Over at the Harmless Sky blog, the sharp-eyed, and quick-minded Tony N has spotted an alarming piece of journalistic interference with Obama’s inauguration speech.
It would seem that someone at the BBC had taken the trouble to splice the tape so that half a sentence from paragraph 16 of the inauguration speech was joined on to half a sentence from paragraph 22, and this apparently continuous sound bite was completed by returning to paragraph 16 again to lift another complete sentence.
This is journalism at its worst.
It’s pretty incredible – not just that they would do it at all, but that they would expect to get away with it.
I wonder just how much of it (the “news”, that is) is construed, manipulated or manufactured – fake spokesman from fake charities, fake facts from fake reports and fake research. Not just on climate change but every social and environmental issue.
Bit scary really.
In the light of the Queen doc controversy and problems over phone-ins ALL BBC staff were obliged to go on a special Safeguarding Trust course on pain of death.
Maybe Susan Watts was too important to go. It is obvious she is a campaigning type of hack given her recent attempt to revive the vCJD scare with one of those ‘could happen’ type stories.
Anyway, this is rather serious and I doubt we’ve heard the end of it.
Pretty amazing. I suspect the science department at the BBC were all primed to go with their contribution and opinion about the scientific bright sunlit uplands of the new Obama administration, and they may have expected a few useful soundbites in his speach to help kick off their contribution. However after listening to the speech myself, I was fairly surprised that he didn’t say more about the environment or even mention the ‘C’ word carbon. I suspect they found themselves actually in the position of having to justify their prepacked story. A bit like having an obituary for the Queen Mum made in the mid-80s and watching it going stale on the shelf. Whereas you couldn’t knock off the Queen Mum to get your story out, in this case the Beeb always had the option of knocking up something in the sound department to justify their little story. If you hadn’t seen the speech you probably would have thought he said it exactly as fabricated by the BBC – you can just detect a slight drop-out on a good sound setup in a quite room.
I think if if denying kids calling a cat ‘cookie’ can get some headlines, then I thnk this should be criticised in more harsh terms