported live outside Liverpool Crown Court.

Sky News presenter Sarah-Jane Mee has sparked controversy after being caught telling her producer to cut her audio as she interviewed a guest outside the Southport murder trial.

A clip is circulating on social media which shows Sarah-Jane Mee off camera, listening to a guest who blamed the police and government Prevent programme for failing to stop Axel Rudakubana before the Southport murders.

The camera then cut back to Sarah-Jane as she made a cut gesture across her neck, before rolling her eyes with exasperation as she realised she was on air.

Sky News have seen clarified that earlier in the programme, Sarah-Jane explained that her mic was live and she was signalling to the gallery to cut her audio so her mic wouldn’t interfere with the interview, before she was accidently shown on screen, rather than ordering her producer to cut the interview.

That last paragraph is poorly written, but it gets the point across and shows up the headline as misleading. “Cut audio” refers to her own mic rather than to the interviewee’s, and she did not “cut a conversation”. Here’s what she says immediately after the social media clip:

Sorry Nazir, I was just asking for my mic to be cut because I can’t actually hear what you’re saying. We’ve got a slight technical difficulty. So, I’m going to ask you another question, I know you can hear me.

The interview then continues. Don’t take my word for it: Sky News has uploaded its coverage for the entire day to YouTube here, and the relevant segment can be seen at 10.17:15 (I’ve also uploaded it here). It didn’t take long to find: one version of the social media clip included the on-screen caption for the segment (1), meaning it was easy to skim along the YouTube progress bar to find the right place without trawling through hours of material (it was also dark at the time of the interview, indicating it would be near the end). Mee had actually worked conscientiously throughout a gruelling day during which at times she became tearful due to the distressing details of the attacks on children.

We know that the Express hack didn’t bother to check the source, because she refers only to a “guest”: the short clip was heavily cropped, meaning that it wasn’t possible to see that the right side of the screen showed that she was interviewing the high-profile former CPS prosecutor Nazir Afzal. Instead, the Express focused on examples of the contrived “outrage” culled from Twitter/X, all saying much the same thing (links added):

Connor Tomlinson penned: “Sarah Jane signals to cut the feed as a guest blames the police and government Prevent programme for failing to stop Axel Rudakubana before the Southport murders. Sky News are containment agents. They silence this, to tell you ‘Diversity is our strength.'”

…Rael Braverman agreed: “Sky News’s Sarah Jane was caught signaling to cut an interview the moment it exposed the authorities’ incompetence in the Axel Rudakubana affair. It’s not surprising anymore, just another day in the life of a media that can’t handle the truth.”

Rael Braverman, of course, is the husband of the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman – he joined Nigel Farage’s Reform amid some fanfare last month. The Express also quotes Chris Rose and Matt Gubba, but there were many others promoting the same misleading clip: Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton (of course), David Atherton, Nile Gardiner and Visegrád24; and internationally the likes of Ian Miles Cheong. Between them, they have racked up millions of views.

The “censorship” interpretation of the clip never made any sense: the onscreen caption says “Why were the warnings missed?” and this was something that Keir Starmer had spoken about previously in some detail. Why have such a segment, if the subject is to be suppressed? However, a bogus “cover up” narrative about Southport has gained momentum despite the lack of any coherent case, and many people would rather look for confirmatory signs, no matter how implausible, than reconsider whether they are less clever than high-profile charlatans make them feel. And those who have responded to the posts by expressing anger against Mee (in some cases descending into crude abuse) won’t want to face what the real context means for their self-image.

More broadly, it’s not exactly news that social media is awash with false claims and misleading clips that people share in a spirit of self-righteous outrage without checking or later correcting. Social media influencers and commentators are often superspreaders: anything that might resonate with their followers is grist to the mill; their own information streams are corrupted with trash, which they pick from without discernment; and I suspect many of them primarily use phones and tablets, which are more fiddly when it comes to doing research and sifting through sources than a desktop computer, even if they were ever minded to do a bit of due diligence before sounding off.

Note

1. There are two versions of the misleading clip: one is 12 seconds long and shows half the TV screen; the other is just one second long and is a close-up that crops out the Sky News caption and which added accusatory text.

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