Mail on Sunday forces BBC Jesus bastard climbdown

The Mail on Sunday is very proud of itself for “forcing” the removal of message from the BBC boards.

bbc message board

The message, pictured above, refers to Jesus Christ as a B-A-S-T-A-R-D. Pretty innocuous you would think, especially if you take the story seriously in the first place, in which case you have to admit it is actually true.

The Mail complains that the remarks had been “allowed to remain for weeks” in spite of protest from un-named Christian groups, until the MoS contacted senior BBC officials and the post was deleted.

The spin is, of course, that anti-Islam posts are deleted within minutes – but the solution to that isn’t to censor everything that might offend the religious. The Mail can’t resist an opportunity to show off how influential it is while simultaneously highlighting anti-Christian pro-Muslim bias in the liberal media.

They also wheeled out a spokesman for the Church of England who said:

Discussion – including robustly critical discussion – of any faith’s doctrines and practices is an important feature of civilised discourse.

But deliberately or recklessly offensive denigration of those doctrines and practices is unacceptable.

Accept it.


10 Responses to “Mail on Sunday forces BBC Jesus bastard climbdown”

  1. marc says:

    You can see from this why Peter Hitchens writes for them… This from the same “news”paper that brought us the totally baseless scaremongering, “frankenstein food watch”.

    Jesus’s parents, as I recall, weren’t married, ergo, if he existed as described Jesus was a bastard.

    What I don’t get (well, I do, but I think he’s an arse) is the comment from the CofE spokesman. If a “robustly critical discussion” is so important, why should we edit out important facts? MWW people should get on that board and make this point to the BBC editors in spades. Bastard is a perfectly acceptable English noun to describe a child born to unmarried parents even though (as Chamber’s Dictionary notes) may be offensive in some contexts. In this case the writer was pointing out a fact.

  2. marc says:

    P.S. reading the comments (the *published* comments) at the Daily Mail’s website suggest that free-speech is alive and well, so long as the Mail’s right-wing agenda agrees with it.

  3. mark says:

    Even by Daily Mail standards, this story is quite ridiculous.

    But the more worrying thing is the way this story is making its way around the rest of the media, all putting the same spin as the Daily Mail: http://news.google.com/news?rls=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&um=1&tab=wn&q=jesus+bastard&btnG=Search+News

  4. marc says:

    Lazy journalism, pure ad simple. Time to join that message board methinks.

  5. Tim Ireland says:

    There’s some quite shocking censorship going on at the Daily Mail website, and it mostly seems to involve a refusal to publish any weighty criticism of that newspaper.

    Take just one example; the widely-blogged and (elsewhere) much-discussed ‘Happy Families’ feature still has two only published comments:
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=468633&in_page_id=1879

  6. marc says:

    The way they’re going on, you’d think that we were discussing Fox News – who recently got caught red-handed (as did the CIA) editing entries on Wikipedia.

  7. Hannibal says:

    “…you’d think that we were discussing Fox News – who recently got caught red-handed (as did the CIA) editing entries on Wikipedia…”

    As did the saintly BBC of course.

  8. marc says:

    “As did the saintly BBC of course.”

    Seems like everyone has their corporate dick in the cookie jar! Course, it rather depends what the BBCs edits were. Fox and the CIA were being very naughty.

    Point still remains that the Beeb didn’t remove the entirely correct bastard reference until the right-wing Mail leaned hard on them: and then crowed trimumphantly about it.

  9. Carl says:

    Silly season story – there’s a lot of them about at the moment. No schools, no parliament, no councils – ergo, very little in the way of material to fill the paper. That’s why they go to town on other items – eg, Foot and Mouth, hurrican, deportation of Mr Lawrence killer, etc.

    For another example of a story which would normally not make more than a “news in brief”, check the laughable “Taxpayers Alliance” story about “mickey mouse university courses” story in every paper.

  10. marc says:

    I don’t normally read the papers – I’m with Mark Twain on that one and I’d rather be uninformed rather than misinformed. Besides, I get the news I really need right here and it isn’t politically motivated; unlike the donation that the “Muslim Friends of Labour” gave to the party recently. I wonder when the Scientologist Friends of Labour will appear? Seems they’re already working hard in Croydon if memory serves.