The BBC covering up the truth - again.

[belial]

BBC has pressed delete on its Freedom of Information website

Why has the BBC deleted from its website nearly 150 responses to TV Licensing questions asked under the Freedom of Information Act?

At the end of 2008, after a Sunday Telegraph investigation into TV Licensing, they cut the responses displayed on their site from 164 down to 16. The deletions included the removal of an FOI request which helped the Sunday Telegraph corroborate evidence that TV Licensing had used fake statistics in millions of letters to members of the public.

When asked to explain the deletion, the BBC press office said: "We regularly remove older responses in order to keep the publication scheme relevant, up-to-date, and easy to navigate. The publication scheme was updated at the end of 2008, in accordance with Information Commissioner Office guidance, and a number of older requests covering a wide range of issues were removed."

That's a bit like a library saying that they threw most of the books out to make it easier to navigate. Or the BBC News website deleting all its back catalogue of articles, claiming it will help to make the site more up-to-date. To anyone with any common sense, it is clear that the usefulness of the BBC's FOI publication scheme is directly correlated to how many past responses are available.

The rest of the BBC's excuse no less of a smokescreen. I read the documentation from the Information Commissioner and it does not call for past requests to be removed.

I asked the BBC when they had previously deleted FOI responses, and was told that: "we update our publication scheme approximately twice a year". Prompted to clarify that this means they delete older items twice a year, a clearly irritated press officer said: "I've already made clear that this process involves taking down older release from the website."

There's just one problem with this claim: my printout from the BBC's website last November shows FOI requests going all the way back to 2005, when the Freedom of Information Act came fully into force.

All I can assume is that the deletion of hundreds of past FOI requests was a cynical attempt to prevent scrutiny of the BBC. But, although the BBC has made it more difficult for researchers and journalists to investigate TV Licensing, it's also quite encouraging. For those of us who oppose the intimidatory threats in TV Licensing's letters, and the unacceptable implication that TV Licensing has the legal right to enter homes, it's a good indication that the BBC knows it is losing the public debate.

Source:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/alex_singleton/blog/2009/02/03/bbc_has_pressed_delete_on_its_freedom_of_informati on_website

------------

The BBC are so full of shit it beggars belief.

[upsetbrit]

They weren't deleted... someone accidentally filed them in the wrong place. :p

When i hear the name BBC, the word "corrupt" comes to mind. Has done for a long time. I'm not surprised by their actions. I'm sure i'm not alone when i say that my messages in "have your say" have never been published, except in one case when i agreed with something the BBC were saying about wind farms.

Shame on them.

[the nine]

They weren't deleted... someone accidentally filed them in the wrong place. :p

When i hear the name BBC, the word "corrupt" comes to mind. Has done for a long time. I'm not surprised by their actions. I'm sure i'm not alone when i say that my messages in "have your say" have never been published, except in one case when i agreed with something the BBC were saying about wind farms.

Shame on them.

my friend always replys to his tv licence demand with a letter asking..
how the bbc knew the wtc7 building was going to fall down a full 23 mins before the building itself knew..answer this question honestly, remove the implications of corruption and i will pay my subscription/tv licence, other wise get t' fuck!!!

[danster82]

I had this idea the other day of replicating the BBC website and simply adding an uncensored comments section to the bottom of each article. It would piss them off something chronic especially where they state public opinions as fact and then looking in comments the public will be total against what they are saying it would create a contrast people could use to see how they lie and allow people to have their say on everything the BBC states as fact.

[christuffer]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/c...n-warming.html



BBC abandons 'impartiality' on warming
Again and again the BBC has been eager to promote every new scare raised by the advocates of man-made global warming, says Christopher Booker.


By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:50PM GMT 01 Feb 2009

Comments 74 | Comment on this article
Polar bear model floating in the Thames
The iconic beast of global warming, as seen in the Thames Photo: PA

Londoners might have been startled last Monday to see a giant mock-up of a polar bear on an iceberg, floating on the Thames outside the Palace of Westminster. They might not have been so surprised to learn, first, that this was a global warming propaganda stunt and, second, that the television company behind it is part-owned by the BBC.

