Another quandary for the BBC….they’ve had the problem of Thatcher’s success to cope with as mentioned in the last post, they’ve had the inconvenient fact that unemployment has been going down…’the great puzzle’….and now they are confronted with another bothersome fact…crime is going down.

Mark Easton has decided this too is a riddle…though never when Labour was in power.

The riddle of peacefulness

All a bit of a conundrum apparently.

He jumps about looking at various academic theories as to why this might be.

One thing of note might be ‘The correlation between policing levels and violent crime in the UK is “very weak”.

But anyway, no matter, Easton, the reporter, has his own theory which he isn’t shy about sharing with us.

‘Could it be that global communication, particularly the internet, is having a civilising and calming effect on people’s behaviour? We live in an age when, for the first time in history, people from all backgrounds can get an understanding of how the rest of the world lives without needing to leave the comfort of their living room.’

Ah yes…multi-culturalism….can’t let that old hogwash be consigned to the dustbin of historic failures.

This is precisely what we need from BBC journo’s…philosophy and creative theorizing….personally I’d just prefer a few facts from which I can dream up my own wild conjectures without a BBC hack trying to ‘educate’ me and mould my thoughts.

Surely it is Coca Cola that is the real crime reduction catalyst, the ‘real thing’ furnishing the world with love and perfect harmony from darkest Africa to the Steppes of the Ukraine….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1NeogMh1JI

And we know the BBC loves Coke.

There is a new, at least to me, theme that it might be worth listening out for on the BBC, and elsewhere.

There are no links  for this but I have heard this new theory several times now on the BBC.

For over thirty years the BBC has attacked Mrs Thatcher’s policies and record,  blaming her for destroying manufacturing, the mining and steel industry, rising unemployment, social breakdown…and added to that is now welfare dependency and the economic crash in 2008.

But suddenly there is a new theory of ‘Thatcherism’…..whilst her critics  still blame her for anything seen to be bad in their eyes, they can’t help but recognise that a very great number of people believe that Thatcher and her policies ‘saved’ Britain from being an economic basket case.

Tricky one that…how to get around it?

The answer they’ve come up with is that Britain’s economic recovery had nothing to do with Thatcher….it was going to happen anyway….all those old, inefficient industries were on the brink of a productivity revolution anyway, the Unions were about to introduce self regulation and rein in their wildcat strikes, a spirit of entrepreneurship was about to sweep the country and rejuvenate its businesses and finances.

Thatcher was just in the right place at the right time and she has taken the credit and the plaudits for something that had nothing to do with her.

On Nicky Campbell’s show a while back it was suggested she was ‘lucky’….But I guess the harder you work the luckier you get…and I would reckon Thatcher made her own luck.

As I said for 30 years Thatcher was to blame for all the ills of society…..and now paradoxically it wasn’t her at all…it would have happened even if she hadn’t been in power.

Still, I imagine that won’t stop them blaming her for the 2008 crash.

Listen out for it.  The new grand theory. ‘Thatcher Who’.  Like the BBC’s other bit of imaginative fiction, ‘Dr Who’,  but even less plausible.

The revelation that the Gay Girl in Damascus is actually a stubbly bloke in Edinburgh has sent shockwaves through the media.

That serious journalists fell for MacMaster’s fiction speaks to a profound crisis of objectivity in the modern media, and a preference for simplistic moralism over the tough task of reporting.

The trend for transforming other people’s struggles into self-serving morality plays has led to an alarmingly casual attitude towards the distinction between truth and lies.

Self serving morality plays.  Sums up the BBC’s journalism in one snappy little phrase….for instance events in Boston are being used by the BBC to ‘educate and inform’ us about the real Islam and the Muslim community and to suppress any criticism of the Islamic ideology.

Mark Mardell has played his part in this type of journalism but seems upset when called out on it.

 Here I have to assume Mark Mardell has wrongly named a post  on this blog as meriting this description:

 What a disgusting website ! Talk about lies and bias!

I guess when the BBC wrote this it should have included its North American Editor and itself in the firing line:

‘The trouble is, though, the British newspaper journalist has no history of taking criticism well… or working out what it is that needs to be done to turn a dysfunctional, distrusted press into something that performs a useful public purpose.’

I can only think Mardell’s lazy and careless journalism is emblematic of the BBC’s recent activity.

No explanation from Mardell as to where the lies and bias are in the post…or on the site for that matter.

