Author Archives: Andrew

writes Anthony Reuben, a BBC Views Online Business Reporter, of the recently deceased Dame Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop, including this wonderfully astute observation:

The very idea of a commercially run business being set up to benefit anyone other than shareholders was a new one.

And I thought that any commercially run business sets out to benefit its customers through the provision of goods and services freely purchased.

Perhaps its due to the unique way the BBC is funded that British tellytaxpayers receive the benefit of such top-notch Beeboid wisdom, not freely purchased!

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Ryan Stephenson for the quote.

P.S. Our Beeboid ‘business reporter’ also overlooks many benevolent and socially responsible commercial employers from generations past in his rush to praise Dame Anita.

Please use this thread for BBC-related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

reports the Grauniad:

Listeners outraged by a BBC Radio Five Live debate on Madeleine McCann forced the station to change a phone-vote on her disappearance.

Victoria Derbyshire’s morning phone-in today asked listeners to vote on whether they still had sympathy for Madeleine’s parents Gerry and Kate after they were officially made suspects in the case by Portuguese police on Friday.

Dozens of listeners contacted the programme to say they did not think it was a suitable subject for debate while the legal process was still ongoing.

And the BBC head of TV news, Peter Horrocks, who was interviewed by Derbyshire, also appeared to question the station’s coverage of the McCann story.

The weight of the negative reaction was such that producers were forced to change the vote to whether the station should be discussing the case at all – and listeners voted by 68% to 32% that it should not be.

Good old BBC. Tasteless and inappropriate, whatever one’s feelings about Gerry and Kate McCann and the fate of poor Madeleine. And just yesterday one of our resident Beeboids was holding forth about the BBC’s need to be careful about prejudicing legal proceedings!

Thank you to Maureen of A View from England for the link.

, BBC Views Online reported that Conservatives Mercer and Bercow to advise Brown.

Co-incidentally, of the seventeen paragraphs in an article about both politicians, BBC Views Online spent five paragraphs, in the middle of course, rehashing the ‘Mercer is a racist’ meme the BBC so gleefully promulgated back in March.

One line would have been enough of a reminder, if it was needed at all, given that the original I am not a racist, says sacked Tory article was linked to as a ‘See also’ anyway.

P.S. Patrick, you need to update the BBC’s photo of you – that ‘Chinny’ Hill look is awful. No wonder they picked it.

:

According to employment law firm Peninsula, 233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees “wasting time” on social networking.

The study – based on a survey of 3,500 UK companies – concluded that businesses need to take firm action on the use of social networks at work.

The Bivings Report: The BBC is invading Facebook:

As of this posting, the British Broadcasting Corporation facebook network has 14,726 members. For an imperfect comparison’s sake, I’ve checked the CNN network, and it only has a 311 members while the Turner Broadcasting (CNN’s group in the AOL TimeWarner empire) network has 1,843 members.

Back on June 6th, Richard Sambrook, the social media savvy and friendly Director of BBC Global News, wrote on his personal blog SacredFacts that “[t]here are over 10,000 members of the BBC group (for which you have to have a bbc email) alone. That’s about half the entire organsiation”. The BBC has invaded facebook!

All thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded. How heartwarming.

Here are four recent news reports, reproduced in full. Can you spot the relevant fact omitted from one of them:

First, BBC Views Online:

Man in court faces terror charges

A man has appeared in court accused of preparing acts of terrorism in his home town in South Yorkshire.

Nicholas Roddis, of Reedham Drive, Bramley, Rotherham, appeared at London’s Old Bailey on Friday by video link from custody.

The 22-year-old was remanded in custody for a plea and case management hearing on 21 November.

At his next court appearance, the charge of preparing acts of terrorism will be put to him.

Second, Teletext:

Muslim convert in court

A Muslim convert from Rotherham has appeared at the Old Bailey accused of preparing acts of terrorism. Nicholas Roddis, 22, of Reedham Drive, Bramley, appeared for the short hearing on a video link from prison. Roddis was remanded in police custody for a plea and case management hearing on November 21, when an indictment will be put to him.

Can you guess what it is yet?

