Commenter SteveB complained to the Beeboids, and received the following reply, which he kindly shared with us:
Dear Mr Bxxxxxxxx
Thank you for your comments. We accept that our initial story was
deficient and should have made it much clearer what the killing in the
song lyrics referred to. We revised the story after re-checking the
facts. We also subsequently did an updated story to include the marine’s
apology, which detailed out much more clearly the thrust of the song.But you make a fair criticism about our first story. We do aim to cover
stories as objectively and accurately as possible.Kind regards
BBC News website
In spite of the acknowledged deficiencies and lack of clarity in their first version of this story, I doubt that we’ll see any public acknowledgement of these errors, let alone a BBC Newswatch record and explanation of them.
I have long suggested that BBC News Online ought, on each page of their site, including the index pages, to have a link to a page of revisions, so that tellytaxpaying customers like us can, if we so wish, see each and every change to a story as it happened, the better to see how stories develop and who edited what and when.
This would be a useful service for all sorts of people, and would also improve the quality of BBC News Online journalism – simply by virtue of doing away with the opportunity that exists at present for journalists to slap down any old tosh, safe in the knowledge that they can ‘stealth edit’ away their errors and omissions later (as with this, my favourite example) – “Wot me guv? No guv, it was always like that, you must be mistaken”!
The answer has always been that such a system would be impractical – why record a change to a story when it could be as trivial as a spelling correction they say?
Well, the solution, a large scale working example of the solution no less, already exists – it’s good old Wikipedia! If every Wikipedia item can have a list of revisions, large and small, complete with times, dates and some kind of author identifier, surely every News Online page could easily do likewise (though obviously without the free-for-all editing) – heck, the BBC could even use some of Wikipedia’s code to do it.
It wouldn’t surprise me if BBC News Online’s system already has this capability – certainly if I had designed their system this is the sort of information that it would automatically capture, free from tampering by ordinary users. If their system, already does this of course, then there’d be little difficulty in making such information publicly readable.
So Beeboids, if Wikipedia can be this accountable to their non-paying customers, why can’t you be that accountable to your dragooned tellytaxpaying customers? What’s to lose?
P.S. As a further constructive suggestion, when you create a link from a current story to a previous related story, it would be very easy to make those links work both ways – i.e. so that by creating a link from a new story to an old story (for background purposes), the list of related stories on the older story is also automatically updated to point forward to the newer story too – an easy to implement form of “what happened next“ service. It wouldn’t be difficult to implement, and would be tremendously useful to your tellytaxpaying customers.