As so often, the little instance of bias I am about to point out is so tiny and insignificant that I almost want to feed it some milk on my finger. The fun part is finding out how many brothers and sisters and cousins it has under the floorboards. In this article about UKIP MEP in row over working women we have (in the grey box):
- Independence and Democracy is a new parliamentary group of hardline Eurosceptics
- It rejects the EU constitution and the “centralisation of Europe”
- It says it opposes xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and discrimination
Note that the first point is stated as an uncontested fact and the second as just what I & D says. Scare quotes by another name. As I said, on its own this is insignificant. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to look for other swallows.
Incidentally, I am 99% sure that when I first saw this story there was no mention of the actual point Godfrey Bloom was making – that legislation designed to give women maternity rights functions as a disincentive to employ women of childbearing age. I distinctly don’t remember, if you see what I mean, this sentence:
“They probably in quite good faith put in a piece of legislation which is designed to protect women in the workplace but what actually happens is it… writes them out of employment.”
I remember not seeing it because as soon as I saw the part of his remarks I did see I thought, I wonder if what he meant was that legislation designed to protect women can have the effect of making employers want to avoid the expense of paying for maternity leave? And I intended to look for his actual words but didn’t get round it, then came back to the Beeb and there they were. Some of them, anyway.
Now this probably isn’t culpable stealth editing.* More probably it is a useful stealth editing: the addition to the story being made after Bloom explained his remarks on today’s Today, and in the light of what he said. However the question remains as to why the BBC couldn’t find space to say that was what he meant in the first place. The original story, my memory insists, simply presented him as a comical dinosaur – and the Ceefax page 117 still does.
*Incidentally, as I say every few months and will add to a FAQ page if ever we make one, even stealth editing is better than no editing at all. Mistakes should be corrected. However there is no need for all the stealth; many newspapers manage a corrections page and the BBC could too. And/or the BBC could actually use the “last updated” field at the top of each story.