The Plain English Campaign gave a gobbledegook award to Donald Rumsfeld the other day. If you are interested, I gave my plain opinion of the Plain English Campaign on my blog here. In this post I’d just like to point out, that of course the BBC zoomed in on this story like flies to honey. As usual, the Beeb did not waste any valuable sneering energy on actually examining Rumsfeld’s remarks to see if there might, after all, be something in them. And, as usual, they got the story slightly wrong in a characteristic direction. On Radio 4 News yesterday the announcer, revelling in it, hastened to say that George Bush and John Prestcott were runners up. No they weren’t. According to The Scotsman “the awards always attracted nominations for Mr Rumsfeld’s boss US President George Bush as well as British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott ” – i.e. the Great British Public, or the letter-to-the-editor-writing subdivision thereof neglect no opportunity to be smug. But even the Plain English Campaign, ignorant though it is of the complexities of either intelligence work or the philosophy of the limits of knowledge, can differentiate between a tendency to verbal slip-ups and the obfuscatory language that should be its main business. The BBC doesn’t seem to be able to. On occasion it might not care to – there is material for a dozen Golden Bull awards in this blog.
It is a wise man who knows how little he knows.
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BBC arrogance toward those who don’t share their ignorance.
The concept of “unknown unknowns” has been around for years. Google gives over 4000 cites for the phrase, some from the UK. The risk of unknown unknowns has been offered as an argument for banning genetically modified crops, which have no known dangers.
If the BBC reporter had recognized the possibility of his own ignorance, he could have done a google search in a few minutes. Just shows that the phrase “unknown unknowns” is self-descriptive as far as the BBC is concerned.
I heard that piece on the “Empire” Service… My god! Rumsfeld is normally praised and pilloried for speaking PLAINLY!!!
The other aspect of the item, as I was trying to give the BEEB the benefit of the doubt – was to accept it for a moment – only to realize that Rumsfeld telling the thing AS A JOKE! a play on the music of words!
The World Service has a one-hour segment (World Update) that they peddle to NPR here in the USA, and also carry on the World Service. When they ran the same item for NPR consumption the presenter (Matt Damon) made a tongue in cheek introduction to it, and the piece was abbreviated somewhat.
His attempt to make it slightly less offensive seems almost like a sign that he’s embarrassed about having to pimp that sort of thing in a product intended for the US. There is a pall of fairness in his interviews – so I feel for the guy, he;s obviously in posession of at least some humanity.
Rumsfelt’s only sin was not to patronize the public with a simple sound bite but to have the nerve to describe a complex idea concerning risk. The Journos felt snubbed because it was a bit above their heads. As for plain english campaign, they are a commerical organisation who look to get the most publicity possible from their award marketting exercise.
This complaint has remarkably little to do with the BBC. They’ve just picked up on the Plain English lot’s award, and from memory they do that each year as there’s usually some choice nonsense to laugh at. I agree that Rumsfeld’s thought is a complicated one and, given that, he expressed it about as clearly as it could be expressed. So the Plain English lot are just being silly.
A better candidate for a “why does the BBC only ever manage to read press releases that it likes the look of” complaint was last week’s (I think) report on a 20% rise in HIV in the UK. The Health Protection Agency’s press release, on which the BBC’s story was based, took great care to disguise the fact that their full report on the increase showed that it was mostly down to immigration of people with HIV from Africa, rather than from transmission within the UK. Obviously the BBC story delved no deeper than the HPA press release, leaving us with the story that HIV in Britain was up 20%, plus lots of
…comments from doctors and lobbyists demanding more “resources”, but no mention of the real reason why resources are stretched.
Lee
Plain English?
It’s a pity that the BBC does not pay attention to some of Britains representatives.
Yesterday onlocal TV there was in interview with Beckham and believe I lost half of what he said trying to explain to the others in the audience the sounds he was uttering at times. :-))
Oi! Rab, No! Leave Becks out of this.
I am absolutely astounded by the amount of right wingers jumping to his defence over the plain english award thing. I’m sure we all know what he was getting at, but you cannot deny that what came out of his mouth that day was complete verbal diarrhea. I honestly think that most people must be just defending him due to political loyalties.
OK then Paul. Express his thought in lovely Plain English more clearly than he did.
Lee
Quite. It’s a difficult concept and Rumsfeld explained it about as well as anyone could.
I have to side with Paul here,it was just a bit on the verbose side…….