Having a blog affords you the chance to share with the world not only your devastating critiques of BBC bias but also your pedantic tendencies.
Having spent over a year now very slowly and carefully reading John Keay's excellent if densely-detailed China: A History I do think that I now know more than I probably ought to about Chinese geography. I can actually tell my Shaanxi from my Shanxi.
So when Kate Silverton told us about a terrible landslide in China on tonight's BBC One news bulletin my nit-picking ears instantly pricked up.
The silver-tongued one said, "There's been a massive landslide in the far-west of the country...(in)...a village in Sichuan province".
Alas, Sichuan is all too prone to devastating landslides. This one occurred in Xinmo village in Maoxian county, Sichuan.
Sichuan, however, is not in the far-west of China. This, courtesy of Google Maps, is where the latest landslide took place:
The BBC-related point is that the BBC prides itself on being the gold standard of world journalism. It's surely not just being pedantic to point out that it sometimes gets its facts wrong. As here.
Silverton is not the most educated or informed of Beeboids. I remember B-BBC commenter Martin (still dearly missed) pointing out how she got some very basic tank detail completely wrong while reporting from the field. Something, as a professional 'freelance' journalist, she could easily have asked her subject about before going to camera. Yet she didn't, fully believing in her own intellectual superiority.
ReplyDelete