Monthly Archives: January 2012

BBC stealth editing is alive and well – and science reporting remains sloppy

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As seasoned B-BBC readers are all too aware, the BBC has an unpleasant habit of editing elements of its stories, without changing the ‘last updated’ timestamp in the article header – an activity known as stealth editing.

The corporation was at it again today in its coverage of the failed Russian mission to send a probe to Mars and return with material from the planet’s surface. The Phobos-Grunt launch saw the probe trapped in Earth orbit and gravity slowly bringing it back through the atmosphere. Today was the day the splashdown happened, and Auntie’s science correspondant, Jonathan Amos, made sure the write up contained suitably dramatic imagery to capture the spectacle of re-entry.

Only the image used was nothing to do with the re-entry and was a radar image with colouration added and it was taken five days ago. The Watts Up With That? blog highlighted the BBC’s sloppiness and explained how radar images are in fact colour-free.

Sometime this afternoon, after WUWT published their blog posting, the BBC replaced the image on the story as you can see below.

The sharp-eyed of you out there will notice that the BBC has tried to hide the alteration by not updating the ‘last updated’ timestamp. Yet again we have an example of stealth editing. In this case it is just a change of image. However, often it is the copy that is altered and at times it is done in a way that changes the emphasis or context of a story so the revised article reads very differently to the original.

Is it just sloppy web management, or is it a case of, “Nothing to see here, we didn’t get anything wrong and correct it after a blog in the US highlighted our mistake”? Either way, it has created a niche for a website called News Sniffer which records many of the BBC’s article revisions for comparison purposes.

It is a terrible indictment of the BBC that because of its stealth editing behaviour and habit of quietly tinkering with news articles, a resource like News Sniffer has become so important.

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The BBC Fails To Provide Context If It Detracts From Their Narrative

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The recent BBC coverage of the indictment and pending extradition of Richard O’Dwyer for abetting internet piracy has been pretty overtly biased in favor of the defendant.

The main thrust of O’Dwyer’s story, the way the BBC tells it, is that the young man is facing serious consequences from a foreign legal system for “simply linking” to illegal content. The legal question was, until yesterday’s court decision, whether or not what he’d done was a crime under UK law. In his  live reports from outside the courthouse on the BBC News Channel yesterday (Jan. 13), BBC correspondent constantly sanitized O’Dwyer’s alleged act by saying the he “simply linked” to illegal content. At one point the reporter clearly stressed the words “simply linking”, raising his voice to emphasize the point.

The legal charges against O’Dwyer do not refer to his actions as “simply” anything. That’s a BBC editorial decision, revealing the report’s personal opinion of the legal issue at hand. He did it over and over again, so it must be condoned by BBC News bosses.

The BBC News Online article is less overtly opinionated, but does give plenty of space to the defendant’s complaints. The article also relates the pure speculation from O’Dwyer and his lawyer that he’s being used as a “guinea pig” by US authorities in their efforts expand their powers to enforce copyright law. Then there’s the sympathy from Victoria Derbyshire.

Essentially, the BBC is presenting O’Dwyer as an innocent student, who did nothing wrong, and is being treated unfairly by a grasping US. But there’s some important background context which the BBC curiously fails to provide, and which makes a lot of difference in how the audience might understand the story.  Here’s what the BBC doesn’t want you to know (h/t pounce for the extra info):
After the authorities originally shut down O’Dwyer’s website in June 2010, he started up a mirror site. This lovable little innocent student included “F*ck the Police” in the title. He also put up a photo of the police-hating old rap group, NWA. This is not the behavior of someone who doesn’t realize he’s done anything illegal. O’Dwyer knew perfectly well what he was doing the entire time: deliberately abetting criminal acts.

That bit of context might have made the reader view things a bit differently back in November, when the BBC was fretting that the poor dear would be “at risk” if extradited, a lost little lamb amongst hardened criminals in the US justice system. At least in that article, the phrasing I’ve been complaining about was presented as the words of O’Dwyer’s lawyer, rather than a BBC reporter’s explanation:

Mr Cooper argued the site did not store copyright material but merely pointed users to other sites where they could download films and TV shows.

 “Merely”, “simply”, what’s a few million acts of media piracy among friends, eh? So why does the BBC allow O’Dwyer to play all innocent, that he was “surprised” when the cops showed up on his doorstep in November, five months after his original site was shut down and he started it up again with an anti-police taunt?

We heard the same BS, unquestioned by the BBC, in Friday’s coverage. The BBC has been very sympathetic to this criminal, going out of their way to portray him not only as someone who should not be extradited to the US, but who really hasn’t even done anything wrong. Even though the facts show that he knew perfectly well what he was doing, and kept doing it even after being told it was illegal.

I wonder how the BBC would spin things if a US citizen was extradited to the UK for helping people around the world pirate BBC content?

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Losing Battle

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In defending Israel I’ve come to realise that preconceived ideas and gut feelings override all reasonable argument. That is to say however well argued, very few are willing to engage, or even listen to any case you may make.

Even those who see themselves as profoundly logical abandon all reason when it comes to this particular topic. The so-called open-minded can’t literally be so, unless they’ve suffered catastrophic memory loss.
It’s a big ask. Why would anyone cast aside a lifetime of negative input the media has subjected them to, and suddenly agree to re-evaluate, reconsider or unlearn material that they’ve digested and misunderstood? It is firmly embedded, and it’s staying that way, thanks all the same.
Defenders of Israel face a fiercely stubborn resistance, impenetrably and formidably fortified and reinforced on a daily basis by the BBC.

