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- Kevin Bakhurst
- 6 Nov 06, 05:29 PM
News 24's rolling coverage of the Saddam verdict on Sunday morning attracted big audiences, hitting a peak of well over 6% of all viewers.
It's not always easy to judge the appetite for big international stories but looking at our audience numbers and the huge number of hits for the BBC News website, this was one of those that people really wanted to see.
We had our world affairs editor, John Simpson, in court to witness events as they happened and Andrew North was in central Baghdad to describe reaction. The deployment underlined the BBC's commitment to the reporting of Iraq despite the obvious dangers of doing so and contrasts with some of our competitors who didn't feel this was a significant enough event to send a correspondent to Iraq.
BBC News 24 has benefited from the BBC's commitment to having a correspondent - Andrew North - resident in Baghdad throughout the year: a decision that has helped us to give day-to-day coverage of one of the world's biggest stories as it unfolds. It represents a very significant proportion of the BBC's weekly world news coverage budget but we feel it is a story we have to cover well and in depth. The challenge in the next few weeks will be reporting on the fallout from Sunday's verdict, the various viewpoints on the judicial process and the death penalty, and how we cover the execution itself - if it happens.
Kevin Bakhurst is controller of BBC News 24
Recent entries
- Amanda Farnsworth
- 6 Nov 06, 03:53 PM
Thanks to those of you who commented on my blog about our climate change coverage - some interesting views. I thought you might all be interested in the results of a poll by the Daily Politics programme on our willingness to pay green taxes.
It's a somewhat more mixed result - and a poll is only a poll - than I had thought. People do seem willing to pay IF they can be sure the government is going to tax in the right way and at the moment they don't seem to trust this will be the case. Anyway here are the results.
The government has published a report showing that climate change could have a very significant impact on the world economy unless action is taken now to reduce carbon emissions. Please say whether you agree or disagree with each of the following statements:
1) The government should impose higher taxes on activities that cause pollution, even if that means the end of cheap flights and driving a car becomes more expensive. Agree 53% Disagree 45%.
2) 'Green taxes' will unfairly hit poorer people, while rich people will be able to continue to drive and fly just as much as before. Agree 69% Disagree 28%.
3) 'Green taxes' are not really about helping the environment; they are just designed to provide more revenue for the Government. Agree 62% Disagree 33%.
4) There's not much point in doing my bit for the environment because Britain accounts for only 2% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Agree 33% Disagree 64%.
You can find more details here (it's a PDF file).
Amanda Farnsworth is editor, Daytime News
On this week's Newswatch, the programme which discusses viewers' complaints about BBC News, Newsnight editor Peter Barron debates David Loyn's interview with the Taleban, and there's a report about the use of old pieces of film on contemporary reports. You can watch it here.
An irregular feature where we round-up blog comments on matters relating to the BBC. Today - Newsnight's recent interview with Madonna (discussed on this blog here and here).
Stressqueen: "It felt positively surreal and utterly ridiculous to see Jeremy Paxman discussing Madonna's adoption of a Malawian orphan on Newsnight." (link)
Adventures in engineering: "Newsnight’s decision to have Kirsty Wark interview Madonna, for example, is coming perilously close to being entertainment." (link)
Bill's comment page: "What is the stage set all about? Is this whole thing not an enormous fire risk?" (link)
Potunkey: "I was under the clearly mistaken impression that responsible journalism didn’t involve getting the subjects of interviews to dance." (link)
Adrian Monck online: "The truth is there are good ways to put on audience, and then there's doing a Madonna interview." (link)
The Independent: Extended interview with BBC News presenter Ben Brown. (link)
The Times: Reports that the historic former BBC studios at London's Alexandra Palace could soon be demolished. (link)
New Statesman: Peter Wilby comments on the recent row over BBC impartiality - "The proposal that the BBC should echo some notional consensus of demotic opinion is a fairly recent one". (link)
- Rod McKenzie
- 3 Nov 06, 01:40 PM
"It's time to bring back the cane!"
No, not the view of a crusty colonel from the home counties in response to this week's news that British teenagers are just about the most badly behaved in Europe. That's Chloe's view - a teenager herself - who argued on our website that borstals and tough prisons work as well as corporal punishment. Teenagers need to show more respect, she argues, and if she is out of order with her parents she knows she can expect a slap.
Plenty of people had their say on this: Bear in mind our audience are both teenagers and twentysomethings - so we're not talking about a big generation gap here. Our reporters, our text response and our online talking point at Newsbeat were deluged with views. Many teenagers complained there was little for them to do, so it's hardly surprising they get into scrapes. Our twentysomethings tended to be more critical - blaming bad parenting, relaxed licensing laws and social factors such as being born into poverty or the breakdown of traditional family units.