Typical of the BBC these days when it relies more on views, opinions and comment than on facts….a BBC famously one of the most reliant on ‘Churnalism’…the use of verbatim Press Releases to pad out its own efforts…despite having as Mark Thompson said more journalists than any organisation outside of China.

We all remember Paxman telling us all about it in 2007:

“In this press of events there often isn’t time to get out and find things out: you rely upon second-hand information-quotes from powerful vested interests, assessments from organisations which do the work we don’t have time for, even, god help us, press releases from public relations agencies. The consequence is that what follows isn’t analysis. It’s simply comment, because analysis takes time, and comment is free.”

Nick Davies in the Guardian tells us that :

Our media have become mass producers of distortion

An industry whose task should be to filter out falsehood has become a conduit for propaganda and second hand news

Although he only targeted the newspaper industry Davies could just have easily included the rest of the Media…including the BBC.

The BBC’s Kevin Marsh (Editor of Today when it made false claims about the 45 minute claims in the Iraq War Dossier…so should know about journalistic ethics!) in his new role at the BBC College of Journalism jumps on the band wagon showing no awareness of the BBC’s own  abysmal record……

Journalism, not ‘churnalism’

But here Marsh gets to the heart of the matter, the very essence of why the BBC so often gets it wrong…though of course he isn’t talking about his precious BBC…..

‘Trust resides in the journalist’s motivation in selecting the facts he/she does and in the realisation of that motivation.’

Every time you see a BBC report or article it is apparent that you also need to ask ‘What is the journalist’s motive for framing the report in this way?’  Is it anti-austerity, pro-immigration, pro-Europe or pro-Islam? etc.

You can no longer trust the BBC’s journalism, you can no longer believe that it comes to you impartial and unadulterated by the BBC’s own views and political prejudices. 

But you may say ‘So what, the BBC is biased…how does that effect my life or other’s?’

Mark Mardell might want to ask himself if he thinks this is disgusting……

How many Jews are attacked around the world because of anti-Semitism stoked and inflamed by the BBC’s reporting of Israel which demonises every Israeli action and turns Palestinians into eternal  and harmless victims?

How many elderly died during the extended cold spell because they had to turn their heating off due to its cost…a cost driven up by government green policies not just reported on favourably by the BBC but actively campaigned for?

How many people have been killed, raped, attacked, robbed or otherwise become victims of crime perpetrated by criminals who entered this country on the coat tails of the Labour Party open border immigration policy….once again supported by the BBC?

How many more patients will die in hospitals as the BBC supports the NHS unions in their battle to prevent reforms?

How many British soldiers and civilians died or were subject to attack because the BBC gave tacit support to extremist Muslims who propagated the isdea that they were merely bombing and killing because of ‘Western’ foreign policy and thereby encouraged radicalisation, especially by its angry attacks on the Iraq War?

Once you start thinking about it the BBC has been at the centre of many major political decisions in this country and has ‘aided and abetted’ in the deaths and disadvantaging of many people in this country and abroad as a result of those policies and decisions.

I don’t know what Mardell means by ‘disgusting’, but I know what I mean….it’s an organisation that puts itself and its own politics ahead of the interests of the people of this country, an organisation that has let its immense power and influence go to its head and is now politically, journalistically corrupt, functioning more as an arm of a ‘shadow’ state that has much of the real power in this land….subverting the elected government and ensuring the Left’s placemen in NGOs and in committees and foundations, that formulate and guide policy, get the right support and publicity…..Margaret Hodge may be a perfect example of someone who gets evermore supportive backing from the BBC.

As Janet Daley points out the BBC appointed itself the ‘official opposition’ in the 1980’s and seems to be carryng on in that stance ever since.

‘The BBC strategy of the 1980s when many of its spokesmen privately argued that since there was no opposition party worthy of the name – Labour having collapsed into internal division and Militant-inspired madness – the proper function of the media was to provide constant resistance to Thatcherism.’

In the 1970’s the Miners smashed and removed governments and intended to do so to Mrs Thatcher’s.   She drew a line in the sand and crushed the wreckers.

If it can be done to the overpowerful unions it can be done to the BBC by someone who has the nerve and will to do it.

Primo Levi:

“Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will. There are many ways of reaching this point, and not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of a privileged few depends on the forced labor and the forced silence of the many.”

‘Denying and distorting information…the forced silence of the many’.

Primo Levi called that….Fascism.

