Yesterday Laban pointed out how the Marxists and fellow-travellers in BBC Southern region manufactured a row, nay, the eruption of a row, in their story, the third most important story in England in their opinion:
Row erupts over Golly exhibition
A row has broken out over a golly exhibition at a Hampshire museum.
Turning to the same shocking story today, after Laban’s article (and articles by Iain Dale and Tim Worstall), we now find that the row that erupted was, in fact, mere:
Criticism over golly exhibition
An exhibition of golly badges at a Hampshire museum has been criticised.
Yet, surprise, surprise, the BBC’s mendacious Last updated: timestamp remains unchanged, still reading Saturday, 13 January 2007, 12:01 GMT, as if it was as it always had been. “Wot us guv, stealth editing, nah, you must be mistaken, we’re professionals you know!”.
Yet again, BBC Views Online demonstrates precisely why they need to implement a publicly available document revision history system, just like the one Wikipedia use on all of their documents, so that the tellytax-paying public can see for themselves just how scrupulous the BBC are in reporting the news. The discipline and rigour of such a system would do the quality of BBC news a power of good.
Failing that, the tellytax-paying public are of course perfectly able to implement their own systems to show just how professional the BBC are, such as the wonderful News Sniffer Revisionista system created by John Leach, which more than amply demonstrates the BBC’s stealth edit:
News Sniffer: The BBC’s Marxist manufactured golly ‘row’ is stealth-
edited down to mere ‘criticism’ after they were caught in the act.
Hat tip to commenter HSLD.
Addendum: Commenter Phil notes that Molyneux is being true to Marx’s creed, quoting from an 1862 letter from Marx to Engels about Lassalle, an ideological rival and one-time suitor to one of Marx’s daughters:
Marx: “It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like”.
I agree that News Sniffer is a very good tool for us but I dont see any evidence that it has detected a stealth edit.
As far as I can see, NS reacts to the RSS feed and the point of a stealth edit is that it is stealthy because it is done without changing the timestamp or generating an RSS item.
When subsequent changes are made then the stealth edit does show up but is indistinguishable from an ordinary update to a running story.
I dont want to rubbish NS at all but I do think it is necessary to be accurate about what it can do.
Incidentally, another way that the beeb can fool NS is to change the report heading so that the sequence of versions is interrupted and a new NS thread starts.
I hope I am wrong in the above inferences about NS but perhaps others can put me right.
My point is that News Sniffer demonstrates the stealth edit – not particularly that it detected it – to confirm that it was necessary to look at the two timestamps, which I did using the Mk. 1 Human Eyeball.
As for fooling News Sniffer, I think the method you suggest is unlikely to work – it plainly didn’t work in this story, since the headings are indeed different.
I don’t know how News Sniffer works, but if I were to write such a system it would rely on the page URL to detect changes, since the URL is the one thing that doesn’t change. I imagine that is how News Sniffer does it too.
Superb Andrew. Museum quietly plying its trade. BBC hears on the grapevine that it has a *the horror* golly collection and has somehow slipped under the poltically correct radar. No-name mediocrity producer phones some useful academic idiot for a quote. Result: MUSEUM DENIES RACIST ROW
F******* ridiculous that British people are jailed if they don’t pay for this rubbish.
NS doesn’t demonstrate the stealthiness of an edit – it shows changes. We only know it was a stealth edit because you happened to noticed the timestamp didn’t change.
If we accept that NS doesn’t show the stealthiness of edits then perhaps someone will respond to the need and come up with a solution. Otherwise onlookers will think that there is no stealth edit problem.
If NS were to include a reference to the official last edit alongside the date of the changes then it would be a very good demonstration of the problem.
GOTCHA……
well done…