Man in a Shed highlights this instance of BBC covering for Gordon in the light of the Hain fiasco. The word “right” is used four times in the opening to the article (including in the photo caption).
This is the kind of knee-jerk support we can expect from the BBC newsrooms. The subliminal dimension of this is underlined by the fact that a search of the BBC website, focussing on News and Sport, cannot locate this article using the exact headline under which it ran- see here.
It’s worth pointing out here that the BBC website search tool is truly the creature of the BBC, aimed at preserving the BBC’s chosen face rather than archiving its content.
What the search did bring up was this article. What is interesting in a way is not the article as much as the way it is described in the “archive” (for want of a better word). Despite the word not being used in the main article, the archive tells how “Peter Hain is taunted by Tories”. The article itself is very loaded, with the nasty Tories to the fore- putting Mr Hain “on the rack” and “under fire” and needing to be warned by the Speaker etc etc. All over “incompetence”, we are told. Needless to say, the matter was not considered only one of incompetence, otherwise Hain would still be in position (according to the statements of Gordon Brown) rather than preparing to face his police investigation. Nice covering Beeb! Somehow it seems to me if they could stop the legal processes taking place in this case, they would, and if they can spike them in any way, they will.
Look on the bright side. At least the Hain story is in the main news section of the website. Who can forget where they hid the news that the BBC had finally upheld a complaint agiant the reporter who cried at Yasser Arafat’s demise? Yes, it was ‘entertainment’, usually reserved for tittle-tattle about the antics of Hollwood stars or the cast of Eastenders.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4471494.stm
How far we have fallen, ¨incompetence¨ is mow a justification for holding high office.
Incompetence is no defence in a court of law.
I notice that with the latest Nu Labour sleaze story that Sky have it as number 1 news story, yet the BBC are doing some report from Kenya.
Why might that be? A phone call from Number 10?
With Benefit Fraud it’s “no ifs no buts”. When it’s cabinet office fraud it’s “only ifs and buts”. Does this mean we can all plead “incompetence” when charged with not paying the licence fee? I’m sure the BBC would be sooo understanding.
Having recovered from my attack of apoplexy (see Hain resignation thread) I noticed this headline.The quote becomes the headline, again!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7211853.stm
“Health Secretary Alan Johnson has rejected suggestions that he broke any rules covering donations during Labour’s deputy leadership contest.
It is claimed £3,334 was given by a man on behalf of his brother-in-law, and the Electoral Commission was not told.
But Mr Johnson said he and his team had complied “100%” with the law.
They checked the donor was legally able to give the money and had registered it with Parliament, the Labour Party and the Electoral Commission, he said.”
Is it now formal BBC newsroom policy to spout verbatim any old sh*t issued by the Labour party spin masters?
This practice of making the quote, however unsubstantiated, the headline and printing a damage control puff piece has got to stop. Lurkers, please go and speak to the supervisor of graduate trainees and let him/her know that the public can see through this. Try printing a story with the unsubstantiated (?)headline “Minister X a lying incompetent self serving oaf with his hand in the till and a contempt for the electorate” claims Mr Y.
“It’s worth pointing out here that the BBC website search tool is truly the creature of the BBC, aimed at preserving the BBC’s chosen face rather than archiving its content. ”
I think the truth is our search tool is just rubbish. Use Google instead.
“I think the truth is our search tool is just rubbish.”
LOL. At least Doc Gregory says what John Reith knows but would never dare admit.
The People’s Front of Judea: Actually it was JR posting on here to say he always used Google to search our site that alerted me to it!
Click on advanced search on the Google main page.
And why is the search function rubbish? Because the BBC decided to spend money and time developing their own search mechanism, when there were perfectly good ones they could just have brought in at half the cost and twice the effectiveness.
In fact, just like the BBC as a whole really, where the TV-tax payer is forced to pay for second rate programming that is available for free elsewhere.
Greggers,
This is more in your line
DG- I do use Google sometimes, but I know (maybe you don’t) that the BBC website search engine was overhauled several years ago. I used to find it quite reliable- if you keyed in some straightforward words from an article you had a recollection of, the article appeared. Or if you asked it about say, a journalist, a list of articles by that journalist appeared chronologically and seemingly exhaustively. Very handy for us critics, it was.
