Monthly Archives: September 2007

to the question I asked yesterday (see post below) as follows:

The piece you are referring to was made by the independent film-maker Jamie Campbell. The BBC has said it was not good practice to reorder the sequences, but that the overall sense of the piece was not significantly changed. I am convinced there was no intention to deceive the viewer and that the ordering of the two sequences was done to assist the flow of the film rather than to change its sense.

But it is clear from our viewers’ response to Robbie Gibb’s blog that they were unhappy with this and we accept that.

…which is a wishy-washy sort of answer to the long unanswered question about why were the sequences switched around in the first place. Peter points out that the public reaction, both here at Biased BBC and on Robbie Gibb’s original non-confessional ‘confessional’ post, Putting things in order, was ‘unhappy’ – just a touch of understatement!

The blame for Newsnight’s ‘dodgy editing’ episode appears to be being placed squarely on the shoulders of ‘independent film-maker Jamie Campbell’, though I’m not convinced that the buck necessarily stops with him alone.

Let us hope that should ‘independent film-maker Jamie Campbell’ ever darken our tellytaxed screens once more that a tight leash is kept on him, especially in the editing suite, and that he’s learnt a useful lesson about telling the truth and being seen to tell the truth.

of David Cameron (see posts below) she has written Bribery and wedding bells in the Sunday Times, explaining, among other things:

I asked Cameron whether he had met anyone who would get married for £20 a week, because that’s the question everyone asked themselves when Iain Duncan Smith’s social justice policy group unveiled its married couple’s tax break a few months ago.

…which is certainly not how it came across at the time. Her piece is thoughtful and informative, but really doesn’t address the issue of how her question came across or how she could have handled it better to make the points she explains at length in The Sunday Times, if indeed such a detailed point was worth pursuing in that forum at that time.

Thank you to Peter Martin for the link.

Please use this thread for BBC-related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

I think it’s fair to say that Alfie at Waking Hereward was not impressed with the opening of Scot Andrew Marr’s Radio Four series Unmasking The English.

(I thought it pretty poor stuff as well. Eighty years ago another Scottish media type wrote about the English rather more successfully. Archibald Gordon Macdonell found fame with his first novel, the autobiographical England, Their England. It’s still in print. The visit to the avant-garde theatre production is my favourite part – you can just imagine the respectful Front Row review.)

asked when does artifice become deception about the tricks, sorry, techniques, used in making TV programmes, in advance of a segment on Thursday’s Newsnight.

On Friday, Peter reported back that Noddy’s not dead at Newsnight, and neither is the much more dubious ‘reverse question’, where questions are re-recorded after an interview, but of course with no guarantee that the questions haven’t been changed, revised or differently emphasised from those in the original interview.

One trick, sorry, technique, that Peter didn’t mention is one called ‘dodgy editing’, one that Robbie Gibb, Peter’s deputy, tried to explain away under the guise of Putting things in order back in July.

I fisked Robbie’s mealy-mouthed article thoroughly at the time, asking:

Why not show events chronologically then? Or explain in the film about the re-ordering of events and the reason for doing so? Anything else would, at best, appear highly questionable wouldn’t you say?

And:

Why did you purposely change the order of events? Presumably there was a purpose. What was it?

With all the hoo-ha at the time and the pressure of work one presumes, neither Peter nor Robbie had a minute to answer these very easy questions about Newsnight’s use of the ‘dodgy editing’ technique at the time.

However, now that Peter is interested in what is and isn’t acceptable in the making of Newsnight, perhaps either he or Robbie could take a minute now to explain the reasons for Newsnight’s use of the ‘dodgy editing’ trick, sorry, technique, just a few weeks back.

P.S. I’ve posted a comment (at 1.34am today) asking about this on Peter’s Noddy’s not dead blog post. Let’s see if it gets published and whether or not we get an answer this time.

Update, 11am: My comment responding to Peter’s post has been published. Let us see whether or not we get an answer to our ‘dodgy editing’ questions this time.

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:

Freed S Korean hostages ‘sorry’

…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.

writes Damian Thompson of the Telegraph on the cash-stricken BBC’s latest use for tellytax cash:

Project Director, Palestinian Territories

‘Support for the Palestinian Media Sector…’ …to increase the level of networking and dialogue between media professionals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As Damian notes, the BBC seems strangely reluctant to “network and dialogue” on the contents of the Balen Report, commissioned by the BBC into its Middle Eastern coverage and then covered up by the BBC at great legal expense to tellytaxpayers.

, even if you’re a religious bigot:

It means Germans are still under pressure from their past and Jews receive special treatment because of that.

Tauseef Zahid, London

This fails the ‘Switch Around Sniff Test’ – switch around the groups named and see how it smells, though perhaps the BBC is right to show that there are people with views like Tauseef Zahid in London.

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Elbow for the link.

draws our attention to BBC accused of insulting war hero in The Times. The BBC’s own Radio Times has this to say:

It purports to be a serious look at British war films, yet only British Film Forever would come up with the following throwaway remark about Reach for the Sky, the biopic of legless Second World War hero Douglas Bader: “Viewers of this film might’ve thought they were having their legs pulled.” I wonder exactly who this witless commentary is aimed at? But as always with this series, best ignore such drivel…

We’ve been here twice already with this series (here and here) – didn’t anyone at the BBC read the tosh turned in by the writer (Matthew Sweet, apparently) before it was recorded and broadcast? Has the writer been reprimanded or spoken to? Or is the only lesson learnt, by the writer, that he can get paid handsomely by unwilling tellytaxpayers to stick in his own politicised sneers as much as he can get away with?

Blair may have gone but the Blair Broadcasting Corporation is still spinning:

The Scottish Executive is to be rebranded as the Scottish Government, it has been confirmed.

No – it’s already been rebranded, as we can see from the photo and as we can read about in the very same article:

A new Scottish government sign has been put in place outside its Victoria Quay building in Leith, replacing the existing Scottish Executive sign.

I always hated the Labour government’s policy of leaking news to friendly journalists who could then write: “The minister will announce today…” How did they know that the minister wouldn’t be struck down by a bolt of lightning before making his pronouncement? I suppose the weather’s been nationalised just like the BBC. When journalists say that something will happen, the event should be in the future and should definitely occur.