. One of their contributors, tank slapper, has linked to Biased BBC as part of their discussion, BBC. Why? Another contributor, Ecks Ridgehead, has responded:
Yes, well that blog is hardly reliable, is it? Ten minutes of brief checking shows that the post Why Doesn’t The BBC Name Emily Thornberry?" is undermined somewhat by the fact that the BBC article referenced names Emily Thornberry in the second paragraph, and that if you examine the item about Daniel Hannan having had an invented quote attributed to him, you’ll see that the BBC quote "Daniel Hannan MEP told Mr Cameron to ‘stop playing games’ on the issue" is not so far away from his actual words of "Let us play no games of our own", and every journalst in the world tweaks quotes.
You are right that it is easy to see bias if it happens to be similar to your own views, but it is similarly easy to invent bias if it opposes them. Personally, I don’t think that any news source can ever be completely unbiased, but I certainly don’t think that the bias in the BBC is as great as many around here seem to think it is.
So, off I go to check, and yes, sure enough, long after the fact, long after the original story was featured on BBC Views Online’s index pages, long after the story was highlighted here, BBC Views Online have indeed re-edited the article, changing paragraph two from:
Sir Philip Mawer revealed in his annual report the unnamed MP then e-mailed the doctored press release on to the media as if it were an official release.
to:
Labour MP Emily Thornberry e-mailed the doctored press release on to the media as if it were an official release.
Unfortunately this article doesn’t appear to have been caught by the normally wonderful Newssniffer Revisionista system, but you can catch the edit here via Google’s cache, while it lasts.
The original BBC article, prior to its much later revision.
Moving on to demolish Ecks Ridgehead’s second point:
…the BBC quote "Daniel Hannan MEP told Mr Cameron to ‘stop playing games’ on the issue" is not so far away from his actual words of "Let us play no games of our own", and every journalst in the world tweaks quotes.
…let’s put this in terms even Ecks might understand. Consider:
“let us not engage in speeding ourselves” as equivalent to “let us play no games of our own”
and:
“stop speeding” as equivalent to “stop playing games”
…and then, hopefully, even Ecks will see that in the first case we are being asked to not start doing something, whilst in the second case, we are being asked to stop doing something that we have been doing. This is no mere ‘tweak’ – it is, indeed, “far away” from what Daniel Hannan said. If someone is being quoted directly, within quote marks, there is no excuse for not having those words exactly as stated! None! As it is, the BBC have subsequently corrected this calumny, noting that the original Hannan misquote was supplied by a news agency – a fact that was omitted from their original story – i.e. the BBC got the words, the wrong words, from a news agency and published them unattributed as their own (to support the BBC line on Cameron and Europe), when in fact, the original and correct words were available free of charge on Hannan’s own Daily Telegraph blog all along!
In closing, let us note that Ecks BoneRidgehead skipped past two newer stories to cherry-pick his examples (since demolished), and that he ignored more than five years worth of preceding blog posts and comments in his rush to belittle Biased BBC and defend the BBC – a BBC that, as usual, has done its utmost to cover up its errors and downplay its falsehoods – all for the bargain price of £3.5 billion in tellytax a year.
Update (Friday): As with the BBC’s belated confession to the provenance of their Daniel Hannan misquote, they have taken the unusual (though welcome) step of annotating their Emily Thornberry amendment thus:
Earlier versions of this story did not include the name of the MP as it was a straight report from Sir Philip’s report in which she was not named. We added the name, and some extra background, once we became aware of her identity.
They don’t, of course, admit that they “became aware of her identity” courtesy of complaints from various bloggers, rather than simply by doing their jobs using nothing more sophisticated than a few minutes with Google. Strange that.