The Children’s BBC Newsround 9/11 Guide Why did they do it? page, the one that we’ve been complaining about recently, was changed at 2pm yesterday (Saturday) to read:
Al-Qaeda is unhappy with America and other countries getting involved in places like the Middle East. People linked to al-Qaeda have used violence to make this point in the USA, and in other countries.
The events of 11 September 2001 and other al-Qaeda attacks have been condemned by many people all over the world, including large numbers of Muslims.
…just two days after Newsround’s Editor, writing about the previous version of the page, said “we stand by the more recent version”.
The newest version might not be how I’d write it, but it’s a huge improvement over what went before (see the megapost below for screenshots, text etc.).
Some of the other CBBC Newsround 9/11 Guide pages have also been improved, for instance, the What happened? page used to begin (my italics):
On 11 September 2001 armed people took control of four planes that were flying above the US.
It now begins:
On 11 September 2001 Islamic fanatics hijacked four planes that were flying above the US.
The How did al-Qaeda start? page used to conclude (my italics):
When the conflict was over, al-Qaeda was set up to continue the jihad against people the volunteers thought were enemies of Islam.
Al-Qaeda is thought to operate in 40 to 50 countries around the world.
It now concludes with:
When the conflict was over, al-Qaeda was set up to continue the jihad against people they considered to be ‘enemies’ of their religion – Islam.
Al-Qaeda is thought to operate in 40 to 50 countries around the world.
It is classed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government.
There are some other tweaks that would be nice, for example:
- Flight 93, the fourth plane, merely “crashed into a field” – without mentioning the passengers who fought back once they realised what was happening – the real story;
- That 300 firefighters were killed whilst attempting to rescue people, rather than just being among the ‘dead’.
…but overall the CBBC Newsround 9/11 Guide is now a lot better than it was last Tuesday (the anniversary), and a whole lot better than it was back in June 2007 when the issue was first raised on Biased BBC (see halfway-down here and here).
Thank you to all of you who took the time to complain to the BBC enough to get their attention and have them reconsider and revise these pages. Thank you also to Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale, Conservative Home, Damian Thompson of The Telegraph and all the other bloggers who linked in support of this effort – it is very much appreciated.
It is a shame that it took so much of our time and effort to get the Newsround team to listen, eventually, to commonsense. I hope that the extent of that struggle will not be lost on the BBC’s management – a less defensive attitude to the first round of complaints (and less obfuscation about what was being complained about) would have saved everyone, the BBC included, a lot of bother.
Thank you to David Preiser for alerting me to the changes. I am sure that Sinead Rocks’ BBC Editors Blog post, Appropriate language, will be updated to reflect recent events in due course. It will be interesting to hear the BBC side of the story.
Congratulations Andrew.
The fact that that Rocks has been forced to back down despite her graceless and devious smokescreens testifies to the intellectual strength of your arguments – and also gives some hope that there might still be wiser heads lurking somewhere at the Beeb.
JR’s contribution on this subject also confirmed him in my mind as somebody who understands the difference between arguing for your point of view and outright propagandising.
Thats enough grovelling from me………
Hear hear. Well done all.
Yes indeed, well done Andrew and BBBC.
But this whole episode shows once again the mindset of the BBC when confronted with justified criticism. It’s just the same mindset identified by Hutton: ‘We are the BBC, we cannot be wrong, or if we are, we cannot admit it’. A rush to ‘stand by’ the output, which later has to turn into a grovelling reversal when the evidence becomes just too great. it would have been so much simpler to just say at the beginning, ‘yes there may be problems with this, we will have a look and do some re-writes’.
I too am waiting to see how Ms Rocks responds on the Editors blog on Monday. Should be interesting.
This just goes to show the sort of people that are employed at the BBC. We must all be on full alert with the BBC. This is just a tiny victory, a drop in the ocean that is the cesspit of crawling left wing Guardianistas.
It’s still a confused and badly written account of 9-11, but at least it now has some balance. Phew – bloomin’ hard work tho wot?
Well done to Andrew for such a sterling effort.
This is very much improved and no doubt is due to the pressure being applied to the BBC. Thank you very much, Andrew, and others who would not settle for the previous “improvements” made to the 9/11 pages.
Perhaps one day, as the enemy is surrendering in utter defeat and the fear an Islamic mob lopping off the heads of the staff of the BBC wanes, the editors will have the courage to publish the truth in total.
It doesn’t matter what the policies of the West are toward the Middle East. The fact that we exist at all is the reason they fight us. Unless one is willing to die or convert to Islam, he finds himself the enemy of Islam.