Our teenagers were much more split in their views. There were many who argued that adults, "should leave them alone/get off their backs". Dave told us that he's a binge drinker and loves it. All had stories of Saturday night fights after the binging went bad. Others were critical of us media types, researchers and others who lump teenagers into one group of evil, snarling, aggressive, hard drinking and drug taking hoodies. Plenty of people to point out that there's a lot of good behaviour around - voluntary work - caring for sick and elderly relatives and much more teenage 'respect' than the government gives them credit for.
Lots of intelligent solutions too, from better diet to parenting classes to investment in youth and sports clubs.
Did we feel uncomfortable covering this story given our audience was coming in for a pasting? Someone asked me if this was the sort of story the rest of BBC News could happily cover but that we might want to shy away from, for fear of upsetting our audience or patronising them. The level of debate and engagement from our teenage listeners proves that wrong, I think - and say what you like about today's teenagers, but they're willing to join the debate about all aspects of modern life in Britain.
Last word to Chloe: "We're not all bad but those of us who understand manners and courtesy get blacked out by those who don't."
Rod McKenzie is editor of Newsbeat and 1Xtra TX
- Steve Herrmann
- 3 Nov 06, 12:33 PM
Apologies to those who haven’t been following this, but here’s a brief update on my recent posting about the News Sniffer website.
As far as we can see, what the site is now showing looks like a more accurate picture of which comments are removed from our Have Your Say pages - when we posted on Tuesday these looked wrong. To make things more complicated we NOW think we’ve got a bug on our side which causes some comments not to show up - we're looking into this.
That doesn’t mean we aren’t removing some that break house rules - we are. To try and demystify how the Have Your Say pages work, I asked Matt Eltringham, a senior journalist in our interactivity team, to explain. There’s more on the pages themselves (under house rules) but here’s a summary:
“The HYS debates are operated by a team of moderators who work across seven days a week from 0700 to 2300. Every day we receive about 10,000 emailed contributions to the debates we have started - debates often suggested by our readers.
“These debates can be either fully or reactively moderated. If a debate is fully moderated, it means that all the comments are read first by our team of moderators before they are published on the site.
"A reactively moderated debate means that some users who have registered with us through a simple online process beforehand are able to post their comments directly on the site without first being read by a moderator. Therefore, in reactive debates, all members’ comments are published on the site, then comments that break the house rules are removed by the moderation team. Most of the comments that break the house rules are highlighted to us by users who click the 'alert a moderator' button.
"Regardless of whether a debate is pre or post moderated the presumption is that all comments should be published unless they break the house rules. These ban defamatory, abusive or offensive comments. We don’t edit comments or correct spelling or grammar.
"But the sheer volume of contributions means that in practice we simply aren't able to publish all of the comments that don't break any of the House Rules.”
One more thing - you may also be interested in this interesting analysis of the News Sniffer site.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website
- Peter Barron
- 3 Nov 06, 11:27 AM
I hesitate to say more because I know many Newsnight fans truly hated the Madonna experience (which you can still watch here), but to put the subject to bed here are a few quick facts and figures.
It was certainly popular. Our audience share doubled, nearly three million watching three or more minutes of the interview. Grubby talk I know.
It was controversial, though not as controversial as the previous week's Taleban film. That attracted 300 comments to this blog. So far Madonna stands at half that. Most have been debating the rights and wrongs of the adoption, but a few think the episode signalled the end of a once-great TV institution.
Was it newsworthy? The interview spawned hundreds of articles worldwide, so if it wasn't that's an awful lot of us with rubbish news judgement.
Regrets? Just a few, number one being that set. Yes, we should have tried harder to restrain the flamboyance of Madonna's stylist, which surely didn't do her any favours either. As one viewer put it: "Just promise me no more petals". I promise.
Peter Barron is editor of Newsnight
Daily Mail: Richard Littlejohn on news coverage of the Stern Report: "The BBC is only too willing to give free rein to the wildest fantasies of the eco-nutters, especially if it can pin the blame on George W. Bush and the evil multee-nash-nuls." (link)
The Sun: "Telly anorak Keith Hamer yesterday unveiled his amazing collection of BBC test cards." (link)
- David Kermode
- 2 Nov 06, 04:47 PM
I'm in Istanbul (at the News Xchange annual conference) getting to grips with the global agenda and, right now, the Turkish keyboard configuration. Both are challenging.
