Going back to what Natalie was saying about 'scare-quotes'...

Drudge was right, the BBC (typically) wrong- and suggestive. You see, what is called into question by the finding of these records? Obviously it is the original statement that they were destroyed- that statement now looks a bit fishy, and we are free to speculate. What is not open to doubt is that they have, after whatever fashon, been found.

I wrote to the BBC earlier on and said I had one word in response to their choice to showcase this story (and I spared them the detail but I suppose I really meant 'in that manner'):Berger. The story of Sandy Berger, pants-stuffing or sock-stuffing, whichever or both, the evidence of his failings, was of course nowhere to be seen by this time, but I have to say I am more suspicious of the BBC's choice to highlight this Bush story in the light of the Berger controversy than I am entertaining of the idea that Bush (or Rove) incubated these documents until the media was ripe to hatch them (they are not consequential anyway- so what's the point? Do tell if you know). Thus, for me, is the BBC politicised and untrustworthy.

'The supposed discovery of these records on Friday afternoon, as reporters converge on Boston to cover the Democratic National Convention, is highly questionable...'

Reactions to 9/11 report

The unanimous final report of the Sept. 11 commission will sharply criticize Congress for failing in its role as overall watchdog over the nation's intelligence agencies and will call for wholesale changes in the way lawmakers oversee intelligence agencies and the Homeland Security Department, lawmakers and others briefed on the panel's findings said Wednesday. (New York Times)

UPDATE:

Laban Tall got a shock as he caught the Beeb's "PM" programme being fair.

"But not everyone finds the new bigger European Parliament refreshing. UKIP now has eleven MEPs and already they're stirring controversy. This their man on the women's committee"

This was voiced over a clip of Robert Kilroy-Silk swallowing a sip of water, then we cut to 'Godfrey Bloom MEP UKIP':

"No self-respecting small-businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age. That isn't politically correct, is it? But it's a fact of life, I know, because I run a business"

Sackur then wraps up the report with the banal:

"That isn't going to go down well here. The temperature inside this parliament could rise quickly."

And that was it - back to Anna Ford. Bloom didn't look like he was being formally interviewed - he looked more like he was inadvisedly ad-libbing at large with an apparently friendly journo, as if waiting for something else, while the camera just happened to be rolling. Whatever, even if he was aware he was being filmed for broadcast, no other information or context was given for the point he was trying to make, right or wrong in this case, that excessive regulation can have unintended consequences.

Independence and Democracy is a new parliamentary group of hardline Eurosceptics
• It rejects the EU constitution and the "centralisation of Europe"
• It says it opposes xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and discrimination

Incidentally, I am 99% sure that when I first saw this story there was no mention of the actual point Godfrey Bloom was making - that legislation designed to give women maternity rights functions as a disincentive to employ women of childbearing age. I distinctly don't remember, if you see what I mean, this sentence:

"They probably in quite good faith put in a piece of legislation which is designed to protect women in the workplace but what actually happens is it... writes them out of employment."

Now this probably isn't culpable stealth editing.* More probably it is a useful stealth editing: the addition to the story being made after Bloom explained his remarks on today's Today, and in the light of what he said. However the question remains as to why the BBC couldn't find space to say that was what he meant in the first place. The original story, my memory insists, simply presented him as a comical dinosaur - and the Ceefax page 117 still does.

*Incidentally, as I say every few months and will add to a FAQ page if ever we make one, even stealth editing is better than no editing at all. Mistakes should be corrected. However there is no need for all the stealth; many newspapers manage a corrections page and the BBC could too. And/or the BBC could actually use the "last updated" field at the top of each story.  

This isn't just the possibly criminal action of one man, it is the conduct of the senior White House foreign policy official from the Clinton era, and the action of a confidant and advisor to John Kerry. Had Rice been the one caught tampering with the records of the Bush Administration relating to terrorism, Rice would already have been forced by a baying press to resign, and Bush would be threatened with a Watergate-style meltdown. But it is a pro-Kerry media, so watch for Berger's attempted cover-up to get its own cover-up.

