This looks interesting. I had an email from a chap called John (not sure if he is the proprietor or not) pointing out a new … truth to tell I don’t know what to call it. Blog? Computer programme? RSS-feed type thingy? Whatever it is, it’s called News Sniffer.
John writes:
It has 2 main projects.: ‘Watch your mouth’ detects censored comments on the BBC ‘Have your say’ section, and ‘Revisionista’ tracks changes to news articles (bbc, the guardian and the independent).
I’ve found lots of interesting examples of their censorship policies (some examples of which are in the blog)
John.
I found this very intelligent discussion on the BBC children’s website;
Starting with this;
“i totally agree with Jack Straw in what he said about the veil that muslim women wear. I believe that it does hide one of the ways that humans communicate. i believe it is right for women to take off the veil as it can be offensive and intimidating to others. it also helps when talking to someone to see their facial expressions and the way they react to things that are said. It isn’t being racist, if a christian or hindu or someone walked into a room with a balaclava on they would asked to take it off or leave (probably thrown out). This is the same principle.
Although they use the arguement that we allow sikhs and jews to wear their traditional headdress and that we are simply picking on them, it is a totally invalid arguement. Their traditional head wear doesn’t obscure there face. It is important for them to understand our values and way of life as well. We are expected in their countries to dress ‘appropraitely’ and cover up our skin, and we do so. I think it important for them to carry out our wishes as well and erradicate the veil whilst in our country. They can wear the head scarf but the face being covered is just simply wrong. It isn’t a case of racial predjustice, but taking in our culture as too many of us the veil is in fact very offensive as it symbolises sexism towards women.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbnewsround/F2706291?thread=3555898
Now the BBC saw fit to censor message 10 and 12 but not this one;
Message 13 – posted by 007PinkKitty (U5350002) , 6 Days Ago
“I think a lil bit of what ur saying is right but most of it wrong. Muslim women should wear the nikaab or veil. I’m a muslim and i heard what Jack straw said in an interveiw. you english people are making life hard for muslims. and i dislike you. that is affending what you said. u don’t know anything about religion.”
It seems that veiled threats can be projected onto non Muslims by the faithful and the BBC is more than happy to sit back and watch. But you try speaking out against Allah. Why faster than you can say “Allah Ackba” your head-line is on the floor.
The BBC and its pro Islamic censorship pen.
wow. that newsniffer service is great. looks like a lot of work has gone into it.
my congrats to “John”. well done.
site bookmarked.
pounce -> i’m still waiting for Jim Naughtie/Paxman/Humphreys or any other BBC journalist to ask the question that all of us know *should* be asked.
“if its islamic to wear a veil, why arent the Islamic men wearing it?”
i’m still waiting.
archduke,
As it’s Islamic men that have the problem with self-control I suggest they wear blinkers instead of making women wear a bin-bag-barrier.
Just had a quick look at the “News Sniffer” – could be very useful. After a few minutes searching I found this interesting revision to this piece from the BBC.
“Pakistan delays rape reform plans”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5337752.stm
One passage originaly read:
“But following complaints from hardline Islamic parties, rape cases could also still be dealt with under Sharia law, the law minister told reporters”
But in the final version it has been changed to this:
“But following complaints from Islamic and secular parties the government says it will now re-draft its proposals to create more of a consensus”
I wonder why?
Archduke,
I believe the male Touregs of North Africa (Muslim) wear the veil, the women dont.
Nowhere – repeat, nowhere – in the koran are women required to wear anything that covers their face or their hair. So even the hijab (headscarf) is a fantasist non-issue. Women are simply directed to dress modestly. (By the way, so are men.)
These facial coverings are from desert tribes in the Middle East who did indeed cover their noses and shield their eyes from the constantly blowing sand. This very sensible habit, which men also follow with the keffiyah, long predates this religion.
The description of these Hallowe’en outfits as “religious” is ignorant rubbish. This Azmi woman who says it’s for her “religion” has been very ill-instructed.
The NEWS SNIFFER is a fantastic tool. It allows one to see how the bias is inserted over time as a “news” item morphs into a BBC “analysis piece”
only question is can it be pointed to specific subject matter?
I’m slightly wary about news sniffer at the moment.
It depends how it detects change in the topics it’s monitoring. If it is testing something under beeb control such as timestamp or RSS feed then I don’t think it will cover stealth editing.
However, what it does do, particularly in picking mesaages deleted from HYS (ie literally a DHYS report), looks very good.
Check this article in the London Evening Standard, highlighted by Little Bulldogs
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23371617-details/We%20are%20biased,%20admit%20the%20stars%20of%20BBC%20News/article.do
It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.
A leaked account of an ‘impartiality summit’ called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.
Richy:
great article! Everyone here will know it’s just stating the obvious, of course – but what on earth wd the likes of John Reith, Cockney/Anon/Dff Anon etc think?
Richy-
Interesting to compare Andrew Marr’s comments about the BBC quoted in your link with his comments from 2001 to the right of this page.
Before you get overly exited about this new site be aware of it’s motivation. It was clearly started by a left winder who believes that the media is not biased left. At the moment he is doing a good job and showing ALL censored comments and revised pages. Let’s see how that develops.
RoP
Good point – anyone who lists “Lenin’s Tomb” as a “friend” should be dealt with very warily indeed.
RoP | 22.10.06 – 11:02 am
Umbongo | 22.10.06 – 2:08 pm
Here’s a link to the blog of the person who developed the news sniffer:
http://johnleach.co.uk/words/archives/category/politics
Scroll down to see that hugo chav is a force for a decent society!
