Archives for August 2007

We've had a huge response to our item looking at the techniques used in putting together TV news pieces, following the decision of the new editor of 5 News to ban "staged" shots (watch the item here).

The outcome is by no means clear cut. Many thought that editing shots like "noddies" and "reverse questions" should be banned, some on the grounds that they could lead to deception, others that they are just plain old-fashioned and clunky. But many others think any ban would be a gross over-reaction and that as long as the broadcasters use these techniques responsibly there is little problem.

So what is our conclusion on Newsnight?

The first thing to say is that the issue of editing shots is in a different league from the incidents of deception and dishonesty which have caused turmoil in the TV industry in recent months. But if the industry's response to those problems is a new level of transparency towards our viewers then it is surely right to address what we used to call the "magic of television"

• Noddies (the reverse shot of the reporter, illustrated here with Evan Davis, Rosie Millard and Andrew Marr, which is recorded after the interview is over, and used to cover an edit point in an interview)
I'd stop short of a total ban, but we certainly encourage our producers to use them sparingly. On Newsnight we make a lot of longer films and I can imagine if we banned the noddy ending up in a perverse situation where you'd have lots of weird cutaway shots of anxiously clasped hands or white flashes just to avoid a perfectly harmless image of a reporter (apparently) listening to an interview.

• Reverse questions (the reporter or presenter's questions, recorded after the interview is over, when only one camera is available)
We're not going to ban these. Unlike most news programmes we often run exchanges between correspondents and interviewees within our films, rather than just soundbites. If we rejected the reverse question we could end up with a lot of shots of interviewees listening blankly to the interviewer's question, or the equally unnatural "two shot" (a wide shot of interviewer and interviewee talking about what they had for breakfast)

• Walking set-up shots (the shot of the interviewee, very often a politician, walking stiffly past the camera as a means of introduction)
These are banned. Our rule is: don't shoot them and you won't be tempted to use them. But where do you draw the line? Is it wrong to direct anyone to do anything they wouldn't normally be doing - prune the roses, type at a computer - so we can get some shots of them? We have at least one cameraman who believes that and insists on only shooting things that are occurring naturally.

And isn't that the real point of this debate? Viewers demand and expect that what they see in news and current affairs reports is a true representation of what is happening through what they know is an artificial medium. And after that they expect a natural and undistracting viewing experience. If the outcome of this debate is that viewers end up being distracted because they can see all the joins, then we will surely have shot ourselves in the foot.

The Times: Report on Panorama's investigation into dog fighting. (Link)

The Independent: Debate about Five News banning TV editing shots known as "noddies". (Link)

Daily Mail: Richard Littlejohn writes about Newsnight's Stephanie Flanders' interview with David Cameron. (Link) (see comment, below)

A number of newspapers have picked up on a debate at the Edinburgh TV festival in a session entitled "How Green is TV?". Broadcasters debated whether TV should make an assumption in their programmes that man-made climate change is happening or not.

Channel Four's "The Great Global Warming Swindle" came in for sustained criticism from delegates for its alleged loose use of facts. In return, Channel Four representatives criticised the BBC for having a "line" on climate change.

BBC News certainly does not have a line on climate change, however the weight of our coverage reflects the fact that there is an increasingly strong (although not overwhelming) weight of scientific opinion in favour of the proposition that climate change is happening and is being largely caused by man.

BBC news programmes and our website of course reflect alternative views but we do not balance these views mathematically as that is not our judgement about where the argument has now reached.

That is definitely not the same as us propagating a view ourselves about climate change. It's not our job to do that.

In the Edinburgh session the possibility of the BBC doing a "consciousness-raising" event about the subject, possibly called Planet Relief, was raised.

There has been no decision yet about whether there might be such an event, nor what its editorial purpose might be. However it is clear that all BBC programming about climate change - whether about the science itself or the potential policy response by governments - needs to meet the BBC's standards of impartiality.

It is not the BBC's job to lead opinion or proselytise on this or any other subject. However we can make informed judgements and that is what we will continue to do.

The Guardian: Reports that the BBC is to consider banning the use of staged shots in news reports. (link)

Daily Mail: Columnist Keith Waterhouse praises senior BBC executives who have criticised plans to hold a day of programmes dedicated to environmental issues. (link)

President Bush makes a bellicose speech about Iran, President Ahmadinejad reacts, within hours US troops arrest Iranians in Baghdad, and then they are released.

It sometimes seems when covering events between Baghdad, Tehran and Washington that normal news timeframes are compressed as news and information fly between capitals with instant action and reaction.

The days of governments and leaders sitting there waiting for despatches from ambassadors and officials to filter through and then slowly and carefully preparing responses which take another age to find their way back again are over.

With 24 hour news you can cut out the middleman as stories whizz around the globe. We've done a decent job of covering this story on BBC World, including the first reaction from the Americans acknowledging their error in making the arrests.

But the challenge in this speeded up news environment is to keep analysing what's happening behind these events - President Bush's words spoken, no doubt, with one eye on the upcoming Petraeus report, Iran watching a potential vacuum develop and paying close attention to talk of British withdrawal from southern Iraq. It all links together and sometimes the speed of it takes your breath away.

The Independent: Columnist Terence Blacker on the BBC's climate change coverage. (link)

The decisions news editors take could result in the deaths of innocent people. That was the premise of "Terror Tapes", the session I took part in at last weekend's Edinburgh Television Festival.

It was produced by ITV News' Deborah Turness and the BBC's Sam Taylor and used dry ice, countdown clocks, spotlights and partial stories to create a pressurised atmosphere for the panellists. The scenario was set so that there was a danger of being reckless, but also that we could be overly cautious, not reporting parts of a story that should be told.

The scenario began with a shakily sourced report that a "major incident" was taking place in Wilmslow - there was a large police presence and it was suggested that the local chief constable wanted a news blackout.