I have noticed that cursory comments made by both BBC and ITV newscasters have increasing become very much less accurate and even misleading in recent months. In a recent report the comment made repeatedly over several evenings by ITV was that an air-gun was fired by a teacher at a youth. It later traspired that the gun was unloaded and was discharged into the ground. Untruths are not news.
Add my voice to the chorus of congratulation.
The newest version might not be how I’d write it, but…
Isn’t that all we ask? Contrary to popular belief within the BBC, we don’t want it simply to reflect our prejudices instead of theirs. We want factual reporting, without weaseling around the implication that a group of deranged fanatics rightly viewed by the majority of Muslims as a disgrace to their faith are somehow morally comparable to one of the free-est, most prosperous nations on Earth. That is not inconsitent with impartiality; it’s simply understanding the difference between right and wrong.
Keep up the good work guys. I’m very impressed with this site!
Excellent work, B-BBC friends.
I love the smell of cyberspace in the morning. . .it smells like victory!
You are insane. Go BBC!
Well done lads.
Thank you Philip for your carefully considered opinion and clear point by point analysis. You are obviously right. Just as soon as the BBC does indeed go, as you implore it to, I promise to give this madness up and find another just cause to fight for 🙂
Well done guys. It’s like pulling teeth, but well done.
Thing that gets me is that I have to pay for them to write the biased rubbish they come up with.
Andrew
I don’t wish to rain on your parade but I just want to say that my heart beats with a fierce pride for the BBC when I reflect that it has taken you 5 years and nearly 2 million page impressions to gain a palpable hit.
Do not let the facts that:
1. The ‘bias’ was clearly accidental….
2. The fault was not with a TV documentary or radio news programme, but a…..webpage; &
3. It was in the kiddies department..
..in any way detract for the magnificence of your achievement.
…oops
‘detract from….’
I was going to pop this in the other thread, but why not here:
Guardian – BBC Newsround’s al-Qaeda posting: why, oh why, did they do it? – http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/greenslade/2007/09/bbc_newsrounds_alqaeda_posting.html
Seems I am not the only one with a few questions left outstanding. Like about the whole ‘saying one thing’ deal for starters.
Meanwhile, if I may just check:
1. The ‘bias’ was clearly accidental….
So that’s OK then. Not deliberate. But no checks or balances from an organisation of… how many… that is already a tad tarnished for what it portrays a bit too often in one sort of way.
2. The fault was not with a TV documentary or radio news programme, but a…..webpage;
So that’s OK then. And the difference being in the conveying of information on a publicly funded entity’s hugely expensive new media baby being…? ps: Like those words: ‘the fault’.
& 3. It was in the kiddies department..
So that’s OK then. It doesn’t matter that it was pants as only our kids were getting it.
I was going to drop the whole question thing, but as we have a BBC rep to hand, about those questions again….
Because it seems that the air in the bunker is beginning to affect even the more rational who are down there.
Can’t anyone see that there are those of us who do care enough about where this is going to be concerned? It’s not a game. Just the truth, well told. Or… not.
I really hope this attitude does not pervade every level.
…oops.
Well done JR • very droll…
There is a victory worth celebrating here though. The systemic liberal-left bias, which permeates through the corporation like so many bad programmes, is bad enough and has alienated a substantial number of discerning viewers, however, this world-view being offered up to children as fact is a new low. B-BBC rightly highlighted the distasteful anti-Americanism on the Newsround website and struck a blow for sanity.
Let the kids make their own minds up on these issues.
Peter Martin
Blimey, for an ad-man you ain’t half prolix. Maybe it comes over a lot snappier in Malay?
Sadly, the verbiage is getting in the way of the sense. What precisely ARE your questions?
What precisely ARE your questions?
John Reith | 17.09.07 – 12:20 pm | #
Ah… the old ‘when you have trouble dealing with the message have a go at the messenger’ deal. Pity.
Sorry. Just figured that as you live on the site you would have seen them getting asked more than once. Not like you to cherry pick topics or anything eh?
Tell you what, as I can’t get through with all my p-stuff, here’s a few from the Guardian:
I think it’s fair to ask the BBC to be more forthcoming about how they did do it? Was that really unconscious or conscious bias? Who was responsible? Have they been disciplined? We need to know more.
Terima Kasih.
ps: Just to check with one of mine: ‘Truth enhancements’ are OK with you so long as they are on the BBC website and/or aimed at kids?
John Reith | 17.09.07 – 12:20 pm
Here’s a qestion for you JR – why are you acting so pleased with yourself when the BBC has just been found guilty of trying to indoctrinate the nation’s children with anti-americanism?
There’s another story you won’t see on the six o’clock news.
‘a question’ I should have said
Rockall
found guilty of trying to indoctrinate the nation’s children
Er….no. Another B-BBC exageration.
