Author Archives: Andrew

the judge named in the blackmail case that finished at the Old Bailey yesterday was referred to as Ilyas Khan and Mr. Khan. Curiously, other news outlets, including the BBC Ten O’Clock News, used the judge’s full name – Mohammed Ilyas Khan. Doubtless the Six’s omission was for lack of space.

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on active service in Afghanistan, the fourth and fifth such deaths in the course of a week. Their deaths were reported as the second item on this evening’s BBC Ten O’Clock News bulletin. What story was judged by the BBC as being more important than the sacrifice of two British soldiers?

Yes, you’ve guessed it – the BBC’s fifteen minute long Ten O’Clock News programme was led by a full five minutes on the resignation of David Beckham as Captain of the England football team, with filmed pieces about the return of the squad (oh look, an aeroplane landing), the disappointment of Sven Goran Eriksson and an obituary style review of David Beckham’s time as captain, “those legendary free kicks”, and so on, even though Beckham has made it clear that he’s staying on as an England player.

The Beckham story is a big story – a big sports story – but it shouldn’t have led the Ten O’Clock News on any but the slowest of news days, and certainly not on a day with sad news like today. It’s not as if England’s football disappointment wasn’t fully covered yesterday, over and above the deaths of sixty people in a Baghdad bombing.

The producers of the Ten O’Clock News should be ashamed of their choice this evening – the British Broadcasting Corporation should know better.

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“in the tropical island of Cuba lies the detention camp that is seen by many around the world as America’s gulag”

Typical Matt Frei – light on facts, heavy on spin. Who are your “many around the world” Matt? Do you mean many BBC reporters around the world? Many Guardian readers around the world, many lefties around the world or what?

And what does it matter what these so-called ‘many’ think, when their alleged comparison is so fundamentally flawed? Unless of course you’re spinning us a line rather than giving us unvarnished facts in an impartial manner?

Do you Matt, have any idea what the Gulags were like? How many millions of people were detained in the Gulags? Over how many decades? How many died in the Gulags? Answers, for you Matt, according to Wikipedia, 18-20 million detained over four decades, with 1,606,748 deaths, not including “the more than 800,000 executions of ‘counterrevolutionaries’ during the period of the ‘Great Terror’, since they were mostly conducted outside the camp system” or the 390,000 plus peasants who died in labour camps.

Compare that with Guantanamo – a few hundred detainees, duration so far three to four years, health and welfare generally taken care of, with just a few deaths, none due to execution.

Do you know what you’re talking about Matt? It’s time for you to read some Solzhenitsyn before you go shooting your mouth off again. Sure, Guantanamo is an aberration in need of urgent resolution, but your unsubstantiated comparison of Guantanamo with the Soviet Gulags, based on nothing more than what you think ‘many people around the world’ (how conveniently anonymous) allegedly think is nothing but far-fetched, over the top, biased hyperbole. Plus ca change.

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are to pick up interesting stories from the Sunday Papers, I’m surprised to see that they missed this fascinating story by Philip Sherwell in the Sunday Telegraph, Ayatollah’s grandson calls for US overthrow of Iran. A couple of excerpts:

The grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, the inspiration of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, has broken a three-year silence to back the United States military to overthrow the country’s clerical regime.

Hossein Khomeini’s call is all the more startling as he made it from Qom, the spiritual home of Iran’s Shia strand of Islam, during an interview to mark the 17th anniversary of the ayatollah’s death.

“My grandfather’s revolution has devoured its children and has strayed from its course,” he told Al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language television station. “I lived through the revolution and it called for freedom and democracy – but it has persecuted its leaders.”

and:

The Dubai-based satellite channel’s website spelt out his backing for armed intervention by America, a country excoriated as the Great Satan by his grandfather and Iran’s current rulers.

It stated: “As for his call to President Bush to come and occupy Iran, Hossein Khomeini explained that ‘freedom must come to Iran in any possible way, whether through internal or external developments.

This is all the more surprising since BBC Views Online has already shown its commitment to covering the 17th anniversary of Khomeini’s death… still, it’s not too late to cover this latest story – get to it Beeboids!