 The BBC seeks to deny and distort information about serious occurrences in our lives…..it forces, or tries to force those with ‘unacceptable views’ to remain silent….climate change sceptics and those who believe Islam has played a part in inciting terrorist activities around the world.  The result is a very unbalanced and out of kilter world where half the debate is silenced and a steadying hand at the tiller is missing.

What happens when you have a system that only listens to one side and thinks of itself as the only arbiter of what is good and right in the world, when there is no ‘why’?

An SS guard at Auschwitz was asked why he was doing such things to Jews…he replied ‘Here there is no why.’ ….  a phrase that became symbolic of the Holocaust’s careening away from rationality itself.

For the BBC there is no ‘why’ for Islamic terrorism, no rationality….there is no cause, no inspiration, no one to point the finger at…..excepting US and British foreign policy of course.

For the BBC there is no ‘why’ about Boston….just as there was no ‘why’ for the shooting of US soldiers by Muslim soldier Nidal Hasan. 

If there is no ‘why’ there can be no one to blame.  No one need be embarrassed or their religion questioned.  But that leads to other ’causes’ being blamed and the real cause left unchallenged and of course unremedied.   And so it keeps happening.

I imagine Mark Mardell is already penning a similar pack of lies about Boston as he did about that mass killer at Fort Hood:

The truth is of course cloudy. The alleged murderer was clearly a Muslim, but there is very little to suggest that he adhered to a hard-line interpretation of his religion or that he had political or religious motives.

He may or may not have posted something on the internet defending suicide bombers. But he also appears to have been traumatised by the idea of being sent to a combat zone.

We search for certainty and for answers. Some will go down blind alleys: reports of his “religious attire”, for example, may turn out to be a red herring.

Still, searching for patterns and for answers is part of what it is to be human. I loathe cliche, but perhaps, for once, this is a “senseless tragedy”, devoid of deeper meaning.

It is odd though that Mardell takes a different tack when he wants to…here using Hasan’s now ‘obvious’ terrorist link to condemn the FBI:

‘If a soldier, a Muslim unhappy about waging war on other Muslims, gets in touch with a man well-known for advocating terrorism, shouldn’t that “raise a red flag”? What do you think?’

So, not such a ‘senseless tragedy’ when it suits Mardell’s politics….suddenly it was very clearly an Islamic terorist event that the FBI should have picked up on.

The BBC has been  quick to play down any Islamic motivation  in Boston, and is moving deftly to separate ‘Muslims’ from those it deems ‘extremist Muslims’ in the viewer’s or reader’s mind:

Boston attacks reignite debate on Islam and terror

Boston Muslims on the marathon-attack suspects

Boston bombings: Muslim Americans await bomber’s ID

Boston Muslims react to marathon bombs

Tamerlan Tsarnaev: A lone wolf between two worlds (A lone wolf?   There were two of them just for starters)

But how justified are the BBC’s claims that they do this to protect Muslims from an anti-Muslim backlash?

Brendan O’Neil in the Telegraph asks that and lays to rest some of the BBC’s myths and legends about ‘Islamophobia’:

Where is the mob of Muslim-hating Americans going crazy after Boston? It’s a figment of liberals’ imaginations

Crown Prosecution Service crime figures for 2005-2006, covering the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks, showed that only 43 religiously aggravated crimes were prosecuted in that period, and that Muslims were the victims in 18 of those crimes. Eighteen prosecutions for anti-Muslim crimes – all those crimes are unfortunate, of course they are; but this was far from an “Islamophobic backlash”. As the then Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, said: “The fears of a [post-7/7] rise in offences appear to be unfounded.”

You can ignore it…but the question is just how long will it ignore you?  And then what?

MPACUK (Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK) might have the answer on its front page right now:

The Obligation Of Jihad

“Allah hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight with their goods and persons than to those who sit (at home). Unto all (in Faith) hath Allah promised good. But those who strive and fight hath He distinguished above those who sit (at home) by a special reward,”  Quran Chapter 4: The Women, verse 95.

The Prophet (peace be upon him) specifically mentions “Whoever of you…” this implies that the command is directed at every single Muslim, man or woman.

Those who do not observe Jihad are indeed committing a grave sin because there is much harm that emanates into society when it is abandoned. Those that neglect Jihad will be disobeying something God has commanded us all to partake in; they have not aided in protecting the Religion of God, they have not defended the Book of God, its messages and His law, they have not helped the Ummah against the enemy who wants to destroy them.

