"They were originally all male references but the woke bros at the news website wanted to make them female because of misgendering. It’s quite shocking. I can’t think of any other situation where we would change the words of an alleged rape victim."

Said an unnamed source, quoted in "BBC ‘altered gender in trans rape claim’" (London Times).

The BBC article replaced every reference to “he” or “him” with “they” or “them”. A source said the quote was the subject of heated debate prior to publication. Some journalists argued that the quote should remain intact, while others said it should reflect the trans woman’s preferred she/her pronouns....

Here's the quote the BBC radically edited:

“I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so he was a ‘woman’ even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout, so I agreed to go home with him. He used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing his penis and raped me."

"The BBC’s wall-to-wall coverage of Prince Philip’s death has become the most complained-about moment in British television history...."

"At least 110,994 people have contacted the BBC to express their displeasure at the decision to turn most of the corporation’s TV channels and radio stations over to rolling tributes to the Queen’s husband.... Not all the complaints were about the extent of the BBC’s coverage. Almost 400 people wrote in to complain that Prince Andrew had featured despite his association with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein and refusal to answer questions posed by the FBI. A further 233 people complained that BBC presenters were not wearing sufficiently respectful clothes, with viewers complaining that not all newsreaders were wearing black – an echo of the controversy over the burgundy tie worn by Peter Sissons when he announced the death of the Queen Mother in 2002. And in a sign that the BBC is destined to be criticised by all sides, 116 people wrote to the corporation over the weekend to complain that it was making it too easy to complain about its coverage."

The Guardian reports.

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BBC headlines "Biden and Trump criss-cross the US" when Biden only went from Delaware to Philadelphia yesterday and Trump flew 3,000 miles and rallied in 5 states.

Subheadline mostly concedes the embarrassing truth: "President Trump visits five states on Sunday while his rival Joe Biden campaigns in Pennsylvania." I say "mostly" because the geographical range of Biden's campaigning is muted by referring to the state, which is rather large, when Biden confines himself to the extreme southeast corner of the place, Philadelphia, which is an easy commute from his home in Wilmington, Delaware.

My screen shot is from the front page. The headline at the article is "US Election 2020: Biden and Trump hit swing states."

I am abstaining in the 2020 election, so I'm about as distanced and cruelly neutral an observer as you're going to get. I care about the quality of journalism, and the main thing I do here on this blog is monitor elite media. I've found the bias in favor of Joe Biden absolutely disgusting. And I believe Biden is a stalking horse for Kamala Harris, whom the mainstream media hasn't subjected to any serious testing. 

Stalking horse. Isn't that exactly the right expression? It's literally this:

"It crept up so slowly that I didn't know anything was wrong - I just thought I was putting on timber."

"I've been with my partner Jamie Gibbins for 10 years and we did wonder a few times if I was pregnant - but we did home tests and they always ruled it out.... Looking at me, anyone would have thought I was nine months gone."

Said , quoted in "Woman's ovarian cyst 'weight of seven newborn babies'" (BBC).

"I was lying there with Jamie beside me as the radiologist moved the [sonogram] probe over my tummy. I saw her eyes widen in horror, but the screen was just blank. The look on her face said it all - something was wrong, and when she said she had to get a consultant I started to panic. Jamie did his best to reassure me but I felt paralysed with fear... [The consultant] told me I wasn't fat all - I was actually quite thin."...

The cyst was finally removed in March last year, and was revealed to be 26kg the weight of a seven or eight-year-old child - or seven average-sized newborn babies.

This happened not in what we traditionally call the "third world," but in Swansea, Wales. The BBC, which I've tended to think of as a high-quality news operation, presents this — with photographs — as just a weird human interest story. There isn't a word about how access to health care in the UK can be this bad.

"The CBC canceled a broadcast of the documentary 'Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?' just hours before it was scheduled to air after complaints from activists."

"The BBC documentary questions whether transitioning is the best path for every child with gender dysphoria. Activists said that was harmful," writes Hit & Run, linking to "CBC's decision against airing Transgender Kids doc should leave everyone unsettled/Ideology is now taking precedence over science" at CBC News.

From the CBC News piece:

In actuality, the documentary offers a rare and factual perspective on the politicization of gender therapy by featuring interviews with Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist and international research expert on gender dysphoria in children....

