As deegee has been pointing out, if Barack Obama got it wrong by saying that Hawaii is in Asia, then the BBC News website has gone one better than the president on the ‘gaffe’ front. It now seems to think that both Australia and New Zealand are in Asia:
The BBC’s World menu changed recently. The old Australasia/Pacific section has gone:
Do they need some geographers at the BBC? What’s going on here?
I reckon the shifting of Australia will accomplish two BBC objectives:
1. The elimination of Oceania will avoid a troublesome reminder of that Orwell book.
2. When some nasty police incident occurs and the Beeb descibe the perpetrators as ‘Asian’ the public might now imagine them as being a gang of jolly swag men or delinquent diggers perhaps?
Ah bless ya Craig!
We`re all one world now…let the Beeb send you Korean caterwauling and some Masai haikoos…forget all that old Empire guff and your stamp albums.
The Geography Curriculum nowadays need only concern itself with the EuroCorridor Zil Lane 666..London-Eurotunnel-Brussels-Berlin.
None of us will be expected to know much else apart from where we can dump our new lighbulbs…Brussels, Strasbourg or Eindhoven.(+/- 2.5 km either side of the Korridor Adenauer)
“Zis convesazione ees schtum..ya vole!”
Ah, the George Lucas molesting a kangaroo incident. I remember it well.
The explanation is that the old colonialist subject of “Geograhy” which was taught to my generation has been subsumed into “Social Geography” a subject more akin to sociology than anything else and with the same faux academic (ie unscientific and political) basis. Although citing Wikipedia as an authoritative source is something I’d steer away from normally this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_geography analysis is pretty sound.
Beeboids probably thought Salford was in Asia .
This explains why Mark Mardell censored the gaffe from his report on the President’s speech. He must not be any more informed about geography than the rest of them.
I have just had a look at the flags of some of the BBC’s Asian states. Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Hawaii, New South Wales, New Zealand, Niue, Pitcairn Islands, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Tuvalu, Victoria and Western Australia. The Union flag in the top left corner of these flags seems familiar, but would embarrass an anti-colonial Beeboid. Maybe the BBC could persuade them to replace the Union flag with the EU flag?
That Wallaby looks stuffed to me.
And so it should….
I feel the BBC are ready and willing to provide a platform for someone to call for an investigation into the lyric ‘Let me Abos go loose, Bruce, they’re of no further use….’