Incident outside Parliament

The camera on the roof of 4 Millbank always used to be ITN's, and the BBC and Sky shared the feed. Certainly the case when I did some work there 20 years ago, not sure what has evolved since ?

Thought GMB coverage was very good and informative. It reminded me of the style of coverage that SKYnews used to do back in their " First for Breaking News" format. Back then the reporting style and presentation was certainly lively and peppy, without being too OTT. Certainly better than the "apologetic-for-interrupting your-morning-routine-hushed-tones" style of reporting that SkyNews does now. Doesnt really get your attention to look up and take notice if you are running around the house after the children or whatever routine your morning or life consists of.
EHH..
But no one can rightly expect BBC News to adopt another strategy because thats not their style. It usually wait for a tweet (which all of us can see on our own) repeat dryly a few times, and then move on. Recap, rinse & repeat until they get a new tweet.) Seeing as these incidents and attacks are sadly becoming frequently, to bolster and flesh out coverage having officials on phoner standby might be a strategy for additional commentary. Rather than hearing a presenter like Ms Derbyshire struggle to form a sentence and repeating a single tweet multiple times and saying things like "a very umm serious.... ummm incident..uhhh indeed." BBC news presenters must get paid by the number of "indeeds" they can get on air. Oh well.

I saw about half an hour of Breakfast from 8.30 and it was almost exclusively covering this story, but just repeating the same few facts again and again, which really wasn't much to go on. Continual speculation for relatively minor incidents like this when facts aren't estabhlished really don't help IMO and for me it felt like a local Westminster (not even London) story getting far too much airtime. I really do think unless it is a major developing story it's a case of report it's happened and move on, updating viewers when they have something to update them with. Anything else is actually turning a small isolated incident in to something that might achieve what a "terrorist" would want.

I know many always give the BBC the benefit of the doubt, but if it had been the other way round, and it has been in the past. If Breakfast had run with rolling coverage meanwhile ITV briefly mentioned it before going back to the planned showbiz interview, they would have been slated here and elsewhere.

Also, why on earth did BBC World simulcast Victoria Derbyshire?

I found BBC Breakfast kind of embarrassing this morning - not because I'm a fan of respected news programmes and organisations reporting unsubstantiated news reports and breaking news events, but to not even refer to it was ridiculous.
Good Morning Britain went to the news at about 07:41, and admittedly they had a crew on the Green, they were in the area, their reporter saw what was happening first hand - but still, even if it had turned out to be a car crash, it was an event which deserved mentioning. Ranvir Singh did a brilliant job of explaining the situation whilst airing caution - the best way to do it. (She's very underrated at ITV, I must say).
I usually listen to 5live on a morning whilst pottering about in the house, and I *think* they were the first BBC station to report it, at around 07:50 - again, airing caution, openly saying they were watching the pictures from GMB - but referring to it.

BBC Breakfast didn't mention it until after 8 from what I saw, and for the most watched morning programme on the country's flagship channel, that's pretty poor. I know the BBC airs caution at all times, but if other programmes on the BBC can get it right, why didn't Breakfast?

Reminds me once again that GMB is actually running a very good programme at the moment.

Early coverage from the BBC appears to be have been mixed. Radio 5 Live, as has been said, was on the story at 7:50 and Radio 4 had a correspondent on the scene by 8:10. However, BBC Breakfast only just started to report it at around 8:05. On Radio London, the best info to begin with was coming from the travel updates. Finally, on Radio 2, completely ignored until 8:30 when it was given a brief mention.

Just bumping this.

4G?

Just to clarify, I'm not aware of any pictures from the scene being pooled today.

There is a rooftop camera at Millbank which is a shared resource between the BBC and ITN only (not Sky) - but my understanding is that this was not able to get a clear shot of the scene.

The rooftop camera which did provide pictures of the incident is a unilateral camera (also at Millbank), but operated exclusively by the BBC - hence the burnt-on BBC bug and on-screen credit when shown by other broadcasters such as Sky etc.

Sorry but I don’t agree. A car crashing into the barriers outside Westminster is slightly more newsworthy than a car crashing into the railings outside Lidl. Even if it didn’t turn out to be ‘terror’ related, I’d still expect national coverage.

I’d expect the same amount of coverage if similar happened outside Holyrood. Whether or not it would or not is probably more about how most TV news is London biased than the importance of the story.

The media has reined it in now, most of this thread is more about how the BBC hasn’t even reined it out, almost as if they knew it wasn’t much to worry about. In the past they would have run rolling coverage for hours on the slightest thing, the fact they didn’t here shows that it’s more about it being in Breakfast’s time slot and the lower resources available on the news channel.

I understand Gaisford was using a LiveU ....

As far as I'm aware, Sky was the only broadcaster to have an SNG actually in Westminster at the time of the incident. This remained in situ (behind the police cordon) throughout the day while other broadcasters were given permission to park on Lambeth Bridge.