Posts tagged bbc
Fake Blogs and Social Media Accounts Smear Exiled Iranian Journalists
Via The Guardian:
Iran has been conducting a smear campaign designed to intimidate Iranian journalists living in exile, including apparent death threats. Cyber-activists linked to the Islamic republic have fabricated news, duplicated Facebook accounts and spread false allegations of sexual misconduct by exiled journalists, while harassment of family members back in Iran has been stepped up by security officials.
Staff at the BBC’s Persian service in London are among dozens of Iranian journalists who have been subjected to what appears to be an operation sponsored by the authorities and aimed at discrediting reporters in the eyes of the public in Iran…
…In recent weeks, the pro-regime activists have set up a number of fake Facebook accounts and blogs, purporting to belong to BBC journalists or their Iranian colleagues. Web users who want to access the real BBCPersian.com, might accidentally visit its counterfeit at persianbbc.ir. The fake site mirrors the BBC’s site in design and fonts but has completely different content...
…Nafiseh Kouhnavard, a presenter on BBC Persian’s talkshow Your Turn, is one of the victims. In a fake Facebook account that carries her name and picture, she supposedly confesses to a culture of extramarital relationships among journalists working for the BBC’s Persian service. The fake comments attributed to Kouhnavard were reproduced extensively in Iran.
“You wrote about my relationships with my colleagues,” she is falsely quoted by a national newspaper in Iran as saying. “Swinging … is not only limited to me, in fact it is common and normal here.”
First carried in Vatan-e-Emrooz daily, the fake material has since been republished by state-affiliated news organisations. The fabricated contents are usually chosen carefully to target the most sensitive issues in Iran, especially among conservatives wary of western lifestyles.
The Guardian, Iran creates fake blogs in smear campaign against journalists in exile.
The playbook for beating bureaucracy and kicking butt in online news (from the BBC?)
What!? We’re saying that you could look to the BBC, that bastion of guidelines, policies, multiple reporting lines and warring fiefdoms, for a lesson in decisive, agile product launches? Strange times indeed.
This is a special case, though; BBC News Online, before the iPlayer, made the single greatest argument for the BBC’s ongoing value in the digital era. It reaches huge audiences, the content is top notch, as is its user experience.
On the 15th anniversary of the BBC News Online launch, UK tech site The Register has the inside story of how a handful of brilliant political operators, nuanced technical architects, and journalism visionaries navigated Aunty’s byways to build one of the worlds greatest news services.
Scoop! The inside story of the news website that saved the BBC has four parts:
- The ah-ha! moment in 1996 when BBC Director General John Birt saw a news online prototype, ignored the question of whether the BBC had the legal right to go ahead and the team took a skunkworks approach.
- The team building phase when content-focussed technologists made the crucial decisions of which systems to tap into, which systems to bypass, and how to get journalists to change their production process.
- Picking the right battles; co-operating with branding, sidestepping back-office tech, paring back stakeholders.
- Nurturing the newborn; featuring the wonderfully snide label for the BBC Online head office “Powerpoint House”.
For me, who worked in a similar bureaucracy for twelve years, The Register’s story raises an interesting question. Now, we can clearly see that the BBC news online team’s political effort, conflict, and compromises were, for all the pain they caused at the time, a minuscule price to pay to start the service. But that’s partially because they were leveraging a gigantically powerful and valuable journalism operation; the BBC. If you had to fight the same-sized political battle in a tiny news operation, there’d be a temptation to start a new business outside old practices and organizations, and you’d expect the cause of journalism to be better off. Bureaucracy is a fact of life at a big organization like the BBC, to be minimized wherever possible, but inevitable at some level. There’s clearly a continuum between a small-town newspaper and the BBC, and somewhere along that continuum the reward for political effort is greater than the cost. Where’s your company?
—Fergus
Twitter is not just a closed coffee shop among friends. It goes out to hundreds of thousands of people and you must take responsibility for it. It is not a place where you can gossip and say things with impunity, and we are about to demonstrate that.
Andrew Reid, lawyer for Former Tory Party treasurer Alistair McAlpine, to the Daily Mirror. Tweet revenge: Tory to sue 10,000 Twitter users who branded him a paedo.
The News: Earlier this month the BBC’s Newsnight aired a program about an unresolved sex abuse scandal that took place in UK children’s homes in the 1970s and 1980s. In it, Newsnight linked an unnamed Conservative Party member to the crimes but, oddly, never actually named him.
Soon, however, Twitter users were identifying Alistair McAlpine as the unnamed politician. Which he isn’t, or wasn’t, as the case may be.