After some discussion we were asked if we would report the story - there was a ten second countdown, after which I held up my sign saying "no" - I would want to find out a lot more information, not least about why the authorities wanted a blackout - there could be a very good reason why the right of the public to know could be substantially outweighed by the need to protect people (though I would be making preparations to report the story should I need to).

Others on the panel were prepared to report this information. This obviously complicates things - if information is in the public domain, is it better for the BBC to wait and find out more, or to break a blackout that has been substantially weakened?

In my view I was still not ready to go ahead with the report. Don't get me wrong - I passionately believe that my duty is to report the news unless there is an extremely good reason why not - but it would be irresponsible not to find out why the authorities wanted to stop this story being told.

The situation changed when the police revealed some more information. A statement was released saying that a serving British soldier on leave from Iraq had been kidnapped by a radical, home-grown Islamic group - they asked that we keep his identity secret, but gave no reason why. For me this made the situation more straightforward - we would effectively be in rolling news mode on News 24 covering what would have been one of the major news stories of the year, though we would have respected the request not to identify the soldier.

Things did not stay straightforward for long. A video was delivered to us from the kidnappers - it showed a soldier with a noose round his neck in an orange jumpsuit, surrounded by two balaclava-wearing men pointing guns at him. He said that the men holding him would kill him if the tape was not broadcast within an hour.

The authorities insisted that we should not show the tape because the soldier being held was a senior member of the SAS, who worked on undercover operations in Iraq. There was more discussion and after a ten second countdown we had to decide whether to run the tape or not. This time I held up the "Yes" sign. It seemed absurd to me that the authorities had attempted to impose a blanket ban on running the tape - if the man was killed the fact that his identity needed to be kept a secret for operations would be irrelevant… but here's the really key point: editorial decisions are not always yes or no - they are often compromises. What the kidnappers wanted broadcast was what was being said, not the identity of their captive. I would have run the tape, blurring the soldier's face.

In my view the life of the soldier was protected by the decision, and it was the authorities that were being irresponsible.

You could argue that it would be wrong to broadcast terrorist propaganda, but the truth is people are highly unlikely to be radicalised by exposure to this kind of thing, and if they are, there is plenty of it on the internet.

You could also argue that giving people the oxygen of publicity only encourages them more. There is some truth to that claim - but on balance the real life of this soldier outweighed some hypothetical future situation.

Others on the panel would have run the video without disguising the soldier's identity.

The session climaxed with a live shot of the building where the soldier was being held being stormed. Would we play the pictures live?

This time the audience was asked what they would do - about 70 to 80% said they would run them live. Everyone on the panel except me said they would run them live. I said I would run them, but with a significant delay, allowing me time to stop the broadcast if something horrific happened.

This was perhaps the easiest decision of all - in a situation where almost everyone involved has a gun, you cannot be sure what the outcome will be, you could be presenting your audience with scenes of extreme violence, or something totally unforeseen could happen. It could end well, and our competitors would have the story well before us, but when lives are in danger it is irresponsible to let competitive instinct trump the need to do the right thing.

In the end we were shown a clip of a dead hostage. He'd been killed because the kidnappers had access to television, and had been tipped off by broadcasters other than the BBC that the building was about to be stormed.

Why are 600 people naked on a Swiss glacier? How do you fancy seeing the stiletto race in Berlin where women in high heels prove their mettle – and their ankle strength - in a dash against their peers? Perhaps the chicken busters of Miami catches your fancy or even the Butt-Cam – the handy device that helps settle that eternal female dilemma about clothes, bums and body image?

Well all these goodies and more are on Newsbeat’s first ever Oddbox. It’s available now to watch, on the Radio One website or on the BBC News website by clicking here.

Fronted by Dominic Byrne – Newsbeat’s man on the Chris Moyles show – it’s well worth a view if, as Dom says, you’re tucking into your sandwich or bag of crisps – or even if you’re not. If you don’t know Dominic (and eight and a half million people who tune in weekly to the breakfast show do) – he’s a very rare thing: a genuinely funny newsman on the radio. By the way there’s even a Dominic Byrne appreciation society on Facebook if you want to show him some more love.

So what’s Oddbox and why are we doing it? Firstly, they’re video clips we’ve seen during the week that made us laugh and didn’t find their way onto other news bulletins you might have seen - it doesn’t take long to watch and it’s a bit of fun. Why? Why not? If you like it, it’s worth our doing it.

And don’t worry – no important current affairs journalism, investigation or analysis has been harmed in any way in the making of this slot - so it’s not a case of dumbing down or barbarians at the gates.

So you thought Newsbeat was just on the radio? We radio folk increasingly refuse to be bound by such old fashioned thinking. We make films almost every day nowadays – we take pictures on assignment and I can promise there’ll be plenty more visual stuff soon from the Newsbeat stable on our website. Judging from the early high number of hits we’re getting for Oddbox – you like it – so a big thanks from us all!

Daily Telegraph: Anna Ford accuses the BBC of ageism. (link)

Daily Mail: Columnist Richard Littlejohn praises Newsnight Editor Peter Barron's criticism of the BBC's plans to have an entire day of programmes on environmental issues. (link)

If the theme of the first day of the Edinburgh TV Festival was trust, then the buzzword of the second day was "purpose". Jeremy Paxman made a plea for a renewed sense of purpose in the industry in his lecture and Channel 4's Andy Duncan should be in the Guinness Book of Records for the number of times he used the phrase "public purpose".

Today Vint Cerf, the chief evangelist of Google, will set out his vision of the future of the media in his alternative MacTaggart Lecture. Where do the issues of trust and purpose sit when everyone can publish content and there are millions of sources of information to choose from? Let us know what you think.

I promised to post your comments on the walls of our confession box at the Edinburgh TV Festival and can report that they're doing a roaring trade.

Last night Jeremy Paxman gave his assessment of the state of the industry in a passionate speech calling for a new sense of purpose in television. You can read the whole text here, and if you want to leave your comments on that, we'll put some of those on the confessional too.

