Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

The ECU agreed that the coverage of the incident, which included shots of the efforts to resuscitate Eriksen and of his evidently distressed wife, was likely to cause offence, both because of the upsetting nature of some of the images and by the element of intrusiveness they involved.Β  The ECU noted that the choice of shots from the stadium was not in the hands of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ programme team (the pictures being provided by the host broadcaster UEFA), who had no way of anticipating the earliest of the distressing images, which were among the most intrusive.Β  The ECU also noted that the programme team’s expectations were influenced by a longstanding UEFA protocol covering events of this nature; they recognised that the initial shots of the incident didn’t conform to those expectations, but assumed from the fact that the UEFA match director then cut to wide shots of the crowd and other players that the protocol was being properly observed.Β  Unfortunately that assumption proved ill-founded, as the remainder of the coverage included several instances of the match director cutting to shots which were closer than a Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ team would have selected.Β  The ECU agreed with the management of Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Sport that the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ’s coverage should not have stayed with the pictures from the host broadcaster for as long as it did, and found no contextual justification which would have brought the sequence as a whole within the requirements of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ guidelines on potentially offensive material.

Upheld