The BBC will admit today that it has uncovered irregularities in the operation of its Children in Need charity, The Times has learnt, after an appeal to staff to report instances where viewers were misled in the wake of controversies over Blue Peter and the editing of a programme about the Queen. The revelation — which will be one of several errors that the BBC is expected to own up … Continue reading →

Please use this thread for BBC related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts. Click through to read and contribute comments on … Continue reading →

featured a panel labelled The Big Picture, with a button to ‘Reveal image’. Clicking on the button popped-up an enlarge image pop-up page, featuring singer Lily Allen, with the caption: Singer Lily Allen signs autographs for school children in London’s Parliament Square as she launches the Make Space Youth Review. The report demonstrates worrying trends in teenagers lives such as antisocial behaviour. (my emphasis) Would this be the same Lily … Continue reading →

former BBC producer Antony Jay remembers those brave anti-establishment days : “For nine years (1955-1964) I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Macmillan’s premiership, and I do not think my ex-colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters. But we were … Continue reading →

posted Putting things in order on BBC Views Online’s The Editors blog, where he said: Maintaining standards of honesty, accuracy and fairness throw up various dilemmas which programme editors have to grapple with on a daily basis. For example we sometimes get politicians making complaints about an interview or a particular film. Uh huh. Where’s this going? We had a recent correspondence from the Treasury about an item made by … Continue reading →

Rod Liddle’s column in The Sunday Times leads on the BBC: Cue meltdown at the corporation. A frightened looking man in a suit, Peter Fincham, was wheeled out to apologise for having inadvertently misled the press and was gleefully attacked live on air by his underlings on Newsnight and breakfast news and repeatedly told to resign. And Jana Bennett, the BBC’s director of vision – whatever the hell that means … Continue reading →

from today, Who are the car bomb suspects?, in which the BBC tells us: Eight people were initially held over the failed car bomb attacks on central London and Glasgow. Three men have now been charged, a woman has been released without charge and four men are still being held. Details have been emerging about their backgrounds. Strangely, in such a long and detailed article, complete with supporting quotes from … Continue reading →

The first train wreck is revealed by the ever vigilant (and ever wonderful) News Sniffer Revisionista as it catalogues eighteen versions, 0 to 17, of BBC Views Online’s original Queen walks out of photo session fabrication page. Watch as the intial version is padded out with more so-called details, with a ‘Tantrums and tiaras‘ section being added, moving revision by revision to the inevitable train wreck at the end, with … Continue reading →

(I wonder how they got hold of it!), here is an unexpurgated 43 second clip of the BBC’s preview trailer, including the now infamous switched around clips wrongly portraying the Queen as ‘storming out’ of a photo shoot:   The silly music and the cinematic voiceover hardly speak for the BBC’s confidence in the ability of their programmes to sell themselves, do they? Click through to read and contribute comments … Continue reading →