Wanted - BBC News Editor
Or at the very least some journalists who know how to write.
It’s a long-standing point in our house that the BBC News site has become an abomination in the eyes of anyone who values good writing, properly structured and with all the punctuation in the right places, so shoddy has it become. But every now and then I stumble across a piece of writing so horrifyingly bad that my assumption can only be that the software somehow mangled it in the process of publication because no one would ever write professionally like that. Then the professional in me, who used to produce material for the BBC and knows how much time and trouble used to go into checking things after they’d been completed as well as before, nudges me and whispers the phrase “falling standards” in my ear.
Today I see one such, and at the risk of breaching their copyright, I feel compelled to reproduce the horror just in case they change it and this is lost to posterity. The whole thing is currently here, and the first twelve paragraphs follow:
As it prepares to announce its annual results, no-one can doubt how bad things are for the UK’s leading advertising-funded broadcaster.
The days when an ITV franchise was deemed “a licence to print money” and a single regional company - Granada - could splash out millions on high-quality dramas such as Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown are long gone.
ITV’s commercial director Rupert Howell admitted this month that it was “scrapping for its life”, as he pleaded with the government to let it make money from “product placement”.
It is one of a series of regulatory changes it is seeking, as advertising revenue dives and audiences fragment.
You might expect ITV to play up its problems as it tries to bounce the government into changing the rules.
Channel 4 has dominated the debate over the future of public service broadcasting, with Ofcom and ministers floating ways to safeguard the smaller channel’s future.
A merger with BBC Worldwide or Five has been mooted, which is expected to announce big job cuts.
But things must be dire for ITV to suggest a merger with the two other ad-funded terrestrial broadcasters, Channel 4 and Five.
It says this is “blue sky thinking”, as requested by the government, in response to Lord Carter’s interim report on Digital Britain - but such a merger really is thinking the unthinkable.
The government would need to scrap the competition rules, as it did with the Lloyds Bank takeover of HBOS - hardly an encouraging precedent.
Other broadcasters and production companies simply will not wear such a merger.
Channel 4’s chairman Luke Johnson says he regards ITV’s pension hole as an “enormous poison pill” and sees no great value in equity in ITV.
Marvel at the misuse of quotation marks!
Gasp at the inexplicable diversion into a possible Channel 4/BBC Worldwide or Five merger!
Cringe at the linguistic ineptitude of a sentence such as “A merger with BBC Worldwide or Five has been mooted, which is expected to announce big job cuts.”!
Wrinkle your brow in confusion at the way the suggestion of an ITV merger is referred to as if the reader already knows about it!
Wrinkle it again at the mention of the ITV pension hole, which is actually ‘introduced’ to the reader six paragraphs later with the sentence “ And, perhaps worst of all, it has a huge pension hole.”!
But if your sensibilities are already too badly affected, I urge you, dear reader, to steer well clear of paragraph seventeen as I now quote it:
The internet has broken the traditional TV advertising model and in, trying to get a slice of the action, ITV bought the wrong internet company - Friends Reunited - at too high a price.
Seriously, does NO ONE edit this crap before it’s published? Or at least give it a quick read after? I despair.
May 5th, 2009 at 2:25 am
I totally agree; the standards of reporting on the BBC News website have definitely deteriorated. About a year ago, I wrote to the BBC to inform it that three different articles on its site, regarding the economic situation in Zimbabwe, quoted three different figures for the current unemployment rate, despite being written within days of each other. Also last year I spotted this: http://enticknet.blogspot.com/2008/04/trickly-treacle-trauma.html.
As you can see, I have an interest in Zimbabwe, but I’m no expert. I didn’t, for example, know that David Coltart is the Education Minister for Zimbabwe. After reading the following article today, I would have remained none the wiser, were it not for the apparent afterthought of a drop quote: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8033064.stm.