Most search engines work quite well along those lines. The BBC one is just without definable rhyme or reason- to me at any rate- but clearly articles are archived with some care- ie. they have tags added and so on. I just don’t see how it couldn’t be an operation with some guidelines and a modus operandi. I think the onus would be on you and the people in charge of the facility to explain. So how about it?
JG/Ed: I think it’s more a function of the fact the website has grown in a rather haphazard way using various approaches that have been bolted together. You wouldn’t do it in this way if you were starting from scratch. So searches often don’t throw up useful video content unless you know exactly what you are looking for for example (and often not even then)
I know it’s being looked at, but for now Google seems to do a much better job. I’ll ask Nick Reynolds though, this is more his sort of thing.
David Gregory:
“The People’s Front of Judea: Actually it was JR posting on here to say he always used Google to search our site that alerted me to it!”
I’m aware of that David, hence my comment that it was something that he knows but wouldn’t admit.
Surely there should also be a colon in the title as well. If the quote is directly from Brown, then:
Brown: ‘right to wait over Hain’
or
‘Right to wait over Hain’ says Brown.
The People’s Front of Judea: But JR did admit it. He said BBC search isn’t any good… use Google. He’s right. It’s what I do too now thanks to him.
Yesterday the BBC News bulletins were stating that even opposition politicans thought that the Johnson matter was nowt to be concerned about, but then showing clips of Alan Duncan & Clegg neither of whom backed up the BBC’s claim. Duncan said that the government consider that rules should not apply to them. Quite so.
David Gregory:
But he didn’t admit to it being C R A P as you did David. My point! Can we move on now please. Please!
I popped over here because I was looking for the articles about how prominently BBC News online had carried their photo gallery for Holocaust memorial Day, and how nice it was to see an article about Israel on the BBC News homepage that wasn’t about people on either side of the conflict being killed, but this caught my eye, so I’ll check those out in a moment.
It is wrong to say that the BBC does not use commercial search products. Web search results are provided by Microsoft, and a company called Autonomy provide the software that indexes bbc.co.uk
It has a gazillion virtual knobs and levers which fine tune the way the algorithm works. I’m unclear whether one of them is marked “Don’t upset No. 10”, but it is a little bit more scientific than that. I know the technical team work very hard to try and get a balance to make the results relevant across all the different types of content indexed on the site. They don’t always get it right, for sure, but you know, if you pull the lever that says ‘jam means results about traffic jams should come up top’, then you annoy the people searching for preserves or mods.
Is Google better? Often, but not always. Google doesn’t get stories into their index as quickly as the BBC Search does (although it is close for main stories). Also Google puts a great deal of store by the number of links pointing to an individual story from around the web. That tends to mean that older stories rank higher than newer stories on the same topic, which can look pretty poor – nobody wants “x is looking poorly” as the number #1 result when “x is dead” is languishing at #4
The team working on search is too small to be micro-managing results in the way some people seem to suggest here. And if the BBC were sitting on a secret system that could interpret semantically whether a story was ‘favourable’ or not to a certain point of view, I think BBC Worldwide would have it on the market quicker than you could say regulatory process 😉
Martin Belam, and assorted Beeboids,
No-one has addressed the fact that one can search for a report using the exact headline and not find it. As glitches go in search engines, I’d call that a pretty big one.
The report in question here was more recent than the one I couldfind- and commented on for its tone and language- and very pertinent to current events. Why couldn’t it be located, while the other could without even trying?
Another thing no-one has addressed is why the whole business is supposed to be so casual when the reports clearly have tag descriptions added which sign-post the reader. Clearly someone somehow sits there and thinks about the appropriate way to record the report.
Martin and other Beeboids, the schtick about knobs and levers and algorithms bolted together haphazardly which passes for your argument is just so much smoke-screening. The fact is that the BBC archive doesn’t truly open the BBC to scrutiny. It used to, and I remember being somewhat mollified by that very fact when I started writing about BBC bias about five years ago.
Will you please address the concrete points. Sighs.
Who’d have guessed it? Beeb to squander £21 million on a little-watched Gaelic TV station:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=510914&in_page_id=1773
Martin Belam, and assorted Beeboids,
Ed | 28.01.08 – 9:46 pm |
It would also be very nice to have a Wikipedia style edits/diffs so we can exactly see what, when and why was something silently edited.