In the aftermath, the BBC’s director general George Entwistle resigned and two BBC news executives, Helen Boaden, and her deputy, Stephen Mitchell have “stepped aside.”
Now, McAlpine intends to sue those who tweeted and/or retweeted the allegations. The Daily Mirror reports that 10,000 people have been identified.
Today, I also read the diary written for the BBC (in Urdu) and published in the newspaper. My mother liked my pen name ‘Gul Makai’ and said to my father ‘why not change her name to Gul Makai?’ I also like the name because my real name means ‘grief stricken’.
My father said that some days ago someone brought the printout of this diary saying how wonderful it was. My father said that he smiled but could not even say that it was written by his daughter.
14-year-old Malala Yousafzai, in her 2009 diary for BBC Urdu, about life under Taliban rule.
She wrote the series under a pen name until the Taliban were driven out of Swat, after which her identity was known and she won a national award for bravery, as well as a nomination for an international children’s peace award.
On Tuesday, she was shot.
BBC reports:
A Pakistani Taliban spokesman told the BBC they carried out the attack.
Ehsanullah Ehsan told BBC Urdu that they attacked her because she was anti-Taliban and secular, adding that she would not be spared.
Malala Yousafzai was travelling with at least one other girl when she was shot, but there are differing accounts of how events unfolded.
One report, citing local sources, says a bearded gunman stopped a car full of schoolgirls, and asked for Malala Yousafzai by name, before opening fire.
But a police official also told BBC Urdu that unidentified gunmen opened fire on the schoolgirls as they were about to board a van or bus.
She was hit in the head and, some reports say, in the neck area by a second bullet, but is now in hospital and is reportedly out of danger. Another girl who was with her at the time was also injured.
FJP: Horrifying.
BBC Syria Coverage Uses Wrong Photo from Wrong Country and Wrong Year
The BBC published the photo above yesterday to illustrate the massacres taking place in Houla, Syria.
Problem is, the photo was taken by Marco di Lauro south of Baghdad in 2003.
Via the Telegraph:
Mr di Lauro, who works for Getty Images picture agency and has been published by newspapers across the US and Europe, said: “I went home at 3am and I opened the BBC page which had a front page story about what happened in Syria and I almost felt off from my chair.
“One of my pictures from Iraq was used by the BBC web site as a front page illustration claiming that those were the bodies of yesterday’s massacre in Syria and that the picture was sent by an activist.
“Instead the picture was taken by me and it’s on my web site, on the feature section regarding a story I did In Iraq during the war called Iraq, the aftermath of Saddam. “What I am really astonished by is that a news organization like the BBC doesn’t check the sources and it’s willing to publish any picture sent it by anyone: activist, citizen journalist or whatever. That’s all.”
He added he was less concerned about an apology or the use of image without consent, adding: “What is amazing it’s that a news organization has a picture proving a massacre that happened yesterday in Syria and instead it’s a picture that was taken in 2003 of a totally different massacre.”
FJP Pro Tip: a reverse image search could have flagged this photo in seconds. Where to do it? We use Google Image Search (instead of typing a search term in the text box select the camera icon which allows you to either enter the URL of an image or upload one) and Tineye (the process is the same).
Image: An Iraqi girl jumps over body bags containing skeletons found in the desert south of Baghdad. Marco di Lauro, 2003.
1. The model which has guided many people’s thinking in this area, the 1/9/90 rule, is outmoded. The number of people participating online is significantly higher than 10%.
Above is just one finding of 6 by BBC’s Holly Goodier, who has spent a good deal of time assessing online participation patterns in the UK. Here are the other 5, which she and her team culled from a general agreement that the former audience is becoming more and more active online:
2. Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way.
3. This has been driven by the rise of ‘easy participation’: activities which may have once required great effort but now are relatively easy, expected and every day. 60% of the UK online population now participates in this way, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.
4. Despite participation becoming relatively ‘easy’, almost a quarter of people (23%) remain passive - they do not participate at all.
5. Passivity is not as rooted in digital literacy as traditional wisdom may have suggested. 11% of the people who are passive online today are early adopters. They have the access and the ability but are choosing not to participate.
6. Digital participation now is best characterised through the lens of choice. These are the decisions we take about whether, when, with whom and around what, we will participate. Because participation is now much more about who we are, than what we have, or our digital skill.
See here for more on the 1/9/90 rule.
The BBC Approves this Camera
Via the British Journal of Photography:
Canon has today announced that its Cinema EOS C300 camera “has met the standards the BBC requires from cameras tested to the EBU recommendation EBU R118.”
