Author Archives: Andrew

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thus missing the last two or three minutes of Blair’s last session of Prime Minister’s Questions. History, happening live before our eyes, cut-off for the sake of five minutes worth of Wimbledon coverage. I hope someone at the BBC will have an imprint of Andrew Neil’s brogues on their posterior afore long!

Just to add insult to injury, having cut off PMQs, the BBC still had the temerity to show its usual package of tedious self-advertising in the gap between programmes – a trailer for ‘Rome’, a trailer for ‘Jekyll’, a BBC2 ident, and then on to Wimbledon, with a lengthy preamble from Sue Barker and then a non-entity tennis match (this is only the first week of Wimbledon, after all, before it was rained off!) – so BBC2 can’t have been that desperate for time.

Either they have no sense of history and public service, or perhaps they do, and this was the BBC’s way, post-Hutton, of showing Blair and everyone else who’s really in charge, at least as far as the BBC Monster is concerned.

Update: Helen Boaden, Director of BBC News has blogged that:

After looking into this, I can at least reassure you that this was cock up rather than conspiracy. A wrong scheduling decision was taken for which the BBC can only apologise. Believe me, no one involved would have wanted you to miss any part of this important event.

Well, never mind Helen, we at Biased BBC know what it’s like to run a quality service as a bunch of amateurs with zero funding – it’s not like you’re professional broadcasters with a £3-billion per annum budget, is it?

Iain Dale has more coverage of this, the latest, monumental BBC News cock-up. We await to see whose career prospects reflect this dreadful stupidity – but we won’t be holding our breath…

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reports on Why the BBC is rubbish, in an article by Andrew Thomas, who sounds like a man after my own heart. Here are some excerpts:

At the beginning of the last century, its newsreaders spoke proper English and wore dinner jackets even though they were only on radio, or the wireless, as it was then known. It was a trusted and respected organisation, much as the London Times used to be before it was taken over by an antipodean charlatan.

Today, the news is read by excitable young folk with impenetrable regional accents who find it impossible to sit down while spouting forth in some hateful modern argot about some soap star’s new hairstyle.

The BBC’s charter states that it should be ‘free from both political and commercial influence’. A laudable aim and one that the BBC completely ignores.

And:

And while on the subject of pseudo journalism, when did journalists stop interviewing the people directly involved in the news? In a story on the Prime Minister, the BBC news anchor will interview the BBC Political Editor, rather than the man himself. A science correspondent will be wheeled in to explain some new technical wonderment, rather than the boffins who developed it and an economics reporter will be interviewed on some shady business deal instead of the man who’s just fled the country taking the pension fund with him.

And:

The ‘commercial influence’ aspect of the BBC’s charter extends beyond straightforward advertising. For years, the BBC’s technology coverage has been beneath contempt. Not only do correspondents genuinely believe that ‘the CPU is the brain of the computer’ and that ‘the sun goes behind the Earth’ during a lunar eclipse, but their coverage could hardly be called objective.

It is all to easy to see the BBC technology desk wetting themselves every time an Apple press release arrives. If it contains the word ‘iPod’, you can imagine them fainting with excitement.

All too true! Do read the whole thing.

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Blue Peter has apologised for showing children the ritual slaughter of a goat in scenes that included the animal’s agonised death throes.

Ofcom criticised the BBC after viewers complained that the scenes, shown without warning, were shocking and wholly unsuitable for children.

The footage was shown in a feature about a village in Oman preparing for the Eid ul-Fitr festival. The killing was shown in long-shot and from behind, so that the method of slaughter was not visible, but the BBC admitted that the death throes were apparent. Ofcom said the goat was clearly seen “twitching” in close-up as it expired and considered that the final moments of its death were “not appropriate on this occasion”.

The BBC said Blue Peter had recognised immediately that the subject should not have been shown in such detail and apologised to viewers and children the day after broadcast.

