tootled BBC Views Online last week, except of course the headline is not quite right. Not all of the hostages were freed, unless you count the two poor souls who were murdered and dumped in ditches as having been ‘freed’ too. Those who clicked on the errant headline did find out, in paragraphs four and five, that:
The Taleban seized the group of 23 last month as they travelled by bus on the main highway from Kandahar to Kabul.
Two male hostages were subsequently killed.
Nice passive BBC reporting on the nice passive Taleban, as if the South Koreans were ‘killed in a road accident’ or somesuch, quite coincidental to their kidnap, rather than brutally and viciously murdered and dumped by their brutal and vicious kidnappers acting in the name of their supposed god.
Later, around 10pm on Saturday, BBC Views Online reported that:
Freed South Koreans return home
But by 6.30am on Sunday, a mere nine edits later, the story was spun into:
…though even after all these ‘revisions’, the article still refers to:
…two colleagues executed by the Taleban.
…which is, as we have noted before (yes you, Robin Denselow, BBC Newsnight), contrary to the BBC’s own BBC News Styleguide (PDF), where page 69, Troublesome words, states:
Execute means to put to death after a legal process.
Terrorists or criminals do not execute people, they
murder them.
You can follow the whole sorry BBC Views Online edit saga, starting with version 1, revision 1 courtesy of the excellent News Sniffer Revisionista service.
Still in Afghanistan, Biased BBC reader Pounce notes another poor BBC Views Online headline, Afghan attack ‘kills civilians’, which is at best ambiguous, at worst downright misleading, since the story itself is:
An attack aimed at a US-led coalition base in Afghanistan has killed at least 10 people…
…in which case the headline could have been Taleban attack ‘kills civilians’. Strange that the supposedly professional journalists at BBC Views Online didn’t think of this obvious improvement to accuracy and clarity.
Thank you to Biased BBC readers Pounce and champagne bottles for their links.
Still in Afghanistan, Biased BBC reader Pounce notes another poor BBC Views Online headline, Afghan attack ‘kills civilians’, which is at best ambiguous, at worst downright misleading, since the story itself is:
An attack aimed at a US-led coalition base in Afghanistan has killed at least 10 people…
But maybe that’s the BBC’s point. If those nasty Americans weren’t there in the first place those nice Taliban wouldn’t need to fire rockets at them and therefore the civilians wouldn’t have been killed in the attack.
Then the nice Taliban could have slit their throats for sending their daughters to school instead!
Re. ‘Taleban free all Korean hostages tootled BBC Views Online last week, except of course the headline is not quite right. Not all of the hostages were freed, unless you count the two poor souls who were murdered’
Are you seriously suggesting that the BBC was deliberately trying to hide the fact that 2 of the hostages were killed? because they biased in favour of the Taleban?
Re. But by 6.30am on Sunday, a mere nine edits later, the story was spun into:
Freed S Korean hostages ‘sorry’
It is the nature of the news that storys develop.
As with edits, words, and the order they are in, or out, can be pretty important.
I’d say that first headline would not have suffered from ‘remaining’ to reflect what seems to have taken place and maintain some accuracy.
And that second headline hardly gets around the fact that the poor sods were in fact kidnapped, held and some murdered.
From those two headlines I’d have trouble figuring out that the Koreans didn’t do something pretty awful to the Taleban and were kindly let go eventually. And what get’s posted on links? Headlines.
So…. where does the story develop now?
I’m guessing it’s over, except of course for the victims and their relatives.
OK, all is made clearer down the text, but I think what is being questioned here is the choice of what gets prominence.
I, for one, don’t think the reporting style does the story, the protagonists or the reader much justice. It could have been better, no?
Baz
The BBC are payed very very well to be experts at what they do.
What the BBC does is propaganda, and they are still the BEST in the world at it.
Whether it is left or right wing propaganda only depends on one’s own definition of what exactly these specific political terms mean these days.
But propaganda it ALL is without question.
Remember this;
John Reith has gone to enormous effort to explain many times how professional the BBC always are and how they always check not only the facts but HOW and WHEN they report them.
You can speculate on whether its a ‘COCK-UP’ or a ‘CONSPIRACY’ if you wish.
I believe its more a ‘conspiracy of cock-ups,’ by people very well aware of what they are up to. It happens far to often to be anything else.
‘But propaganda it ALL is without question.’
Perhaps in your mind it is all without question’ but that says a lot about your entrenched state of mind, immune to new evidence or argument.
@Baz
Funny how you BBC fanboys cherry pick your arguments. How about the fact that the BBC says that the Taliban “executed” the two hostages, which is not only nonsense but goes against their own guidelines? The proper term would be murder. But that’s a lot less sanitized than execute and will of course brand the Taliban as murderers – a big no-no these days.
Or how about the Afghan attack “kills civilians”? Why not say Taliban which is far more accurate?
There are two possible explanations for this phenomenon. Incompetence on an epic scale, or a deliberate effort to be PC.
Nice blog entry. I excerpted and linked to it here:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/ken-shepherd/2007/09/04/bbcs-flawed-reporting-talibans-korean-hostage-release
–Ken Shepherd
Managing Editor
NewsBusters.org
Thank you Ken. It’s appreciated.The journalisitic tendency to finesse acts of murder into ‘executions’ or mere ‘killings’ seems fairly widespread at the moment, though of course murder is murder, and should be called that.
I prefer slaughtered or butchered in lieu of murdered.