A change at the BBC for which I have mixed feelings, but in a good way. The change? Evan Davis is moving to the Today programme from his post as BBC Economics Editor. Evan Davis is, to me, amongst the very best of the BBC’s editors. I enjoyed his pieces when he was ‘just’ the Newsnight […]
The US elections are proving absolutely fascinating after Hillary Clinton won the latest primary, and there are some top-class BBC journalists doing an excellent job reporting this interesting process to us Brits. Jon Snow, former ITN Washington correspondent (My review of his autobiography here), has charged over there the last week or so, and has […]
Is it just me, but is the news today that house prices have fallen ’sharply’are ‘turning down’ a self-fulfilling media prophecy, along the same line as the run on Northern Rock not so long ago. Also, why is a monthly -0.8% drop, but an annual rise of 6.9% considered a ’sharp tumble’? That’s the BBC speaking, […]
I imagine - hope even - that a lot of people were taken aback to hear the news today that a ’senior judge’ is calling for everybody to be put on the DNA database. The main reason cited it’d be ‘fairer’ than the widely acknowledged to be broken and unfair system, where anybody arrested by […]
The Repeal vote has opened with a truly disappointing shortlist that is sure to appeal to middle-England, but is sadly reactionary and horribly predictable in it’s contents. Listening yesterday to the (disappointing) panel wafting it’s way through the nominations, and brushing aside the opportunity to push the debate in interesting directions, I soon lost hope […]
The Holocaust denying ‘historian’ David Irving is back in the UK after having been jailed in Austria for 13 months, and was interviewed this morning on Today. His views are quite clearly ludicrous, and manage to cause great offence to a large number of people. However, locking him up for espousing those views was wrong. We, […]
I heard Radio Four are looking for nominations of laws that should be repealed, and no2id Glasgow’s timely e-mail coaxed me in to action. So regular readers won’t, of course, be surprised to read that I’ve nominated the Identity Card Act 2006 as the single worst piece of legislation that’s appeared in years for the way […]
A mailing list I’m on drew my attention to a phone interview on Radio 5 last night by Stephen Nolan, with Philip Pullman (author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, my review here). What follows is probably one of the most unbelievably rude treatments I’ve heard of a well respected author by somebody who seemed […]
I’m a regular listener to the Today programme, but a continual source of puzzlement (previous comments here ) is the refusal by the BBC’s department of “Religion and Ethics” to allow humanists and atheists to contribute. This is especially puzzling when you look at the Census figures for the populations declared ‘religious’ beliefs. Between 14% […]
I’ve often been struck that there is a huge repository of classical, and more modern music, that is long past it’s copyright expiration dates. With the growth of wikipedia, I’ve often wondered when enthusiastic musicians might get together to release free versions of such pieces. Enter The BBC. Their podcasting experiment (which I’ve mentioned before on […]
