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BBC Buys Google News Keywords In Kelly Case
foreign devil writes "BBC has purchased keywords related to coverage of the Hutton Inquiry in an attempt to direct all traffic to their special news coverage. This would be only moderately interesting, except the BBC is complicit in the death of Dr. Kelly and the 'sexing up' of the Iraq dossier. The article in the Guardian says this is coming out of the GBP 63.5m ad budget. I wonder how much it would cost them if someone, say, automated searching for those links on Google." It doesn't seem fair to pronounce the BBC complicit in Kelly's death (unless that's proven by the facts of the case), but it's certainly an interested party.
This guy is just being a bastard with this line, "I wonder how much it would cost them if someone, say, automated searching for those links on Google."
vampirical
Yet we'll publish it anyway.
Doesn't this qualify as an abuse of the Google search service?
I (and I'm sure millions of others) browse through Google results to get the articles and opinions from over the world. Allowing this would mean no fair-an-balanced news via Google anymore.
Google would be wise to come up with way to prevent such abuse IMHO.
Why would anyone assume that the "sponsored links" are somehow independently managed by an editor? So what if the BBC comes out on top--it just means that they paid the most.
In my mind a news organization has the right to actively defend itself when it itself is being accused of a crime--just as any other entity would...
It reminds me of when eastern bloc reporters used tocome to north america and wonder how we managed to have all these newscasts repeating the 'party' line without any threats or coercion.
Then of course they got a course in Soros style journalism where now they teach them how to be good reporters like north americans.
Criticize some things, minimize the importance of others and always be politically correct when you criticize certain favored groups.
I also remember a german friend who lived in NYC and told me that he couldnt stop laughing whenever a yank would praise Charlie Rose as representing a different viewpoint.
Sure Charlie wasnt FOX caliber but he's the same corporate flack as Jennings, Brokaw and the rest.
Radio Pacifica and Rush are extremes of the spectrum but the spectrum is heavily on the right here.
don
29 May: BBC defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan tells the Today programme that a senior British official has told him that the government's dossier on Iraq...
BBC web page timeline
July 7: The government says the official is not one of the senior officials involved in drawing up the September dossier, but an expert who has advised ministers on weapons of mass destruction.
MediaGuardian.co.uk timeline
Did anyone else notice that when you google "Kelly", this story (as in, this /. story) comes up under 'News'?
I guess I knew that googleheads read slashdot, but now google does too!
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
I'm sorry, but someone has to draw a line in the sand here. The American revolutionaries wanted freedom from the British, and they fought the superior enemy's military and won. That is a HUGE fucking difference than sneaking men and women onto busses with explosives and killing dozens of innocent people, or blowing up religious dinners (but no, they don't hate jews, just "zionists"), or hiding with sniper rifles behind kids throwing rocks hoping one of the IDF accidently hits a 12 year-old.
The Palestinians don't want freedom from Israel, if they did they would have taken the offer of a state they got 3 years ago instead of launching this latest jihad. The palestinians want to destroy Israel because they hate Jews. Do some research and find out about how many of the founding members of the PLO helped recruit soldiers for the Waffen SS. The Mufti of Jerusalem even lived in Berlin during the war, helping Hitler organize military units. Oh yeah, he was related (uncle I believe, it's been awhile) to Arafat. Oddly enough Arafat doesn't use his real name anymore because it ties him directly to the Nazis.
If the revolutionaries in america had said "No thanks, we'll just destroy your country instead" when the British gave up, THEN they'd be no different than the palistinians.
The BBC didn't name Kelly. His name was leaked by the Goverment. He was subjected to Goverment's Foreign Affairs Committee on the 15th of July 2003, 24 hours later at the Goverments intelligence and Security Committee, the next day he was found dead. As for media attention it was a major part of his day to day life, there is plenty of evidence that Dr David Kelly met with a variety of journalists. "I have been involved with the press for ten to 12 years" - Dr David Kelly, FAC transcript Evidence from the Hutton Enquiry is here, with the report appearing at lunchtime in the UK. http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/
history is written by the victors man.
