[I wrote most of this post on Thursday 24th. Unfortunately I did not have time until today to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and post it.] Deference was alive and well when James Naughtie interviewed Joe Wilson on Radio Four this morning. Naughtie started risibly by describing Valerie Plame as a “deep cover” agent – clearly he had no idea what the phrase meant. I laughed out loud, … Continue reading
Biased BBC in the background of a Paul Mason Newsnight report about ‘Web 2.0’, online companies that are making serious cash, with B-BBC, co-incidentally or not, on screen as he mentions the possibility of people seizing back control from large corporations. View via Newsnight’s pages until Monday night (B-BBC is 15’15”-18″ in). Thanks to commenter SiN. Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.
“Well for those of you wanting more news on the weather, I’m sorry, but for obvious reasons we need to spend more time on the George Best story. Police in Cornwall have set up a Gold Control, and for those of you like me who didn’t know what that was, it’s a special incident control room…” Oh dear. The passing of George Best is noteworthy, but the reality of Hundreds … Continue reading
BBC defends ‘digital face’ trails, following four hundred complaints about them. They write: The BBC has defended its adverts for digital TV following criticism from viewers who found them frightening. Is that an official admission that these ‘trails’ are actually adverts? In common with many telly-taxpayers, I’m sick of the amount of advertising the BBC has loaded onto BBC1 and BBC2 over the last few years. It used to be … Continue reading
– has anyone seen or heard anything of this important story on the BBC? Anthony Browne, reports: BRUSSELS unveiled detailed proposals yesterday that would for the first time create a body of pan-European criminal law and force member states to punish citizens who transgress it. … The ruling means that for the first time in legal history, a British government and Parliament will no longer have the sovereign right to … Continue reading
claims Man killed by his own car. Wrong. Man killed with his own car. Or, more fully, Car thieves murder car owner, both still less than View’s Online’s maximum headline length. Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.
Imagine if the BBC created a page entitled The Struggle Against Aids. Imagine if then they included copious stories about linkages between Aids and homosexuality. Imagine if then they took an opportunity to frame a story about rising Aids cases alongside one about indecent and criminal homosexual behaviour, and alongside someone influential’s unmediated and copiously quoted opinion that Aids was linked to homosexual bad behavour. Well, that’s just imagination, isn’t … Continue reading
, a story about violence and threats of violence against the family of five female cousins, now aged 14 to 22, who were ordered nine years ago by ‘village elders’ to be married to the boys of another family in settlement of a dispute. Whilst BBC Views Online goes into some detail about the tragic circumstances of these unfortunate girls (sadly not uncommon in their part of the world) and … Continue reading
, presenter Deborah Mackenzie introduced a report on Her Majesty’s trip to Malta with: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth… What a damn cheek! Almost everyone in the UK refers to Her Majesty as ‘The Queen’, but no, not the other worldly BBC News 24, even though it’s the BBC’s domestic 24 hour rolling news channel, targetted at and paid for by the BBC’s UK telly-taxpayers (as distinct from BBC World, or for … Continue reading
Adloyada has an important post on what she has said in comments to the BBC’s Israel/Palestine impartiality review. The deadline for submissions is tomorrow. One of the BBC pages she cites is this page of statistics about the Intifada. As Adloyada observes, the BBC breaks down the statistics of Israelis killed by Palestinians into civilian and military but all the Palestinians killed by Israelis are placed in one large group. … Continue reading
