Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may be moderated.
John Reith: “It’s not as if there were a big football story or anything.”
The failure of the England side last night should cast a light on the ineptitude of the people who employed the incompetent McClaren.
Let’s see who hired Steve McClaren – step forward one Brian Barwick, former journalist and a Beeboid for 18 years.
Who was Barwick’s predecessor as FA chief executive? David Davies, former BBC political correspondent!
So, if the “blazers” who administer our national game are so inept, I think I can see a possible explanation!
David Gregory
The stats are from the US Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey, via Volokh. OK so they are 2005 stats, but I doubt they will go from 5.4% of assaults and 26.3% of robberies (assaults I am sure being more common, so a statistic with higher weighting) to most in 2 years!
It looks like an error. Just absolutely ignorant handling of statistics. If they recruited people who didn’t have arts degrees they might get a little more accurate.
Thursday’s BBC Newsnight has just informed its viewers that the FTSE was up 80 odd points, but the Dow was down 210 points. That’s funny it was down 210 points on Wednesday as well.*
* And closed Thursday for the start of the Thanksgiving holiday.
Random: Doh! Journalists and statistics. A particular bugbear of mine
No David, NO! that is no excuse is it?
If Sky and others can get its facts and stats right with a fraction of the money that you have access to, then why does the BBC get it so wrong, so often?
Is it because jobs are awarded not on MERIT but on POLITICAL RELIABILITY?
You and I know that socialism all over the world thrives on placing people in jobs according to their political abilities rather than their actual abilities, even you must look around and see it happening!
When you are ‘leapfrogged’ in promotion by a ‘party member’ or a ‘reliable minority’ how will you feel?
Stephanie; I can honestly say I was never asked anything about my political views at any BBC job interview.
Many, many journalists are simply not very good at statistics. Or indeed science to be honest. It’s not a problem unique to the BBC. Indeed I wouldn’t say the BBC is worse than anyone else and hopefully slightly better, it does after all have the resources others don’t.
Check out badscience.net for plenty of examples of science, statistics and journalism meeting.
Don’t even get me started on homeopathy and journalism!
Lurker in a Burqa, from your Daily Mail link, I had to smile at this quote:
“If we are going to present them as victims we have got to be very careful. There is a massive physiological advantage that comes from being white in this country.”
Forgive me for possibly asking a stupid people, but aren’t “white people” the indigenous people of England? And why wouldn’t the “indigenous people” of a nation have an advantage over newcomers?
As an American of the whitish persuasian I have been told all my life by leftoids that I don’t belong in North America because my ancestors stole it from the indigenous people. Indigenous people in the leftoids’ viewpoint are 100 percent in the moral right in North America, even though many of them were slaveholders, cannibals, and mass murderers of other indigenous people.
I find it amusing how quickly the leftoids change their tune when it comes to the indigenous people of Europe. Suddenly the “moral right” of the indigenous goes out the window, and the colonizers become the ones with the “moral right” — as long as they are not white.
Obviously the left just hates white people. Not just Western civilization, not just capitalism, but — the people who created those things.
Reg Hammer | 22.11.07 – 8:50 pm
John’s attitude (as is most of the BBCs) that if you are white working class you live on a council estate, read the tabloids and watch football.
I don’t do any of that John.
Are you in prison? 🙂
John Reith:
“Are you in prison?”
Yes John, I live in the UK.