BBC interviewers ‘sycophantic’ to big business leaders

From British daily The Independent:

BBC interviewers ‘too frightened of offending big business leaders’

Published: 26 May 2007

If Bill Gates was nervous before his appearance on the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News earlier this year, he did not need to be.

His interrogator, Huw Edwards, could hardly have tried harder to put the world’s richest man at ease.

“Lots of our viewers are wondering what Bill Gates, the great innovator, is thinking about technology in 10 or 20 years?”was one of the questions Mr Edwards put to the head of Microsoft, at a time when British consumers were complaining about its prices, when it had been accused of restrictive practices, and was battling to keep pace with Google.

It was hardly inquisitorial interviewing in the style of John Humphreys or Jeremy Paxman, and yesterday it earned the BBC a rebuke from an independent commission for being “at times sycophantic in tone”.