The Sun’s coverage of multi-culti fun on Blue Peter

Hmmm. The BBC’s claim that “Blue Peter had recognised immediately that the subject should not have been shown in such detail” is utter tosh. When we first covered this appaling story back on January 23rd, I noted that:

…having searched through BBC Views Online’s search engine, the Blue Peter Homepage and the BBC’s Press Office, I can find no references to this apology from the editor of Blue Peter – has it passed you by Beeboids? There’s still time to get an article up on BBC Views Online’s Entertainment page, the place where you normally need no excuse to toot the BBC’s horn!

Even now, searching Google for site:bbc.co.uk “blue peter” oman goat slaughter returns just one result, a BBC Complaints response allegedly published on 19 Jan 2007, in which Richard Marson, Editor of Blue Peter, states:

We thought long and hard about the treatment of this story. We decided to include it because it is a fact of life not only in Oman but all over the world and we felt that it was important to show the link between the food that people eat and where it actually comes from.

So, on the one hand, we have the editor of Blue Peter saying “we thought long and hard about the treatment of this story” and on the other we have “Blue Peter… recognised immediately that the subject should not have been shown in such detail”. Well, which is it?

And even if they did recognise their error immediately afterwards, shouldn’t it have been just as obvious immediately before it was broadcast? We are talking about alleged broadcasting professionals here, aren’t we? Has anyone been punished or reprimanded over this now admitted error?

P.S. Beeboids: There’s still time to get an article up on BBC Views Online’s Entertainment page about this BBC story – you know you would if another broadcaster had done this…

The BBC has confirmed that an Iraqi bomb has got through the armour of a Challenger tank for the first time.

– quite why the BBC are able to confirm this, since they don’t operate the tanks, escapes me. Perhaps they’re using ‘confirmed’ in the same way as that other lazy BBC-ism, “the BBC has learned”, when of course the BBC’s job is to report, rather than to toot it’s own trumpet at every opportunity, even during news bulletins it seems.

Moreover, a roadside bomb capable of defeating the armour of a Challenger II tank is not your average roadside bomb – it must be a sophisticated shaped-charge device, difficult to design and difficult to manufacture without sophisticated equipment, so is almost certainly not an ‘Iraqi bomb’. It’s much more likely to be an Iranian bomb, but in the absence of proof, the BBC would be more accurate to describe it as a ‘bomb in Iraq’ rather than an ‘Iraqi bomb’.

BBC Views Online’s sleazy stealth editors have been in action again (though I doubt that they are ever really out of action – it’s just that we don’t always spot it happening).

On Saturday morning BBC Views Online reported Migration ‘tipping point reached’, beginning:

Immigration could lead to the political break-up of Britain, according to think-tank Civitas.

A pamphlet by the group suggests that Britain may have reached a “tipping point” beyond which it could no longer be seen as a single nation.

Looking at the same story today, it has been modified, stealthily, as follows:

Immigration could lead to the political break-up of Britain, according to right-wing think-tank Civitas.

A pamphlet by the group suggests that Britain may have reached a “tipping point” beyond which it could no longer be seen as a single nation.

You can see the original version of the article courtesy of Google’s cache (until Google next refreshes their cache in a day or two).

The strange thing is that Civitas, a widely respected think-tank, is deliberately non-partisan, as set out on their About Civitas page:

Intellectual orientation

All think tanks have a point of view, and unthinking commentators always want to know whether an organisation is left wing or right wing. Those who think for themselves know how misleading these categories are. Civitas is not easy to position on the left-right spectrum. Most of our staff have no current or past party affiliation, but our director of community studies, Norman Dennis, is a member of the Labour party in Sunderland and our Director, David Green, was a Labour party member for over ten years and a Labour councillor in Newcastle upon Tyne for about six years. To avoid the tug of party loyalty, Civitas is non-partisan in politics.

Moreover, our principal concerns are not the property of any one political party. The focus of Civitas on encouraging social cohesion is shared by many who would describe themselves as on the left.

(Read the rest for further details).

Perhaps this is a case where the unthinking lefties at Views Online don’t care much for the message, hence them helpfully labelling Civitas, incorrectly, as right-wing, lest anyone else should care to think for themselves.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.