Mr Berger served as President Clinton's national security adviser from 1997 to 2001 and is currently advising Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

UPDATE: He has resigned from the Kerry Campaign.

Manila's Catch 22 The Philippine choice between saving a life and angering the US

Philippine President Gloria Arroyo was faced with an awkward choice - to save the life of a Filipino held hostage in Iraq or support the United States by keeping Philippine soldiers there. It was a tough decision for Mrs Arroyo, just weeks after she won a new term in office. By withdrawing all 51 peacekeepers, she scored political points at home. Now she must wait to see the extent of the fallout with Washington.

USS Neverdock has given this one a thorough look. (Thanks to B-BBC commenter, Dave.)

Margaret Thatcher, again a woman unafraid of speaking her mind, was reported to have told Jane Byrne, mayor in 1960s Chicago, that "the Irish, they're pigs", before remembering her host's family background and adding: "oh-oh, you're Irish".

I made a note and decided to do some fact-checking later. Now, after a chunk of fruitless Googling (save for this quiz page), I went back to the original BBC page to check it again. This time the offending paragraph read:

Princess Margaret, again a woman unafraid of speaking her mind, was reported to have told Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne in 1979, that, "the Irish, they're pigs", before remembering her host's family background and adding: "oh-oh, you're Irish".

I knew the article definitely referred to Margaret Thatcher when I first read it. I checked the timestamp. Unbelievably, after such a major correction, it still read Thursday, 15JUL04, 15:03BST.

While the world went to sleep, shocked at this BBC revelation about Baroness Thatcher, the BBC's gang of sleazy, dishonest, stealth editors crept in, Watergate style, switched the names around, and crept back out again, remembering to leave the timestamp well alone, covering up the evidence of their nasty slander.

You can verify this for yourself via Google's cache (until it is updated with the doctored version), and compare it to the version now on BBC News Online (I've saved copies of both of these, just in case).

Utter bastards. They are so unprofessional - if a newspaper or a broadcast programme made such an egregious slur they'd print a correction or broadcast an apology. But not in the unprofessional Toytown world of BBC News Online - nope, they just slip right in and change it, hope no one noticed and pretend it never happened. No harm done, eh, just one of Britain's leading elder statesmen slandered, move along now please.

This sort of awful behaviour is just not good enough. If the BBC wish to clean up News Online's act and encourage responsibility, professionalism and accountability, they must modify their content management system so that each News Online page has attached to it (perhaps as a link) a log of i) who it was created by and when; ii) who has amended it and when. This list should include initials or an identifier specific to each author/amender. It needn't have a description of every amendment, but major amendments, such as new paragraphs, fact corrections and so on should be recorded. The log should be recorded automatically free from tampering by authors/amenders. And in the case of major errors, such as the vicious slander documented here, News Online ought to publish an apology - and apologies ought to remain in the News Online archive, in exactly the same way they would in a newspaper archive.

So, BBC lurkers, you know what to do - publish an apology to Baroness Thatcher, and then get to it implementing the above changes to your CMS to make your people transparently accountable to us poor damn telly-taxpayers.

Update: After a bit more fact-checking (it's not that difficult you News Online cub-journos - you should try it sometime) I found an acidic obituary of Princess Margaret, on, er, News Online, including this:

In 1979, the year Lord Mountbatten was assassinated by the IRA, Princess Margaret caused a stir when the Mayor of Chicago alleged that she had described the Irish as "pigs"

This at least places the Princess' alleged gaffe in context - in the same year that a senior member of her family was murdered by the IRA. There's a somewhat partisan account of the murder at An Phoblacht/Republican News. Just in passing, where else do we see terrorist murders described as 'executions'? Sickening. Still, at least we aren't compelled by law to buy An Phoblacht. For the record, Mountbatten was a 78-year old murdered along with two relatives and a 14-year old local lad while daytripping on his small boat on holiday in Ireland. Eighteen soldiers were also murdered that day in a vicious roadside double-bomb ambush at Warrenpoint. Some terrorist tactics never change it seems (and yet the US has never, not even once, extradited IRA terrorists to face justice, but I digress).

