BBC Complaints: The link you need!

Tuesday 15 December 2009

SIBERIAN SNOW FALLS ON ANDREW LILICO

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Where James Naughtie and Justin Webb went yesterday, Sarah Montague went today. http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8413000/8413170.stm
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Go to the Today programme website (see above) and you'll see this:


7.48 The government has praised its own policies for better than expected
unemployment figures, and has said that future unemployment would have been
even higher without government action. Professor of human geography at
the University of Sheffield, Daniel Dorling, discusses the
government's claims


You can click on the 'listen' icon and hear all that the left-wing professor (and frequent Today programme guest) has to say, as he praises Labour and condemns the Conservatives, advocates public spending and deprecates cuts.
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Look further down the page and you see this:

0847 Professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield, Daniel
Dorling, said on the programme that cutting public spending and public sector
jobs was not an inevitable or efficient way of reducing the deficit. Andrew
Lilico
, who sits on the shadow Monetary Policy Committee run by the Institute of
Economic Affairs, reacts to Professor Dorling's comments.

Inexplicably, here you cannot click on a 'listen' icon. There isn't one! To hear it you must go to the 'listen to full programme' option (how many people ever do that?) and scroll forward 2hrs and 48 minutes!! What possible reason could there be for not allowing the same sort of easy access to this interview that was granted to all the other interviews between 7.00 and 9.00am. It's almost as if the pro-government expert were being placed in the limelight at a parade in Red Square while the anti-government expert was being sent to the radio equivalent of Siberia. Truly bizarre.
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This is not all.
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Danny Dorling of the Left, got 4 minutes 29 seconds' worth of interview time, whereas Mr Lilico of the Right, got only 2 minutes 27 seconds (i.e. two minutes less).
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Danny Dorling of the Left was interrupted once, whereas Mr Lilico of the Right was interrupted twice.
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Danny Dorling of the Left therefore earned Sarah Montague of the BBC an I.C. of 0.2, whereas Mr Lilico of the Right earned her an I.C. of 0.9.
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2 comments:

  1. Yesterday after 100% government propaganda on the Toady Programme I switched off at 8am.
    Today I also switched off due to boredom.
    In spite of constant news of serial government incompetence none of the Toady team can effectively address this problem with ministers, not even the vaunted Humphries who appears in a dwawl these days. The same goes for all radio 4 presenters except Eddie Mair.
    This incompetence has spread to the weather forecast in that on radio 4 our Midland heartland has been wiped off the map and Wales was mentioned once in passing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Monday and Tuesday's editions were awful. (I've still to listen to today's). And I know what you mean about John Humphrys. He's losing it a bit at the moment and the others at Radio 4 never really had it - except, as you say, Eddie Mair.

    ReplyDelete

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