Don’t the audience know the script?

I got this one from the comments to the post below. Many, including me, were surprised to note that the audience of Radio 4’s tranzi flagship Today apparently contains a goodly proportion of believers in the right to armed home defence. Laban Tall writes about the way the BBC dealt with this distasteful result.

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8 Responses to Don’t the audience know the script?

  1. Thomas Egan says:

    I clicked on the BBCi site below related to the result re Tony Martin’ s law on the Today programme to find that the site no longer exists. (Fri 2pm). Surprise?

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/vote/results.shtml

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  2. PJF says:

    Just updated and moved:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/misc/law_result_20040101.shtml

    It strikes me there is a simple explanation of the ‘shock’ result – of the five options selected by the producers, three were nanny-state-leftist, one was rubbish and one was individual-empowerment-rightist. The majority of leftist listeners/voters (59%) split their vote. In other words, the Today glibbies were hoist by their own biased petard.

    Unphased, the BBC continues in its ignorance of voting and democracy (and perhaps arithmetic):
    “It’s a controversial choice but, nonetheless, it’s the choice of the majority of our listeners.”

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  3. Morgan says:

    OT.
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3367725.stm

    This might seem like nit picking here but..
    The above BBC story says that Bin Laden is only alleged to have masterminded the 9/11 attacks and that he remains at large.

    Could the BBC tell us who else is being alleged to have masterminded the attacks and where Bin Laden might be larging it up?

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  4. pete says:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1116149,00.html

    Richard Norton-Taylor (Guardian 5 Jan) hopes the Hutton Report will result in Blair facing a hanging judge in the Commons.
    Taylor’s open mindedness is evident from such phrases as –

    “Hutton also cannot credibly ignore the mountain of evidence about how Downing Street put pressure on the intelligence agencies to “sex up” the dossier” (Mountain of evidence !?)

    “the 45-minutes claim related all along only to battlefield weapons – just as Robin Cook said in his resignation speech – and not, as the dossier clearly implied, to long-range weapons.” (Dossier emphatically did not “clearly imply”)

    Taylor is of course entiltled to his opinion, which will be shared by the majority of his Guardian readership. But Surprise, surprise – the article concludes with “his edited extracts from the Hutton inquiry, will be shown on BBC Four on January 8”

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  5. Jane says:

    BBCi “Have Your Say” is holding another one of its periodic anti-American hatefests in response to more stringent entry procedures for visitors to the US.

    The “representative” sample of comments they have chosen to print are truly foul (yes, sneer quotes around “representative” fully intended.)

    Just so you have a record, I have sent the following comments to the “Have Your Say” Team (which I know from experience will never see the light of day.)

    “To the Have Your Say Team: I know you hate Americans and America beyond all reason, but journalistic self-respect alone should keep you from printing such blatant lies as ‘There are more gunshot murders in Washington DC in a year than have been killed in all terrorist attacks in the US ever.’ Washington DC does not have 3,000 gunshot murders a year. According to the FBI, there were 262 murders (by all means of killing, not just gun killings) in DC in 2002.

    Get some help, BBC. You are truly a sick organization and you

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  6. Jane says:

    . . .and you are giving journalism a bad name throughout the entire world.

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  7. d mac says:

    Jane,

    Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Have Your Say about the Mars robot.

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  8. Jane says:

    Umm, you mean the AMERICAN Mars robot that has succeeded in showing up the EU Mars robot so beautifully?

    Yeah, I think not.

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