Daily Telegraph: "Jeremy Paxman will deliver a blistering attack tonight on the television industry's pursuit of ratings." (link)

The Guardian: BBC Director General Mark Thompson writes about what the corporation must do to restore the public's faith in it. (link)

The Times: Article looking ahead to Jeremy Paxman's MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh. (link)

The Guardian: Guide to the Edinburgh TV Festival. (link)

Celebrity endorsement is nothing new. A quick search of Wikipedia reveals even Pope Leo XIII and Queen Victoria were at it as far back as the 19th century. In their cases it was testimonials to heighten interest in patent medicines.

It was probably Band Aid in 1984 which first harnessed the power of celebrity on a mass scale to highlight a particular cause. And since then, charities have become ever more sophisticated in getting their message to a wide audience by tapping into society’s obsession with celebrity.

Breakfast is frequently offered a famous name using their A-list status to draw attention to others less fortunate than themselves. Many of those offers are politely declined but some do end up on the sofa, as did the British-born Hollywood actress Sienna Miller. She’d been to India to highlight the issue of global warming and was interviewed by us, Radio Four’s Today and BBC News 24 as she encouraged society to think about the environment.

Nobody is pretending that her opinion is worth more than others but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what she has to say. She wasn’t gifted six minutes of BBC One air time to preach on the social injustices of climate change.

In fact, she had to defend why we should listen to her opinion and were her actions of flying to India hypocritical, actually increasing her carbon footprint.

On Breakfast, Bill and Kate challenged her repeatedly on her beliefs; she gave an illuminating, insider’s description of how Hollywood, a major, global industry, was adjusting the way it operates in response to concerns over the environmental threat to our planet.

You can’t escape from the fact that Sienna is one of our most in-demand actresses. This doesn’t give her automatic and unchallenged access to our viewers but it does make her well placed to outline the movie industry’s reactions to a worldwide phenomenon.

Daily Mail: Former BBC arts correspondent Rosie Millard on the commotion over how female newsreaders dress. (link)

The Independent: Reports that YouTube is to show adverts during video clips, which will include the BBC's commercial content. (link)

The Times: Figures published by Ofcom reveal that women spend more time on the internet than men, and that the BBC's website is one of the most popular used by them. (link)

Thanks for the huge number of comments you sent (and are still sending) through on the state of the TV industry.

We promised to post them at the Edinburgh TV festival this weekend so that those who make TV can absorb them. We've hired an old confessional box (pictured) which will sit in the foyer of the conference centre - we'll adorn the walls with your thoughts, and invite those who work in the industry to leave theirs too.

Ten years on from the death of Princess Diana, BBC Parliament will show the original broadcast of the funeral service in Westminster Abbey. Prefaced by David Dimbleby, the programme will run through the day exactly as viewers followed the events of ten years ago, from the first movement of the cortege through to the gates of Althorp.

It was a remarkable day, whether you were in London among the crowds or watching on television. From the first distraught gasp as the coffin left Kensington Palace to the flower throwing along the motorway in London’s outskirts, there was no precedent for this. Commentators went back to the funeral of Admiral Nelson to make their comparisons.

The grief of the immediate family shared the stage with the pageantry of a ceremonial funeral. Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a reading, and family politics became state politics in the eulogy of Earl Spencer.

Sir Elton John’s performance of Candle in the Wind is being shown again, I think, for the first time in this broadcast.

We did think long and hard about whether such a deeply personal event as a young mother’s funeral could be treated as part of our shared television history, and broadcast again in this way. Given the other public events on this tenth anniversary, including the commemorative concert for Diana and the Service of Thanksgiving in the Guard’s Chapel (BBC One, 1100, Friday 31 August) we took the view that the re-broadcast could be part of that sequence of programming.

BBC Parliament has taken whole programmes from the television archive before, for national occasions. We showed the Queen’s Coronation on its 50th anniversary and the State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill on its 40th.

In contrast to the informality of most of present day life, BBC Parliament offers space for events which otherwise may only be witnessed in short clips. In the last few months we’ve shown contemporary speeches, in full, from the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Authenticity is a hallmark of this channel – stemming from our core remit to show parliamentary debate and political speeches in full and without commentary. In the broadcast of the funeral of Princess Diana, the channel will keep to the original format: showing the programme 4 by 3. This allows you to watch the whole picture, undistorted, as it was meant to be seen.

The programme begins at 0825 on Saturday 1 September and runs through until 1605.

Daily Mail: Reports that some viewers have complained to the BBC about a Ten O'Clock News trailer featuring newsreader Emily Maitlis. (link)

The Sun: "The BBC is to rerun Princess Diana's funeral in full to mark the tenth anniversary of her death." (link)

This weekend around 2000 representatives of the television industry will gather in Edinburgh for the International TV Festival. Traditionally the festival offers the chance for those for make their living in TV to discuss the issues and challenges of the moment and, yes, indulge in plenty of socialising and networking too.

As one of the organisers of the event, I've been involved in planning what to discuss. To be honest, it's been a bit of a no-brainer in what has already been coined TV's annus horribilis. The crisis of trust in TV - painfully exposed in a series of revelations about phoney phone-ins and faked footage - will rightly dominate the discussion both on the floor of the festival and in the bars and restaurants, kicking off with the MacTaggart lecture from our own Jeremy Paxman.

But rather than contemplating our own navels all weekend we are also keen to hear what the all-important consumers of TV have made of the year's turbulent events. Several sessions will use opinion polling and vox pops from viewers, but here is your opportunity to send a message direct to the people who make and run TV in Britain.

Post your thoughts about the current state of television (not just TV news or the BBC) here, and we'll make sure they are posted both on the festival website and on the walls of the conference centre. How has your view of TV changed as a result of the events of the last few months? How well has the TV industry responded to the crisis? Has the newspapers' reporting of TV's predicament been proportionate?

