BBC’s controversial documentary on crypto millionaires exposes the dangers of mainstream media

Earlier this week, the BBC was forced to withdraw a documentary about a crypto trader when British daily The Guardian show Question the legitimacy of the claims.

The UK national news agency quickly removed the documentary from its programme, but gave no explanation as to whether it had been screened. The Guardian called the incident an “embarrassment” for the company and criticized it for being too lax in editorial oversight to reduce the efficiency of news output.

However, this incident leads to a more serious and pervasive problem that could negatively impact the crypto industry.

The dark side of revealing crypto reports

The controversial BBC documentary, titled The Crypto Millionaire, tells the story of Hanad Hassan, a 20-year-old cryptocurrency entrepreneur and trader from Birmingham. In the film, Hassan claims he turned a $50 investment into $8 million by 2021, earning nearly 16 million percent in just nine short months.

one article Entitled Birmingham Self-made Crypto Millionaire Gives Back Money, it was included in the film’s trailers and featured prominently on the BBC News homepage. The article tells how Hassan made 10x gains just days after his first crypto investment and dropped out of college to focus on trading full-time.

According to the article, Hassan used his “spurred fortune” to donate to charity and set up a crypto charity that donates more than $270,000 to various causes. While the Orfan token went under last year due to what investors claimed was a deliberate scam. However, Hassan said he stopped the project after spending too much money to fund and fund it confirm I have nothing to do with investors selling their tokens.

“It’s not really a ‘scam’, I fund the coin with my own money at all costs and the profits go to charity. But when the crypto market takes a big hit, the cost is even greater than the amount donated to charity, so we just let everyone know about it on Telegram.”

While the staggering returns claimed by Hassan are not uncommon in the cryptocurrency market, promoting them in major mainstream media outlets like the BBC gives the entire industry a huge boost. career a bad impression. Last year, the BBC reported that it reached 465 million weekly viewers across its five television channels. The BBC News website has an average of 14 million monthly readers, making it one of the largest online news sites in the world.

This means that any crypto-related news item on the BBC is quite contagious as it is often taken seriously by millions. When stories like Hassan are given the spotlight, the broader market sees only the riskiest and most unsustainable parts of the crypto industry, negating the hard work of hundreds of projects working to boost the industry.

Stories with guaranteed returns of 16,000,000% tend to draw a lot of traffic, but are also likely to draw the attention of market regulators. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s top markets regulator, has begun cracking down on cryptocurrency trading and advertising, and is said to be considering restricting trading to only licensed trader investments. The FCA has also issued strict AML (anti-money laundering) regulations that only 6 crypto companies can meet. A total of 96 companies are currently in regulatory limbo, while more than half of the 153 companies that have applied for a license from the FCA are either rejected or withdrawn for review.

All of this creates a very volatile regulatory environment and is made worse by stories like the BBC’s.

The story of the BBC’s editorial negligence

The Guardian’s criticism of the BBC focused mainly on the lack of editorial oversight rather than the oddity of the drama the BBC has so close to airing. According to the publication, this is not the first time the BBC has published controversial news about cryptocurrencies and emerging industries.

“The BBC has a patchwork of precedents for crypto-related reporting and publishing stories of young entrepreneurs making big bucks from online trading.”

Last year they promoted the Squid Game that can be earned. This game’s value fell to almost zero after the developers earned $3.38 million in an apparent carpet move. In 2020, the news outlet removed a BBC Three program about a 20-year-old Welsh trader who claimed to be making over $10,000 a day trading cryptocurrencies. At the time, the BBC said it did so because it was not “clear enough about the potential risks” in forex and cryptocurrency trading.

The BBC’s editorial misconduct could begin in 2020 as the company gradually cuts budgets to boost profits. As part of the reduction plan, they canceled the long-running regional news show Inside Out, which ran 11 regional editions.

This sudden budget cut has left many investigative journalists and editors working out of London out of work. In the months following the cuts, the quality of BBC regional broadcasts fell significantly, despite efforts to maintain it.

The documentary The Crypto Millionaire was scheduled to air on the recently premiered show We Are England as a replacement for Inside Out.

“The BBC’s continued drastic budget and job cuts as a result of successive license fee freezes are believed to be at the root of recent news output failures, particularly in UK regional newsrooms.”

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