It was ironic that, last week, while the BBC was refusing to show an appeal for aid to the victims of Israeli bombing in Gaza, on the grounds that this might breach its charter obligation to be impartial, a rather less publicised row was raging over Newsnight's doctoring of film of President Obama's inaugural speech, which was used to support yet another of its items promoting the warming scare. Clips from the speech were spliced together to convey a considerably stronger impression of what Obama had said on global warming than his very careful wording justified. While that may have been unprofessional enough, the rest of the item, by Newsnight's science editor, Susan Watts, was even more bizarre. It was no more than a paean of gratitude that we now at last have a president prepared to listen to the "science" on climate change, after the dark age of religious obscurantism personified by President Bush.

At last, after years when they could not speak openly on this subject, chirped Ms Watts, "scientists calculate that President Obama has just four years to save the world". She failed to explain (although she was later forced to clarify this on her blog) that the only scientist to say anything so silly was Dr James Hansen of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose utterances on climate change have lately become so wild and extreme that they have made him a laughing stock. (He was last week publicly disowned by his former supervisor Dr John Theon, who said that Hansen's unscientific claims had been an embarrassment to Nasa ever since he joined Al Gore in whipping up panic over global warming back in 1988.)

In all this, however, Newsnight only reflected the shameless way in which the BBC makes not the slightest attempt to provide impartial coverage of this issue. As its editorial guidelines make clear, "mainstream science" is now so overwhelmingly agreed on global warming that the BBC sees no reason to give balancing coverage to the views of a minority of "sceptics"; and examples are now legion of how it loses no opportunity to propagandise for the cause.

One of the madder instances was the 15 hours of airtime it gave in 2007 to the dreary Live Earth pop concert at Wembley, which was no more than a commercial for the views of Al Gore. Another was last year's lavish Climate Wars series, designed by the BBC's science team as an answer to Channel Four's The Great Global Warming Swindle. Nothing was more laughable than the sequence showing a huge poster of the infamous "hockey stick" temperature graph being driven round London on the back of a lorry, without any mention of the expert studies which have made the "hockey stick" one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history of science.

Again and again the BBC has been eager to promote every new scare raised by the advocates of man-made global warming. As late as August 28 this year it was still predicting that Arctic ice might soon disappear, just as this winter' s refreezing was about to take ice-cover back to a point it was at 30 years ago. Inevitably it fell for that "iconic" picture of two polar bears standing, seemingly forlorn, on a melting ice floe, despite the photographer's explanation that it had nothing to do with global warming and that she had only wanted to capture a dramatic snap of wind-sculpted ice.

The BBC couldn't wait to publicise the recent study claiming that Antarctica, far from getting colder over the past 50 years as all the evidence suggests, has in fact been warming. It didn't, of course, explain that the new study is based on a computer model run by the creator of the "hockey stick", which, in the absence of hard data, allows for inspired guesswork – what the study's authors call "sparse data infilling".

It was typical that, when that plastic polar bear was floated up the Thames last week, the BBC's favourite naturalist, Sir David Attenborough, should be wheeled on to claim that, although he once been a "sceptic" on global warming (a fact we had all somehow missed), he now found the "science" entirely convincing.

In terms of journalistic professionalism, the sad thing about all this is that the debate about global warming has now entered a fascinating new stage. Honest coverage of all the new information coming to light would be vastly more interesting to the BBC's audience than the vapid propaganda which is all they get.

But inevitably this also exposes the hollowness of all those claims that the BBC still has a duty to remain "impartial", which on this issue is belied by own guidelines. As a particularly glaring example of how the BBC has, on so many issues, abandoned any pretence of impartiality, this can only provide more ammunition to those who argue that it no longer deserves that compulsory licence fee.
__________________

[leviathanstaar]

Thats a great idea.

An exact mimick of all a websites links/comments and articles.

Picture and video archived privatley to avoid them whining about any copyrights. Some sort of foolproof timestamping software thet will prove beyong all doubt said material cannot be forged.

The entirety of targetted websites to be recorded down to the second.
Picture the number of things that may have been noticed just a minute after being published, ect, that have enever been seen.

