Sunday, July 22, 2007
The BBC: Caught Again, they Apologize Again
This is becoming a regular feature: the BBC is caught lying, cheating, or doing something Dan Rather-like, and they apologize for their latest fuck-up - and everyone forgives them, until the outrage caused by the next lie or fraud.
Last week it was making up calls for winners to charity contests. This week, it is making up numbers in a poll to fit their own agenda.
Why does the BBC continue to get £7 billion in taxpayer funds again?
BBC apologises in row over 'mistake' in SNP survey
Imagine if a taxpayer-funded media outlet in the US was caught time and time again lying to fit a liberal agenda...you would have PBS, wouldn't you?
Of course, we should listen to a former Beeb worker, Rod Liddle, on what is so very wrong with the BBC:
BBC in need; Poor old Auntie Beeb is unwell. She’s confused and no longer knows right from wrong, truth from fakery
They are "shocked"? At what - that they were caught lying? Or that they have a 60 year record of some of the most anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-Semitic rants ever heard outside of al Jazeera?
That is not shocking, folks. What is shocking is that BBC continues to suck at the tit of the British taxpayer - and that British governments continue to fund this insane monster.
This is becoming a regular feature: the BBC is caught lying, cheating, or doing something Dan Rather-like, and they apologize for their latest fuck-up - and everyone forgives them, until the outrage caused by the next lie or fraud.
Last week it was making up calls for winners to charity contests. This week, it is making up numbers in a poll to fit their own agenda.
Why does the BBC continue to get £7 billion in taxpayer funds again?
BBC apologises in row over 'mistake' in SNP survey
THE BBC has suffered another credibility blow after admitting that it made up a Newsnight survey suggesting that most of Britain and Scotland's leading businesses were not in favour of independence.
Presenter Jeremy Paxman had told SNP leader Alex Salmond that 'not one' of 50 firms, made up of 25 in Britain and 25 north of the border, supported the party's independence policy on a TV special shown before the Holyrood elections in May.
The Sunday Herald has discovered the BBC has since apologised after a viewer complained the 'straw poll' was mis-represented by Paxman because only a handful of companies replied to the survey.
Details of the latest mistake emerged only days after a number of corporation staff were told to 'step back' from their duties over their involvement in a fake phone-in scandal affecting six programmes, including BBC Scotland's Children In Need Appeal.
The BBC's head of editorial complaints, Fraser Steel, responding to the complaint by viewer Chris Hegarty conceded that only seven of the 50 firms approached for their views on independence had replied.
Imagine if a taxpayer-funded media outlet in the US was caught time and time again lying to fit a liberal agenda...you would have PBS, wouldn't you?
Of course, we should listen to a former Beeb worker, Rod Liddle, on what is so very wrong with the BBC:
BBC in need; Poor old Auntie Beeb is unwell. She’s confused and no longer knows right from wrong, truth from fakery
The BBC executive board gathered for its regular meeting last Tuesday morning for coffee, biscuits and meltdown. The previous evening, at 5pm, the deadline had passed for producers to come forward confessing, in a spirit of openness and honesty, to programmes they had made that had misled the public in some way.
The invitation for them so to do had been extended by both Jana Bennett, the BBC’s director of vision and an executive board member, and Jenny Abramsky, the BBC’s director of audio and music. They, and other BBC chiefs, were giving staff a chance to come clean after revelations that a trailer for a programme about the Queen had been less than truthful with viewers, and that the corporation had also been fined £50,000 for faking a Blue Peter competition.
Much to the apparent surprise of Bennett and Abramsky, two experienced and highly respected corporation bureaucrats, a procession of contrite and nervous producers came forward to ’fess up. The public, it seemed, had been deceived with unnerving consistency, particularly over programmes with phone-in polls and competitions. And on the corporation’s most noble flagship enterprises, too. Comic Relief and Children in Need, for example.
“We just sat there absolutely stunned,” one executive board member told me, “shocked beyond belief. Nobody had any idea that this was going on on such a scale.”
They are "shocked"? At what - that they were caught lying? Or that they have a 60 year record of some of the most anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-Semitic rants ever heard outside of al Jazeera?
That is not shocking, folks. What is shocking is that BBC continues to suck at the tit of the British taxpayer - and that British governments continue to fund this insane monster.
