Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Michael Taylor, in the comments to the previous post, on the BBC. It’s not Paul Reynolds in disguise, is it ?

The agenda-setting is tedious for those who don’t share their world-view, but where it’s accompanied by the hard slog of good journalism – Channel 4 News for example – you agree to disagree and wish them well on their way.

Who believes these are the people to save the BBC?

So say the Civitas think-tank, in a report on a BBC ‘documentary‘ which turns out to be a bit of a travesty of the truth.

“A programme broadcast on 5 October 2005 called ‘Little Kinsey’ manifested such a distortion of its source material that we can no longer depend upon the integrity of the BBC’s factual programmes.”

‘Little Kinsey’ was part of the ‘Lost Decade’ season, focusing on issues relevant to the period 1945-55. Its central argument was that the restrained attitudes towards sexual activity which would have been considered as typical of the era were hypocritical, that men and women were commonly adulterous, that family life was frequently unhappy, that many men used prostitutes and that homosexual activity was common. In fact, the archive, now housed at the University of Sussex, showed no such thing: it showed a society in which most people were still very conservative in their attitudes. Nor do official statistics back up the lurid picture painted by the BBC.

The Civitas press release is here, the full report (pdf file) here.

doesn’t mean the Beeb will be at all interested, especially if it departs from the “torture” script.

Some Gitmo Prisoners Don’t Want to Go Home

Fearing militants or even their own governments, some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay from China, Saudi Arabia and other nations do not want to go home, according to transcripts of hearings at the U.S. prison in Cuba.

Uzbekistan, Yemen, Algeria and Syria are also among the countries to which detainees do not want to return. The inmates have told military tribunals that they or their families could be tortured or killed if they are sent back.

Could the BBC simply report this very straightforward story? We’ll see.

In this BBC story.

(In justice to the BBC, I’ve looked at the ONS site and I can’t actually find if there will be a category for the English. But if there isn’t, of course, that would be a story in itself – one you’d think a national broadcaster might want to cover.)

Hat-tip to Archduke in the comments.

UPDATE – England has arrived on the page after an intervention by commenter Pete_London – Drinking From Home has the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pages, stealth-edited in the best BBC tradition.

This morning’s Radio Four news headlines tell us that David Mills, husband of Labour Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, will learn soon whether he will face trial on corruption charges.

“Miss Jowell, who is separated from Mr Mills ….”

Well, yes. Since Saturday. Obviously no time for that little detail.

The Today programme page adequately describes the first item after the news at seven.

“Hear the latest news from Washington where the Bush administration has been embarrassed by the comments of its ambassador in Iraq.”

The story, an LA Times interview with the ambassador, is an assessment of the current situation in Iraq, and as such is an important story which the BBC are right to cover. But to the BBC its importance is entirely couched in terms of its potential to embarrass President Bush. I’m not at all sure this is responsible reporting – in fact it’s quite distasteful. Listening to the BBC, you get the impression that dead Iraqis only count when viewed in terms of their impact on Presidential poll ratings.

…doesn’t mean the Beeb has to agree. This “story” is bogus. President Bush, after all, was not slow to declare a state of emergency along the Gulf Coast. Mayor Nagin’s reaction to this “news” is laughable and hypocritical but the Beeb is happy to serve us New Orleans sludge.

Update: DFH, one of our B-BBC commenterati has two very helpful posts here and here. Auntie can’t get away with what she once did.

Both Expat Yank (hat tip: David H in comments) and Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day spotted something odd about the reporting of a recent BBC poll on Iraq.

Hello? Three-quarters of the tyrant’s former subjects are thrilled that the old monster is behind bars, but the BBC buries the fact at the very end of the report on its own poll. Talk of selectivity! Talk of bias!

, I have decided to put USS Neverdock’s BBC bias reference page from January last year on the sidebar among “other links”. Lots of good stuff there, although Marc ought to note that the infamous CBBC page on the Holocaust that didn’t mention Jews has since been amended.

I know, I know, ought to clean out all the other links that don’t work. Don’t like doing it, for some reason.

It is said of many a failing company that it was not just the occasional faults in their products that trashed their reputation but the arrogant and evasive way they dealt with complaints.

This BBC article says, twice, that terminations were made legal in the US by the 1973 court decision Roe v Wade. In other words it is factually wrong in a typical BBC way.

The American Expatriate spotted the mistake and complained. The response made by the BBC’s Louise O’Doherty was far more astonishing – and revealing – than the initial error.

I can assure you that factual accuracy is the essence of news reporting and the BBC aspires to the very highest standards of journalism but in many cases, particularly with breaking news stories, facts can be scarce or conflicting.

Nevertheless I do realise the frustration this supposed error must have caused.

Read the Expatriate’s response.

UPDATE: The BBC have now corrected the article in question, and state that the initial response to the question “will be raised as a training issue.”

They are the ones with a “nose” for a story. Hard-bitten, often hard-drinking, they are the ones
who “just happened” to be there when the war started or the government fell – or the story first broke that the world would eventually know as “The Oldham Horror”…

Extremists have been blamed after a cartoon featuring the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban was put up in a housing office in Oldham.

Tim Blair is on the case.