Abandoning reason is not the BBC’s exclusive prerogative. We can all do it. Fruitlessly citing individual examples of unfairness, and still, despite past performance, hoping for a breakthrough in some kind of imaginary BBC future, has to involve blind faith. Where is the logic in believing that One Day someone important at the BBC might have that crucial, eureka-damascene-moment?
Silly me. It’s all water off a duck’s back to the Beeb, but here’s one anyway.
Yolande Knell has noticed that an Israeli hacker has retaliated. She noticed, in the best BBC tradition, the retaliation only. The provocation, no.

Here’s another one, and I’m using today’s examples but I could just as easily have picked any other random BBC day.

Israel is banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship. How awful! Newsworthy because it fits a pattern perhaps. Less newsworthy because it does not, is the way the rest of the Arab World treats Palestinians. And the rest of the Arab World, unlike Israel, hasn’t even been threatened with holy Jihad with the intended goal of annihilation. They can be racist, discriminatory and evil to their hearts’ content, and no-one at the BBC bats an eyelid. But the BBC and their sibling, the Guardian, with hostility in their hearts send forth reporters just to put despised Israel under a microscope. The mission is to seek out whatever might conceivably add to their systematic vilification, egging each other on like a couple of gossips revelling in the character assassination of another.

I wrote the above yesterday, but despondency prevented me from posting then. That, and the fact the article did stick more or less to the facts and didn’t contain the BBC’s usual ‘Palestinians-as-victims’ emoting.
However, last night the BBC world Service spurred me into action by broadcasting a self-piying interview with a married couple who had been inconvenienced by this ruling. No, they were not actually inconvenienced yet, but they might be in the future.

Racist, apartheid, discriminatory, nationalistic and any other evil insinuations can be made by the media about ‘Jewish Israelis’ or ‘Israeli Jews’ for ever and a day, but never can the same be made about the people in the places where such things are a reality. We rarely hear from the BBC the openly-stated Palestinian boast that any future Palestinian state will be “Jew-free”.

The BBC will not engage with this simply because it doesn’t choose to. Sixty years of insidious, slippery, stealthy demonisation can’t be undone overnight, and rational argument will have no impact unless the BBC changes its mind.

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TALK TO THE TALIBAN

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It’s really all so simple when you understand the meme.  The US is always wrong and the US military in particular is evil, a global bully. By way of contrast the Taliban are noble, exuding a humanity few truly appreciate, apart from BBC presenter Lyse Doucet. I was relieved to read the BBC dutifully report that despite the atrocious desecration of some of these noble humanitarians by evil Marines the Taliban have said it will not stop their commitment to the peace process. Taliban – heroes. Marines = enemies of civilisation. Oddly enough, the BBC don’t seem to be that interested in the mutilations, the maimings, the decapitations and the murders which the Taliban impose on fellow Afghans. Desecration seems a one way street these days.

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IS IT COS I IS A CRIMINAL?

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Well then, it’s been a busy morning on the BBC pushing the old “Institutional Racism” narrative. I do hope Diane Abbott was listening. It seems that whether we like it or not, the Met just can’t stop themselves from stopping and searching disproportionately large amounts of black youth.
As Lord Adebowale puts it, “this is poor customer service”. Just one point. Wonder why NO ONE on the BBC mentioned this little detail?  Still, never let the facts get in the way of the narrative, right?.

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BBC AUSTERITY

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Recession? What recession?

The expenses of senior BBC bosses have soared by 20 per cent in a year largely as a result of the costly move to Salford. Executives face fresh accusations of profligacy after spending on rail fares shot up by 57 per cent, while its hotel bill surged by 70 per cent. Figures, which cover the opening months of the new Media City, show the financial impact of the BBC’s plans to become less ‘London-centric’ In the latest numbers covering a three-month period from April to June 2011, the combined expenses bill of the top 102 senior managers grew to £183,276. This is a rise of a fifth on the same period of 2010 when the total was £152,257 – and came as the rest of the UK faced an austerity drive.

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Question Time LiveBlog 12th January 2012

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Welcome back to the Biased-BBC Question Time Live-Chat! We resume after the Christmas break with a classic line-up of typical BBC fodder.

Tonight Question Time comes from London.

David Dimbleby is joined by Secretary of State for Transport Justine Greening, Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander, Deputy First Minister for Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, Minister for Pompous Smugness Paddy Ashdown and editor and broadcaster Kelvin MacKenzie.

This week sees your usual regular Moderators line-up of David Vance and David Mosque. TheEye is back permanently as of tonight and is looking forward to getting back into the fray.

It’s a 10:30pm kick off. You know where to be. And how much alcohol to bring.

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DESTROYING INNOCENCE

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BBC's Sex and Relationship Education
Interesting story here over on The Mail.

“A sex education video produced by the BBC for children as young as nine has been criticised as being ‘like a blue movie’ by an MP who said the material is ‘shattering the innocence of childhood’. The video aims to teach children aged between nine and 11 about growing up, the cycle of life, feelings, family life and friendship. But included in the CD-ROM is an animated video of two cartoon characters making love and a computer-generated sequence showing a couple having sex, accompanied by a graphic explanation. There is also footage of a naked man and woman, used to demonstrate the differences between the sexes, information about ‘wet dreams’ and masturbation, and graphic diagrams of genitalia.

Sexualising childhood – part of their mission to inform. My congrats to Andrea Leadsom.

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ALWAYS IN THE WRONG

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Are these two paragraphs related?

First the lead …

“British police are to investigate claims that UK secret services helped in the rendition of a man to Libya.”

And then…

The Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service said MI5 and MI6 officers would not be charged over separate torture collusion claims

Is the BBC disappointed that our secret services have been proven INNOCENT of the crimes that some fevered imaginations construct? No, that could not be right. Could it?

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