Be as rude as you like, but no obscenities please or we won't be able to put your comment up.

Daily Mail: Columnist Richard Littlejohn accuses the BBC of being afraid of offending Muslims but not other religious groups. (link)

The Independent: Newsnight editor Peter Barron on his life in the media. (link)

The Guardian: Interview with Panorama reporter John Sweeney. (link)

Daily Telegraph: Reports that the BBC had to remove comments from a Radio Five Live message board after complaints from religious groups. (link)

Observant visitors to our website will have noticed a new feature which we added yesterday. From now on, you will find social bookmarking links at the bottom of all the stories on the BBC News website.

This is what they look like, and you can see how they work by clicking on any story - here's a random example.

If you're not familiar with the concept of social bookmarking, these are sites which allow you to store, tag and share links across the internet. You can share these links both with friends and people with similar interests, and you can also access your links from any computer you happen to be using.

So if you read a BBC story that you find interesting, and you want to save for future reference or share it with other people, simply click on one of these links to do so. All the sites we've chosen are free to use, but they do require you to register before you can begin bookmarking.

We're not the first - or the only - news website to offer these buttons. Others, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have also added this functionality, and you'll see similar links on many popular blogs. We hope that adding them to BBC News pages will encourage more people to use these services, and in turn, to use them to highlight interesting BBC content.

You can find out more about social bookmarking in this Wikipedia entry.

As you'll see on that page, there are a huge number of social bookmarking sites out there. The five sites we've chosen - Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Facebook and Stumbleupon - are those which we believe are going to be most useful to our audience. We'd be interested in what you think, though, so please do let us know.

A striking blonde A-level student ripped open the envelope containing her results, grabbed her best friend and literally leapt around with joy as she saw she had got the grades she needed to read English at university. Then slowly, as the interview continued, her face crumpled as the realisation dawned that she had got an A grade in the wrong subject, and a B in English, which might not be enough to secure her place.

As a viewer (and programme editor) I lived the moment with her and sat open-mouthed as she rushed off camera to check it out, leaving our reporter to wrap up the item and hand back.

That was yesterday morning’s edition of BBC Breakfast. A live programme. You can't make it up. And we don't.

So I am wondering about Mark Lawson's source of information for his piece in yesterday's Guardian in which he claims we've recently started to repeat live discussions, where previously we might have run a TAPE of an earlier version.

He is quite simply wrong. We have never run tape repeats of interviews and certainly have never pretended a tape was live. We are not currently obsessed with 'honesty' as he suggests - we have always been obsessed with honesty.

The reason we don’t run tapes is because it looks and feels repeated. Why would we say “here is an interview we did earlier”, when we can ask the guests to stay on, and with a new contributor, discuss the issue again? Something new might emerge, and often does.

Our audience knows they are watching a live show and apart from pre-filmed features and news clips, that is what they get, gaffes and all.

So yes, we repeat things at times on a three and a quarter hour programme, but very different audiences are watching.

As Mark correctly points out, not many people see the show from beginning to end (37 minutes on average at the last count). Sometimes the guest even appears on several BBC platforms consecutively. We think that can offer good value for the licence fee payer, as many different consumers of BBC News benefit from one booking.

If you were watching for longer you might have seen our A-level student interviewed on BBC News 24 later in the morning, when she confirmed that she hadn't got her first choice of university but was hoping she would get her second. As I said, live TV – the same story but it had moved on.

UPDATE 1500: BBC Breakfast presenter Sian Williams has also written a response to Mark Lawson's article here...

Read the rest of this entry

The Independent: Columnist Terence Blacker on why the BBC shouldn’t always feel the need to apologise. (link)

Press Gazette: Despite radio listening figures being at an all time high, the BBC’s audience share has fallen.(link)

There was significant interest in our piece yesterday on the online tool that shows the identity of organisations where employees have changed Wikipedia pages.

The focus of the story was changes the CIA had made to pages, but other organisations - including The Vatican, the US Democratic Party and US company Diebold - didn’t escape our attention.

Words like glass, house and stones spring to mind, because we weren’t exactly sharp about the other obvious question that springs to mind... What about people inside the BBC?

This was an irritating oversight. Some of you have written to complain, others have given the issue a significant airing online (see here, here and here) and beyond.

I still think it was a good piece to write, but we should have asked the question about ourselves - and reflected it in the report - before it was published. That may be the sound of the barn door closing, but we have now put a line at the end of the story about the BBC and the fact that the Wikipedia scanner shows updates from people at IP addresses traceable back to the BBC.

Some of the examples are pretty unedifying, but for every dodgy one there are many, many more uncontroversial edits where people at the BBC have added information or changed a detail in good faith. The scanner also shows the same kind of results for a wide variety of other media organisations.

So what are my conclusions on all this? People from the BBC interacting with social networking sites seems like an entirely proper thing. We are only part of the web, after all, and we should be willing to freely link off to other places and to engage intelligently with some of them.

You are hardly the brightest button if you choose to make unpalatable updates to Wikipedia when you are sitting at a BBC computer, but policing every keystroke of more than 20,000 staff is impossible. One thing is clear – when BBC staff choose to get involved, they should behave well and not in a way that flies in the face of BBC values or risks bringing the BBC into disrepute.

Having said that, I think I’ve broken the rules once too. Some time back I noticed Wikipedia had the wrong information about who was in charge of BBC News Interactive. So I wrote a couple of paragraphs about myself which is by all accounts not good form in the Wiki world. Whoops, I’ll leave you to go in and edit that one.

It’s a pretty quiet period for news at the moment - fairly normal for August though - and sometimes it can be a bit of a struggle to find enough stories from around the UK.

Earlier this week our interest was sparked by the news that a group of climate change protesters was setting up camp near Heathrow airport. Two thousand people are expected at the Camp for Climate Action by the weekend and there's the promise of "mass direct action" on Sunday.

