Sunday 14 August 2016

You don’t look Judokish

Sudoku, Soduko, Joduko? 

Judoka…. I didn’t know what that meant until the story about Or Sasson hit the headlines. As Craig noted, (great to have you back) (how was Aleppo?) the BBC also got confused, mistaking “Or” for “Os”, which - although it must be quite hard to make a mistake in at two-letter word (or possibly a three-letter word) - was probably because the BBC’s massive Olympic team of reporters and journalists are more familiar with the latter, which is a slang word for Australia, and I suppose also an abbreviation for “Ossie”, as in Oswald, Oscar or Ostrich. 

(No such mistake was made with the opponent’s name"Islam el-Shehaby" which is obviously more familiar to the Beeb.) 



There have been quite a few political incidents in Rio, which the BBC has reported in their scrupulously impartial manner, not wanting to be caught out while making an unseemly value-judgement. The Lebanese bus incident, in particular, was notable for this,  and the subsequent reprimand -  did the BBC mention the reprimand? 

However my point is that several commenters have defended Egyptian Islam el-Shehaby (or possibly Islam el-Shebaby) on the premise that he made a ground-breaking, nay, defiant  decision by actually appearing with Or (or Ori ) the Israeli in the first place, and he certainly wasn’t going to risk adding insult to injury by looking pleased about it as well.

Since the BBC has made such a big deal about Saudi and other hijabbed women being ‘allowed’ to compete,  I thought they might at least have taken an interest in the cultures that let their political and religious cultural customs override those noble Olympian principles. 

But, no. All that nonsense is accepted without a murmur.  Nary a value judgment to be seen.

I think I said this once before, and I might say it several times more, but we’re not the only ones who regard the BBC as you-know-what.  Do look at the comments below Rod Liddle’s piece here, about those Norwegians. 

Is it time for Craig and me to retire? Nothing would please me more than to become redundant. 

From this blog, anyway. 

We could start another blog entitled “The BBC isn’t Biased”. Catchy though, eh?

1 comment:

  1. I'll just lift one of those comments before Rod Liddle's piece, as it makes a point which chimes very strongly with me at the moment:

    Siree • 4 hours ago

    An awful lot of people have been asking similar questions. As an exercise in amusement I've been looking at the latest news and comments on this story on Twitter. I'm not a twitterati and I know that it is a self-selecting commentariat and audience but then so is The Speccie site, and every other news outlet that allows people to post comments. Forgive me if this is a statement of the obvious (it's what I excel at) but what is really interesting is that the media and the "authorities" know by now that the plebs have lost trust in them. It's been going on for a long time and the Brexit vote was only one indicator of this. So what do they do? They merely increase that lack of trust by refusing to give the information they have about incidents like this. Perhaps you can't make public comments when there is a real lack of information but until quite recently people in Europe were not attacked on public transport or in public places with knives, axes, trucks etc. We now know the likely background of the perpetrators and their motivation and the "authorities" should also know that people make assumptions when similar things happen. Assumptions aren't always correct but hey, they've been pretty good over the past year or so. Mental illness, repressed homosexuality and being a "loner" don't cut it. They never really did and explanations along these lines, or no explanation at all, just dropping the subject, actually serve only to increase lack of trust and a suspicion that there really is a conspiracy.

    Anyone hear about the molotov cocktail attack on a bus in St Denis recently? Nope? I thought not. Even the French didn't bother with it initially. It was only because someone uploaded a video to youtube that it was grudgingly reported. In Paris I think, but nowhere else.

    The "authorities" are playing a number of dangerous games and refusal to release information is now pretty high up there.

    http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/08/something-bbc-isnt-telling-us-norwegians/#comment-2836773195

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