This guy even quotes chomsky and pilger with approval rather than derision!
Although he is self evidently a leftie nutcase, nevertheless his product doesn’t seem yet to be censored to detect only right-wing bias. There wouldn’t be much left in his database if he edited out all the left-wing bias from the beeb extracts.
Hi,
I designed News Sniffer in order to help uncover bias in whatever form. I do have what might be described as “lefty” ideals, but I have no intention of fiddling the results (though the irony of the situation would not be lost on me 🙂
I guess my bias does show in which news organisations I’ve chosen to monitor (BBC, The Guardian, The Independent). All generally regarded as the “liberal” media.
News Sniffer’s current recommendation system is flawed though and very much open to bias. For example, if only smelly lefties visit the site and vote on censored comments and revisions then top recommended stuff will very likely be left-leaning.
I’m looking to replace this with more of a categorisation system, where users tag things with keywords rather than vote.
Additionally, I plan to release the code of the program under a free software license. This will allow anyone (with the know-how) to run their own News Sniffer and monitor their own news sources. Then people don’t *have* to trust me.
Whether you like it or not, it’s undeniable that there are valid topics that are completely unmentionable in *any* of the corporate media. Media Lens[1] investigates some great examples of these. I hope that News Sniffer will help find examples of the bias towards this, whether considered in favour of the “Left” or “Right”.
[1] http://www.medialens.org
does reith work for the bbc? if so, he really ought to be ashamed of himself, IMHO. i hate to get personal, but is he trying to refute the charge that the bbc isn’t or can’t be biased because it isn’t monolithic?
if so, then reith, you must agree that the KKK aren’t racist or biased in matters of race because they aren’t monolithic, either. picture it: some of them want to put blacks back into slavery, others want all blacks deported, still others want a u.s. style of apartheid…
for me, the bbc ranges from pink, to pinker, to reddish pink…
but still, all pink, all the time
if you do work for the bbc, reith, tell us all, please, all those in-house bbc debates, were they over degrees of pinkness, or were more fundamental disagreements generally in play?
John Leach,
Fair enough.
J. Leach
thanks for clearing that up. Congrats on what looks like a very interesting site.
Will your site pick up BBC stealth edits, where the time stamp has not been changed?
J.G: News Sniffer doesn’t rely on time stamps. *Any* change in an article is detected. The design spec. assumed a sneaky BBC. There is no escaping the sniff 🙂
How long before something like this is available with speech recognition??That will keep the BBC and others on their toes.
John Leach | Homepage | 24.10.06 – 12:37 am
J.G: News Sniffer doesn’t rely on time stamps. *Any* change in an article is detected. The design spec. assumed a sneaky BBC. There is no escaping the sniff
Since you intend to release the code for the sniffer at some time could you please be more explicit now about how the sniffer monitors the beeb?
Are you analysing the RSS feed or are you scanning the website every n seconds to detect changes?
I suspect that a stealth edit – the sort of thing we are very concerned about on this blog – wouldn’t give rise to a detectable event and might not be apparent to sniffer unless it constantly monitored every news article. Am I wrong about this?
The BBC seems to keep a text record of most of its output now?Ideal for News Sniffer (as long as it’s an accurate record).Perhaps speech recognition software has advanced far enough to be used to transcribe BBC newsreaders to text?They are a small(ish) group so speech recognition software could be ‘trained’ to recognize their speech via tape?((aided manually by an attendee when a word needs to be repeated (rewound)).This would allow monitoring,transfer to text (a true record) and search by software programmes at reasonable cost?Labour/New (improved) Labour are sometimes used to suit the context of the story.’Labour’ when addressing ‘traditional socialist issues’ and ‘New (improved) Labour’ when addressing the partys ‘vision of the future’.It would be nice to flag this up for example.
John Leach – Your News Sniffer is being put to good use on this site now. Yet you are (currently) unquestionably leftist. The product of your work is exposing the innate leftist bias within the BBC. Does this perplex you as a lefty or are you open to persuasion?
Seeing as you’re so concerned with fairness, balance and accuracy, I’m sure you’ll be posting this link soon
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2006/10/bias_at_the_bbc.html#commentsanchor
Allan@Aberdeen: I don’t believe that a political outlook automatically causes blindness to bias supporting that outlook. I see examples of all kinds of bias in the corporate media.
And I don’t believe it’s possible to have useful discussion without being open to persuasion.
Re the poll results that so please Mr Beast, above – did the respondents have the option of saying “none”? Are the 60% trusting the BBC 60% of the total numbers polled, or 60% after excluding nones & don’t knows?
will,
Someone pointed out in the comments section of Helen Boaden’s defence of the BBC that the percentage support of the various media in the poll does not add up to 100%, but 116%.
Fear The Beast,
Unlike the BBC, commenters on this site are not the kind of people who ignore facts that don’t fit in with our views. If you knew anything about this site, you’d know that.
I don’t watch any of the BBC’s “drama” programmes, but whilst “Spooks” is perhaps the most egregious example, the BBC’s policial line seems to find its way into all their output, e.g Robin Hood (Iraq, Guantanamo), Dr Who (evil American presidents).
I have seen a minute of each of 2 episodes of “The Amazing Mrs Pritchard” (a drama series about a supermarket manager who becomes the prime minister), in one they were claiming that school funding was inadequate, & last night declaring an amnesty for all illegal immigrants & looking to get rid of the monarchy.
Anyone dare to watch “Casualty/Holby City”?
This constant subversive stream gives the impression that the BBC considers itself beyond control.
Great site & I hope you can get some sponsorship soon. 🙂 Josh geburtstags gedicht blatter braun wc mit