It certainly sounds like a story we should be keeping an eye on so we sent a team down there on Monday to take a closer look.

The problem with a story like this is we need to get our team in place just in case something happens, and once they're there we can't leave in case we can't get back in! So, we've now got a satellite truck parked up in a field next to the camp, and will keep it, and the team, there until at least Sunday.

However, so far, not a lot has happened. People are still arriving and although there've been a couple of protests (one at Heathrow and another at Biggin Hill airport) they've been relatively low-key. While our team sit and wait down at the camp, back at base we're trying to make sure that we don't over-report the story just because we've invested in it or just because there's so little else happening in these long, quiet summer days.

The Times: Reports that the BBC has apologised to the Conservative party for using old footage of John Redwood in its coverage of Tory plans to cut red tape. (link)

The Guardian: Marista Leishman talking at the Edinburgh international book festival about her father, Lord Reith. (link)

Financial Times: Reports that the BBC is selling its outside broadcast units, post-production suites and costumes. (link)

We've got used to our news being served instantly, with pictures always available from anywhere in the world, and a correspondent appearing at the scene from a live link soon after. It's one of the reasons why the news channels have thrived - we've been able to use digital technology to satisfy the audience demand for instant information.

So what happens when the pictures or the interviews aren't available straight away? We've had two examples this week of stories where we wanted to provide detailed coverage, but where the logistics or the politics made it much harder to do so.

First, Iraq. The reports started coming through on Tuesday evening that there had been a series of explosions near the city of Mosul. A curfew had been imposed so no journalists were being allowed to enter the area. None of the local news agencies were providing pictures, so throughout Tuesday night and much of Wednesday morning, our coverage was restricted to showing graphic maps of the area, and talking to our team in Baghdad.

Eventually some pictures of people being treated in hospital did emerge, but at the time of writing, there are still no pictures from the scene of the attack. And yet it looks as though it's led to the worst loss of life in Iraq in any incident this year, so we have a clear need to give the story a great deal of prominence.

In our flagship programme World News Today we interviewed our correspondent in Baghdad, Richard Galpin. He was able to pull together information from local sources, and we've also been speaking to the BBC World Service Middle East analyst Roger Hardy, who has briefed us on the Yazidi minority group which has been the target of the attacks. But our staff are still trying to get hold of people who can give us direct eyewitness accounts and paint a more accurate picture of exactly how many people have been killed or injured.

The slightly easier task is to place the event in some sort of context - who might be behind the attacks, what they are hoping to achieve, what reaction has there been from the Iraqi government and from the White House. But first-hand accounts of what happened are vital to our reporting.

The same is true of the floods in North Korea. The problems for us are similar - we know there has been a major loss of life, and unusually the North Koreans have asked for help. That in itself is seen as an indication of the seriousness of the situation. But North Korea is a closed country and Western journalists are rarely allowed to report from there.

We have a team based in South Korea, and we're trying to get people into the North. But for now we have to rely on pictures emerging either on North Korean television or from any news agencies which are able to operate there.

We have no real idea of how many people have died, or how the rescue effort is progressing. Our journalists continue to push for new information - and these days we also routinely appeal for information on air and on our web pages. But once again, we're struggling to give the story the kind of coverage it probably deserves.

The Times: Reports that the BBC was forced to apologise after Blue Peter presenter Konne Huq appeared with Ken Livingstone as he made a political speech. (link)

Daily Mail: Columnist Stephen Glover accuses the BBC of constantly demonising Margaret Thatcher. (link)

In a blog post entitled How BBC does Labour's dirty work, Iain Dale wrote that our coverage on Sunday of John Redwood's proposals to cut £14bn in red tape gave undue prominence to the Labour party's reaction to them. He writes: "[T]he BBC are starting all their news bulletins about John Redwood's Competitiveness Commission reports with the words...'The Labour Party has today criticised...' This has happened many times before. Instead of concentrating on the substance of a Tory policy announcement the BBC seem to revel in giving Labour Ministers the microphone to explain how whatever the policy happens to be is making the Tories more right wing than Michael Howard."

Voter X, a commenter to the same blog post, said that the use in a TV report of footage of John Redwood "failing abysmally to sing the Welsh Anthem" appeared to be "totally irrelevant and somewhat slanted". It's a line which was picked up in this morning's Sun, which claimed the BBC had made a joke of Mr Redwood's proposals. It also claimed that "the caustic bulletins could have been scripted by Labour ministers".

In retrospect we weren't right to use that footage again, which came from a long time ago. But as for the claims about the wordings of the bulletins, the facts just don't support Iain or the Sun. For the record, here are the opening words from each of our news stories:

BBC One/News 24, 6am: The Conservative leader, David Cameron, is considering radical plans to help businesses cut 14 billion pounds a year by cutting red tape and regulation. The proposals have been put forward by a senior figure on the right of the party, John Redwood. Labour says it's evidence the right had regained control of the Tory agenda.

Radio 4, 8am: "The Conservative leader, David Cameron, is considering radical plans to cut 14 billion pounds in red tape and regulation -- put forward by a senior figure on the right of his party, John Redwood. Labour says it's evidence the right has regained control of the Tory agenda."

Radio 2, 11am: "The Conservative leader, David Cameron, is considering plans to cut fourteen billion pounds in red tape and regulation, put forward by the senior right-winger, John Redwood. Labour says it's evidence those on the right are back in control of the Tory agenda. Mr Redwood wouldn't be drawn on specific details of his proposals."

BBC News website, Ceefax and Digital Text: "Tory leader David Cameron is looking at plans to cut £14bn in red tape and regulation for UK businesses. The plans have been put forward by John Redwood - one of the most senior figures on the Tory right - who called them "a tax cut by any other name". The focus is on easing regulation such as data protection laws, rules on hours, and health and safety regimes. Labour claims the proposals show the party is lurching back to the right in the face of disappointing polls."

