BrewDog Complaint Against BBC Dismissed

The Office of Communications (Ofcom), the U.K.’s communications regulator, has dismissed a complaint from Brewdog and CEO James Watt against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which claimed the BBC treated and portrayed Watt and his company “unjustly or unfairly” in a 2022 expose, BBC reported.

The BBC aired “Disclosure: The Truth About BrewDog” in January 2022, analyzing the Scotland-based craft brewery’s marketing strategy and company culture, and detailed allegations by several former BrewDog employees about inappropriate behavior by Watt, and the alleged formation of a “whisper network” to warn staff – particular female employees – about the CEO.

Other allegations detailed in the report include:

BrewDog misled consumers on the use of funds in its Lost Lager campaign, allegedly publicizing that a portion of proceeds would be used to plant trees in a forest in Scotland, but then paying for said trees with a government grant;
BrewDog workers were encouraged to use falsified information to import beers from the brewery in Scotland to markets in the U.S.;
And that Watts owns approximately £500,000 in Heineken stock, which could be seen by consumers as a contradiction to Watt’s previous knocks on the Dutch beer maker, including banning the products of Heineken subsidiaries from BrewDog bars.

At the time, Watt said the claims were “totally false” and threatened legal action.

He then filed a complaint with Ofcom, claiming that Watt’s “privacy was unwarrantably infringed” – particularly in regards to the investment details – and that Watt and the company were “both treated unjustly or unfairly” “because the programme misrepresented, disregarded and omitted material facts.” The complaint denied the majority of the claims made in the documentary, including Watt’s own alleged conduct.

The complaint also reads: “The programme gave viewers the misleading impression that the allegations of personal misconduct against Mr. Watt made by former employees in the programme … were from the recent past and therefore ‘relevant to the current culture of the company.’ He alleged incidents are all said to have occurred some years ago, and the programme did not quote any current BrewDog employee regarding the allegations against Mr. Watt of misconduct towards women.”

The complaint also claimed that the BBC “failed to draw viewers’ attention to information relating to the sources relied upon for some of the allegations regarding Mr Watt which gave a misleading impression of their reliability.”

“In particular, the programme did not draw viewers’ attention to the fact that there was a well-documented pre-existing relationship between a number of the sources for the allegations against Mr. Watt,” the complaint summary from Ofcom reads. “The complainants said that many of the sources were ex-employees who ‘have an axe to grind’ and that they appeared to have been recruited for the programme by Ms. Charlotte Cook, a former employee with a ‘readily-discoverable history of personal antipathy towards Mr Watt.’”

In Ofcom’s decision and dismissal of the complaint, the organization found no fault with the BBC’s conduct. However, Ofcom added that “it is important to note that Ofcom’s role is not to determine the factual accuracy (or otherwise) of statements made in the programme. Our role in this case was solely to consider whether the broadcaster took reasonable care not to present, disregard or omit material facts in a way that resulted in unfairness to the complainants.”

The full complaint, as well as the BBC’s response and Ofcom’s decision, can be read in the link.

Insiders can also checkout Brewbound’s previous reporting on other allegations against BrewDog: