Britannia Radio

 

That BBC/Guardian thing again

>> WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2010

Earlier this year we learned that the BBC was helping the Guardian produce its front-page scoops. An interesting series of tweets from yesterday shows that the licence payer is also subsidising technological advice to our national broadcaster's favourite newspaper.

Here's the head of all things digital and interactive at BBC Radio 5 Live, Brett Spencer:

A good morning spent hammering out our big interactive general election offering. Off now to do a bit of show and tell at the Guardian

The natural first port of call following a morning's discussion of election coverage.

The Guardian's Matt Hall was grateful for the BBC employee's time:

Great presentation from @brettsr on #fivelive visualisation . He even came over to Guardian Towers to do it!

The editor of the Radio 4 blog Steve Bowbrick was there too:

Just grabbed a coffee with @bowbrick in the Guardian canteen. Talking blogs, governors, twitter & the like.

The Guardian's head of audio Matthew Wells:

Great presentation about BBC 5 Live interactivity from @brettsr - Gdn can only afford a fraction of what they do, but will take inspiration.

A question from "medluv":

@MatthewWells Did Guardian pay BBC industry rates for R5L presentation today?

The reply from Wells:

@medluv @brettsr no we didn't pay. Equally my colleagues and I do similar talks at other organisations. It's called collaboration

Are these licence fee funded presentations available to all newspapers, or just the BBC's ideological soul mates?

Justice From Justin

I know this isn’t saying much, but Justin Webb on Today is a great improvement on Ed Stourton whom he replaced much to some people’s dismay. I thought he gave Gita Sahgal a fair hearing this morning, and it’s certainly encouraging that for once the BBC allowed someone to dislodge the halo surrounding Amnesty International.

If you haven’t been following the story, Ms Sahgal, a senior official at AI, became uneasy about Amnesty’s association with Moazzam Begg who heads the organization Cageprisoners that “ actively promotes Islamic Right ideas and individuals.”
So she wrote about her concerns to the Times.
“Within a few hours of the article being published Amnesty had suspended me from my job.”
The Today interview gave her the opportunity to express her point without the usual innuendos and interruptions. In My Humble Opinion. *And not a word from Widney Brown.
* H/T Hippiepooter

More Palin Bashing

When Barack Obama was mocked recently for addressing a sixth grade class, and later a committee meeting, with teleprompters present, did the BBC report it? No.
When he was mocked recently for repeatedly mispronouncing "Navy corpsman" as "Navy corpse-man" at the National Prayer Breakfast, did the BBC report it? No.
When he was mocked recently for saying, "The Middle East is a problem that has plagued the region for centuries", a line right up there with any Bushism, did the BBC report it? No.

But Sarah Palin jots a few words on her hand and already the BBC has responded with two news articles (neither of which finds space to mention Palin's amusing "Hi Mom" response to the media frenzy). No doubt broadcast versions of BBC news have also covered the story with equal glee.

Unfortunately for all the rabid Palin-haters at the BBC and elsewhere, the repeated attacks on her don't appear to be doing her any harm within the increasingly influential Tea Party movement. I like the House of Dumbdescription of Palin as Roadrunner and her detractors as Wile E Coyote:

Every single time they think they've totally nailed her, they somehow end up under the boulder while Sarah disappears in the distance.

IT STINKS...

The latest climate scare story from the BBC is this gem. Plants are going to be on permanent high alert and a lot smellier. Why this is a problem is not quite clear, but hey, this is climate change work, there's lots of money in pursuing this line of research, so the authors clearly believe it's something we should worry about - and the BBC think its worth covering. Who's the reporter? Matt Walker, who is also editor of BBC Earth News, based at the Natural History Unit in Bristol, increasingly a source of climate alarmism. Oh, and Matt is also a former reporter for New Scientist, and still a contributor. He was writing scare stories like this, even before the BBC caught climate fanaticism. And that will be the New Scientist that is so fervently pro-warmist that it publishes stories with titles such as "50 Reasons Why Warming isn't Natural".