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THE BBC has raised more than a few eyebrows after recycling an old story about John Swinney’s World Cup trip to the US – and using it as a lead item on its flagship News at Six.
The cost of the trip has been well reported by now, and you can find the full breakdown here. Yes, £18k for a few flights seems steep, let alone £8k for a few days’ care rental.
But this is about something else: BBC editorial decisions.
Because by the time the BBC reported on the cost of Swinney’s World Cup trip, it was not, in the purest sense of the word, “news”.
I assume we will get regular updates on the PMs travel costs every week to and from Manchester pic.twitter.com/07ZxkwTtVn
— Christopher McEleny (@ChrisMcEleny) August 21, 2026
The figures which the BBC reported on Thursday evening had been published by the Scottish Government two-and-a-half days earlier, on the morning of Tuesday, August 18.
(Full transparency: we saw them at this point, didn’t think they were very interesting, and moved on, only publishing an article two days later when Swinney was asked about the figures.)
Anyway, by Tuesday evening, the publicly available figures had made it into the Daily Express. (Note that the story – which they labelled an exclusive – was not deemed important enough to put on their front page.)
The following day, an article appeared in The Sun and other outlets.
The day after that, the BBC caught up.
The BBC story on August 20 used the exact same Scottish Tory quote as the Express had two days earlier.
"In typical SNP fashion costs were never kept under control,” Conservative MSP Stephen Kerr said.
That quote was then paraphrased for viewers on the BBC News at Six – who, as mentioned, bizarrely made the story one of their lead pieces.
It’s hard to imagine how the right-wing-media-to-BBC-News pipeline could be more clearly illustrated.
It is also hard to imagine how BBC editors decided that a two-day old story should be one of the lead pieces on their flagship News at Six show.
The idiom is “yesterday's news”. This goes one step further – and that's without getting into why the BBC never reported on Andy Burnham's use of a private jet to fly from Glasgow to Manchester.
How much did the BBC spend flying staff to the World Cup?
The other pressing question is how much the BBC spent flying their staff to the US.
It was not only John Swinney, after all, who went to the World Cup on the taxpayer dime.
We submitted a Freedom of Information request to find out how many staff the BBC had sent to the World Cup (broken down by seniority), how much flights had cost, and how much accommodation had cost. We also asked for the total overall cost incurred in deploying staff and contractors to the World Cup.
In response, the BBC refused to release any information at all, saying that those figures were “held for the purposes of journalism” and that FOI laws therefore do “not apply”.
Quite how costs already incurred, for an event that already happened, are being kept for the purpose of BBC journalism was unclear and unexplained.
Perhaps the broadcaster intends on pro-actively publishing the data in an article of its own?
Surely the BBC wouldn’t be so hypocritical as to lead a news item on the Scottish Government spending £100k of taxpayer cash going to the World Cup, while hiding how much taxpayer cash they spent themselves?
A BBC spokesperson said: “Our FOI response explains that providing World Cup spend and staffing would disclose editorial decision-making, which is protected to safeguard the BBC’s editorial independence. It outlines the review and appeal rights available if a requester is not satisfied.”