But who's got the resources and the time for that?
Do we need a funded, transparent, epic scale, anti-MSM dissemination team?
That is virtually uninfiltratable due to the nature in which it would be designed?
Yes, we do.

I wish I was so right brained and poor, heh.
But many of you could do this sort of thing couldnt you? All the calculations and informations.

I hope you will.

[sixfour]

Danster - you might find this site interesting...

http://www.newssniffer.co.uk

A very good friend of mine built it years ago. It keeps track of deleted "have your say" comments on the bbc, guardian and somewhere else i think.

Check the "Watch your mouth" section for this.

It also keeps track of news article changes/revisions in a number of sections on the bbc website. This sometimes throws up quite a few questions as to why they took out or change news articles. Interesting and insightful stuff.

Check out the "Revisionista" section for this.

[danster82]

Thats a great idea.

An exact mimick of all a websites links/comments and articles.

Picture and video archived privatley to avoid them whining about any copyrights. Some sort of foolproof timestamping software thet will prove beyong all doubt said material cannot be forged.

The entirety of targetted websites to be recorded down to the second.
Picture the number of things that may have been noticed just a minute after being published, ect, that have enever been seen.

But who's got the resources and the time for that?
Do we need a funded, transparent, epic scale, anti-MSM dissemination team?
That is virtually uninfiltratable due to the nature in which it would be designed?
Yes, we do.

I wish I was so right brained and poor, heh.
But many of you could do this sort of thing couldnt you? All the calculations and informations.

I hope you will.

You could make it open to everyone and let trusted users update it and I wouldnt worry about copyright you can decentrialse it host it through proxys.

[sixfour]

danster - did you check out the link i posted.
It does exactly what you guys are talking about! Check it out.

[illuminatiman]

BBC has pressed delete on its Freedom of Information website

Why has the BBC deleted from its website nearly 150 responses to TV Licensing questions asked under the Freedom of Information Act?

At the end of 2008, after a Sunday Telegraph investigation into TV Licensing, they cut the responses displayed on their site from 164 down to 16. The deletions included the removal of an FOI request which helped the Sunday Telegraph corroborate evidence that TV Licensing had used fake statistics in millions of letters to members of the public.

When asked to explain the deletion, the BBC press office said: "We regularly remove older responses in order to keep the publication scheme relevant, up-to-date, and easy to navigate. The publication scheme was updated at the end of 2008, in accordance with Information Commissioner Office guidance, and a number of older requests covering a wide range of issues were removed."

That's a bit like a library saying that they threw most of the books out to make it easier to navigate. Or the BBC News website deleting all its back catalogue of articles, claiming it will help to make the site more up-to-date. To anyone with any common sense, it is clear that the usefulness of the BBC's FOI publication scheme is directly correlated to how many past responses are available.

The rest of the BBC's excuse no less of a smokescreen. I read the documentation from the Information Commissioner and it does not call for past requests to be removed.

I asked the BBC when they had previously deleted FOI responses, and was told that: "we update our publication scheme approximately twice a year". Prompted to clarify that this means they delete older items twice a year, a clearly irritated press officer said: "I've already made clear that this process involves taking down older release from the website."

There's just one problem with this claim: my printout from the BBC's website last November shows FOI requests going all the way back to 2005, when the Freedom of Information Act came fully into force.

All I can assume is that the deletion of hundreds of past FOI requests was a cynical attempt to prevent scrutiny of the BBC. But, although the BBC has made it more difficult for researchers and journalists to investigate TV Licensing, it's also quite encouraging. For those of us who oppose the intimidatory threats in TV Licensing's letters, and the unacceptable implication that TV Licensing has the legal right to enter homes, it's a good indication that the BBC knows it is losing the public debate.

Source:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/alex_singleton/blog/2009/02/03/bbc_has_pressed_delete_on_its_freedom_of_informati on_website

------------

The BBC are so full of shit it beggars belief.

Nothing surprises me as far as the BBC are concerned! I doubt any question of relevance will be asked on Sheepletime tonight either. BBC- British Brainwashing Corperation!!! thats it corperation!!!