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Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

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.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

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.

Sir, As a record producer, a black parent and a taxpaying citizen, I welcome David Cameron’s criticism of Radio 1’s promotion of music that encourages violence (People, June 13).

The BBC and other media continue to install “white liberals” and irresponsible blacks to brainwash our youngsters. The black community is silent and powerless: as in the days of slavery, we have no say in what music our people listen to. We sit back and allow ourselves to be driven down a precarious track, by drivers who are not on the vehicle.

The Government will not do anything until the senseless violence spills over into white suburbia. Three years ago when two young girls were killed in Birmingham, I and others protested about the promotion of violent music. I in particular named the BBC. The BBC continued, saying that there was no evidence that its music policy encouraged violence. Since then we have lost many young lives.

If the BBC has any responsibility to the black community, it will install a panel of responsible people, who will not only monitor the material, but create our own icons.

NEIL FRASER (aka MAD PROFESSOR)

London SE25

Hat tip: An anonymous commenter

Our persistent Spanish comment spammer, El Pajero (a.k.a. Hal, hippiepooter, Irishcustard, englishpatriotuk@hotmail.com etc.), comments (here and here in full):

“If you’re so absolutely confident that your fellow Contributors have absolute confidence in you, why not put this to the test to shut the likes of me up once and for all, and step down from B-BBC – relinquishing all your sabotage powers et al – and see if a few days later your fellow Contributors are willing to readmit you?”

EP, if you knew how Blogger works you’d know that any of my co-hosts with administrator powers (e.g. Natalie etc.) could easily remove me from Biased BBC any time they wish, and there is nothing I could do to stop them. Knowing this, hopefully you will now undertake, as you suggest, “to shut up once and for all”. El Pajero continues:

“I’m sure it has not escaped your attention that you have repeatedly banned me from the IP address I am posting from and a day or two later I have repeatedly been unbanned”.

Again EP, if you knew how Haloscan works you’d know that your ISP, Telefonica de Espana (a strange choice for someone so concerned with the BBC and British democracy, but I digress), has millions of randomly assigned IP nos. All that happens is that from time to time you get lucky and get one that isn’t banned yet. No one has ever unbanned you.

Frankly, none of my poor colleagues who you regularly send your unwelcome rants to has ever expressed any sympathy for you, let alone questioned whether or not you should be unbanned. Having said that, as I have already said, if you are willing to 1) apologise for your past behaviour; 2) accept that Biased BBC is private property and that we make and enforce the rules, I will unban you – it is as easy as that, and more than you deserve after your harassment and implied threats.

I am sufficiently fed up of your tedious attacks that I am tempted to set up an online poll to resolve your problem and shut you up once and for all, however such a poll could well be subject to abuse by Beeboids and their leftie sympathisers keen to get rid of me and the rest of Biased BBC (which may of course be your aim).

However, if any one of my co-hosts, Natalie, Ed, Laban, etc. asks me to leave the Biased BBC team, I will do so. If any of our readers wish me to stay or wish me to go, please say so in the comments on this thread.

If enough real non-leftie non-Beeboid non-obsessed people want me to go in contrast to those who want me to stay I will do so – I have no interest in wasting my time here if I’m not wanted – I do have a real life and other interests, and should probably spend more time on them anyway.

Likewise, if you like my posts and want me to continue posting then please also speak up – your support will be welcome – it’s safer to help me here than intervening in a real world mugging. If you don’t want to speak up in public, for or against, then email me: biasedbbc AT gmail.com. Copy it to Natalie (see sidebar) if you wish.

Thank you. Normal service will now resume, if enough people want it, and if they do, I hope that EP will be honourable enough to “shut up once and for all” if that is the prevailing view.

An agency set up to seize criminals’ assets has cost taxpayers around £60m despite only recovering just over £8m from law breakers since 2003.

The Asset Recovery Agency was set up to tackle organised crime. It was meant to raise enough cash to cover its budget.

Tory Grant Shapps obtained figures from the Home Office showing in the ARA cost four times what it recovered in 2005.

Presumably they mean Conservative MP Grant Shapps, or even Tory MP Grant Shapps, rather than the sneering pejorative style ‘Tory’ prefix used by lefties everywhere.

Hat tip to Bob for this one:

France jails 25 for attack plot

A French court has jailed 25 alleged Islamist militants for planning attacks in France in support of Chechen rebels.

Alleged? They have been convicted by a French court of law. That it was no kangaroo court was indicated by the fact that two of the defendants were acquitted. I thought it was us Amerikkka-luvvin neocon warmongers who were supposed to claim that France is a banana republic whose courts cannot be relied upon, not the BBC.

The featured quote in the grey box is, of course, from the defence lawyer: “These convictions profit the United States, Algeria and Russia.”

Update by Andrew: A screen grab to accompany Natalie’s post:

BBC speak: convicted terrorists are merely “alleged Islamist militants”.