The approval allows both internal and external BBC production teams to use the EOS C300 “for the production of a variety of programmes to be broadcast on the BBC’s range of HD channels.”
In a separate article the BJP writes about the camera’s technical details and how it was created.
BBC Attacked by Iran’s Cyber Army?
On March 1, parts of the BBC were unable to access e-mail and other internet services, possibly due to an attack caused by its systems being overwhelmed by a flood of external communication requests.
Recent attempts were also made to disrupt the Persian Service’s London phone-lines through multiple automatic calls and to jam two BBC Satellite feeds into Iran.
Though Director General Mark Thompson would not comment on the details of these attacks, he did write a blog post last month on interference and harassment of BBC Persian service by the Iranian authorities.
via BBC News:
The revelations follow Reporters Without Borders “Enemies of the Internet” report which was released at the start of the week.
The free-speech lobby group reported that Iran and some of the other countries on its register “censor internet access so effectively that they restrict their populations to local intranets that bear no resemblance to the world wide web.”
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard created a “cyber army” in 2010. Hundreds of net users have been arrested and some even sentenced to death.
The BBC is the world’s greatest broadcaster, but it isn’t perfect and it does sometimes get things wrong.
BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten.
So, to ensure amends are made more quickly and apologies are administered when appropriate, the BCC is launching a corrections and clarifications page online, and due to recruit a new chief complaints editor. BCC Trust has also outlined 7 new proposals to improve the efficiency of the complaints process, which are open for public assessment.
via journalism.co.uk:
This comes as titles in the newspaper industry introduce such columns within their printed pages, as launched by the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday and the Metro last year. In evidence to the Leveson inquiry at the beginning of this year, editor of the Telegraph Tony Gallagher also said he “may need to consider” the introduction of a corrections column ”in due course”.
The proposals can be viewed here.
Designing the News
While at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, Johnny Selman monitored the BBC and created a poster out of each day’s “most important” news. The result is BBCx360.
Via Imprint:
“The purpose of this project is to promote the awareness of global current events with the American public,” Selman wrote in the introduction to his website. “‘American citizens know little about current events in general and even less about overseas events’ according to The Washington Post in 2006.”
Shown here:
- May 7, 2011 - Libya ‘scatters mines’ in Misrata
- August 29, 2011 - Colombia’s long task to identify conflict victims
- August 16, 2011 - Tibetan monk burns himself to death in China
- April 23, 2011 - Syria protests: Security forces shoot at mourners
- April 19, 2011 - India: Haryana widows battered to death
Visit BBCx360 to view this exceptional project.
BBC World Service To Run Ads On Some Websites And Radio Stations
From paidContent.org
The BBC Trust has approved plans to run advertising on a number of BBC World Service websites as well as in radio broadcasts for the first time in the corporation’s history.
BBC World Service has been given the green light to run ads on the Arabic, Russian and Spanish websites, which the trust says will put it “on a par with the BBC’s international-facing website BBC.com”.
The World Service, which has seen its budget slashed by £46m a year resulting in more than 600 job losses, has been asked by the government to generate £3m from commercial activities by 2013/2014….
Plans to launch advertising on BBC.com faced fierce criticism from some sectors of the media industry, nevertheless ads have been running on the website since late 2007.
Well, hello.
Image: A young golden snub-nosed monkey in China’s Qinling Mountains. Cyril Ruoso via the BBC.
How News Organizations Can Help Battle Internet Censorship
Internet censorship is growing throughout the world, according to a study conducted by the Canada Centre for global security studies and Citizen Lab, and the BBC.
“This problem of Internet control is becoming an issue for more than human rights concerns,” Ronald Deibert, director of the Centre, tells the New York Times. ”The fact is that you have dozens of countries not just filtering for porn, but political filtering and key events as well.”
Called Casting a Wider Net (PDF), the study focusses on China and Iran where the BBC has a pilot program to provide proxy services to citizens in an attempt to to get around censorship barriers.
Key takeaways from the report include understanding circumvention tools such as Web proxies as publishing tools or “channels” in and of themselves that help drive content to audiences; an understanding that blocking is unpredictable and often occurs when particular news breaks; and that different methods should be simultaneously deployed such as Web proxies, email newsletters and Twitter posts in order to reach core audiences.
Images: Web Proxy and Twitter logins, and replacement proxy logins circa July 2011 in China.
Report (PDF).
The Guardian vs the BBC
The Guardian created a 3D interactive timeline of its coverage of the UK Riots. The BBC created an audio collage of voices talking about the UK Riots. Combine them, and you get something like this.
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