What was so controversial about Zucker's approach? In short, he did not blindly follow the current popular dogma of affirming young children who say they want to transition to the opposite sex. Instead, Zucker's therapy was informed by research that shows that the majority of gender dysphoric children desist by puberty.

Indeed, across all 11 studies conducted on this topic, including research published in the last five years, about 60 to 90 per cent of gender dysphoric children grow up to be gay in adulthood, not transgender....

"A man has died after being savaged by his dog while being interviewed by a BBC documentary film crew in north London."

"The man, named locally as Mario Perivoitos, 41, was with the film crew at his home in Wood Green on 20 March when his Staffordshire bull terrier attacked, biting him in the neck."

The police say the documentary was "entirely unrelated" and BBC won't say what the documentary was about.

"The BBC really made a satirical show called ‘The Real Housewives of ISIS’..."

"... while the real housewives of ISIS are being raped and abused daily."

BBC asks: "In the age of genetic engineering, do we need two sexes any more?"

"Do we need men?"

Predictable sexist joke: Yeah, we need them to do the genetic engineering.

"The BBC has admitted mistaking footage of a 'third rate' Bob Dylan impersonator for the singer in a report about his Nobel Prize award."

"Instead of using stock footage of the artist singing his hits on the BBC's Six O'Clock News, a young producer at the corporation mistook a tribute act for the folk legend...."

An inside source said: "It looks like they asked someone who didn't really know much about Dylan to find footage for the report. Perhaps when you're in your 20s one old rock star looks pretty much like another. But anyone editing the package should have known something was wrong. Dylan's voice isn't exactly smooth, but this guy sounded like someone strangling a cat!"

"An army group in Turkey says it has taken over the country, with soldiers at strategic points in Istanbul and jets flying low in the capital, Ankara."

"A statement read on TV said a 'peace council' now ran the country and there was a curfew and martial law. There would also be new constitution. It is unclear who the army group is...."

Reports the BBC just now.

ADDED: The current report is that the coup has failed.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a speech from Istanbul’s international airport, blamed the coup attempt on a group of followers of U.S.-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen. "They will pay a heavy price for their treason," Erdogan said....

"A court in Qatar has convicted a Dutch woman of having sex outside marriage after she told police she was raped."

"The 22-year-old was handed a suspended sentence and fined $824 (£580). She will also be deported. Her lawyer said her drink had been spiked at a Doha hotel in March and she had woken up in a stranger's flat, where she realised she had been raped. Her alleged attacker, who said the sex was consensual, was sentenced to 100 lashes for having sex outside marriage. He will be given a further 40 lashes for consuming alcohol."

BBC reports.

Responding to a customer complaint, the official US Airways Twitter feed sends out a picture of a naked woman holding a toy plane.

"The tweet was deleted after approximately an hour but not before it had been retweeted hundreds of times."

I'm linking to BBC.com, where the story is ranked as #1 on the sidebar "Most Popular" list under the teaser "US Airways apologises for porn tweet."

Come on, the tweet was incredibly foolish — and a good reminder of the inherent danger of relying on some lower-down writer-drudge to man the Twitter feed — but it was not porn. A photograph of a naked person isn't porn.

Wait! I was relying on the BBC description of the photograph: "a naked woman and a toy plane." Then, I went looking for the photograph. I must say that it is porn. (NSFW: here.) The woman is holding the plane in a very special place.

ADDED: And by NSFW, I mean not safe for anybody.

Those Dell laptops that smell like cat urine? Don't worry.

"The smell is not related to cat urine or any other type of biological contaminant, nor is it a health hazard."

Link goes to a BBC news item that ends "News of the issue spread after a link to the thread was posted to discussion site Reddit," which links to a Reddit thread where the top-rated comment refers to the BBC link to the comments thread and comments like "Clearly BBC journalists like to keep their fingers on the pulse of what's happening. Commendable attitude" and "Or they're desperately scrabbling for a source that isn't 'Marge from St. Ives said so' and don't think people will look too carefully..."

"But since my cancer diagnosis, I’m beginning to empathize with Jesus at Gethsemane..."

"... Just as he’d gotten his life’s work going, just as he was planting the seeds of a new society, just as he was gaining followers willing to give up everything for justice and love, he found out he was probably going to die, at the age of 33...."

