as noted by commenters here. The story reports that:
The BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombings to avoid labelling the perpetrators as “terrorists”, it was disclosed yesterday.
Early reporting of the attacks on the BBC’s website spoke of terrorists but the same coverage was changed to describe the attackers simply as “bombers”.
The BBC’s guidelines state that its credibility is undermined by the “careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments”.
Consequently, “the word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding” and its use should be “avoided”, the guidelines say.
Rod Liddle, a former editor of the Today programme, has accused the BBC of “institutionalised political correctness” in its coverage of British Muslims.
A BBC spokesman said last night: “The word terrorist is not banned from the BBC.”
Though many of us here welcomed the BBC’s, albeit hypocritical, use of the word ‘terrorist’ (where, according to the BBC, London bus bombers are ‘terrorists’, while Palestinian bus bombers are mere ‘militants’) to describe murdering scumbags who are, clearly, terrorists, if the BBC have actually gone to the lengths of re-editing material, after the fact, to remove the word ‘terrorist’ then their hypocrisy knows no bounds – the rewriting of history, BBC Ministry of Truth style.
If the BBC is truly honest, next time (and sadly I expect there will be a next time) there is a terrorist atrocity in the UK, let them refer openly, as is their wont, to the cowardly murderers as ‘militants’, ‘insurgents’ and ‘bombers’ – then let’s see how long the BBC’s politically-correct fifth-column naifs last when their adoring telly-taxpaying public sees the stark reality of the BBC’s detachment from the common-sense and decency of the hard-working compulsory telly-taxpayers that it supposedly serves.
Sickening.
Update: Examples of rewrites at BBC News Online, courtesy of Harry, and an update explaining how the leftie-PC view was reimposed at the BBC.
Back to the random number generator.
“This could imply that there may have been another ‘Text of speech’ that has gone missing.”
My thinking when I wrote this are as follows:
Anyone who has worked with a computer based system, sales receipts, stock exchange contracts, electronic parts are things I’ve handled will be used to the way computers generate numbers and what you can learn from the numbers themselves.
When I worked with Exchange deals, buys and sells were generated out of totally different strings so you could always identiy which was which. NATO part numbers are complex multi-part constuctions that tell you country of manufacture, supplier, type of equipment etc just by looking at the number. Other systems batch allocate sets of numbers for different departments which are drawn on as required.
The BBC seems to use a very simple system where the each page uses the next available number. Try changing the final digit of any page number by one and resending it and you get page unavailable because the preceeding part of the address does not agree with the page. Given the resouces we could probably work out when the Blair transcript was loaded by comparing the page number with pages elsewhere on the site where the time is verifiable – sports results, newsflashes etc.
A pal of mine used to work for A TV company designing the graphics for the news broadcasts. He told me a lot of how they operated. He would prepare a screen some time before they went to air, but final details maybe video footage or captions would be inserted only a couple of minutes prior to broadcast. For instance the report of the Queen Mother’s death was formatted years before the event and regularly updated. All they had to do when it happened was insert current material and it was ready for air. Why shouldn’t the BBC operate the same?
The Prime Minister’s statement was made at 3:30pm http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/cm050711/debindx/50711-x.htm so the sequence of page numbers would imply that the comment on the statement page and Howard’s response page were made up in advance, the code tested by previewing in a browser and the text pasted in when available.You wouldn’t want to be in the position of having the text ready for publication and then finding a glitch on the page. Note the Howard statement number preceeds the ‘mother makes plea’ by almost 300 digits.
The party leaders statements are on what are effectively generic pages. All the sidebars, headers, footers etc occur all over the site. The comment page is somewhat more complicated as there is the picture and the links.
It would seem logical that both the Blair and the Howard statement pages would be made up together, by the same person, consecutively, so the numbers shouldn’t have been too far apart. So why weren’t they? We already know that even when edited, even stealth edited, the page number remains the same. Blair’s speech should have appeared on a page with a number close to the Howard page.
Of course the innocent explanation was that it was inadvertantly used for something else and a new page created from scratch. But why the Blair page? The text for that would have been available before Howard’s.
A puzzle…….
dogsbitz
The Hutton enquiry gave us a window into the murky ways the BBC operates – and the way No 10 operates these days.
I would love to see what happened on this occasion. Very strange.
Meanwhile on Any Answers, bloody Jonathn Dimbleby is backing the Palestinian case. Now interrupting a woman caller. An enqiry in HIM would be no bad thing a forensic dissection of his programmes, the ITV series. It is all there on tape or disk. Fair as a 9 bob note.
He usually interrrupts panellists or callers in two ways –
1 to stop the flow of the pro-US lined by contradictions or snide questions
2 to add to the anti-US case by lobbing easy supplementaries, and OMITTING to chllenge obvious lies or non-sequiturs.