Five Live, 11am: "Labour has condemned the latest review of policy carried out by the Conservatives as a lurch back to the right wing of politics. The review -- led by John Redwood -- identifies ways of deregulating business. The secretary of state for business, John Hutton, said the Tories were now more right wing than they had been under William Hague and Michael Howard.

News 24, noon: "The Conservative leader, David Cameron, is considering radical plans which the party claims could save businesses 14 billion pounds a year. The proposals would cut red tape and regulation, including data protection laws, and health and safety legislation.

BBC One, Lunchtime news, noon: "Good afternoon. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, is considering radical plans which would cut fourteen billion pounds in red tape and regulations for businesses in the UK. They've been put forward by the former Cabinet minister, John Redwood. Labour claim that the right wing is taking control of the Tory party."

BBC One, 6.05pm: "It's being called a 'tax cut by any other name'. The Conservative leader David Cameron is considering a radical programme of cuts in red tape and regulation."

BBC One, 10pm: "The Conservative leader David Cameron is considering a radical programme of cuts in red tape and regulation, especially for small businesses."

In addition, John Redwood was interviewed at length about his report by Peter Sissons on BBC One and News 24 on Sunday morning, on Five Live on Sunday, and on Radio 4's World Tonight on Monday. Naturally we included in our coverage the reaction from the Labour party, and also from the LibDems, the CBI and the TUC. There can be a temptation sometimes to present stories as merely matters of party politics, but despite what the Sun says, we believe that we gave good consideration to the substance of the proposals.

The Telegraph: Reports that the launch of the BBC's iPlayer, as well as other video services, could affect the amount people pay for their internet connection. (link)

The Guardian: Debate on the devolution of Scottish broadcasting. (link)

The Guardian: Reports that the BBC World Service Trust has trained several journalists from Liberia and Sierra Leone so they can cover the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor in the Hague. (link)

The Independent: Reports on the success of the BBC's iPlayer trial so far. (link)

The tragic Madeleine McCann story and the enormous public interest in it have created quite a few dilemmas for BBC News (see previous blog entries here, here and here). Many of these have revolved around the lack of hard information in the case.

However the situation that many facts are not reliably established has not stopped many of our press and broadcast colleagues from treating rumour as being newsworthy.

For instance, ITN led last week on a claim that a child like Madeleine had been sighted in Belgium. ITN headlined this with a lurid photo-fit of a suspect abductor with the words "Does this man have Madeleine McCann?"

The BBC gave little prominence to the possible Belgian sighting, on the basis that there have been many previous false sightings.

Yesterday it turned out that DNA tests had shown that the Belgian sighting is very likely to have been false.

However the endless reporting of Madeleine rumours is something BBC News sometimes needs to take account of. Millions of our viewers and users remain strongly interested in any information about her.

This week we have a team in Portugal to report the marking of 100 days since her disappearance.

At this time, some in the Portuguese press have been reporting unsubstantiated claims about the McCanns and their holiday friends.

We did not report those claims until the McCanns themselves responded in interview, when it was hard to understand what their responses were without some idea of the accusations.

It's an uncomfortable position. The BBC absolutely needs to distinguish between fact and rumour. But the enormous febrile and emotional atmosphere, enflamed by a media for whom this story is a potential commercial opportunity, have made that hard.

I can't help reflecting that all this mass of hysterical rumour stands in very stark contrast to the one incontestable sad fact - a little girl has disappeared in unexplained circumstances.

Daily Mail: "The BBC may be forced to scrap one of its television channels to help meet a £2billion cut in its budget, its chairman has revealed." (link)

The remarks by Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond are intriguing for BBC News - in their possible implications for our journalistic offering across the UK and as a story for us to cover.

The first minister characterised the debate he wanted to start as a broader one than previous arguments about the so-called "Scottish Six" - the notion that there should be a combined news hour created for Scotland that would mix international, Scottish and UK news according to overall news values as seen from Scotland.

Instead, he focused on the need for broadcasting policy to enhance the overall creative vitality of Scotland and complained about what he says has been a reduction in network production spend in Scotland by both ITV and BBC.

BBC production spend in any location can fluctuate, particularly as major drama series productions begin or end. But BBC investment in Scotland is significant. I recently visited the impressive new BBC Scotland HQ at Pacific Quay which cost £188m. To get a good return on that investment a substantial amount of UK production will need to come from there - for instance from its superb High Definition studio.

The BBC's formal audience accountability processes will be fully assessing the BBC's provision of programming in and for Scotland and through that process, dealing with the questions raised by Mr Salmond. (See BBC statements about this here and here)

For BBC News the focus will be less on cultural creativity or cash spend, important as those are, but on editorial representation. That, for audiences, is what matters most. How well, whether in drama, documentaries or news, do we represent the lives and concerns of licence payers across the UK?

At BBC News we will listen hard to what audiences tell us and respond to that. And we will work closely with our colleagues in BBC Scotland to develop editorial and technological options that allow us to meet new audience needs as the debate develops.

And as for covering the story on network news, BBC News 24 carried Mr Salmond's speech live and interviewed him subsequently and both the Six O'clock and Ten O'Clock bulletins carried the speech. Scotland Editor Brian Taylor also gave his comments on the Six, the programme that has often been in the eye of this particular storm.

The Guardian: Interview with Sir Michael Lyons, to mark his first 100 days as chairman of the BBC Trust, in which he responds to criticisms of the corporation following recent scandals. (link)

The Scotsman: Reports that Alex Salmond has set up an independent commission on Scottish broadcasting. (link)

The use of the News helicopter over the fields of Surrey to cover the foot and mouth outbreak has caused some consternation, on the part of the audience, and also the government, who clearly would prefer all our coverage to be at ground level.

One member of the audience wrote: "A helicopter should not under any circumstances be flying over the affected farm given that this is a windborne disease. I sincerely hope the slaughter, then removal, of the beautiful creatures will not be shown."

