The quality of writing on the BBC News website

[idunnosomename]

are the other three homeless?

[touchingcloth]

#ThisIsMyChoice sees four people being violently sodomised and saying "this is my choice." The catch is, only one of them is telling the truth.

[imitationleather]

I know this isn't news but still.



How long is this show? You could get it down to about 2 minutes if you didn't piss about.

It's hard to picture Louis Theroux agreeing to present this sort of shit.

[BlodwynPig]

They've changed "Technology" to "Intelligence" now,  it have added:

That was your licence fee, that.

"The Government/Corrupt body has been contacted for comment"

is the go to "get off Scott free" thing I hear all the time, especially on local news now. It means "we couldn't be arsed to chase this up properly and this story will be lost in time like lard down the drain.

[BlodwynPig]

I know this isn't news but still.



How long is this show? You could get it down to about 2 minutes if you didn't piss about.

Fucking sell out, Dooley. This is how they win.

[buttgammon]

It's hard to picture Louis Theroux agreeing to present this sort of shit.

I wasn't quite sure whose house it was, but I knew it was time for me to leave.

[Icehaven]

From this article https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/54615776 about the ancient cat drawing they've just found on a hillside in Peru.

Many of the geoglyphs are depictions of animals, some of these animals are depictions of rain or water.

Am I being thick or does that sentence not make sense?

[bgmnts]

I assume they mean they are representations of rain or water?

[Clatty McCutcheon]

Makes fuck-all sense to me. Are there two different levels of depiction? Plus it has a dirty great comma splice in mid-sentence which makes it ungrammatical.

[touchingcloth]

From this article https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/54615776 about the ancient cat drawing they've just found on a hillside in Peru.

Am I being thick or does that sentence not make sense?

I assume they meant:

Many of the geoglyphs are depictions of animals, some of these animals are depictions of rain or water.

[Icehaven]

I assume they mean they are representations of rain or water?

Yeah I thought that so I'm guessing it's just a typo, unless they think the meaning of depiction suddenly changed between the first and second halves of the sentence.

[bgmnts]

"Many of the glyphs are depictions of animals, some of which represent rain or water."

That makes more sense to me.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Fuck me Peston's off on one.

[bgmnts]

THE ECONOMY.

[Sebastian Cobb]

THE ECONOMY.

Tories: give starving kids basic sustenance? Nah.

Peston: we've never been more socialist.

[bgmnts]

I dont think most people even know what things like Socialism, Communism and Marxism are. Its like football rules, people just guess and form their own opinions.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Most people aren't political editors tbf.

[RDRR]

Obviously no one gives a shit and it doesn't matter in the slightest but the phrase "by far one of..." has always pissed me off.

[idunnosomename]

that thread is unreadable. itv pay him so much he could at least make the sentences in the tweets self-contained. absolute waste of skin and floppy hair

[Sebastian Cobb]

that thread is unreadable. itv pay him so much he could at least make the sentences in the tweets self-contained. absolute waste of skin and floppy hair

I've said it before but he's like a non-Bill Murray character in groundhog day. Like he wakes up and his brain has been reset.

[Captain Z]

What will actually happen is that we'll have ultra-austerity for as long as Covid remains in living memory, because even 25 years later 'the poor should be grateful that we almost bankrupted the country supporting them in the pandemic'.

[Paul Calf]

While the richest get richer and richer.

I mean, before long we'll be back to sharecropping anyway so the issues of wages, taxes and public spending won't be relevant.

[Rizla]

Peston throwin a few numbers together there, if you get my meaning

[Sebastian Cobb]

There's parallels between the ITV/BBC approaches to client journalism that are similar to the old days of ITA/BBC broadcast. In that one was technically slapdash and had a bit less pride but it didn't matter too much in terms of reach.

[idunnosomename]

i'll stick this here, as the BBC tries to prop up the prolapsing blobfish with some old idiot who lives in a fucking wendy house or something
https://twitter.com/bbcquestiontime/status/1319401799011414024

[touchingcloth]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54654937

Mr Biden said Mr Trump was "one of the most racist presidents we've had in modern history. He pours fuel on every single racist fire."
He added: "This guy is a [racial] dog whistle about as big as a fog horn."

Is there any need for adding that [racial]? I think it works perfectly well without it - it works better, in fact - and I reckon Biden probably intended it more generally than being a specific racial dog whistle. At least call it [racist] if you absolutely have to jam something in there.

[idunnosomename]

I think that's to help readers understand that Mr Biden means Trump to be a metaphorical dogwhistle, not an actual whistle like what shepherds use on One Man and His Dog. The size of a foghorn.

[dissolute ocelot]

Fuck me Peston's off on one.

$300bn of borrowing, most of which is being funded by the Bank of England printing money. He claims that 10m workers having their wages paid or topped up by the government is the biggest number dependent on the state, but in 2013 (the first figures I found, from the height of Cameron's austerity), 20.3 million families received some kind of benefits. A common myth about benefits is to promote the idea that everybody on benefits is lazy and it's only the worst of the worst who benefit. Thanks for demonising the poor and knowing fuck all about economics, Peston!

Bonus fact: for all Peston's talk of biggest state sector since the war, fewer people were employed by the public sector in World War II than in any year since 1949 (due to the creation of the NHS and other massive nationalisation). (Although definitions of public sector may vary.) State spending was also vastly greater pre-COVID than in wartime. Stop acting like a large public sector is only justified in war.

[idunnosomename]

cultural consequences.

[Fambo Number Mive]

Easy for Peston to call for less public spending when he is wealthy enough not to be affected by any austerity. This is part of the problem with paying commentators such high sums