As one of the commenters on the Guardian blog mentioned above says:
I don’t see bias followed by correction here; I do see a piece of bad writing tightened for clarity.
Quite so.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/greenslade/2007/09/bbc_newsrounds_alqaeda_posting.html
Yoo-hoo! Me again. I know you’re there!
Must be a real trial, skipping from thread to thread, keeping track and commenting. And in the time. I’d need a clone to do it!
Er….no. Another B-BBC exaggeration.
John Reith | 17.09.07 – 1:35 pm | #
I guess you’re still working on answers to Andrew’s and The Guardian correspondent’s questions, along with mine.
However, are you really going to point at some bod’s opinion ‘post’ in all this as some kind of vindication for the ‘moving on, nothing to see here’ position?
I’ll have to add ‘bad writing tightened for clarity’ to my list of neat troofamisms – http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/09/the_troof_is_out_there.html
But you know, I really would prefer my kids didn’t get such stuff from such a source, especially when, to date, we still don’t seem to have the unenhanced truth of what lead to its creation, upload, download, change, upload again…
Peter | Homepage | 17.09.07 – 2:02 pm
Yes, I suppose the issue does raise some serious questions:
1. Are the enthusiastic young people who are good at plasticene, Petra the dog and so on, necessarily safe with geopolitics too?
&
2. Are the intricacies of ME affairs capable of reduction to terms with which a six year old can meaningfully engage?
I don’t pretend to know the answers.
My gut instinct says ‘no’ to both.
…..but I still find it quite funny that Andrew & co, who set out 5 years and 2 million page visits ago on their quest to bring low the likes of Paxo, Naughtie, Humphrys. Frei, Guerin & Simpson should return now in such splendid triumph. proudly holding up the scalp of …….. Siobahn Somebody-or-other, or whatever her name is…….. of whom none of us had previously ever heard.
And frankly, I can’t see that she did anything so terribly wrong anyway.
John Reith | 17.09.07 – 3:14 pm | #
I don’t pretend to know the answers.
My gut instinct says ‘no’ to both.
Phew.. at last. OK, no answers to what was asked (but a few to some that were not), because you don’t pretend to know them (is that like ‘relations with that woman’ as a troofemism?). So… who does? They would still seem to be missing in the narrative.
Presumably, if you were running the show, you wouldn’t have tried? It’s a notion: ‘If you can’t do it well, don’t try and do it.’
Which brings one to…
…. I still find it quite funny that …etc… should return now in such splendid triumph. proudly holding up the scalp of..
I don’t find it funny at all. Nor, I am sure, does she. And what scalp are we talking about?
..I can’t see that she did anything so terribly wrong anyway.
Me, either, if she made A, genuine, mistake. Or, indeed, considering the environment in which she works, just made an editorial call that may now not get by without challenge as easily as it used to.
But, at risk of repeating myself (and giving you a quick deflection opportunity), that’s just it? Whoops… nothing terribly wrong… moving on like nothing happened. It seems subsequent events – in no small measure with the BBC as protagonists – played a part.
And, in any case, I would very much suspect, and hope, that the BBC has management systems in place to avoid, address and prevent in future such ‘situations’. And support their more junior staff at a point (which I think it may have reached by then) when it was looking like an ‘issue’.
Where have they been/are they/will they be in future?
It’s not about petty point scoring; it’s about what ‘we’ get served up by those ‘we’ are required to pay to serve it up to us.
John Reith,
I think most of us agree that the whole series of articles contained a great deal of sloppiness. Obviously this was done in haste, and thrown together without much thought or supervision.
If the posts were about the anthropomorphised machines on “Bob the Builder” were abused by management, with one of the articles describing why the one that hides all the time was doing so because she was unhappy that Bob was an evil capitalist and did not distribute the profits evenly and they should really form a collective, then it would not be such a big deal if B-BBC got CBBC to remove the pro-communist bits. We wouldn’t even care that this was left up unchecked and unedited for years.
This was not the case, however. The topic was and is an extremely important one, to both British and US citizens. Even if we accept that the posts were made in haste, there are several bits which give clear evidence of a predisposition towards certain attitudes on the part of the writer(s). These have all been raked over the coals elsewhere, no need to list them here, except for two simple examples:
1. Somebody obviously believed that the Palestinians were a major cause célèbre for Al Qaeda. Can you point to any evidence – other than a brief mention in an obscure missive from Bin Laden, one which nobody at CBBC could have possibly known about – that would have convinced CBBC employees that the Palestinians were known at the time to be an important gripe against the US, significant enough to be singled out by CBBC? If not, then you must ask yourself serious questions about the mindset of whoever wrote that bit.