I've ceased to believe this. After looking at the current state of the world I find that the victors write thier history and think that no one else knows any different while the victims (and much of the rest of the world) remember. It's not hard to find grudges in europe that go back thousands of years where the victors thought they wrote history and it turns out that 300 generations later thier decendandts still remeber the old hatred.
At one time a bunch of people hiding in the woods and sniping at officers was beyond reproach, and were the "terrorists" of their time.
Not really, I've heard this one said many times. While it wasn't normal it was by no means so extraordinary that one would call it "terrorism". That statement needs a little more backing up than "I said so". The British at the time used it as propaganda but pretty much every known army has *always* done so, it so foolish not to that any and all commanders know to do it.
During the civil war, the north took a radical step by attacking civilian and logistical targets instead of purely military ones. A move that would have been reviled had the north ended up losing, instead it's hailed as tactical genius.
Have you ever been to the south? Having grown up there and currently living there I can tell you that is a *very* reviled thing that Sherman did. It went well beyond "unconventional warefare" even for it's time. Grant tried to reign Sherman in and was pretty much unable to. It is probably the number one reason for resentment between the north and the south today. Seeing a northerner on TV dreamily talking of poisoning, raping, and torturing my great great grandparents doesn't make me feel too happy.
Conventions of warfare go OUT THE WINDOW when you are faced with a militarial superior enemy. Calling palestinians freedom fighters is no more or less accurate than calling our american forefathers heroes.
The reality is that for one side they do, that doesn't make it legitamate. Our American forefathers fought pretty much within the rules of war, many other revolutionaries have also.
A large part of terrorism is attacking civilian targets (not as collateral targets, but as the main targets), as far as I know they didn't attack innocent civilian targets over in england. Neither did the British for the most part. Most of the civil war was fought in the same way, in the places civilians were specifically targeted the victims hate the agressors (no need to look further than native americans for another example). There are few recent wars where people did and in most of those cases it was normal rules of wars (WWII for instance, though even then the fire bombing of dresdin was seen as over the line back then and that was probably the most "no rules" modern war ever).
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Whoa buddy, God has NOTHING to do with these United States of America. And you know what, these terrorists don't give a rat's ass about you or I, or especially our freedom. You have been soaking in too much propaganda. America is a victim of terrorist attacks because of our government's greedy capitalist tactics that trash poorer developing countries and humiliate proud people. I am not defending terrorist tactics by any means, but you should know that from every other country's perspective, the US is the largest terrorist threat in the world (and has killed more foreign people and destroyed more foreign property during "peace" time than any one else).
every time a republican dies a queer angel gets his wings
It's a massive, disparate, semi-controlled corporation where one arm can frequently operate without the others being aware. There is the occasional shitstorm which flies up because of this (when, accidentally, the BBC 6 and 9 o'clock News programs almost entirely neglected the ruling Conservative Party's campaign in one election they went nuts and refused further interviews, threatened funding changes etc.) but on the whole the system balances out, given time.
Hutton is a big story in the UK. I don't work in News (thankfully) but I am willing to bet that what we have is an entirely regular attempt to drive traffic to the BBC for coverage of a major story. The BBC is an interested party, but news.bbc.co.uk couldn't give a damn about protecting Andrew Gilligan, broadcast news or any other part of the corporation.
In another situation, maybe you would have Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch flaying the different section chiefs about contradictory coverage, or maybe not. But in the beeb, it simply doesn't happen. Nobody knows about anyone else's activities, and if they want to find out they've got to investigate, like journalists should. It's not efficient, but in terms of a free press, it's effecive.
Its called historical fact. Documented, historical fact. Have you heard of Mexico, Korea, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama (and much of Central America)? Ask people that live in these places about US terrorism.
I wouldn't call most of those terrorist acts, they are Acts of War.
When Bill Clinton ordered the bombing (with a cruise missile) of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory, that wasn't an act of terrorism, it was an act of war, not terrorism.
Hypothetically, if Clinton supported a guerrilla group that went and bombed the pharmaceutical factory, then they would be supporting terrorism.
Notice that the result is the same - a blown up pharmaceutical factory. Terrorism is a tactic, it is not a goal in and of itself.
Ok besides the fact that in the end, your tax money just went to google.. a good thing..
