Category Archives: Uncategorized

I think it’s fair to say that Alfie at Waking Hereward was not impressed with the opening of Scot Andrew Marr’s Radio Four series Unmasking The English.

(I thought it pretty poor stuff as well. Eighty years ago another Scottish media type wrote about the English rather more successfully. Archibald Gordon Macdonell found fame with his first novel, the autobiographical England, Their England. It’s still in print. The visit to the avant-garde theatre production is my favourite part – you can just imagine the respectful Front Row review.)

asked when does artifice become deception about the tricks, sorry, techniques, used in making TV programmes, in advance of a segment on Thursday’s Newsnight.

On Friday, Peter reported back that Noddy’s not dead at Newsnight, and neither is the much more dubious ‘reverse question’, where questions are re-recorded after an interview, but of course with no guarantee that the questions haven’t been changed, revised or differently emphasised from those in the original interview.

One trick, sorry, technique, that Peter didn’t mention is one called ‘dodgy editing’, one that Robbie Gibb, Peter’s deputy, tried to explain away under the guise of Putting things in order back in July.

I fisked Robbie’s mealy-mouthed article thoroughly at the time, asking:

Why not show events chronologically then? Or explain in the film about the re-ordering of events and the reason for doing so? Anything else would, at best, appear highly questionable wouldn’t you say?

And:

Why did you purposely change the order of events? Presumably there was a purpose. What was it?

With all the hoo-ha at the time and the pressure of work one presumes, neither Peter nor Robbie had a minute to answer these very easy questions about Newsnight’s use of the ‘dodgy editing’ technique at the time.

However, now that Peter is interested in what is and isn’t acceptable in the making of Newsnight, perhaps either he or Robbie could take a minute now to explain the reasons for Newsnight’s use of the ‘dodgy editing’ trick, sorry, technique, just a few weeks back.

P.S. I’ve posted a comment (at 1.34am today) asking about this on Peter’s Noddy’s not dead blog post. Let’s see if it gets published and whether or not we get an answer this time.

Update, 11am: My comment responding to Peter’s post has been published. Let us see whether or not we get an answer to our ‘dodgy editing’ questions this time.

tootled BBC Views Online last week, except of course the headline is not quite right. Not all of the hostages were freed, unless you count the two poor souls who were murdered and dumped in ditches as having been ‘freed’ too. Those who clicked on the errant headline did find out, in paragraphs four and five, that:

The Taleban seized the group of 23 last month as they travelled by bus on the main highway from Kandahar to Kabul.

Two male hostages were subsequently killed.

Nice passive BBC reporting on the nice passive Taleban, as if the South Koreans were ‘killed in a road accident’ or somesuch, quite coincidental to their kidnap, rather than brutally and viciously murdered and dumped by their brutal and vicious kidnappers acting in the name of their supposed god.

Later, around 10pm on Saturday, BBC Views Online reported that:

Freed South Koreans return home

But by 6.30am on Sunday, a mere nine edits later, the story was spun into:

Freed S Korean hostages ‘sorry’

…though even after all these ‘revisions’, the article still refers to:

…two colleagues executed by the Taleban.

…which is, as we have noted before (yes you, Robin Denselow, BBC Newsnight), contrary to the BBC’s own BBC News Styleguide (PDF), where page 69, Troublesome words, states:

Execute means to put to death after a legal process.
Terrorists or criminals do not execute people, they
murder them.

You can follow the whole sorry BBC Views Online edit saga, starting with version 1, revision 1 courtesy of the excellent News Sniffer Revisionista service.

Still in Afghanistan, Biased BBC reader Pounce notes another poor BBC Views Online headline, Afghan attack ‘kills civilians’, which is at best ambiguous, at worst downright misleading, since the story itself is:

An attack aimed at a US-led coalition base in Afghanistan has killed at least 10 people…

…in which case the headline could have been Taleban attack ‘kills civilians’. Strange that the supposedly professional journalists at BBC Views Online didn’t think of this obvious improvement to accuracy and clarity.

Thank you to Biased BBC readers Pounce and champagne bottles for their links.

writes Damian Thompson of the Telegraph on the cash-stricken BBC’s latest use for tellytax cash:

Project Director, Palestinian Territories

‘Support for the Palestinian Media Sector…’ …to increase the level of networking and dialogue between media professionals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As Damian notes, the BBC seems strangely reluctant to “network and dialogue” on the contents of the Balen Report, commissioned by the BBC into its Middle Eastern coverage and then covered up by the BBC at great legal expense to tellytaxpayers.

, even if you’re a religious bigot:

It means Germans are still under pressure from their past and Jews receive special treatment because of that.

Tauseef Zahid, London

This fails the ‘Switch Around Sniff Test’ – switch around the groups named and see how it smells, though perhaps the BBC is right to show that there are people with views like Tauseef Zahid in London.

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Elbow for the link.

draws our attention to BBC accused of insulting war hero in The Times. The BBC’s own Radio Times has this to say:

It purports to be a serious look at British war films, yet only British Film Forever would come up with the following throwaway remark about Reach for the Sky, the biopic of legless Second World War hero Douglas Bader: “Viewers of this film might’ve thought they were having their legs pulled.” I wonder exactly who this witless commentary is aimed at? But as always with this series, best ignore such drivel…

We’ve been here twice already with this series (here and here) – didn’t anyone at the BBC read the tosh turned in by the writer (Matthew Sweet, apparently) before it was recorded and broadcast? Has the writer been reprimanded or spoken to? Or is the only lesson learnt, by the writer, that he can get paid handsomely by unwilling tellytaxpayers to stick in his own politicised sneers as much as he can get away with?