Let me say at once that we wouldn’t do or show anything which we thought might contribute to the spread of the virus, or cause unnecessary distress to viewers.

We were careful to take advice about the potential effects of using a helicopter, and whether its rotor blades could contribute to airborne transmission. That advice was that air is only disturbed at most by three times the length of the rotors. And at no time did our aircraft go below 1200 feet. The quality of the camera enables us to film from that height in sufficient detail.

I can also assure our correspondent that we did not and would not show the moment of culling on grounds of taste. We didn’t do this in 2001, and we see no reason to do so now.

As it happened, the government imposed an air exclusion zone over the affected area at the point when cattle were being herded into a pen to begin slaughter. It was put to us that we were hampering by frightening the cattle, and potentially spreading the disease. We were happy to comply.

Television does need pictures to tell a story. A comprehensive police cordon was in operation on the ground, for obvious reasons. Any attempt by us to walk or drive around to see what was happening could have helped spread contamination. The use of aircraft is an effective way to cover this type of story and possibly the safest as well.

Our teams are well aware of bio-security issues and are under strict instructions not to cross any cordons. Some of our staff were here into the early hours of the morning after the story broke, making sure our equipment was fully equipped with disinfectant and other safety kit. Of course we don’t want to do anything that might makes things worse. But while respecting the restrictions, it’s also our job to cover the story as comprehensively and informatively as we can.

The Guardian: "BBC News 24 has continued to increase its lead over Sky News." (link)

Daily Record: Reports that Labour has attacked Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond's call for a Scottish Six News bulletin which he's expected to announce today. (link)

There’s one personality amongst Catherine Tate’s menagerie of characters with which I can most closely relate. Thankfully I’m not talking about Lauren the cheeky teenager but the awkward party guest who can’t help but put her foot into it - usually in spectacular and toe-curling fashion.

As always, observational comedy is at its best when it’s accurate and so to 9.09am on Friday morning as the eloquent and debonair Rupert Everett graced the Breakfast sofa to talk about the paperback release of his autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins.

Like Catherine Tate’s caricature, Rupert surprised our viewers with a comment that at best can be described as startling, and at worst, lewd. In response to an innocuous question from Susanna Reid about how Julie Andrews’ Oscar winning performance as Mary Poppins first lured him into showbusiness, he unfortunately described how, until he’d seen the quintessential English nanny, he’d thought rural cinemas were places where you were able to become intimate with your girlfriend.

I’m not going to spell out here exactly what he said (it won’t take you long to find it in its colourful glory elsewhere on the ‘net) but needless to say some of those watching weren’t best pleased that the actor who can currently be heard as the voice of Prince Charming in the latest child-orientated Shrek film felt the need to be so graphic on morning television. And Susanna and co-presenter Charlie Stayt are to be commended on their appropriate reactions and swift on air apology.

Daily, I mentally applaud the bravery of the guests which we subject to live television. We don’t quite have the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd, but certainly with the knowledge that there are millions of people watching, the madness of the moment can sometimes get the better of even the most seasoned of performers.

I am convinced that this is what happened with our Hollywood star.

Were his comments inappropriate? Certainly. Were they deliberate? Certainly not. I greeted him as he came off air and I was struck by two things. Firstly, he looked much taller in real life and secondly he was mortified by his slip of the tongue. He walked into the corridor with a hand framing either side of his unshaven face. “I can’t believe I said that,” he apologised. “I am so sorry, it just slipped out”.

The abnormality of conversation under the watchful gaze of millions of viewers had, in my opinion, tripped Mr Everett, a man who makes a living from saying other people’s words. He visually flinches as soon as he makes his childhood recollection and I’ve no doubt his apology once he’d come off air was sincere. There is one thing I am sure of. You can’t get a more innocent question than one which features Mary Poppins and Julie Andrews and this won’t be the last time a guest shocks us on live television.

When we heard about the outbreak of foot and mouth on Friday evening, it was clearly going to be big news - most of us vividly remember reporting the devastation and suffering caused by the disease in 2001.

In the early stages of breaking news, when camera crews are heading to the scene, we relied in part on a lot of phone and studio interviews to tell the story. And producers dug out library pictures of the 2001 outbreak to play during these interviews.

The trouble was, even though they were labelled as library pictures, their repetitive use began to annoy some parts of the audience and they told us. Some thought they were distressing. Some thought they created the impression that 2007 would be a repeat performance of the last time around.

It's an easy trap for us to fall into - after all we're television and we use pictures to tell stories. But in this case you told us that we're weren't thinking carefully enough about the effect these pictures were having.

Of course they do have a place in the unfolding story and we shouldn't blank out the painful memories. So to those who were annoyed, I'm sorry, but we did listen and on Saturday we took steps to limit the use of the library footage to very specific examples.

The Guardian: Article criticising the BBC for trying to target particular types of people rather than engaging the audience as a whole. (link)

The Sun: Reports that the BBC paid nearly £20 million in staff bonuses in the year to 30 June 2007. (link)

This week's Newswatch, the programme which discusses viewers' complaints about BBC News, comes from Northern Ireland. TV News editor, Angelina Fusco, talks about the challenges facing BBC News there.

You can watch the programme by clicking here.

The Independent: Conor Dignam, editor of Broadcast magazine, defends the BBC and other broadcasters against the criticism received in the press after recent scandals. (link)

The Herald: Reports that former BBC director-general Greg Dyke has said that he was in favour of a Scottish Six news bulletin. (link)

New Statesman: Letter from the director of BBC News, Helen Boaden, responding to an article written by John Pilger on the BBC's Middle East coverage. (link)

On The World Tonight this week we've been looking at Darfur and Iraq - both subjects that came up during the new prime minister, Gordon Brown's trip to the US and the UN.

