BBC Complaints: The link you need!

Tuesday 11 August 2009

PLUS CA CHANGE, PLUS C'EST LA MEME CHOSE...

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...and on this morning's Today, as well as an Ed Stourton interview with Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone, which scored an I.C. of 0, we heard three more politician-centred interviews by Jim Naughtie.

First we had Labour MP Andrew Dismore, who scored an I.C. of 0, and finally came an interview with Labour minister Ivan Lewis, which also scored an I.C. of 0.

In between, Naughtie interviewed the Conservative shadow chancellor George Osborne. What was the I.C. this time? Was it also o? Of course not. It was 1.2. Lasting 8 minutes, the Osborne interview contained 10 interruptions, and (though not counting towards the overall I.C. - as they never do) there were no less than 9 abortive interruptions (those attempts to interrupt that either stop almost before they start or just fail to stop/divert the interviewee). It was a hostile interview.

6 comments:

  1. Abortive interruptions -

    Marr does this a lot when interviewing Labour guests but I would call them micro abortive interruptions!

    He often gets no further than the "b" in "but wouldn't the tories..." or the "ah" in "ah that's not what the prime minister..." etc

    Either those interruptions are immediately shut down via a harsh bark into his earpiece from the gallery upstairs or they are deliberately done to make it look like the BBC is equally "tough" during a Labour interview!

    Of course when the guest is Tory those abortive interruptions go a lot further than the first sylable and are clearly meant to distrupt the interviewee's flow.

    [is it me, my browser or this comments page, but I can neither cut/paste into this comment box, or use my arrow keys to move the cursor around?! Or copy out the text to spell check it!]

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  2. Llew, it's not you! I can't even copy and paste onto my own blog. I have to type out EVERYTHING. It's infuriating. There must be a way to do it. To copy out the text I have to 'Control and C' it!

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  3. Llew, I've finally worked out how to copy and paste on blogger! Good grief, if I'd have known that earlier I could have transferred my spreadsheet data onto this site in seconds rather than over many, many, many hours!!! I hope this also effects the comments field too. Please let me know if it doesn't.

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  4. Craig -
    So how do you paste into the comment box? because I can't. Its as if the box only accepts characters which are printable and not any other keystrokes (control key or arrow keys etc)

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  5. Llew - I'm not sure at all. To do it on the main bit of the blog I had to click on 'Edit Html' (a feature on the post page itself) - but that's not much help to you as I can't work out how you would get to 'Edit Html' (or its equivalent) on this page. I will work at it & find out!!

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  6. Llew, I've been through my options on the blog's 'Comments Settings' and changed one thing (that I don't really understand) but it's now allowing me to cut and paste onto comments, and to arrow around too. I hope this works for you too! Again, please let me know if it doesn't and I'll hunt for another answer. Fingers crossed!

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