Even then though, the BBC's quote is still not well founded - according to this obituary of Irv Kupcinet, the journalist who claimed to overhear the alleged remark:

...it was in a 1979 column that he quoted Princess Margaret of Britain as saying that "the Irish are pigs." Mr. Kupcinet said he personally heard the princess say that to Chicago's Mayor Jane M. Byrne at a dinner party. Mayor Byrne, ever the diplomat, explained that the princess was not referring to all the Irish, only those who engaged in terrorism.

It seems, therefore, that there are grounds for demanding another BBC News Online apology, this time for Princess Margaret, or at the very least the addition of a bit of context and a little more doubt into the BBC's allegation against her.

It is not surprising that Paul Reynolds, in his 'analysis',  fails to mention the discredited Wilson/Plame story, so gladly trumpeted by the BBC.

Uranium: Here the report stands by the SIS report that Iraq had indeed sought uranium from Niger. It adds in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well. It even says that the inclusion of the statement in President Bush's State of the Union address was "well founded," a finding which is at variance with that of the CIA.

Bush Questioned Over CIA Leak

US Diplomat Raises Iraq Dossier Doubts

Profile: Joseph Wilson

Since you are unlikely to hear of this from the Beeb, here, in part, is Robert Novak's op/ed:

Like Sherlock Holmes's dog that did not bark, the most remarkable aspect of last week's Senate Intelligence Committee report is what its Democratic members did not say. They did not dissent from the committee's findings that Iraq apparently asked about buying yellowcake uranium from Niger. They neither agreed to a conclusion that former diplomat Joseph Wilson was suggested for a mission to Niger by his CIA employee wife nor defended his statements to the contrary.

Wilson's activities constituted the only aspects of the yearlong investigation for which the committee's Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, was unable to win unanimous agreement. Peculiarly, the Democrats accepted the evidence building up to the Wilson conclusions but not the conclusions themselves. According to committee sources, Roberts felt Wilson had been such a "cause celebre" for Democrats that they could not face the facts about him.

For a year, Democrats have been belaboring President Bush about 16 words in his 2003 State of the Union address in which he reported Saddam Hussein's attempt to buy uranium from Africa, based on official British information. Wilson has been lionized in liberal circles for allegedly contradicting this information on a CIA mission and then being punished as a truth-teller. Now, for Intelligence Committee Democrats, it is as though the Niger question and Joe Wilson have vanished from the earth....[emphasis added]

"While there was no dispute with the underlying facts," Chairman Roberts wrote separately, "my Democrat colleagues refused to allow" two conclusions in the report. The first conclusion merely said that Wilson was sent to Niger at his wife's suggestion. The second conclusion is devastating:

"Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided."

The normally mild Pat Roberts is harsh in his condemnation: "Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa . . . [N]ot only did he NOT 'debunk' the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true." Roberts called it "important" for the Intelligence Committee to declare much of what Wilson said "had no basis in fact." In response, Democrats were silent. [emphasis added]

UPDATE: Joseph Wilson continues to spin like a top but the major news outlets tend to either bury it (as with the New York Times and Washington Post) or ignore it altogether (as with the BBC). Michael Barone, political reporter for US News and World Report points out how reckless an approach this is.

All this is significant because for the past year most leading Democrats and many in the determinedly anti-Bush media have been harping on the "BUSH LIED" theme. Their aim clearly has been to discredit and defeat Bush. The media continue to fight this battle: contrast the way The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times front-paged the Wilson charges last year with the way they're downplaying the proof that Wilson lied deep inside the paper this year.

Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued that George W. Bush has transformed American foreign policy, in response to the threat of Islamist terrorism, more than any president since Harry Truman transformed our foreign policy in response to the threat of aggressive communism.