If any of us find our hearts at this stage; as a matter of urgency we must change for not only are we exposing ourselves to humiliation and harm in this life, but also in the Hereafter; for the Prophet (peace be upon him) said, “He who dies without having fought in the way of Allah or without having felt it to be his duty, will die having a trait of hypocrisy”

Can anyone explain the difference in treatment that the BBC gave Tom Herndon whom they believe undermines the case for Austerity,  here on the Today programme (08:49): 

Last week Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff paper that showed that growth slows dramatically if a country’s debt goes over 90% of its GDP was found to contain significant errors. Tom Herndon, a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explains that he discovered the inaccuracies while he was doing his homework.

…And the way the BBC treated Steve McIntyre whose work proved that the climate lobby’s central pillar, the Hockey Stick, was wrong.

Whilst giving Herndon a highly respectful write up McIntyre’s work was buried under a deluge of insults and smears for climate change sceptics from Roger Harrabin who then tried to imply that in fact McIntyre didn’t think his own conclusion was correct somehow.

Climate sceptics rally to expose ‘myth’

Note the choice of wording,  all selected to convey a particular impression…rightwing, vegetarians endangered, wine and blood coursed, libertarian, oppress the people, ‘geologist and Republican’, small government, McIntyre ‘shambled…a retired mining engineer…climate a hobby….a lugubrious bear of a man…nervous, winced’,  one handed applause, this conference – part counter-orthodox science brainstorm, part political rally.

Rather than look at McIntyre’s debunking of the graph Harrabin gets personal. 

So an article by Harrabin about someone exposing the Hockey Stick myth didn’t actually deal with the claims made by McIntyre or his evidence that the graph was badly misleading.

Here is the only comment on the graph…..

‘Mr McIntyre then advised sceptics to stop insisting that the Hockey Stick is a fraud. It is understandable for scientists to present their data in a graphic way to “sell” their message, he said. He understood why they had done it. But their motives were irrelevant.

The standard of evidence required to prove fraud over the Hockey Stick was needlessly high, he said. All that was needed was an acknowledgement by the science authorities that the Hockey Stick was wrong.’

Harrabin is working hard to give the impression that McIntyre didn’t think the Hockey Stick was a fraud, that he couldn’t prove it was wrong, but he could understand the reasons for its conclusions.

I think it is almost a racing certainty that McIntyre said no such thing…or rather he said a lot more which would have made  a strong case against the Hockey Stick and that Harrabin has been highly selective in what he puts down on paper.

Harrabin is engaged in a campaign to undermine Sceptics with ridicule and accusations that their scepticism is based on politics not science.  He doesn’t examine McIntyre’s thesis because to do so would mean actually admitting that McIntyre was right and that the Hockey Stick was just ‘an illusion’.

Here is a good overview of Mcintyre’s Hockey Stick work.…

Steve McIntyre linked up with Ross McKitrick a Canadian economist specialising in environmental economics and policy analysis. Together McIntyre and McKitrick began to dig down into the data that Mann had used in his paper and the statistical techniques used to create the single blended average used to make the Hockey Stick. They immediately began to find problems.

Some of these problems just seemed the sort of errors that are caused by sloppy data handling concerning location labels, use of obsolete editions, unexplained truncations of available series, etc. Although such errors should have been spotted in the peer review process and they would adversely affect the quality of Mann’s conclusions they had a relatively small effect on the final results.

But McIntyre and McKitrick found one major error, an error so big that it invalidated the entire conclusion of the whole paper. A whopper of an error.

Shame once again it is a mere blogger who provides the credible and coherent examination whilst the BBC hack provides an almost invective laden diatribe intent solely on insulting and abusing Sceptics in an attempt to undermine their credibility.

Harrabin’s artricle is just as much a ‘fraud’ as the Hockey Stick graph he sought to defend.

In 2008 the BBC paid for a large truck to tour central London displaying a giant version of Mann’s Hockey Stick as part of the promotion of its very pro CO2 warming mini series called “Climate Wars”.

Romany Blythe, 45, a drama teacher, urged thousands to join in “demonstrations of disapproval” around the country after creating a Facebook group called The Witch is Dead.

“In normal circumstances celebrating someone’s death would be reprehensible. But we are generation X, upset people that left school to find hopelessness and despair.”

What she actually found was a council house that she bought and made a whacking great profit on when she sold it and a boob job on the NHS to help her with low esteem issues.

Apparently this was all forced on her by the tyrant Thatcher…..“She was a despot. They danced in the streets when Hitler died too.”

Hitler handed out Living Room, Mrs Thatcher handed out Live-in bras…so alike. 

