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The BBC's Own Goal
We'd just like to point EURSOC readers in the direction of the Biased BBC blog, which has caught the Beeb red-handed once again.
For those who missed the story, the BBC announced with some fanfare that it had discovered that the CIA had been editing stories on Wikipedia. The horror! A sinister, agenda-driven government organisation tinkering with an interactive encyclopedia which for many people (at least, those who use Google) has become the number one source for information on the internet.
But then a Biased BBC contributor checked the files and discovered that people within the BBC had been up to the same trick - indeed, 7,000 entries to Wikipedia had been altered by contributors within the BBC's network. One, as Damien Thompson notes, had painstakingly changed references to Palestinian "terrorists" to "freedom fighters."
The BBC's response has been a case of ,"err, ooops." No major apology or backtracking, rather a comment from the online editor on the lack of sense in using a BBC desk to tamper with Wikipedia.
Interesting, Damien Thompson notes another Wiki page close to the BBC's heart which was edited...
"Another edit traced to a BBC computer removed references to BBC bias from a Wikipedia entry...
"Missing from the new version is a reference to the BBC being “out of touch with large swathes of the public and … guilty of self-censoring subjects that the corporation finds unpalatable”. That’s one newspaper's take on the Bridcut report, commissioned by the BBC."
(What with all the fuss about the Beeb and the CIA, one of the BBC's original findings has been somewhat ignored. It reported that a source at the Vatican, no less, had removed a section of IRA-Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams' biography on Wikipedia. The section in question relates to newspaper reports that Adams' prints were found on a car used in a 1971 double murder. Someone in the Vatican must have taken offence and wiped the entire section.)
The BBC's Wiki cock-up comes just after another embarrassing scandal, this time related to Conservative MP and former Welsh Secretary John Redwood. Redwood recently announced plans to cut bureaucracy bills in the UK. While covering the story, the BBC's news bulletin aired footage from more than a decade ago of Redwood mumbling along as the Welsh national anthem was sung. Conservatives complained that the footage played no role in the story and was simply unearthed to make Redwood look thick: The BBC's news editor later admitted that using the old footage was wrong.
Biased BBC cleverly draws comparisons of the Redwood footage with an ancient interview with former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who lost his rag with a reporter in 1989. The BBC didn't release the interview until 2000 - and then only with permission from Kinnock.
UPDATE: The EU Referendum Blog points to a Little Green Footballs investigation which shows a United Nations IP address was used to edit the Wikipedia entry on the late Oriana Fallaci. The UN's insider added to her Wiki entry the words "racist whore." Nice.