On Monday, in his press conference with President Bush, Mr Brown, said:

“Darfur is the greatest humanitarian disaster the world faces today and I've agreed with the president that we step up our pressure to end the violence that has displaced two million people, made four million hungry and reliant on food aid and murdered 200,000 people.”

On Tuesday, Sir John Homes, the head of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, writing in the International Herald Tribune, suggested Iraq may qualify for world's worst humanitarian situation with eight million Iraqis now dependent on humanitarian aid:

“One of the world's largest and fastest-growing humanitarian crises is also among the least known: Iraq. More than four million people, one out of every seven Iraqis, have fled their homes in what is the largest population displacement in the recent history of the Middle East.”

There are also an unknown number of civilian dead with estimates ranging from President Bush's 30,000 to the Lancet's of more than 600,000.

Covering both these conflicts in broadcast journalism can be difficult, because in a radio or TV programme you have a limited amount of time to explain complex situations to audiences who may not be very familiar with the details. Hence the need to simplify, the art of this is simplify without distorting the picture - something we take pains to try to avoid.

On Darfur, earlier this week, we spoke to the Sudan specialist, Julie Flint, who said the new resolution backed by a threat of further sanctions is unlikely to work unless the rebel groups are brought together and there is a cohesive peacekeeping effort.

Tonight (Friday), we are planning to lead on Darfur because the rebel groups are meeting in Tanzania which gives us an opportunity to assess how likely it is the competing factions will sign up to a peace agreement so the newly agreed UN force will have a peace to keep.

We'll also talk to some veterans of the UN force in Bosnia because there are concerns the mandate of the new force for Darfur may suffer from the same weaknesses and ambiguities as the Bosnian force, which struggled for three years to deliver aid and was unable to stop the killing of thousands of civilians, let alone keep the peace.

We will also analyse how complex the Darfur conflict is - a mixture of competition over increasingly scarce water resources between settled agriculturalists and nomadic herdsmen, as well as among other things, an attempt by the Sudanese government to put down a regional revolt and a conflict between ethnic Arabs and Africans. We'll also ask whether the coverage by some Western journalists and the rhetoric of some Western leaders and pressure groups that say the Sudanese government is carrying out genocide in Darfur is an oversimplification that has impeded attempts to reach a political solution to end the fighting.

On Iraq, we heard on Wednesday from our correspondent in Baghdad, Nicholas Witchell, that there are signs the American-led 'surge' is making progress in military terms. But on the same day the main Sunni party in the governing coalition announced it was leaving so we turned to Yahia Said, an Iraqi specialist at the London School of Economics, who told us there has been no progress on achieving political progress there between the Sunni and Shia political groups.

Again - not a simple picture and difficult to report without, on the one hand confusing the audience, and on the other presenting a misleading picture through oversimplification.

It would be interesting know what you make of our efforts.

For me the most striking story of the week was the end of Operation Banner, the 38-year-old British army operation in support of the police in Northern Ireland. Having grown up in Belfast, I can only very barely remember a time when there weren't troops on the streets.

We lived in a peaceful part of town, but I still remember the chilling feeling if you got stuck in a queue of traffic at night behind an army Land Rover, with a couple of blacked up, anxious squaddies peering out the back. It was a relief all round when the traffic started to move again.

Later, I remember the very different reactions of friends from "over the water" who visited Northern Ireland. Some were horrified at the sight of the heavily tooled-up armoured cars - everyone called them pigs - on the streets of a British city, others were surprised the army weren't on every street as they'd been led by the news bulletins to expect.

The BBC's coverage of the end of Banner has led to something of an outbreak of hostilities on the Northern Irish blogs, particularly from Unionist bloggers (here and here). But the really striking thing is that nearly 40 years of troubles and thousands of killings have now been reduced to little more than an online skirmish.

For Newsnight's coverage (which you can watch here) of the end of the longest military operation in the history of the British army we sent our producer Jonathan Bell back to the streets of Derry where he had once patrolled as an infantryman. In the Creggan estate he told locals what he'd being doing on those streets 20 years ago - then a shooting gallery, now a tourist attraction.

Their extraordinary response: "Oh aye?"

Daily Mail: "Government ministers were given too much opportunity to influence the selection process behind the appointment of BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons, an all-party select committee has said." (link)

Press Gazette: Kevin Marsh, head of the BBC's College of Journalism, on impartiality. (link)

The Times: Profile of BBC political editor Nick Robinson. (link)

We like doing OBs on the Breakfast programme on Five Live. But there's always a bit of an issue about getting places where things are happening at the kind of anti-social times we go on air.

So this morning at about 0620, when crowds of teenagers struck up a chant "Oggy,Oggy, Oggy" (that's one for spellcheck) and a man started playing the bagpipes, we knew were in for a different kind of programme.

Shelagh Fogarty was capturing the sights and sounds as 40,000 scouts celebrated the 100th anniversary of a youth organisation which now claims 28 million members around the world. These were not the "don't-get-out-of-bed-till-midday" types. It was barely dawn, but these teens were bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and having an absolute ball.

Normally stories we do on the programme about young people tend to focus on things like binge-drinking, drug-taking, underage sex or obesity. There was little of any of these to report this morning.

But did the listeners mind? Well, largely no. Interestingly there was an overwhelmingly positive response - even on texts which normally are rich in cynicism.

Many people seemed to welcome hearing a different view of young people. Ok, some of the response was from former scouts - or parents of youngsters in the throng at Hylands Park in Chelmsford.

Yet a significant number were from people just pleased to see the world through a less depressing prism for a change. Some even said it made them wish they'd joined up as a child.

It doesn't mean obesity isn't still a major issue, and that we won't be reporting on problems like underage drinking. But it might just give us extra reason to pause for thought.

The Guardian: TV critic Jim Shelley on the role of the newsreader. (link)

Press Gazette: Reports on the BBC's use of interactive tools, including Google maps and Twitter. (link)