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This government with its awful handling of the 15 sailors held briefly by the Iranians and now released has actually dragged the United Kingdom into utter disrepute. I can only assume that ministers were once again incapable of revealing simple truths. It presumably never occurred to anyone to just let the sailors tell their stories openly to all the press. No, every single piece of information has to be twisted and spun to cover up the truth or create some false impression.
How low can the Royal Navy sink? In Nelson’s day the despatches of commanding officers were published so there was no chance of a cover-up. Nowadays that would seem to simple. And as a result the Navy becomes the laughing stock of world opinion.
I have long been unhappy with BBC news output. It is far too parochial and shows symptoms of journalistic laziness such as too many government originated stories.
In particular I find most annoying the Radio 4 Today programme habit of forecasting the days news and announcements. Items that start with “The department of XYZ will announce today…” to my mind is a technical breach of a publication embargo on a press release. They seem to get away with it day after day and I can only assume a too cosey relationship between Today journalists and the government departments concerned.
The BBC 24 News programme often picks every possible grain of interest out of a story, bringing in endless specialists to speculate and pontificate. This is lazy. It is only too easy to pick a few stories and then call on known talking heads to fill out the air time rather than search out many more stories from around the globe. As a recent example, Aljazeera English ran a story about fighting in the capital of Somalia and a further news item on the Arab peace plan for Israel with commentary from both sides while News 24 was going over the Iranian capture of British sailors ad infinitum. I finally heard about Somalia on the BBC World Service later on that night. It appears that they take the lazy way out by running and re-running a very parochial story which is easily got together. It is particularly noticeable when there is a home news story which could be of popular interest. On days when there is no such story, the actual scope of their news widens considerably.
Many people have complained in the past how BBC news is biased towards the South East of England and this has not really changed.
