Author Archives: Natalie

“I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared–seared–in me.”

But he doesn’t say it any more.

This official retraction, of a serious claim that had been made repeatedly and that was part of the candidate’s own explanation of his why he holds the views he does, ought to be news. At 11.30pm I couldn’t find it on the BBC website.

More can be read about the “Bush AWOL” story here (4 February), here (10 February), here (14 February), here (also 14 February), here (27 April), here (31 May), here (10 July), and here (24 July).

The February cluster of stories are evolving versions of the same basic framework. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The BBC was on top of every twist and turn of that story.

Yup. Scott Burgess’s title pretty well states the case.

I do not subscribe to the argument that the BBC should resemble the nation as a whole. The nation as a whole is too varied, fickle, inconsistent and unclassifiable for that to work. The two issues he picks as examples of “broad liberalism”, support for the death penalty and support for not persecuting homosexuals, are, in their very different degrees of public acceptance, a vignette of why his argument smacks of trying to sell a package deal to a customer who wants to buy goods separately.

Humprhys himself would be horrified if he were asked to represent the views of a majority of the nation on asylum seekers, say. Gypsies – don’t even think about it.

ADDED LATER: Thinking further, I could go with the argument that the BBC should generally represent a highest common factor of British values (acknowledging that the HCF is a pretty low number!) Obviously I’m talking about the BBC’s collective persona here, not about individual opinion honestly labelled as such. Yet I also agree with commenter “billg”, that there are times when the BBC should rise above popular opinion – and I’m fully aware how dangerous that sentence is. Finding a definition that allows for both these views is beyond me at the moment. Yet I suspect that the right course is hard to define but fairly plain to see.

Just another day at BBC radio.

I’ve been away. So I might have. But has the BBC reported the Swift Boats controversy at all?

As so often, the little instance of bias I am about to point out is so tiny and insignificant that I almost want to feed it some milk on my finger. The fun part is finding out how many brothers and sisters and cousins it has under the floorboards. In this article about UKIP MEP in row over working women we have (in the grey box):

Independence and Democracy is a new parliamentary group of hardline Eurosceptics

• It rejects the EU constitution and the “centralisation of Europe”
  

• It says it opposes xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and discrimination

Note that the first point is stated as an uncontested fact and the second as just what I & D says. Scare quotes by another name. As I said, on its own this is insignificant. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to look for other swallows.

Incidentally, I am 99% sure that when I first saw this story there was no mention of the actual point Godfrey Bloom was making – that legislation designed to give women maternity rights functions as a disincentive to employ women of childbearing age. I distinctly don’t remember, if you see what I mean, this sentence:

“They probably in quite good faith put in a piece of legislation which is designed to protect women in the workplace but what actually happens is it… writes them out of employment.”

I remember not seeing it because as soon as I saw the part of his remarks I did see I thought, I wonder if what he meant was that legislation designed to protect women can have the effect of making employers want to avoid the expense of paying for maternity leave? And I intended to look for his actual words but didn’t get round it, then came back to the Beeb and there they were. Some of them, anyway.

Now this probably isn’t culpable stealth editing.* More probably it is a useful stealth editing: the addition to the story being made after Bloom explained his remarks on today’s Today, and in the light of what he said. However the question remains as to why the BBC couldn’t find space to say that was what he meant in the first place. The original story, my memory insists, simply presented him as a comical dinosaur – and the Ceefax page 117 still does.

*Incidentally, as I say every few months and will add to a FAQ page if ever we make one, even stealth editing is better than no editing at all. Mistakes should be corrected. However there is no need for all the stealth; many newspapers manage a corrections page and the BBC could too. And/or the BBC could actually use the “last updated” field at the top of each story.  

You have to wade through almost to the end of this BBC story of July 10th “Bush military records destroyed” to see that the destruction took place in 1996 or 1997. This fact makes it all less suspicious.

Compare the BBC story to this New York Times account of July 9th. Many things are similar, but the point that the destruction accidentally occured in 1996 or 1997 comes in only the second paragraph.

The NYT also stresses that the destruction occurred as part of a general conservation project which went wrong much more strongly than does the BBC.

Also note the up-front way the NYT has dealt with the correction to the story, issued on the 10th. There is a line at the top saying “correction appended” and it is duly appended at the bottom. The BBC could and should copy this technique.

Perhaps it could also copy the specific correction and state that the White House admitted the loss of the records not in the last few days, as you might think from the BBC story, but in February.

(New York Times links via Jim Millerwho is less impressed with the NYT than I am.

So far as I can see the only permitted ways of sorting the comments are chronologically or reverse-chronologically, irrespective of post. This makes it very difficult to search out a particular comment in order to edit it. Is there a way of sorting comments according to the post they are connected to? I note that the premium service offers a word search facility, but we don’t have that level of service.

The BBC provides 170 news-based lesson plans for teachers. Some strange force drew me towards the section on the EU. In this “myths or facts” quiz the pupil is asked to say whether each of five reports in which it is said that the EU does or does not wish to ban, change or rename some aspect of British life, are facts or myths. It turns out that number four is the only true one.

Answer the following questions. Use one side of the paper only.

(1) What is the general idea that this quiz is intended to convey?

(2) What other questions can you suggest that might convey different ideas?

(3) (For advanced candidates only) Write not more than 100 words on the background to any ONE question demonstrating how another very similar example might have been chosen giving quite the opposite result.

(4) Why is the BBC providing lesson plans anyway? Discuss.

(5) Remind me, who pays for all this?

some comments recently. May I draw your attention to our comments policy:

This comments facility is the property of ‘Biased BBC’ blog.

The owners of this blog reserve the right to edit, amend or remove all and any comments for reasons of libel, gratuitous insult or any other legal or policy reasons or any other reasons we judge fit.

By posting comments here you accept and acknowledge the absolute and unfettered right of the owners of this blog to edit your comments as set out above.

[On reflection I thought it best to have this post as a mere re-statement of the comments policy. A few lines have been deleted.]

Jim Miller compares and contrasts the Sun‘s treatment of the visit to Britain of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who advocates wife beating, execution for homosexuals and suicide bombing by children, to the BBC’s much more insipid account.

Reader Patrick Bramwell sends another link and writes:

An utterly appalling whitewash of Al-Qaradawi on today’s UK BBC Online. The man is the soul of moderation, in tune with the mainstream Arab thinking, and a peacemaker!!!

This one is a real doozy so far as BBC bias goes.

In defence of Magdi Abdelhadi, who wrote the piece, the assertion that al-Qaradawi is in tune with mainstream Arab thinking may well be correct. It is notoriously difficult to know what people in unfree societies really believe.