about an article, UK personal wealth at £6 trillion, featured on BBC Views Online over the weekend. The main point of complaint was the final section:
Other figures, published by HM Revenue and Customs, show how rising house prices have provided a tax bonanza for the government.
Stamp duty on residential property sales in the UK brought in £6.44bn for the chancellor in the last financial year, 2006-07.
That was more than double the level seen five years earlier in 2001-02, when this tax take stood at £2.69bn.
The basic rate of stamp duty is 1% on sales worth more than £125,000.
But higher rates were introduced in 1997, taxing sales above £250,000 at 3%, and those above £500,000 at 4%.
These rates have not changed since then, so with a quarter of all house sales now being valued at £250,000 or above, the government’s take from stamp duty is now booming.
Despite a hysterical campaign against inheritance tax in some quarters of the media, HMRC figures show it is not as onerous.
In 2006-07 it brought the government £3.5bn, up a relatively modest 50% during the previous five years.
In particular the use of the word hysterical (emphasised above). This is nothing but Beeboid opinion masquerading as news. Our two valiant complainers, David G. and Towcestarian, received similar responses:
Dear Mr. G,
Many thanks for your e-mail and for bringing this to my attention.
You are right, the word hysterical has no place in this news story, and
I have replaced it. I will also have a word with the author of the
piece.
Regards
AN Other Beeboid
Business Editor
BBC News Interactive
The word ‘hysterical’ was changed to ‘intense’. Even then, it’s still nothing but Beeboid opinion masquerading as news, even though the adjective is less obviously wrong.
There has been no intense (let alone hysterical) campaign against inheritance tax that I’ve noticed. That’s not to say that I notice everything, but there haven’t been series of front pages devoted to the subject or newspaper campaigns of the sort we see for a referendum on the EU Constitution, sorry, reform treaty. Certainly there have been a number of newspaper articles expressing legitimate public concern about the government’s stealthy extension of inheritance tax (by failing to increase the tax threshold in line with property values), but nothing terribly intense or hysterical as far as I can see.
To compound matters, our anonymous Beeboid reporter’s assertion that “HMRC figures show [inheritance tax] is not as onerous” is also dubious. It all depends on how you define onerous. If you take the Labour Party’s spin (as relayed by the BBC), that inheritance tax only affects 4% of estates, it does indeed appear to affect only a few people. But that misses the point entirely. The real extent of inheritance tax should be measured in terms of how many people it would affect if they died today. That figure is very much bigger than 4%. Many ordinary families with dependent children, living in relatively modest homes, would find their children hit by inheritance tax if the parents died suddenly.
Under these circumstances, and given that Stamp Duty (in effect a tax on moving home) is a known quantity (up to 4% of a property’s value now) and to an extent avoidable (by not moving), it seems to me at least that Stamp Duty, though certainly a burden, is arguably much less onerous than inheritance tax at 40% on everything you own over £300,000 in total at some unknown point in the future. In other words, I think a very reasonable case can be made for disagreeing with the government spin that this Beeboid has reported as factual news.
But that’s only half of the story,
Our unidentified Business Editor’s reply rather implies it was a mere slip and that he will “have a word with the author”. That is simply not good enough. Surely material published on BBC Views Online isn’t supposed to go ‘live’ online without being checked by someone else? Surely a word like ‘hysterical’ (outside of a quote) in a supposedly impartial factual news piece should raise an eyebrow or two?
And yet, looking at the ever wonderful Newssniffer’s record of this BBC story, we see that it originally went live around 1am on Saturday morning, whereas the change from ‘hysterical’ to (the not quite so obviously wrong) ‘intense’ took place at 8.30am on Monday, some fifty-seven hours later – long after most of the damage was done! (To add insult to injury, the ‘Business Editor’ stealth-edited, his change, leaving the original timestamp unchanged).
Almost everyone who ever views that article will have seen the ‘hysterical’ version. It was featured across BBC Views Online throughout the weekend, on the top page until around noon on Saturday, moving over time to Business and then to Your Money, where it resided on Monday evening, before sinking into the Views Online archive little to be seen again.
