Comments on: Mail on Sunday forces BBC Jesus bastard climbdown

By: marc

marc — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 15:31:06 +0000

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.

By: Carl

Carl — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 09:00:29 +0000

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.

By: marc

marc — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 22:46:42 +0000

“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.

By: Hannibal

Hannibal — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 20:33:57 +0000

“…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.

By: marc

marc — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:47:49 +0000

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.

By: Tim Ireland

Tim Ireland — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:34:55 +0000

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

By: marc

marc — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:25:36 +0000

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

By: mark

mark — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:26:00 +0000

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

By: marc

marc — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:11:05 +0000

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.

By: marc

marc — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:02:29 +0000

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.