BBC stealth editing
When the BBC news website puts up a story, if that story changes, instead of starting a new page they simply update the original page. Fair enough you might say, apart from the pain it can cause us bloggers who can find quotations used from the original article changed or deleted.
However, Dr Crippen finds a more suspect use of this ’stealth editing’ – a rather glaring mistake swept away with the clatter of a keyboard. Basically, they recycled a press release as news without citing the source of the release’s vested interests.
Dr Crippen complained to the BBC and got an accusation of misrepresentation for his trouble. Fortunate then, that the original version of the story has been tucked away on the internet so the before and after comparison can be made and Dr C vindicated. Go read the full story.
Trust no one, as ever.
Posted on November 28th, 2006 at 2:02pm under Culture, media and sport
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• 4 Comments |
They clearly had trouble with their adding this morning: a story headlined that Labour and Tory loans totalled £62m shortly afterwards changed to show a total of £59m (and now , if it’s the same page, has an altogether different emphasis).
to be honest, this looks like the weakest possible version of blogosphere triumphalism I have ever seen. The most natural assumption about what happened is that the BBC picked up the mistake pretty quickly and changed the page, so that the minion charged with responding checked up on the page, thought “what the hell is this guy talking about?” and responded accordingly. I think that “can you ever trust the BBC again given its shameful coverup?” is a bit less accurate a conclusion to draw than “the BBC corrects its mistakes really pretty quickly, but they were a bit mean to poor little me, boo hoo hoo”.
I’m sorry dsquared, but I don’t agree. Sloppy journalism led to the production of the original piece and sloppy procedures dealt with the aftermath. If the BBC don’t have audit trails for their pages well they damn well should have. Hell, these guys can do it on an amateur basis. When a blogger does this kind of thing it’s considered poor form.
I think if mistakes were made then admissions should be made. We’re compelled to pay for this and I’d like to see things done in a clear and transparent manner. As I said, how many other instances of this kind of thing slip through undetected?
It’s more of a case of arse-covering that hidden agendas, if you ask me.