BBC Views Online’s own Most Popular Now feature reveals that this flawed story was the most read business story on Saturday (29SEP) and the second most read business story on Sunday (30SEP), dropping out of the top five by Monday (select the date and then the Business section to see for yourself).
Where was our unidentified Business Editor whilst this story was going great guns over the weekend? Did no one else at BBC read it and spot the howling error? It seems not, otherwise such an obviously wrong article would have been changed quicker than the fifty-seven hours it eventually took.
This might seem like a lot of effort over just one adjective, but I hope I’ve shown why there’s more wrong with the article than just the word hysterical. Even if it is just the one word that “has no place in this news story”, it’s a good illustration of quality control, oversight and accountability failures at BBC Views Online.
Winston Churchill famously observed:
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on*
…as demonstrated time and again by BBC Views Online, sometimes unwittingly and inadvertantly, often without the truth even getting out of bed before the lie’s been all around the world and is back in the BBC Viewsroom, untroubled by the truth.
I’ve mentioned my favourite example of BBC Views Online’s stealth-editing, shoddy quality control and lack of accountability before – it was the article that, when most people read it, wrongly attributed a vile Princess Margaret quote to Margaret Thatcher – before the mistake was stealth edited away several days later (long after the damage was done to Margaret Thatcher’s reputation). When I mentioned this a year ago, a Beeboid, John Brunsdon, apparently confessed to the crime, saying:
Marvellous! I just stumbled across this blog entry on your ever-amusing front page, and was delighted to see the link to your favourite piece of BBC “stealth editing”.
I felt I had to reply as, reader, I am that BBC journalist! I wrote that piece, and made the change, and the time has come to ‘fess up.
I’m sorry but – a bit like Andrew George of Hilda Murrell infamy – my confession may pop a rather nice conspiracy theory bubble. Rather than a subliminal attempt to slur Maggie, it was just me being crap.
In my defence, I had been down the BBC bar at lunchtime – but I simply wrote the wrong name then noticed it, and put the story through without a new timestamp because I didn’t want the editor to see what a f***wit I had been. I reckoned without the eagle-eyed (and hare-brained) devotees of biased bbc!
This particular tin-foil-hat wearing piece of anti-beeb paranoia is made even more amusing by the fact that I, as any of my colleagues would gladly point out, have political views on most subjects somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan.
I’m afraid that while the beeb can be crap, it can twist itself in knots trying to be impartial and end up just being hamstrung, and it can be wrong – it really isn’t biased.
To quote Margaret Thatcher (and it really is her this time) “Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides. “
Oh and another: “Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story. “
Which is of course to miss the point entirely. My complaint was not that the misattribution was a conspiracy – even I don’t think Beeboids are that stupid – but the fact that something so clearly wrong, so clearly damaging, so clearly worth checking, went live on BBC Views Online and stayed live while it was featured on BBC Views Online’s index pages, only to be changed much later, quietly and stealthily, long after the damage was done and most people had read the wrong version.
It really is time for BBC Views Online to adopt a publicly visible Wikipedia-style edit history for each story on BBC Views Online, free from tampering by staff, showing a full automatic record of each and every change, as and when it is submitted, complete with enforced editorial review and approval as necessary.
If BBC Views Online is interested in honesty, truth and transparency in the news, as a supposedly impartial tax funded news service should be, there is no reason for Views Online not to do this. The same should go for BBC Views Online’s many index pages. Currently there is no proper record of these (barring a third-party developed beta system limited to the home page) – yet the selection, ordering, presentation and duration of news headlines is at least as important as the content of the news with regard to impartiality and truth.
It is now more than three years since Biased BBC first called for BBC Views Online to provide a Wikipedia-style document edit history. Has anyone yet come up with good solid reasons why the BBC shouldn’t provide tellytaxpayers with this straightforward information automatically?
* I’d always thought it was boots rather than pants, but a spot of Googling strongly favours pants over boots. Can any of you provide a definitive source for this great quote?
Update: Perusing Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (a book!), I found:
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, 1834-92:
If you want truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it; but if you want a lie to go round the world, it will fly: it is as light as a feather, and a breath will carry it. It is well said in the old proverb, ‘a lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on’.
Collected in Gems from Spurgeon (1859)
