Where this was said
Social Media Vetting: How TV Does It and Why It Fails
At 24:53 · chapter starts 21:50
Rosie Norton asks whether the Ashley Cain situation — where the BBC dropped a documentary after his misogynistic social media history was discovered post-production — reveals a systemic failure in vetting processes. Marina Hyde provides a detailed breakdown: the BBC uses third-party firms to check social media alongside DBS criminal record checks, because the business risk of pulling a finished documentary is enormous. But as the Emilia Perez Oscar campaign showed, even major studios with serious resources can fail spectacularly — Netflix's failure to scrutinise Carla Sofia Gascon's old posts was, in Hyde's words, 'complete amateur hour vetting'. Similarly, Disney shelved an entire completed season of The Bachelorette after star Taylor Frankie Paul's domestic violence arrest emerged post-casting. Hyde widens the lens to politics, noting Reform and its predecessor parties have repeatedly failed to vet candidates who turned out to hold extreme views, while pointing out that Peter Mandelson — despite being appointed British Ambassador to the United States — would never have cleared BBC vetting for The Apprentice due to his publicly known Epstein connection. Television, she concludes, is actually better at this than most industries, and certainly better than politics.
TV production companies use third-party firms and DBS checks to vet talent's social media, but failures keep happening. Netflix's Emilia Perez Oscar campaign was derailed by missed posts from lead actress Carla Sofia Gascon — and it cost them everything.
Netflix failed to vet Carla Sofia Gascon's old social media before the Emilia Perez Oscar campaign, derailing it entirely — described by Marina Hyde as 'complete amateur hour'.
Disney shelved an entire completed season of The Bachelorette after breakout star Taylor Frankie Paul was found to have a domestic violence arrest that wasn't caught in vetting.
Peter Mandelson's Epstein connection was sufficiently public that he would have failed BBC social media vetting and never appeared on The Apprentice. He got the ambassador's job anyway.
