Summary of complaint
We received complaints from listeners who claim that Stacey Henley was allowed to call J.K Rowling transphobic, and was not challenged on this by Evan Davis.
Our response
We do accept that there wasn’t sufficient challenge to the claims that were made and that we fell short here. Â
Clearly J.K Rowling has been at the centre of a lot of controversy for her views, and that has led some to call for the new game Harry Potter Legacy to be boycotted. We wanted to explore that debate among fans and it was not meant to be an examination of J.K Rowling’s position per se. Evan Davis has since tweeted that he should have made it clearer that Stacey Henley’s view of J.K Rowling is her own premise for boycotting the game and is heavily contested - ‘I think perhaps we got stuck because we were actually trying hard not to debate J.K Rowling or the substance of her views. We hadn’t intended or cast it that way.’ He did challenge the characterisation of her views being put forward by Stacey Henley, but we do agree this should have happened at an earlier stage during the discussion and could have been done more thoroughly.
This is a difficult and contentious area which we do try very hard to cover fairly and well on the ±«Óãtv. However we should have challenged Stacey Henley more directly on her claims and apologise that we did not.