Not sure why Victoria Derbyshire brought this woman onto her show (11:08)….this is old news…the ‘death threats’ were reported 10 days ago and the rest was nothing she hadn’t said before.

It just seemed an opportunity was given to her to bash the Daily Mail, the Sun and the ‘Right Wing’ Press in general…Derbyshire asking her encouragingly if she would be taking legal action against ‘certain newspapers’.

Blythe laughably bemoaned the fact that she was being ‘vilified and turned into a hate figure’ by the Right Wing Press.   Hmmmm….The woman who compared Thatcher to Hitler and Ian Duncan Smith to a criminal attacking disabled people.

Blythe was allowed to spout her well worn rhetoric about the Coalition for a couple of minutes without interruption…Welfare reform..the ruthless attack on disabled people being ‘criminal’….Derbyshire rapping up with a lame  ‘ Thank you very much for talking to us’.

Amusingly Blythe said she was glad to have created a political dialogue, a national, global conversation….because without her Thatcher’s legacy would have been whitewashed and no one would have spoken up about all the terrible things she did.

She clearly hasn’t listened to the BBC for the last 30 years.

According to the Associated Press  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has admitted that his attack was motivated by religion:

‘Interrogators questioned him at the hospital, letting him write down his replies, and his answers led them to believe he and his brother were motivated by religious extremism but appeared to have no major terrorist group connections, said U.S. officials’

The Guardian thinks otherwise:

‘Can an act of violence be called ‘terrorism’ if the motive is unknown?’

The BBC probably still thinks it was some RedneckChristiananti-abortionistlowtaxgoodoldboys  in sleeveless tee shirts but they do worry about this fellow,  Mr Tsarnaev, who is being held in custody and wasn’t read his rights for a while:

‘Justice department officials said that in an effort to “gain critical intelligence”, they decided to question Mr Tsarnaev “extensively” before giving him the so-called “Miranda” warning of his right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present during questioning.’

Not a clue as to what he said when questioned…though they point out he couldn’t afford a lawyer: 

‘Mr Tsarnaev responded to questions mostly in writing. He nodded when asked if he was able to answer some questions and whether he understood his rights, the notes read.

He managed to say the word “no” when asked if he could afford a lawyer.’

Anyway, that’s one possible subject for the new open thread.

You choose the rest……….

The government wants nurses to have a year honing their caring skills before starting their training proper.

The BBC report that the Royal College of Nursing has ‘ridiculed’ this idea…and called it ‘really stupid’.

In fact the BBC seemed so pleased with that phrase, ‘A really stupid idea‘, that they couldn’t repeat it enough times today.

It probably is a really stupid idea but that’s by the by….if the RCN had said it was ‘A really  magnificent idea’ I doubt that would have got much air time on the BBC.

Here’s a really magnificent interview on ‘Morning Reports’ (5:05:30) with Unison’s Karen Jennings.

The interviewer does ask some relevant questions but also seems to feed her some easy ones that she easily bats away.

The worst point is a major failure by the interviewer.

Jennings claims that patient safety is at risk and that staff are stressed by the shortage of staff, and that this is caused by the ‘cuts’.

The interviewer feeds her a line…‘Is this a recent phenomenon?’

Well….what do you reckon she said?

The problems have only arisen in the last couple of years she claims…since 2010 ‘actually’….it’s a disaster in the making she tells us.

Really?  Who’d a thought a Union bod would come up with that?

Not the BBC because the interviewer didn’t have the obvious rejoinder ready for her….

‘What about Stafford Hospital….didn’t that occur under the Labour government long before 2010…you know..when over a thousand patients died  due to lack of care and money was being poured into the service?’

A disaster in the making indeed.

Doesn’t that one point completely undermine her narrative?  The service was obviously atrocious before 2010….but the BBC lets her get away with it…and Labour who seem to have escaped all culpability for the deaths.

Wonder what Karen Jennings and her Union buddies think of this:

Labour rules out ‘massive’ NHS spending increases

Labour has said it will seek to “protect” NHS funding if re-elected while acknowledging that increasing budgets is unlikely in the current economic climate.

So the same policy as the Coalition then?

The BBC has standards…they might be double standards but it has them.

It seems that for the BBC using social media or crowd sourcing news is bad practice leading to inaccuracy and potential dangers...Many are now asking: should “crowd-sourced investigations” be stopped?…unless of course it is done by a responsible news outlet….em…like the BBC perhaps who say about their own use of social media…’it helps us gather more, and sometimes better, material; we can find a wider ranges of voices, ideas and eyewitnesses quickly.’

