Rod Liddle’s column in The Sunday Times leads on the BBC:
Cue meltdown at the corporation. A frightened looking man in a suit, Peter Fincham, was wheeled out to apologise for having inadvertently misled the press and was gleefully attacked live on air by his underlings on Newsnight and breakfast news and repeatedly told to resign. And Jana Bennett, the BBC’s director of vision – whatever the hell that means – let the genie out of the bottle by calling for producers to inform her of any other programmes that may somehow have misled the public. Oh dear…
Ten years ago it looked as if the royal family was on its way out; an unloved anachronism. Today which publicly funded institution looks more confident and secure: the monarchy or the BBC?
Read the whole thing, including Liddle’s delicious boot in the nuts delivered in passing to that twit Keith Best, who would do well to slink off and get a real job out of the public eye.
Meanwhile, apropos of the fisking we did waaay back on Wednesday of Beeboid Richard Black’s pathetic article, ‘No sun link’ to climate change, toeing the BBC line on climate change, the Sunday Telegraph has former BBC science correspondent, Dr. David Whitehouse, responding with The truth is, we can’t ignore the sun, where he lays into the same sloppy BBC article, their one-sided approach to reporting climate science and the Royal Society paper on which the BBC article was based. He concludes:
My own view on the theory that greenhouse gases are driving climate change is that it is a good working hypothesis – but, because I have studied the sun, I am not completely convinced.
The sun is by far the single most powerful driving force on our climate, and the fact is we do not understand how it affects us as much as some think we do.
So look on the BBC and Al Gore with scepticism. A scientist’s first allegiance should not be to computer models or political spin but to the data: that shows the science is not settled.
If only the BBC still had reporters like David Whitehouse, inquiring and inquisitive, free from toeing the BBC’s long accepted line on the subject.
Keith Best, a regular talking head on the BBC, supplying the “some critics say” role.
Bygones are bygones for that old jailbird. Conversely the BBC boast of scooping the story of Owen Oysten attending the Labour’n’Sport bash at Wembley.
(Yes, I know rape is more serious than fraud, but can one be selective about which crimes are considered to be expunged by serving a jail sentence? Anyway I suppose Best & Oyston are two facets of the same 80’s coin – stock market greed & cocaine fueled debauchery.)
Am I the only one who commented on it that has cause to be a tad frustrated that the Newsnight editor’s blog has so far only moderated ‘in’ one comment so far?
ps: Tried to pop in the URL but this system didn’t seem to like it
No, you ain’t the only one. I sent them a comment on Friday, though I should know better because they seldom pay any attention to the blog over weekends. We’ll be lucky if our comments appear by tomorrow. When I last looked there were 18 backed up in the queue. Slack bunch.
Dunno about the URL, but I see your homepage next to your name.
Amendment to above post:
There are now 26 comments on the post (though apparently 37 have been received.) Maybe they didn’t like the other 11 or maybe it’s a technical glitch. They didn’t publish mine.
Er… link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/07/putting_things_in_order.html#commentsanchor
FYI Dr David Whitehouse (doctorate in science) was the only BBC science correspondent who ever knew what he was talking about. BBC Newsgathering management (who never knew any science or even appreciated the subject) sacked him in 1998. He then went to BBC News Online where he became the only BBC Science correspondent to win any awards. Sadly that wasn’t enough to save him in the latest round of cuts. I am told that this most productive of journalists and most respected (outside the BBC) was made redundant as part of the ‘value for money’ drive.
Is this crazy or what?
Look at his website http://www.davidwhitehouse.com
and ask yourself whay the BBC treated him this way?