2. You have already conceded (on another thread) my point about leaving the door open to conspiracy theories. The original version was even worse, expressly leading British children to believe that it was only the US position that AQ were behind the attacks. What kind of person would even think to write such a thing in the first place? That’s not sloppy or hasty. That is evidence of a preconceived notion in the writer’s mind. Who else would write such a thing, even in haste?
Even if we accept that an ignorant, barely out of the broadcasting school in Bournemouth, junior assistant copywriter wrote this stuff and threw it up there in a couple of hours, it shows that either nobody has looked at since, or the editor saw no problem with either of these issues.
The former shows a lack of professionalism on the part of the editor. Surely a series of articles such an event would be worth a second edit. If this was all done in haste, a proper editor would say that they should go back at some point and look at it. It also opens up the usual can of worms regarding BBC hiring practices. How can you hire someone who believes these things? Remember, we are not talking about political positions on foreign policy. We are talking about provable facts here. Further, how can a series of articles on such an important topic go untouched by an editor for years? They didn’t look at it after it was posted online, ever? I think we all find that increasingly hard to believe.
The latter option really just means that the editor(s) looked later, and had no problem with the two issues I just raised, nor with any of the others Andrew listed in his main posts, and everyone else here has discussed. This would seem to demonstrate that people who have been hired by the BBC – even for its kiddie division – are so concerned about the Palestinians that they conflate AQ’s desires with their own, and that their minds are open to conspiracy theories. This is also shows that nobody from the adult news division has ever looked at this. Or has, and, well…you know….
So it’s not really just a harmless little children’s story, easily dismissed just because it was written quickly and badly. This incident opens up legitimate questions about the mindset of BBC employees. There can be no denying it.
David Preiser | 17.09.07 – 4:38 pm
We should be wary of the hindsight factor here.
The 9/11 Commission was not even established until November 2002 and did not report until the late summer of 2004, if my memory serves me right.
There was little, therefore, by way of authoritative or definitive source material on the motivation of the terrorists themselves or of al-Qaeda more generally until quite a late stage. I don’t think much was widely known about the ideology of Islamism either in the period just after the attacks.
You have already conceded (on another thread) my point about leaving the door open to conspiracy theories.
I don’t think I so much ‘conceded’ as simply agreed with you.
I dare say conspiracy theorists were active on the web before the dust even settled at ground zero • but they weren’t a well known cultural phenomenon until recently. So maybe when the piece was written, no such factor was in play.
So I don’t think any of this says anything about ‘mindset’ issues.
In any case, perhaps we may well be asking too much of people whose quotidian concerns are more with tickling the tummies of teletubbies in Balamorey than with checking out the latest goss on the interrogation of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed?
(My suspicion that the original was written by someone more used to fantasy-land is supported by evidence of a belief that there is a state called Palestine, which is in dispute with its neighbour, Israel.)
Yes, of course you are right that someone should have revisited these pages at a later date.
I frequently spot mistakes on websites • of organizations public and private.
Sometimes, like Mr O’Connell, I send an e-mail suggesting a correction.
That’s normal life.
That’s what happened here. Let’s get it in proportion.
John Reith,
The fact that Al Qaeda planned and perpetrated the attacks was well known long before any such commission was formed. Or are you suggesting that the jury was still out on who done it until the commission report was published? I know that’s not what you mean, but why else would it be necessary to wait until then to say that AQ did it?
As for the rest, you know what I mean, I know what you mean. There is enough agreement here, I think.
I also completely agree this was clearly beyond the ken of mere CBBC juniors, and have said as much several times previously, both here and on S. Rocks’ blog. My sense of proportion is not entirely out of line, though.
It’s just too bad that half the people arguing about this are only going on about the most recent versions, and haven’t even seen the originals. You know, like the part where they said that Jewish Israelis were the enemies of Islam, before they amended it.
I am happy to take towcesterian’s advice from the other thread and move on to another problem. Perhaps it’s time to start keeping a list of similar changes caused on the main site, or (hope springs eternal) in broadcasts.
The notion that it was ‘only’ in the kiddies section is not only patronising, but misguided.
Surely it is more important, not less, that we get the facts right when we are targeting impressionable youngsters who may not have the tools to examine the story critically for themselves?
Has anyone noticed the biased reporting of the conservative conference, When compared to the reporting of the liberal democrats or labour. Today for example they had a 1 hour show in which they did not cover any direct speaches from the party converence and spent the time debating issues not related to what was happening in the conference, But with liberal democrats and labour the reporting lasted much more than 1 hour and also most of the time covered direct speechs from the converences. It frustrates me so much that we now live in a country that does not have a free press, It is a huge attack on democracy I still can’t belive things have become this bad in this country….