Third, The Star (from South Yorkshire):

Rotherham man faces terror trial

A WHITE Muslim convert has appeared in court accused of plotting to bomb his hometown of Rotherham.
Nicholas Roddis, aged 22, allegedly kept a list for attacking Rotherham, along with chemicals for making explosives and bomb-making recipes.

Counter terrorism police claim he also kept extremist propaganda including beheadings at his then home during a two-and-a-half year period. The property was searched on May 8, this year.

He was yesterday charged with 13 offences under the 2000 and 2006 Terrorism Acts.

Roddis, of Reedham Drive, Bramley, spoke only to confirm his name and date of birth during a 10-minute hearing at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court in central London. He appeared in custody wearing a white prison-issue tracksuit and goatee beard.

District Judge Nicholas Evans declined jurisdiction and committed the case for trial at the Old Bailey. He will appear for a preliminary hearing on September 7. Judge Evans said: “This is a case in which the Terrorist Protocol applies.”

No bail application was made and there was no indication of his plea.

You must be getting close by now!

Fourth, CourtNewsUK:

A white Muslim convert accused of plotting to bomb his home town appeared at the Old Bailey today (fri). Nicholas Roddis, 22, allegedly kept a ‘To Do’ list for attacking his hometown of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, along with chemicals for making explosives and bomb-making recipes.

Got it yet?

Here’s a clue: it’s the thing that probably inspired the alleged acts.

Good old BBC. All the news, all the time (except when it’s some of the news, some of the time).

Update (Sunday):

Apologies to those who have found this Biased BBC Compare & Contrast Quiz too easy. It would have been tougher with the addition of reports from the Hawick News, the Bridlington Free Press and the Buxton Advertiser, all with this Press Association report:

Convert in court on terror charges

A Muslim convert from Rotherham has appeared at the Old Bailey accused of preparing acts of terrorism in his home town.

Nicholas Roddis, 22, of Reedham Drive, Bramley, appeared for the short hearing on a video link from prison.

He was remanded in custody for a plea and case management hearing on November 21, when an indictment will be put to him.

Thank you to pounce for the BBC and Teletext links. Good spot.

: academic, writer and anti-semitezionist, Tom Paulin:

Paulin, who appears regularly on the panel of the BBC2 arts programme Newsnight Review (formerly Late Review), allegedly made the comment in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.
The interviewer wrote that Paulin, a consistent critic of Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians, clearly abhorred “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers. Paulin, a lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford, was then quoted as saying: “They should be shot dead.”

“I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them.” Earlier in the interview, he was quoted as saying: “I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all.”

On the subject of suicide bombers, the paper quoted him as saying: “I can understand how suicide bombers feel. It is an expression of deep injustice and tragedy.”

“I think, though, that it is better to resort to conventional guerrilla warfare. I think that attacks on civilians in fact boost morale. Hitler bombed London into submission, but in fact it created a sense of national solidarity.”

And here was me thinking it’s a long time since we’ve seen that dreadful old bore on Newsnight Review, maybe they’ve done the decent thing and quietly dropped him. Alas not.

More on Paulin in Wikipedia and of course Google.

Update: Oh dear. He’s just blabbed out a crucial plot development while discussing Awake and Sing.

:

The BBC has admitted that Alan Yentob, the corporation’s creative director, has performed “noddy shots” on interviews that he did not personally conduct for his arts series Imagine.

In the first instance of a senior BBC executive being drawn into the TV trust issue, a senior corporation source admitted to MediaGuardian.co.uk that Mr Yentob often does not conduct all the interviews on Imagine – even though he appears nodding or reacting to them.

Mr Yentob, one of the BBC’s most senior figures and widely seen as the corporation’s ambassador, conducts many of the major interviews for the series…

However, it is understood that scenes featuring Mr Yentob reacting to some of the more peripheral figures and experts featured in his programmes were edited in even though he was not actually present. Editing work on the programme later gave the impression that he was present.

Oh dear. And I thought all the recent contoversy was just down to sub-contractors and ‘work experience kids’. Do read the rest.

