Hi Howard,
Always happy to volunteer but geographically speaking I can't really be much help to AMSAT-UK except on rare trips home :-)
Trevor (M5AKA) is the AMSAT-UK PR guru and does a fine job - after I brought this to his attention I believe he will be in touch with the BBC to have the article corrected.
Of course mistakes happen but if no-one notices them and reports them then errors remain and for something as high profile as this we really can't afford to pass up on any publicity.
In response to your e-mail though, I am not sure why "volunteers" would need to be "experts" in PR - the question asked by the media would be "/how is the contact made/", the answer would be "/amateur radio"/ - how satellite phones got mentioned and by whom is more the issue I would have thought!
Having been part of a team that conducted a highly successful School contact a couple of years ago, I am well aware of the enormous pressures that are ever present with these things and therefore things can slip! We had two TV News crews and 3 local papers in attendance and we had pre-prepared Q&A crib sheets for them to ensure that the subsequent reporting was as controlled and therefore as accurate as possible.
73