There's a small group of us here from the BBC. Well, okay, not that small. But it's at these kind of events you realise just how enormous the BBC's news operation is and just how varied is its agenda.
Our domestic television output is represented, radio too, then of course there's BBC World and World Service radio. There's also a big safety focus to this event, with the people who specialise in keeping journalists and crews out of harm sharing their experience and knowledge. The morning session ended with a grim roll call of those who have died in the name of journalism within the last year - almost two hundred.
The day had two really big themes I suppose - war and terrorism.
The keynote speaker was Jan Egeland, UN Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, a man who speaks his mind. He told us how much he wished we'd be more consistent in our approach to war and disaster. He said that coverage of global catastrophes was like "a lottery", with some getting a huge amount of coverage and others getting next to nothing.
Mr Egeland talked about Darfur, which had a lot of attention from the world's media, then asked us why we had largely ignored the situation in Congo or Northern Uganda? He also talked about the media's obsession with celebrity, contrasting the time the American media devoted to Darfur versus the amount of airtime given over to Martha Stewart's brief spell behind bars. He clearly wasn't in Britain for coverage of the McCartney-Mills separation, but I suspect he'd have been less than impressed.
After a short break, while we digested what Mr Egeland had had to say, the rest of the morning was given over to the debate on embedding with the military. This subject is familiar territory now, but here was a chance for some senior military figures (retired, or about to retire) to give us their perspective on fighting with journalists in tow. There was debate about the extent to which objective journalism is compromised by being embedded with the military. The consensus, from where I was sitting, appeared to be that while embedding was useful in terms of getting access you would not otherwise get, there was still the need to have unilateral journalists going their own way.
That, of course, was what Terry Lloyd was bravely doing when he was killed. He was very much in delegates' minds today.
When is a terrorist a terrorist? It's frequently raised as an issue at the BBC and that question dominated the afternoon's proceedings as we debated the way we cover terrorism.
The person with the most experience of such matters at the BBC is probably the current affairs journalist Peter Taylor, who has frequently reported on al-Qaeda. He shared his thoughts on the challenge of covering "terrorism" and the obvious difficulty in getting access to those who seek to promote it. Yosri Fouda of Al Jazeera has had such access. He defended his decision to interview those involved in terrorism, reminding us of the importance of context.
At the BBC, we know that hearing all sides of the story is really important to our viewers, but we also know from some of the reaction to the recent Taliban film that it's a divisive issue. One person's "context" is another's "enemy propaganda". This debate rages on, as I write, and I suspect will be back on next year`s agenda.
David Kermode is editor of BBC Breakfast
- Alistair Burnett
- 2 Nov 06, 11:39 AM
What a difference we often come across with many stories we cover - especially in areas such as crime, the justice system and the NHS. The World Tonight asked why it is that given all the extra investment the government has put into the health service - with new GP surgeries and new hospitals being built, and new technology being introduced into those surgeries and hospitals - why the latest opinion polls suggest a majority of the population think the NHS has got worse over the last ten years.
Are people just badly informed or is there a more nuanced explanation? The pollster, Joe Twyman from YouGov, discussed his findings with Robin Lustig on Wednesday's programme (listen here) and it seems a large part of the explanation is that people don't trust politicians, so the more our politicians say the NHS has improved, the less people believe it.
There are also the protests of staff and unions which get publicity, and people tend to believe the professionals more than the politicians. There's also a lot of negative coverage of health issues in the press which add to this. Finally there are the anecdotes that get passed from person to person and end up inevitably getting distorted. Only today a colleague told me a particular hospital had killed his father - if I passed this on to you, maybe you'd tell a friend and another anecdote could take off.
Set against this on the other hand, Anna Walker of the independent watchdog the Healthcare Commission, told Robin Lustig their surveys of patients shows most think they get good care from the NHS.
This is a potent mix with pretty disturbing implications - it appears people are more prepared to believe things they hear about a crucial public service than to believe politicians or their own direct experience. We also need to look to the role of media in this - is our coverage of the health service giving an accurate picture overall? After all, news is what is unusual and so the 'bad stories' about the NHS such as job cuts, hospital closures, or outbreaks of MRSA tend to get more coverage than the building of a new hospital on time and to budget.
I think as journalists we tend to assume our listeners, viewers and readers make allowances for the fact that what makes news is not the norm but the exception. Are we right to do so?
Alistair Burnett is editor of the World Tonight
The Guardian: "The recent BBC debate over religious adornments gives a new context to the annual display of Remembrance poppies by BBC frontpeople." (link)
Daily Mail: Reports that presenter Huw Edwards was briefly without a poppy during a recent broadcast. (link)
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