Did enjoy reading this on the BBC website today:
Finding joy in the hypocrisy of others
How, too, are we to survive in this richly unfair world if we are to be robbed of the satisfaction of observing and detecting the hypocrisy of the high and the mighty?

Well it seems that the BBC haven‘t  yet been robbed of that satisfaction in observing and detecting the hypocrisy of others…..

Of course they only need look in the mirror to see the greatest example of that……

Justin Webb this morning lays into the US TV and social media (8:56) which ’crowd sourced’ information to be provided the police about the Boston bombs to help with their inquiries.

Webb says that in America the 24 hour TV channels went haywire and broadcast all sorts of things that weren’t true.

Does he mean much in the way that the BBC broadcast claims that the evidence was almost certainly pointing towards a ‘domestic’, that is, white, right wing terrorist?

Webb goes on to say  that ‘So much of this is very wrong and potentially very damaging to people.’

Of course this was the same BBC who was happy to report that Israel had killed a young Palestinian boy, Muhammed Al Durra using film taken by a Palestinian camera man.

The same BBC that broadcast false claims that the Israelis had massacred 3000 Palestinians in Jenin:

The BBC News and World Service gave the microphone to and quoted unchallenged the Palestinian Authority spokesman, Saeb Erekat and other Arab sources to talk on an ‘Israeli massacre’, starting with “data” of 3000 and switching later to 500 or 520 Palestinian civilian casualties. The BBC broadcasted very intensively the big story of the Israeli ‘massacre’ of Palestinian civilians, through reports, unchallenged quotations and  renewing reminders.

The same BBC that blamed Israel for the death of one of its own Palestinian employee’s son in Gaza recently….

The home of a BBC employee, Jihad Misharawi, was hit Wednesday by “what looks like a shell,” according to Danahar.  “It caused a huge fire,” Danahar says.  Jihad’s 11-month-old son, Omar, was badly burnt. He was taken to hospital, but died after about an hour. 

“I spoke to him myself today,” Danahar says, “and he said there was no fighting going on, there was nobody from (Hamas) there. It was just civilians.”

…a death in fact caused by a Hamas rocket.

 
The same BBC which used film of Palestinian casualties, again provided by ‘Pallywood’….only for  the casualties to suddenly reappear later on fit and healthy.

The same BBC that tweeted the picture of an injured Palestinian girl…only for it to be shown that she was in fact a casualty of the war in Syria.

Not to mention this bit of infamously emotive crowd sourcing by Jeremy Bowen:
‘In the last hours before a ceasefire, in a United Nations school in Gaza City that was packed with families who had fled from Israeli shelling, a girl of about 13 pushed a piece of cardboard torn from a biscuit wrapper into the hand of one my colleagues.
It was a checklist for the future, with one spelling mistake:
I hope to stop a war
I hope to live in a happy life
I hope to be pace [at peace] for ever
Happy dream
But this is Gaza, a place where nightmares can come true. ‘

But hang on…doesn’t the BBC make use of ‘Social media’ itself?  In fact isn’t ‘Social Media’ playing a central role in its news gathering now?

Justin Webb had better look out…he may not have a job unless he keeps up with the  new digital age:

BBC tells news staff to embrace social media
BBC journalists must keep up with technological change – or leave, the director of BBC Global News Peter Horrocks says

BBC news journalists have been told to use social media as a primary source of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News who took over last week. He said it was important for editorial staff to make better use of social media and become more collaborative in producing stories.
“This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary”, he is quoted as saying in the BBC in-house weekly Ariel.

And from the Guardian:
The BBC, as an early presence on the web, also spotted the possibilities of social media quickly and it has become a highly important and fast-moving part of our multimedia newsroom- it helps us gather more, and sometimes better, material; we can find a wider ranges of voices, ideas and eyewitnesses quickly.

The BBC already has a fair track record of inviting the audience to get involved in our journalism – web forums; debates; blogs and comments, and most recently incorporating comment within our website story pages, particularly on the live pages.
We are proud of the standards we have set in processing, sifting and verifying material sent to us and sourced through social newsgathering, giving us a new dimension when telling some of the major stories of recent times – the Japan tsunami; the Arab Spring; the Burma uprisings; the Norway shootings; the riots in England.

Good old BBC…never let the facts get in the way of a good story…especially if it is about Israel…or the ‘Right’ in the USA.

What Jeff wants, he gets…a new open thread…..