But there is one big difference. In the late 1940s, Truman got bipartisan support from Republicans like Arthur Vandenberg and Thomas Dewey, even at a time when there were bitter differences between the parties on domestic policy, and received generally sympathetic treatment in the press. This time, George W. Bush has encountered determined opposition from most Democrats and the old-line media. They have charged that "BUSH LIED" even when he relied on the same intelligence as they did; they have headlined wild and spurious charges by the likes of Joseph Wilson; they have embraced the wild-eyed propaganda of the likes of Michael Moore.

They have done these things with, at best, reckless disregard of the effect their arguments have had on American strength in the world. Are they entitled to be taken seriously?

Five Live's Ian Shoesmith was interviewed on BBC1's lightweight Breakfast programme. The story was also on BBC News Online, BBC One O'Clock News, and as a lead item on the BBC London news at lunchtime, 6.30pm and 10.30pm.

Watching and reading the various takes, it boils down to:

1) six fictitious candidates, three male, three female, two with traditional British names (Jenny Hughes and John Andrews), two with African names (Abu Olasemi and Yinka Olatunde) and two with Asian names (Fatima Khan and Nasser Hanif).

2) applications from each of the six in response to adverts for a job at each of fifty companies ("Many... well known... jobs covered a range of fields"), thirty-one of them based in London.

3) the CVs were of "the same standard of qualifications and experience but... were presented differently".

4) of all the applications (100 for each pair of names), the traditional British named pair were offered 23 interviews, the African named pair 13 interviews and the Asian named pair 9 interviews.

5) Shoesmith followed up with five of the fifty employers, three of whom responded in an unspecified way, one of whom "disputed the findings", claiming to have offered interviews to "one or two" of the non-traditional British named candidates, but this was disregarded because "we had to go on what we received".

Example conclusions drawn from the above are:

- Shoesmith was "'surprised by the sheer extent' of religious and racial discrimination it uncovered";

- Brendan Barber of the TUC said "Statistics as shocking as these suggest that many people recruiting for the private sector firms are harbouring inherently racist views. Public sector bodies have to prove they are doing all they can to eliminate race discrimination";

- Professor Muhammad Anwar of Warwick University said "the survey was proof of a recent rise in anti-Muslim feeling".

From the information provided (the above summary really is all of the detail that can be discerned), there are a number of flaws with, and omissions from, the survey, the accompanying news reports and the rentaquote conclusions drawn from it, including:

- the survey sample was very small - just fifty jobs, with six applications for each, meaning that small errors (e.g. missing post) one way or the other have a large effect on the apparent outcome;

- the success rate of all the applications is poor - it would be much more significant if, say, one pair had a 60-70% hit rate in contrast to the other groups - it doesn't say much for the standard of the fictional applications in general;

- the CVs were of "the same standard of qualifications and experience but... were presented differently" - no examples are provided. When sifting job applications presentation is often the first consideration - poorly written, poorly spelled and poorly laid out CVs can be quickly rejected, so unless the survey applications were genuinely alike in every respect, it is likely this will have affected the outcome;

- beyond the details above, nothing is said about the nature of the jobs, the types of companies, their sizes or locations;

- we don't know the backgrounds of the people processing the applications or the methods used to decide between one application or another. Maybe they read them. Maybe they cut the pile in two. Maybe they picked the first twenty for interview. Who knows? Certainly not the BBC with their lack of rigorous follow-ups (and why limit follow ups to just five employers anyway?);

- the BBC ascribes attributes to the three pairs of names - White, Black-African and Muslim. Leaving aside that there are many Black and Asian Britons with traditional British names, I cannot, in spite of being well read and living in Greater London, distinguish people's religious backgrounds from their names, except in a few obvious cases (e.g. a Mohammed is almost certainly a Muslim, a Patrick O'Flaherty is most likely Catholic etc.), so it seems a big stretch to conclude that these employers rejected someone on the grounds of religion (e.g. Muslim) rather than simply ethnicity (e.g. Asian), if indeed racism played a part;

This is all very troubling. Racism does exist in the UK, in (but not throughout) all groups and communities, white, black, Asian, etc. But this 'survey' (some reports even called it an 'undercover investigation') does not merit the conclusions drawn from it. At best it suggests there is a case for a proper study of such issues, perhaps a Panorama style investigation. But not the shock, horror headlines that have been used so glibly already.