In yet another of those strange BBC coincidences, Dr. Who’s latest foe, a greedy, grasping, people-absorbing monster, the Abzorbaloff, is… a Daily Telegraph reader! Strange how things always seem to happen that way at the BBC!

A Daily Telegraph reader is really…		a greedy, grasping monster…
that gobbles up its enemies and…		sticks up two fingers to the world!

Hmmm. I wonder what was the inspiration for a large greedy, voracious monster that gobbles up its enemies as it expands in every direction…

To be fair to the large voracious monster (the BBC that is, not the Abzorbaloff), we should remember that the Daily Telegraph is the last of the broadsheets, now that The Times and The Independent are tabloids, sorry, comicpacts, and The Grauniad is a Beezer or Berliner format, or something like that.

Hat tip: commenter Rob.

examine the following introductory excerpts from two news reports about the same ongoing Old Bailey trial:

Using your skill and judgement, try to determine which report is from The Times, freely available on the web, courtesy of News International, and which report is from BBC Views Online, available on the web courtesy of the compulsory BBC tellytax.

Give up? You don’t really need me to tell you, do you? Oh, you work for the BBC? In that case, the BBC’s is on the right*, the one that doesn’t mention a certain ‘I’ word** anywhere in the whole article. For the full story, read The Times article, by Nicola Woolcock, free of charge too.

* a first for a BBC Views Online report, I know 🙂

** or plumbers either, for that matter.

Commenter SteveB complained to the Beeboids, and received the following reply, which he kindly shared with us:

Dear Mr Bxxxxxxxx

Thank you for your comments. We accept that our initial story was
deficient and should have made it much clearer what the killing in the
song lyrics referred to. We revised the story after re-checking the
facts. We also subsequently did an updated story to include the marine’s
apology, which detailed out much more clearly the thrust of the song.

But you make a fair criticism about our first story. We do aim to cover
stories as objectively and accurately as possible.

Kind regards

BBC News website

In spite of the acknowledged deficiencies and lack of clarity in their first version of this story, I doubt that we’ll see any public acknowledgement of these errors, let alone a BBC Newswatch record and explanation of them.

I have long suggested that BBC News Online ought, on each page of their site, including the index pages, to have a link to a page of revisions, so that tellytaxpaying customers like us can, if we so wish, see each and every change to a story as it happened, the better to see how stories develop and who edited what and when.

This would be a useful service for all sorts of people, and would also improve the quality of BBC News Online journalism – simply by virtue of doing away with the opportunity that exists at present for journalists to slap down any old tosh, safe in the knowledge that they can ‘stealth edit’ away their errors and omissions later (as with this, my favourite example) – “Wot me guv? No guv, it was always like that, you must be mistaken”!

The answer has always been that such a system would be impractical – why record a change to a story when it could be as trivial as a spelling correction they say?

Well, the solution, a large scale working example of the solution no less, already exists – it’s good old Wikipedia! If every Wikipedia item can have a list of revisions, large and small, complete with times, dates and some kind of author identifier, surely every News Online page could easily do likewise (though obviously without the free-for-all editing) – heck, the BBC could even use some of Wikipedia’s code to do it.

It wouldn’t surprise me if BBC News Online’s system already has this capability – certainly if I had designed their system this is the sort of information that it would automatically capture, free from tampering by ordinary users. If their system, already does this of course, then there’d be little difficulty in making such information publicly readable.

So Beeboids, if Wikipedia can be this accountable to their non-paying customers, why can’t you be that accountable to your dragooned tellytaxpaying customers? What’s to lose?

P.S. As a further constructive suggestion, when you create a link from a current story to a previous related story, it would be very easy to make those links work both ways – i.e. so that by creating a link from a new story to an old story (for background purposes), the list of related stories on the older story is also automatically updated to point forward to the newer story too – an easy to implement form of “what happened next“ service. It wouldn’t be difficult to implement, and would be tremendously useful to your tellytaxpaying customers.