Mid-afternoon yesterday news broke here that UK defence giant BAE Systems has won a £20bn contract to build frigates for the Australian navy and many people immediately began looking to the BBC to report this good news:
But the BBC didn't report it for several hours. As Sisypus noted on the open thread, "6pm News: does the BBC lead with Guido's story that Australia is ordering nine anti-submarine warships from BAE Systems? Of course not - they bury it!"
The BBC News website began reporting it at 7.20 pm last night, as per Newssniffer.
Newsniffer also reveals, in fascinating detail, how that BBC website report changed - and always in the direction of 'dampening' the good news for the UK.
The original version says:
Defence analysts said the deal represented a significant success for British naval exports.
In Version 1 this changes to:
As the frigates will be built in Australia, BAE's shipyards on the Clyde in Glasgow are unlikely to see a significant boost to jobs.
Nevertheless, defence analysts said the deal represented a significant success for British naval exports.
Version 2 corrects an error in the previous two versions. For over five hours since the first report, the BBC report had begun:
British defence giant BAE Systems has won a multi-million pound contract from the Australian government to build nine new warships, marking a significant victory for British military exports.
In Version 2, at 0.35 am this morning, they finally got it right:
British defence giant BAE Systems has won a multi-billion pound contract from the Australian government to build nine new warships, marking a significant victory for British military exports.
(Isn't it extraordinary that such a basic error in the opening paragraph of such an important story remained unnoticed and uncorrected for over five hours?)
Version 3 reverts to the 'dampening' process. Paragraphs 2-4 in the second version read:
BAE beat Italian and Spanish rivals to win a large slice of the £19.6bn ($25.7bn; A$35bn) spending programme.
The ships will be built in Australia, but are based on the Type 26 design BAE is building for the Royal Navy.Theresa May said the deal was "an enormous boost" for the UK economy..
In the third version this changes to:
BAE beat Italian and Spanish rivals to win a large slice of the £19.6bn ($25.7bn; A$35bn) spending programme.
The ships will be based on anti-submarine frigates that BAE is building for the UK's Royal Navy.
However, the new warships will be built in Australia by a local workforce.(Mrs May gets dropped down several paragraphs).
It's as if the BBC is trying to make a point here....
....a point they also seemed to be making on last night's BBC1 News at Ten, where they gave the story just 17 seconds (though at least they got the billions/millions point correct, unlike their online colleagues!):
The defence giant BAE Systems has secured a £20 billion contract from the Australian Navy. It's ordered nine of a new type of ship designed to detect submarines. The Prime Minister has welcomed the deal although the ships will be built in Australia where the work will secure 4,000 jobs there.
(Note how News at Ten didn't say "the UK defence giant" there.)
In fact, as I watched that live last night it struck me that the word "there" was a very conscious addition as it was surplus to requirement. The sentence, "The Prime Minister has welcomed the deal although the ships will be built in Australia where the work will secure 4,000 jobs", is grammatically correct and complete by itself. Adding "there" to the end of it is grammatically redundant, serving no purpose, as it merely repeats what has already been said - "the ships will be built in Australia where the work will secure 4,000 jobs". It's an example of tautology:
Nevertheless, the adding of "there" to the end there did serve a purpose: to make the point even harder for BBC viewers to miss that the UK isn't going to gain job-wise out of this great deal, only Australia - an added emphasis made even more emphatic as Fiona Bruce paused slightly after "jobs" and, thus, emphasised it even more.
Again, it's hard not to see this as the BBC very deliberately making a point about a major deal that a lot of Brexit supporters had been enthusing about as a wonderful example of the UK forging ahead, 'despite Brexit'.
It's as if the BBC was doggedly trying to downplay it and to neutralise its 'good news' potential - especially for people here in the UK, 'despite Brexit'.
It is a constant of BBC reporting that 'jobs' in manufacturing industry are all about 'metal bashing' yet as with the Trident replacement programme a lot of the work is design and project management (the sort of thing girls can do!), relatively well-paid and high skill.
ReplyDeleteWhile the hulls of the ships will be built in Australia it will be surprising if much of the content, (the 'high skill' stuff) isn't UK-sourced.
There are no silver-lined clouds in BBC land and their silver clouds are paper thin and filled with 'buts' and as many negatives that they can drum up.
I missed the sour 'analysis' in the online report from Douglas Fraser, Scotland business editor. It ends:
Delete"However, this looks like a design which was heavily subsidised by the UK taxpayer, being sold overseas, and wholly to the benefit of BAE Systems. It appears that the UK taxpayer sees none of the direct payback or royalties from that investment."
Yes, the BBC only like to report negatively about UK industry. There was another example of a British firm selling hundreds of lawn mowers to Russia for maintenance of all the world cup football pitches. It received a couple of sentences on the business pages.
DeleteThe owner of the firm concerned is English - living and working well away from the clutches of London and the BBC. Had there been an ethnic dimension such as there was for the manufacture of traditional cricket balls a year or two ago, then we would have been force-fed the glory of such a firm.
I only wish we had a Government truly dedicated to promoting our re-industrialisation, moving us away from the corrupt casino economy centred on the City that successive chancellors have backed.
DeleteThere's more from the BBC business pages today: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44659500
Delete'Steel firm Thyssenkrupp backs Tata merger'. What about Brexit? The word doesn't appear throughout the whole article. It must be a serious worry to the BBC that these pesky businesses establish their own trade deals for the future - despite Brexit.
I you were to travel along the A50 in Staffordshire, you would see that JCB are expanding their factories and warehouses with new road layouts and bridges. Their own machines are cleverly displayed working of major earth-moving operations.
DeleteThe once small agricultural market town of Uttoxeter is expanding rapidly as a result of the introduction of high-skilled employment in the area, if the recent opening of stores such as Waitrose and Majestic and a new cinema complex are anything to go by.
This is business and employment at the heart of England - well away from London. The success of JCB with its stated pro-Brexit policies hold very little interest for the BBC.
Re, Steel firm Thyssenkrupp backs Tata merger' ... Perhaps the Dutch and German owners have decided that a post-Brexit UK will be a better launchpad into global markets than from their existing base within the EU - especially into the UK's traditional markets and the US.
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