A proper investigation should include:

- a much larger sample with a wider variety of candidate names (i.e. names with obvious religious connections, names from different parts of the UK, continental names, names from different classes (e.g. how does Wayne Smith fare compared with Tarquin Fortescue for different types of jobs), etc.;

- proper follow-ups with all employers to ascertain their backgrounds, selection methods and reasoning;

- distinction between employers - to ascertain the extent of racism among white/black/Asian/Muslim/etc. employers when it comes to employing people apparently from other groups - racism isn't limited to white people;

- analysis of the differences between the private-sector and the public-sector (given that the former are often very small businesses, the latter much larger more bureaucratic organisations, where stats would be more meaningful);

Until then it's wrong for a small item on a small radio station to become the inspiration for a great deal of "employers are racist" headlines across a wide variety of major BBC broadcasts.

Addendum (for B-BBC scare-quote aficionados):

The first News Online version, timestamped 11.22BST, began:

A BBC survey showing applicants from ethnic minorities still face widespread discrimination in the job market has prompted calls for tougher regulation.

CVs from six fictitious candidates - who were given "white", black African or Muslim names - were sent to 50 employers in the BBC Radio Five Live survey.

White candidates were much more likely to be given an interview than similarly qualified black or Asian people.

A union boss is calling for tougher regulation after a BBC survey showed ethnic minority applicants still face major discrimination in the jobs market

CVs from six fictitious candidates - who were given traditionally white, black African or Muslim names - were sent to 50 firms by Radio Five Live.

White "candidates" were far more likely to be given an interview than similarly qualified black or Asian "names".

Note the aimless scare-quote merry-go-round and how the level of journo-spin ratchets up from cub-journo to junior-journo as the day progressed!

No fear! The story, appropriately enough in the Entertainment section of News Online, reveals that:

"BBC coverage of the Iraq war did not treat military sources with enough scepticism, the corporation's annual report has said." and "there was "much to be proud of" in the BBC's coverage of the war. It included a good range of Arab and Muslim opinion, the governors said, while "outstanding analysis" came from Newsnight and The World at One. BBC news reporting in general was praised."

Turning to the News section of the annual report reveals this gem:

The main international story of the year was the war in Iraq and its aftermath. The conspicuous lack of national consensus here meant that, once again, the BBC’s impartiality came under intense scrutiny. BBC News passed the test. An ICM poll in April 2003 indicated that it had sustained its position as the best and most trusted provider of news.

Could this be the same organisation that was described in The Guardian (Jason Deans, 26MAR03) thus:

The BBC's coverage of the war has come under fire from one of its own correspondents in the Gulf who has fired off a furious memo claiming the corporation is misleading viewers about the conflict in Iraq.

Paul Adams, the BBC's defence correspondent who is based at the coalition command centre in Qatar, complained that the corporation was conveying a untruthful picture of how the war was progressing.

Adams accused the BBC's coverage of exaggerating the military impact of casualties suffered by UK forces and downplaying their achievements on the battlefield during the first few days of the conflict.

"I was gobsmacked to hear, in a set of headlines today, that the coalition was suffering 'significant casualties'. This is simply not true," Adams said in the memo.

"Nor is it true to say - as the same intro stated - that coalition forces are fighting 'guerrillas'. It may be guerrilla warfare, but they are not guerrillas," he stormed.

"Who dreamed up the line that the coalition are achieving 'small victories at a very high price?' The truth is exactly the opposite. The gains are huge and costs still relatively low. This is real warfare, however one-sided, and losses are to be expected," Adams continued.

For this affair has left the BBC dangerously exposed. It has served as a catalyst, allowing diverse complaints about its news coverage to resurface simultaneously. The Beeb has been accused of, among other matters, fanatical suspicion of the motives of those in power and unrelenting hostility towards the Conservative Party. It has been attacked for a wholesale scepticism about capitalism, combined with a weakness for quack environmentalism and health-scare speculation over hard science.