When has your life experience caused you to change which character you identify with in an old story?

Or is this a big sermon cliché? First, we identify with the sleeping disciples because blah blah blah but then etc. etc....

Eh. Maybe it's a big but great cliché. Let's have your examples.

I can't offhand think of any of my own, but I think of that mother in the BBC documentary we were watching last night who described her son as always identifying with the villain in the story and who gives — as her one example — Cruella De Vil. It's a power fantasy, and he doesn't seem to mind — mom says — that the character loses in the end. She probably thinks the BBC documentary viewer identifies with her, the devoted mother of a difficult child. Why would she have invited the documentarians into her home otherwise?

It's a cliché of documentaries to lure us into identifying with one character and then tempting, then forcing us to switch to another character. How else are you going to build narrative energy? And yet you invite these devils into your home. They seem so empathetic as you open up not just your house but your soul.

I said I couldn't  offhand think of any examples of my own, shifting from empathizing with one character to another. But now, in the context of that BBC documentary, I realize I do it all the time in blog posts. I get interested in one person, and I start writing, and I find — make?! — a narrative thread that ends up turning my empathy around. I'll bet there are over 1,000 examples of my doing that in this archive.

Perhaps you should turn against me. Perhaps I am the devil you've let into your house.

"America's Medicated Kids."

A 1-hour BBC documentary by Louis Theroux. I share Theroux's skepticism about medicating children, but I don't think he ends up explaining much about the problem in general. Instead of "America's Medicated Kids," a more accurate title would be "3 Medicated Kids in Pittsburgh." I do recommend this. Worth discussing.



ADDED: Next morning thoughts at the end of this post.

"Kim Kardashian: How do Armenians feel about her fame?"

BBC homes in on the question everyone is asking.

"Kim is an Armenian and famous in the world, so this is enough for every Armenian to be proud of Kim. But because of cultural and traditional issues, they do not want to accept that she is an Armenian," [says BBC monitoring journalist Armen Shahbazian].

Stories about Kardashian are frequently a topic for comedy programmes, he says.

"They always compare the Armenian French singer Charles Aznavour, who they are proud of, with Kim Kardashian, who is seen in a more negative light. They don't want her to present their country," he says.

Deep into this article we get to some comparative material about what the people of Gibraltar think about fashion designer John Galliano and what the people of the Isle of Man think of Dan Quayle, who — "was internationally ridiculed when it appeared he could not spell the word 'potato.'"

"Earlier today, certain realms were affected by an in-game exploit..."

"... resulting in the deaths of player characters and non-player characters in some of the major cities," reports the BBC. This is news, right?

"So there you go: an internet troll. That's what they look like."

I thought this was a joke, but it's not. The BBC tracks down some piddling internet troll and confronts him.

"Poisoned cat stew 'killed tycoon.'"

Strange headline ranks second on the "Most Popular" list at BBC.com.

"I'm about as secular as a person could reasonably be..."

"... but not secular enough to grumble about other people's enjoyment of what they regard as the birthday celebration for their spiritual savior," says Geoffrey K. Pullum, at Language Log.

From my kitchen here in Edinburgh right now, I can hear the bell of Broughton St. Mary's Church calling the flock in for the Christmas morning service, and it doesn't make me bristle. And I don't mind the huge Norwegian Christmas tree that is always erected on The Mound behind the Scottish National Gallery (a gift from Hordaland in Norway in memory of close ties during the Second World War) being called a Christmas tree. The nativity scenes put up here and there annoy me to the same extent as the menoras in some windows, which is to say, absolutely not at all.

The Christmas Eve carol service from King's College Cambridge, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, is worth hearing by anyone who appreciates high-quality choral music, and if some public funds are used to get the outside broadcast trucks to Cambridge and the mikes set up, I say good, spend it. The BBC's short sermon each morning, "Thought For The Day", studiously circulates through Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Islam, so determined are they to be eclectic in their spiritual uplift. I disappear into the shower rather than hear the platitudes, but I'm not inclined to campaign for removing them from the airwaves. Considering that the UK actually is a theocracy (the reigning monarch is both head of state and head of the uniquely established church that the state recognizes), it's all pretty relaxed and inclusive and not worth a serious person's protest time.

The UK actually is a theocracy... but a serious, completely secular person shouldn't mind it at all.