Can you spot the missing word(s) from this BBC News Online article, Thousands march for HK democracy, about a major pro-democracy demonstration in Hong Kong?
A. Yes, you got it, the missing word(s) are communism and variants thereof, with bonus points if you also noted the omission of any reference to the Tiananmen Square Massacre (sorry Beeboids, that would be the Tiananmen Square Tragedy to you).
news for most of Tuesday:
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It’s reassuring that News Online are getting to the bottom of some stories – it’s a pity though that others, such as this one, Christian doctor ‘was forced out’, seem to pass the BBC by.
Biased BBC in the background of a Paul Mason Newsnight report about ‘Web 2.0’, online companies that are making serious cash, with B-BBC, co-incidentally or not, on screen as he mentions the possibility of people seizing back control from large corporations. View via Newsnight’s pages until Monday night (B-BBC is 15’15”-18″ in). Thanks to commenter SiN.
“Well for those of you wanting more news on the weather, I’m sorry, but for obvious reasons we need to spend more time on the George Best story. Police in Cornwall have set up a Gold Control, and for those of you like me who didn’t know what that was, it’s a special incident control room…”
Oh dear. The passing of George Best is noteworthy, but the reality of Hundreds stuck on snow-hit moor is surely pretty urgent here and now for anyone travelling in the south-west, particularly with the evening commute fast approaching! While we’re at it, surely anyone who’s watched rolling-news coverage of any major police operation or the BBC’s own documentaries would have heard the phrase ‘Gold Control’ before, let alone a professional BBC journalist.
BBC defends ‘digital face’ trails, following four hundred complaints about them. They write:
The BBC has defended its adverts for digital TV following criticism from viewers who found them frightening.
Is that an official admission that these ‘trails’ are actually adverts? In common with many telly-taxpayers, I’m sick of the amount of advertising the BBC has loaded onto BBC1 and BBC2 over the last few years. It used to be that the lack of adverts on the BBC was used as a justification for the telly-tax, but those days are long gone.
“They have generated an encouraging level of enquiries, which has vastly outnumbered the amount of complaints received,” a spokeswoman said.
That’s the same lame excuse peddled by dodgy-advertisers everywhere!
“It is designed to be upbeat with cheerful music,” it continued, adding that the trails were not screened near children’s programmes.
BBC heads: ‘Upbeat and cheerful’, or scary and sinister?
If they’re so ‘upbeat’ and ‘cheerful’ why avoid children’s programmes?
However, one viewer complained to the BBC’s Points of View website that the image was “disturbingly psychotic”.
“It makes me feel queasy thinking about it,” wrote another contributor, while a third described it as “absolutely horrible”.
Quite. I don’t know about you, but the BBC’s digital ‘faces’ remind me of the stacks of skulls in photographs from the killing fields of Cambodia or Rwanda – stacks and stacks of individuals, born, nurtured and loved by someone, only to end up senselessly murdered in the name of political ideology or ethnic cleansing. Brrrr.
– has anyone seen or heard anything of this important story on the BBC? Anthony Browne, reports:
BRUSSELS unveiled detailed proposals yesterday that would for the first time create a body of pan-European criminal law and force member states to punish citizens who transgress it.
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The ruling means that for the first time in legal history, a British government and Parliament will no longer have the sovereign right to decide what constitutes a crime and what the punishment should be.
Also unseen and unheard on the BBC are:
CHARLES KENNEDY is expected to be subjected to a Commons investigation over his failure to declare more than £30,000 of free flights from his party’s most generous donor, who is wanted by police in America.
…producers of Tamburlaine the Great have come under fire after censoring Christopher Marlowe’s 1580s masterpiece to avoid upsetting Muslims.
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The censorship sparked condemnation yesterday from senior figures in the theatre and scholars, as well as religious leaders. Terry Hands, who directed Tamburlaine for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992, said: “I don’t believe you should interfere with any classic for reasons of religious or political correctness.”
Bet these would have both got top billing at the BBC if they weren’t about Charles Kennedy and Muslim appeasement…
Update: Bryan comments that the Marlowe story was mentioned on the BBC World Service yesterday, whilst Venichka has spotted the third of these ‘missing’ stories in action on BBC Views Online as Marlowe rewrite ‘draws criticism’, a luke-warm report of The Times story, missing out, for instance, an interesting quote from Inayat Bunglawala, media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, who said “In the context of a fictional play, I don’t think it will have offended many people”.
Meanwhile, the search goes on – has anyone seen or heard anything of the other two stories (the EU one in particular is notable – where is Mark Mardell?) in any BBC media or the Marlowe story on any UK broadcast?
claims Man killed by his own car. Wrong. Man killed with his own car. Or, more fully, Car thieves murder car owner, both still less than View’s Online’s maximum headline length.
, a story about violence and threats of violence against the family of five female cousins, now aged 14 to 22, who were ordered nine years ago by ‘village elders’ to be married to the boys of another family in settlement of a dispute.
Whilst BBC Views Online goes into some detail about the tragic circumstances of these unfortunate girls (sadly not uncommon in their part of the world) and their “religious marriage ceremony, called a sharai nikah”, the BBC have, for some unknown reason, managed to omit a crucial word or two of useful background information. Either of these words would have done. They begin with ‘m’ and ‘i’.
Update: Marc of USS Neverdock comments that the BBC’s omission’s from this report go much further than omitting the ‘m’ and/or ‘i’ words. According to the Telegraph, Blood debt women offered up for rape:
A village council in Pakistan has decreed that five young women should be abducted, raped or killed for refusing to honour childhood “marriages”.
The women, who are cousins, were married in absentia by a mullah in their Punjabi village to illiterate sons of their family’s enemies in 1996, when they were aged from six to 13.
The marriages were part of a compensation agreement ordered by the village council and reached at gunpoint after the father of one of the girls shot dead a family rival.
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In addition to the sentence on the women, the village council has sentenced to death Jehan Khan Niazi, the father of three of the women, and the fathers of the other two for failing to honour the supposed bond with men whose identities they are not even certain of.
The women have said they will commit suicide if their fathers obey the council.
– the reality therefore is so much more awful than the BBC’s namby-pamby token coverage. Worse, a scandalous story like this doesn’t even get a look in on the BBC’s television news – they’re too busy following every last minute of George Best’s dying days. It’s sad to see a character like Best on his death bed, and it is worth a mention in passing, but it doesn’t (yet at least) merit full-length coverage high up in the running order (like on this evening’s Six O’Clock News) when there are stories like this one or the ongoing famine in Niger that are so much more deserving of our attention.
, presenter Deborah Mackenzie introduced a report on Her Majesty’s trip to Malta with:
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth…
What a damn cheek! Almost everyone in the UK refers to Her Majesty as ‘The Queen’, but no, not the other worldly BBC News 24, even though it’s the BBC’s domestic 24 hour rolling news channel, targetted at and paid for by the BBC’s UK telly-taxpayers (as distinct from BBC World, or for that matter, News 24’s own ‘The World Today’ programme).
P.S. Is it just me, or is that moustached twat who pops up frequently on News 24 to exclaim:
This week on Talking Movies…
exceedingly irritating? Still, I suppose he does at least jolt me into changing channel as fast as I can before I get too brainwashed to resist!
reminded me of the murder in Birmingham last year of the last police officer to die on duty in the UK. Alone among news organisations, the BBC’s pathetic choice of lead story that night was the appointment of Mark Thompson as the BBC’s Director General. Tossers.