Update: More on noddy and friends from Rod Liddle in the Spectator: The end of the ‘noddy shot’ is a ray of hope for television:

Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it’s a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal — processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you…

There has been much photogenic hand-wringing and crocodile tears, but in the end I doubt very much that there is the will to change things a great deal…

So, along with the noddy shots, let’s consign a few more of those hackneyed TV devices to the bin. The ludicrous knocking-on-the-door shot, for example — the staple of every TV documentary and something I’ve had to do in almost every film I’ve made. The audience is enjoined to believe that this is a wholly naturalistic event — the presenter, followed by a film crew, wandering up to some interviewee’s front door, knocking and being admitted. I once had to do the door-knocking thing 14 times when about to interview a very thick lady in Leicester, because no matter how much we told her not to, through gritted teeth, she kept opening the door and saying hello to me and then offered a cheery ‘And how are yow?’ to the rest of the crew. Who, of course, the audience is not meant to know exist…

But for too long the television industry has been mired in a self-disgust occasioned by its implacable belief that it must always appeal to the lowest common denominator, that its audience has the IQ of a lamprey. This is as true of even some of the most serious documentaries; it is especially true of evening news reports.

Amen about the evening news. Another article worth reading in full.

Thank you to The Fat Contractor for the Spectator link.

on BBC Views Online yesterday – a fawning and uncritical analysis of Labour’s school building program – a nice companion piece to last night’s BBC Ten O’Clock News that featured Gordon Brown visiting the very same school on the same day – what a happy coincidence.

Gordon Brown: “This school’s great!”, BBC: “It really is a school of the future!”

Biased BBC reader Ayayay commented:

The story basically says, aren’t Labour’s school building plans wonderful.

No analysis of whether it is necessary to rebuild or refurbish every single secondary school in England. No analysis of whether the PFI involved is good value [or] that the schools will still [be] being paid for long after Labour has gone. No analysis of whether the money would be better spent elsewhere (e.g. teacher training, teacher pay, better equipment, school vouchers etc.). No analysis of whether school buildings truly affect teaching quality (as opposed to good teaching).

As ever an underlying BBC assumption that public expenditure is always justified. The only note of controversy touched on in the article is whether the money is being spent fast enough.

Reader 1327 saw the story on BBC Breakfast:

It really was breathtaking… I suspect the “reporter” simply took a Government or PFI contractors PR handout and then read it out over the air. There was nothing about how it would all be paid for in the years to come or anything about the improvement (or not) in similar schools to judge if all that spending is worth it. Even worse was the way children were used in parts of the report saying just how wonderful the new school was in obviously pre-rehearsed statement.

Whilst an anonymous reader summed up the BBC’s reporting most succinctly:

Is tractor production up?

I particularly liked the second paragraph:

There is a real “wow” factor when you walk through doors of the £24m Bristol Brunel Academy, the school’s new principal Armando di Finizio says.

By paraphrasing the Head’s words and quoting just the word ‘wow’ it makes it read as if it’s the reporters opinion, with extra emphasis on ‘wow’, rather than the Head speaking. Why not just tell us what he said, and put his name up front too?

“It’s incredible really – it’s a cross between a shopping mall and Hogwarts because there are all these stairs criss-crossing.”

The whole school is a wi-fi zone. It features independent learning areas and uses biomass boilers to provide about 80% of its energy. It really is a school of the future.

“When you first walk in there is this ‘wishing wall’ which has a whole load of wishes from staff and pupils carved into stones,” Mr Di Finizio says.

Ah, I see why the Head needed help with his words. “When you first walk in there is this wishing wall”. Is the Head a victim of comprehensive education himself? I’m sure there is a wishing wall every time, whether you walk in or arrive on a Nimbus 2000 broomstick.

And is that second paragraph the reporters own words, or is it another quote, without quotation marks?

And didn’t Hannah say this was the first time the pupils saw their new school? Getting those quotes etched in stone and up on the wall must have been done a bit sharpish – especially allowing for the inevitable time to correct their spelling and grammar.

One reads: “I wish more children could enjoy having a school like this.”

Poor child. When you’re a bit older you’ll understand that the quality of your education is mostly to do with the dedication of your teachers, your parents and yourself, rather than wonderful school buildings. Unless you want to get a job with the BBC that is.