Blair may have gone but the Blair Broadcasting Corporation is still spinning:

The Scottish Executive is to be rebranded as the Scottish Government, it has been confirmed.

No – it’s already been rebranded, as we can see from the photo and as we can read about in the very same article:

A new Scottish government sign has been put in place outside its Victoria Quay building in Leith, replacing the existing Scottish Executive sign.

I always hated the Labour government’s policy of leaking news to friendly journalists who could then write: “The minister will announce today…” How did they know that the minister wouldn’t be struck down by a bolt of lightning before making his pronouncement? I suppose the weather’s been nationalised just like the BBC. When journalists say that something will happen, the event should be in the future and should definitely occur.

, so the second most important Entertainment story, in their view, is the stunning revelation that Theron ‘wants US soldiers home’ – a masterpiece of investigative reporting. Quite coincidentally, she’s also plugging her latest film that just happens to be about an American soldier who goes missing after serving in Iraq.

Meanwhile, just for balance, we have this tacked on to the end of the same article:

Meanwhile, director Ken Loach also premiered his new film, It’s A Free World at the festival.

The movie takes a look at the exploitation of migrant workers in the UK.

Loach said he hoped it would generate attention on the plight of immigrants – legal or otherwise – who have flocked to the country from eastern Europe in recent years.

“On the one hand people say the economy couldn’t survive without the immigrant workforce. On the other, the right wing is saying, ‘Get these people out of our country’. It’s hypocrisy,” he said.

A free advert for the leftie film-maker’s latest tosh, and a platform to express his bigotry about his political opponents. Funnily enough Ken, the people who say that we need immigrants for the sake of our economy are not the same as those who wish to get rid of immigrants. I know that’s a complicated idea Ken, but it’s not hypocrisy when two different groups express different views, is it? Though of course what you’re ignoring completely is that most people just want, and would be happy with, some form of reasonable control over immigration to the UK – something that our Labour luvvie government has failed to manage.

P.S. The most important Entertainment story, at least according to the BBC, is BBC’s DJ held ‘over order breach’, which isn’t a story I want to comment upon beyond the dodgy headline. Surely it should just be BBC DJ – they do have more than one DJ on the tellytax-teat don’t they?

Thank you to David for the Theron link.

Update: Ms. Theron’s comments are now more important than the BBC DJ in jail story, at least according to Views Online.

, BBC Views Online bring us news that TV’s McGovern calls BBC ‘racist’:

Asked by Mayo whether the country was less racist than it once was, McGovern said: “I have got to say this, you will not like this. But I’ve worked a lot in the BBC, you know.

“I love the BBC as an institution and as an organisation and you do see lots of black faces in the BBC. But you see them in the canteen. You do not see them in positions of power.

“It would appear to me that one of the most racist institutions in England is in fact the BBC.”

You could’ve fooled me, but there’s no shortage of “black faces” all over the BBC’s output. Perhaps an over-representation in strict numerical terms even. To present for BBC London it seems that being a good-looking Asian female is a big advantage, and nobody can say that the Black and Asian community of Mull isn’t more than amply represented in Balamory for instance.

Fortunately, the BBC does defend itself against this nonsense:

Mayo reacted by saying it was “a very serious allegation to be making”, adding that the BBC would be responding.

He later read out a statement from the BBC. It said: “What really matters is that we reflect our audiences through our programmes.

“The BBC’s ambition is to reflect the ethnic and social mix of people around the country. We’re actively seeking and nurturing ethnic talents both on and off the air.

“This has been coming through in our output with a range of presenters and reporters across our peak-time programmes for example Freema Agyeman in Doctor Who, the forthcoming Omid Djalili show, Dance X, and dramas such as Waterloo Road.

The BBC can certainly be accused of having too narrow a cross-section of people running the BBC – but it’s not so much that there are too few “black faces” (to use McGovern’s loaded term) – it’s that there are far too many lefty-liberal arts types who’ve never had proper real world jobs and who’ve never had to worry about where their next wedge of tellytax salary and pension were coming from.

Someone at BBC Views Online does have a sense of humour though:

In March, Jonathan Ross said during his live Radio 2 show that too many black people at the BBC were in low-paid jobs.

To which one can only respond that there are too many Jonathan Ross’s at the BBC in extremely highly paid jobs (£18m over three years). No one’s forcing you to take that much Jonathan. If you want to share it with the BBC’s poorer employees, black or white, there’s nothing stopping you.

Thank you to j0nz for the link.

laying in to Stephanie Flanders over that Cameron interview on Newsnight (see Biased BBC yesterday and the day before) didn’t get a mention in the regular BBC In The News section of the BBC Editors Blog on Friday, at least not until after 5.44pm, when one Elliot Spencer commented (see no. 2):

I see Littlejohn’s piece in the Mail didn’t make your list, I wonder why?

…complete with a link to the article. The Littlejohn article was then dutifully added, with a note linking to Mr. Spencer’s comment. Must just have been an oversight. Oh the fun of blogging!

Update: And now an apology comment has been added too, though considerably later than the time on the comment’s timestamp.