Reporting the Middle East, it sometimes seems so remorselessly anti-Israeli that Mr Dyke might as well be open about it and allow his reporters to appear speaking Arabic, riding a camel, stopping occasionally to suck from a long pipe in a crowded souk.

Put bluntly, the BBC, a public sector bureaucracy funded by a poll tax, with a privileged status that looks starkly anomalous in an age of hundreds of television channels and thousands of radio stations, needs more friends. It is already detested by other broadcasters, derided by the print press for squandering its vast resources and damned by publishing houses for its increasingly aggressive marketing activities in their domain.

Could be. And what can we conclude from these contradictions?

Little has changed, other than the names on the doors of the DG and the Chairman of the Governors. Smug old Auntie's grand party continues - at least until we benefactors realise that Auntie's not the slim, sober, reliable soul she once was. It's time to find her a nice home to while away her dotage, on a much reduced allowance, of course.

The first version of the story, online for five and a half hours, was simply about a moronic tirade by a moronic councillor, thrown out of a Scottish pub for being obnoxious to English patrons during the recent England/Portugal football match.

On reading it, I wondered why such a moron was being given coverage on the BBC. What was the point of the story? It was simply "Obnoxious man behaves obnoxiously. Ends". Embarrassing for those of us who hail from Scotland, but hardly a major news item, either in Scotland or across the UK.

Indeed, were he, say, a visiting Islamic cleric with a penchant for supporting suicide terrorism, wife-beating, gay-bashing and the murder of apostates, I expect his views would have been downplayed a bit - "Mr. Leggatt, a respected peace-loving community leader, expressed his enthusiasm for football as the English team struggled against the better armed Portuguese team, with their, according to an insider, superior American-backed* ability to kick the ball straight". (* their coach is Brazilian after all!).

Then last night, the story was heavily amended, doubling in length to its current size. The original story ended at the "Their fans are a disgrace... Motson should be put up against the wall and shot" paragraph, followed by the paragraph about the Battle of Culloden, that now sits rather oddly further down among the newly added paragraphs.

The new paragraphs are all the stuff that should have been in the original story for it to even have qualified as a potential story - Fife Council's reaction, codes of conduct, Commission for Racial Equality (Scotland) etc.

For good measure, although the URL shows the story is part of the BBC's Scottish coverage, for a chunk of yesterday morning, it was listed in the England section of the UK home page, before later being moved to the Scotland section.

I wonder why the original non-story was published? What prompted it to be modified so heavily? (i.e. was the original story half-finished, or did the CRE get in on the act later?). Is any of it news (beyond the weekly free-sheet variety) anyway? How did it come to be listed under England rather than Scotland for a time yesterday?

P.S. Lest we forget that we're really all Brits together, I suppose it could have been much worse!

Compare the BBC story to this New York Times account of July 9th. Many things are similar, but the point that the destruction accidentally occured in 1996 or 1997 comes in only the second paragraph. The NYT also stresses that the destruction occurred as part of a general conservation project which went wrong much more strongly than does the BBC.

Also note the up-front way the NYT has dealt with the correction to the story, issued on the 10th. There is a line at the top saying "correction appended" and it is duly appended at the bottom. The BBC could and should copy this technique.

Perhaps it could also copy the specific correction and state that the White House admitted the loss of the records not in the last few days, as you might think from the BBC story, but in February.

(New York Times links via Jim Miller who is less impressed with the NYT than I am.

Answer the following questions. Use one side of the paper only.
(1) What is the general idea that this quiz is intended to convey?
(2) What other questions can you suggest that might convey different ideas?
(3) (For advanced candidates only) Write not more than 100 words on the background to any ONE question demonstrating how another very similar example might have been chosen giving quite the opposite result.
(4) Why is the BBC providing lesson plans anyway? Discuss.
(5) Remind me, who pays for all this?