Monthly Archives: November 2006

… the coverage of two court cases where teachers are alleged to have had sex with pupils.

A Grammar school music teacher embarked on an affair with a sixth-form pupil, a court heard on Tuesday.

The headline originally referred to the school’s grammar status – it’s since been amended. Contrast with :

An art teacher has appeared in court charged with sexual offences against girls over a period of 30 years.

Not ‘a comprehensive school art teacher’ ? It’s the little things.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

says NHS Blog Doctor. I ain’t going to say it any better.

…Though I will add that the practice of significantly changing an article while leaving the “Last Updated” field unchanged has been noted many times on this blog. Both the old and the new versions of the article on milk allergy say that they were last updated on Monday, 20 November 2006, 04:54 GMT.

UPDATE Tuesday 10.23am. A comment to this post by Lee Moore points out that the Google cache search result that Dr Crippen had cited to show the earlier version has now been updated, in the way of Google cache stories, to show the later version.

A more permanent record of the changes can be found using the News Sniffer programme. (Specifically the bit of it called “Revisionista”.)

This link shows versions 0 and 1.

This link shows versions 7 and 8

I haven’t the time to track down exactly when various changes happened. However I note that whereas Versions 0 and 1 say at the beginning:

Nearly 80% of 500 doctors polled by the medical taskforce Act Against Allergy thought…

Versions 7 and 8 say:

Nearly 80% of 500 doctors polled by a formula milk manufacturer thought…

There are other changes in the story. One important change relates to the question of how common milk allergy is. Earlier versions say it is very common. Middle versions say that opinions differ. Later versions state some figures from the Food Standards Agency.

As always, I do not complain that changes have taken place. The changes are improvements. What is bad is that non-trivial changes are done by stealth. An organisation with the BBC’s resources ought to find some way of making significant changes explicit. Failing that it ought at least to not make a false statement on the Last Updated field.

Of course none of this business of stealth edits is news to readers of this blog, but judging from the correspondence that “Dr Crippen” has received, the fact that the Last Updated field has not been changed does lead to some readers being misled.

• “The BBC has excised all references to the anti-black and antisemitic nature of the attack …” Melanie Phillipscompares how the BBC reported what happened after a football match between the Israeli team Hapoel and Paris Saint Germain with the AFP and AP reports of the same incident.Her link doesn’t work. The BBC story is here.

  Hat tip: Biodegradable

   

• 800,000 demonstrate. Guess which three we found.Pounce comments:
  

  Three Lebanese people give their views on the significance of the past few days in their country: the assassination of anti-Syrian politician Pierre Gemayel, and the huge crowds attending his funeral rally. (Link to BBC story)

  1st viewpoint ; The Jews and America did it.

  2nd viewpoint; Not sure who did it but I don’t think Syria did it. Oh by the way Hezbollah have a valid point about wanting more of a say in government.

  3rd viewpoint; Hezbollah are great and America isn’t..

  Hang on. 800,000 people protested against Syria in Beirut yesterday and its shared familiar ‘Hezbollah’ […]

  Yet strangely in Beirut today out of a total population of approx 1.5 million the BBC manages to find 3 people who not only support Syria and Hezbollah but hate the Jews and America in which to express the view in Lebanon.

  Why am I not surprised

  Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

(aka Amnesty and HRW)

It was a while back that I read the Human Rights Watch report on the war between Israel and Hezbullah. I realised then that there was quite a bizarre section which claimed that on the one hand Hezbullah had used settlements for rocket launch pads, while on the other that they hadn’t used “human shields”. Just how wrapped in humanity one has to be to have a human shield around one isn’t clear- a dance of definition noticed with scorn by LGF.

The BBC is to be commended in its report for calling HRW and Amnesty “pressure groups”. Now all they need to do is to subject them to the most cursory scrutiny. They could start I suppose with the fact that the following claim (with the same pretzel-like logic) appears to be lifted directly from the HRW report by Amnesty:

“Amnesty found that Hezbollah hid Katyusha rockets among civilians and often fired them into Israel from the cover of civilian villages.

But researchers found no evidence that Hezbollah actually used civilians as human shields during the fighting.”

Maybe I mistitled this post, in fact. The Gospels get a far harder time than the BBC gives its pet transnationals.

My colleague Andrew recently highlighted a case where the Beeb re-wrote a company’s press release and called it news. He felt, he said, a Mandy Rice-Davies moment coming on.

Here’s another instance where Mandy’s wisdom should be heard. NHS Blog Doctor pointed out this BBC story.

Nearly 80% of 500 doctors polled by the medical taskforce Act Against Allergy thought their colleagues confused milk allergy symptoms with other conditions.

Experts say the problem lies…

And who or what are the “medical taskforce”, Act Against Allergy? The makers of a milk substitute.

I’d be the first to argue that the company’s vested interest does not necessarily make them wrong. Indeed I often like to point out that non-commercial bodies and experts are not themselves immune from having vested interests. But the commercial link is something one wants to know when evaluating the story, don’t you agree? The BBC showed laziness in simply repeating Act Against Allergy’s self-description as a “medical taskforce”, as if the prime minister had appointed them.

UPDATE: Follow-up post concerning stealth-editing of the BBC story here.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

Quentin Langley has been counting mentions of “left wing” and “right wing” on the BBC.