IMO, BBC tends to silently edit much more than other outlets.
The few official retractions pale when compared with a huge number of silent edits. Silent edits are used even when important paragraphs are changed.
Martin Belam:
I popped over here because I was looking for the articles about how prominently BBC News online had carried their photo gallery for Holocaust memorial Day,
Huh? Where?
All I could see is:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7212394.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7213754.stm
Or, even this,
“Why Israel wants the Beatles, 43 years after banning them”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7213105.stm
a misrepresentation of the facts: A then Israeli Socialist Government did ban a concert (as did many other countries/cities at that time).
It sounds from the article that Israeli police was going around smashing vinyl records, or something.
The Israeli ambassador did apologize for the cancellation of the concert, not for “banning the Beatles”.
Now, I’m sure dexterous JR will be able to find those Holocaust Memorial day articles you speak of somewhere, but they certainly are not prominent.
Not yesterday and not today.
Belam is a notorious lurker who loves reading this site so he can go away and make sarcastic digs at the comments posted here on his own site, without ever having to defend himself.
He only ever sticks his neck in when it’s to do with his ‘specialized’ subject of web technology and feathering his bed so his BBC paymasters will be impressed enough with his sicophancy they will keep him gainfully employmed.
I love the “they don’t always get it right” terminology though Martin. Right out of the BBC manual of catch phrases. I expect they’ll be “victims of their own success” next.
The People’s Front of Judea | 28.01.08 – 7:15 pm
But he didn’t admit to it being C R A P as you did David. My point!
Are you sure I didn’t? You’re probably right. I try not to to be over-critical or rudely dismissive in matters where I am not expert. 🙂
I regard the BBC search engine much as I do the predictive text option on my mobile: I’m sure that there’s some clever algorithm thingy behind it, but using it is a pain in the arse.
I think you are being unnecessarily harsh on Martin B. People who quit a well paid job to go and live on an island in the Med aren’t in my experience the sort to kiss corporate butt to get work.
>> Belam is a notorious lurker who loves reading this site so he can go away and make sarcastic digs at the comments posted here on his own site, without ever having to defend himself.
I would have thought by definition a lurker wouldn’t post 😉
Yes, I do frequently reference Biased BBC on my site, both when I think people make good points here and bad points. And people are very welcome to leave comments disagreeing with me on http://www.currybet.net
They do, and I’m always happy to publish them.
>> He only ever sticks his neck in when it’s to do with his ‘specialized’ subject of web technology and feathering his bed so his BBC paymasters will be impressed enough with his sicophancy they will keep him gainfully employmed.
Well, I could post lots of comments where I don’t know anything about what I’m talking about, but I think the internet has enough people like that on it already…
Martin:
“Well, I could post lots of comments where I don’t know anything about what I’m talking about, but I think the internet has enough people like that on it already…”
Yes Martin, we know. And the worst offenders tend to go off and set up their own personal web sites.
Wreath Old Chap,
“I try not to to be over-critical or rudely dismissive in matters where I am not expert”
No snark intended,but would you tell us exactly what you are expert in? I know you can use Google and Wiki,but what is you know?
Brown looks sicker and more hang-dog as the days go by.
There is something moribund about him that makes my skin crawl. Yeuck.
Me too, Fleur. Moreover, while nobody in cabinet since 1997 has been entirely sane, he is a particularly frightening example of a lunatic PM of a large country.
On a different matter: anybody know what happened to J. Miller, the Sunday Times journalist who claimed some 3 years ago he was not going to pay the licence fee even if he had to take it up to Strassbourg, indeed even if he had to do porridge?
Nearly Oxfordian: I’ve often wondered. I have seen a Jonthan Miller posting on here. I wondered if it was the same chap.
Gordon Brown says he was right. So the BBC uses the word ‘right’ a lot. Three times in inverted commas, once as reported speech. That’s how quoting works – you repeat what the person said. And it’s also how journalism works – you repeat yourself ad nauseum.
Now I challenge you to write a short article on one of Hitler’s speeches without using ‘Jew’ ‘Germany’ or ‘National Socialism’ more than once each.