Butterflies

First they altered the BBC Style Guide to re-write the meaning of the word “gay” to mean same-gender attracted, rather than same-sex attracted, then they used red ink and a rubber to censor the testimony of a female rape victim so as not to offend her male transgender attacker, and now we learn that the BBC hired a trans organisation called Global Butterflies to train BBC staff on trans matters. 

Global Butterflies told them to be 'allies' and use their influence to sway the public and politicians. 

This has understandably raised both eyebrows and hackles:

Mary Harrington: This is a scandal. The BBC is meant to be politically neutral, not hiring ideologues to catechise their HR teams on how to ensure all staff enforce only one one side of perhaps the most controversial and divisive political issue out there.

The fascinating complication in this latest story of trans activism sweeping the BBC is that it was a BBC programme that broke it, with Stephen Nolan continuing his charge against trans extremism at the BBC. 

The BBC is still evidently caught in something of a civil war on the issue. 

Fisking 'an Arabic speaker'

Talking about The Critic, I read a striking denunciation there yesterday from Oz Katerji. It was one last fisking, so to speak - of the late Independent foreign correspondent Robert Fisk. 

The piece's headline, Fabricator and fraudster, sums it up what Oz thinks of Mr Fisk - though he later adds "fantasist" as well. 

In a nutshell, Oz Katerji believes that Bob Fisk was an unethical anti-American/anti-Israeli propagandist who built a successful career by making things up and getting away it, and he's aghast at the "veneration" displayed in some of the obituaries of him. 

The BBC was one of those who gave him what Oz would probably regard as a whitewashed obituary, with Jeremy Bowen  - a self-declared "admirer" - leading the eulogy. 

(Anti-Israel Jeremy and anti-Israel Bob always mutually admired each other). 

Oz Katerji puts the "veneration" of Robert Fisk down to the fact that "like him, they preferred to tell a story that was not true, because stories are often far more comforting than the reality."

One passage in the Critic piece struck me in the light of the BBC's obituary. The BBC, while saying how "highly regarded",  says, in passing: "Fisk, an Arabic speaker". Oz regards that as fake news:

So let’s separate the myths from the facts. Fisk did not speak fluent Arabic, not even after living in the Middle East for more than 40 years. Leaving aside the testimony of Arabic speakers who worked alongside him, his lack of basic knowledge of the language is contained multiple times within his own work, such as his inability to tell the difference between the words “mother” and “nation” in a well-known Ba’athist slogan.

One for the BBC's fact checkers?

Performing somersaults with gusto

An editorial at The Critic points out something that doesn't get pointed out enough: "No one in BBC management ever pays a price for the BBC’s mistakes — they just happen, like the weather".

(Poor hapless George Entwistle, who arrived as DG at precisely the wrong moment and lasted just 54 days, is the most obvious exception to the rule).

We know [the BBC] has been paying itself far too much for years because its defence now is that it’s no longer doing so. Yet if you boast about cutting Gary Lineker’s income, for example, by £400,000, who takes responsibility for having overpaid him so much for so long? No one. For years, the official BBC line on pay was: we can’t tell you what we’re paying ourselves because otherwise all our talent will be snatched away (by namelessly wealthy rival employers, they live in the next media village, you wouldn’t know them). Then it was obliged to tell us and the line became: we’re worth it. This was followed by, we’re sorry, our pay structure was racist and sexist — who did that? — but now it’s not: give us more money please.

On a related theme, there's an amusing story from Patrick Kidd in The Times today: 

For the Tory leadership contest 30 years ago this week, Radio 4 sent three wise men to follow the stars: Steve Richards with Michael Heseltine, Huw Edwards with Douglas Hurd and Robert Orchard with John Major. If only the IT hadn’t been in the hands of asses. The first technology failure came when someone played the wrong pre-recorded bulletin after the first ballot, announcing that Heseltine had won. At the second ballot the studio producer failed to hear Richards bellowing “Come to me now! Now!” in his ear and so missed Hezza’s concession speech, while Edwards was “apoplectic” that his magisterial analysis of Hurd chucking it in was binned because the radio car sent to relay his report couldn’t find anywhere to park. “It was all a serious cock-up,” Richards says. “As usual, those responsible got promoted.”