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Old Jan 18, 2008, 4:30 pm
  #614  
bealine
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Posts: 3,775
arguably the best news service in the world, the BBC as part of "Britain's Lying, Cheating, Conniving Gutter Press".
I suggest, A J London, if you think the BBC is really the best news service in the world, you trot along to Buckingham Palace and ask Her Majesty the Queen about her recent little incident at their hands!

The BBC News rivals comic newspapers like the "Sun" and the "Daily Sport" at the moment for inaccuracy and deliberate misrepresentation!

Ask the Government - the conduct of BBC News has recently been debated at length in the House of Commons, particularly following the "Queen storming off in a huff, incident!" A couple of hundred years ago, there would have been a few BBC employees hung, drawn and quartered for that act of treason!


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Taken from Daily Telegraph
Peter Fincham, the controller of BBC One, was facing a battle to save his job yesterday after the corporation’s Director-General described the edited footage of the Queen shown to the media as “incorrect and misleading”.

Mark Thompson said that he planned to introduce a series of measures to tighten standards after the error, which Mr Fincham was forced to admit having known about on Wednesday evening, although he did not apologise until Thursday.

Mr Fincham’s fate will most likely be decided by a meeting on Wednesday of the corporation’s regulator, the BBC Trust, for which Mr Thompson has been asked to provide a full report as to how pictures of the Queen walking into a photo shoot came to be presented as footage of her storming out.

In an e-mail to all staff, sent at 3pm, Mr Thompson said that recent problems including “the incorrect and misleading edit of Her Majesty the Queen in the BBC One seasonal launch tape” defied “our values and threaten the precious relationship of trust between the BBC and our audiences”.
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Yesterday, before the stern warning from Mr Thompson, Mr Fincham went on a tour of radio and television studios. He conceded on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that he knew that the clip of the Queen was misleading late on Wednesday, a few hours after it had been shown to journalists as part of a promotion for the BBC’s autumn season.

Officials from the Palace called the BBC press office at about 7pm that day, unhappy with the emerging press coverage. Mr Fincham was alerted. He contacted the programme’s makers RDF Media and established that the clip he aired had been edited out of sequence, and was therefore misleading.

However, an apology was issued just before midday on Thursday, by which time newspapers had widely reported the story.

The BBC has already become concerned at declining standards, as mounting competition and a growing tendency to rely on external producers have put pressure on quality. Yesterday, the corporation said that it would introduce a special training initiative, entitled Trust With Our Audience, aimed at both in-house and external production staff in an effort to reassert editorial values.

Michael Grade, the former BBC Chairman who now runs ITV, said that the breakdown in standards in television was endemic. “Kids today [in production teams] don’t understand that you don’t cheat viewers,” he said, but added that corners were often cut because of “huge commercial pressures” and “there is no job security in this industry any more”.

According to the BBC’s account, it obtained the footage of the forthcoming five-part series, A Year with the Queen, from RDF Media, but did not check the clips. Mr Fincham, in a presentation to journalists, said that viewers would see “the Queen walking out in a huff”.

It has also emerged that the photographer Annie Leibovitz contradicted the version put out by the BBC originally when she described the photocall in a magazine interview several weeks ago.

She said of the Queen in the June issue of Vanity Fair: “She entered the room at a surprisingly fast pace — as fast as the regalia would allow her — and muttered, ‘Why am I wearing these heavy robes in the middle of the day?’. She doesn’t really want to get dressed up anymore. She just couldn’t be bothered and I admire her for that.”

Mr Fincham, a multimillionaire from the sale of his television production company, Talkback, for £62 million, said that resigning would be “disproportionate”, but he did say that he would if the Director-General asked him to do so.

Nobody was yesterday willing to own up to making the controversial clip, although the programme itself was co-produced by Stephen Lambert, a respected producer. He worked with Andy Goodsir, who runs his own small production company HTI. The programme has already been sold to ABC in the US and around the world.

This week the BBC was fined £50,000 after production staff faked the winner of a Blue Peter phone-in by choosing the winner from the studio audience after the phone lines failed.

Last edited by bealine; Jan 18, 2008 at 4:37 pm
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