There is *NO* news source out there that you could say does not have a 'side' to a story. No matter how you say how something happen, there is someone else saying 'but my story is better', and so on. Thus why we have that whole free speech thing.. To say that the BBC can't have an ad up just becuase you don't 'agree' with it, is what fighting 'big media' was suposed to be about.
The point comes down to, it's an ad on google. MANY MANY different links are right there, for the user, to click on. And google of all places is about the best thing for them to put it on. Google, puts right up, and infornt.. "hay I'm an ad, paid for, by some company". You might even have a glimps of a change of this agument if it was a banner ad, tricking the user, or a normal link.
They did a good thing with your tax money (google rocks), and they are getting 'their side' out to the public, being wrong or right. If this was a topic yourself felt was 'under known in the news', you'd be happy for the extra bit of coverage.
You shouldnt be surprised by this at all. Read this piece of trash that recently appeared in The Guardian. These people are internet and computer illiterates; nothing wrong with that, until of course you portray yourself as a source of correct information about this very important subject and the way it can influnce the flow of news.
What is amazing is that there is not one person on The Guardian's staff that can get the facts right when they write about anything related to the internet or computers, even on a most important and politically sensitive subject like this.
We need to remember that at the end of the day, The Guardian is just another newspaper. Whilst we may have applauded it for its recent coverage of the Iraq debacle, its still run by the same sort of people who run The Telegraph and The Times; Fleet Street Journalists - for whome "truth" and "accuracy" are just pawns on a chessboard.
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Nonsense. Their Left-of-New-Labor editorial lines are strikingly similar. And the BBC has for years recruited almost exclusively from the 'Grauniad'. In American parlance, think of the Guardian as the BBC's farm team.
Granted there's certainly envy of the BBC at the Guardian, but there isn't the ideological opposition to everything the Beeb represents that one finds at the Murdoch papers.
sig semper tyrannis!
Yeah, well, your great-great-grandparents were fighting to preserve slavery, if not actual slave owners themselves, and therefore deserved no better than what Sherman dished out.
In fact, had I been in Sherman's shoes, I would have summarily shot or hanged every slave owner I captured.
People forget, or lie about, what the Old South stood for and what it was fighting for. Talk of states' rights is crap. The Confederacy existed purely to preserve human chattel slavery. It was destroyed and will never rise again. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Hmmmm, this man is so offensive and serially wrong that you stopped buying the paper on the day he writes!
Printing a few articles because they are funny is one thing, but the evidence is that the editors do not understand that this man is a joke which is evidenced by the sort of article that we are talking about right now.
Keeping him on while he perpetually writes nonsense simply doesnt cut it; the other, clue purchased, writer you mentioned writes only occasionally, then there is Naughton who is probably not read as widely because his work appears in the vestigial Observer; either way, he is obviously not on the "consult before print" list.
The way you "do it" is get columnists who know what they are writing about to contribute regularly, and make sure that they are consulted so they can correct and doublecheck everything written by staffers related to their expertise before it appears in the paper.
For the record, I dont care that the Schofield article is about Linux. Its the fact that its factually upside down that is so...surprising.
The UK is in the middle of deciding if it will accept biometric passports and ID cards or not. The public, for better or worse, relies on papers like The Guardian to give them the information they need to make informed decisions. If Jack Schofield is the one who is deli^H^H^H filtering and munging this information, that is a BAD THING, and the editors at The Guardian clearly dont have anyone else (or anyone at all) that they call on to set their internet/computer stories straight - if they did, they could not have printed this BBC Google story in that form.
That is what the problem is the editors, true to form, are not paying attention. Just ask the guy who used to run Demon Internet, who was accuesd of porn crimes because his company ran USENET servers. His company and his life were almost destroyed because of newspaper people who CANT (or willfully refuse to) READ. That is wrong, and theres no two ways about it.
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At this time I still don't notice a difference, so I have to wonder if Google didn't pay the BBC for all this publicity.
No longer.
He manages to find that the Covernment did no wrong, despite commenting on the insufficiency of the records of the meetings upon which he based this judgement.
He finds all the government claims justified, and all the counterclaims without foundation.
Here's a hint - don't let him near the SCO trial - you'll end up with SCO (no evidence) winning against the rest of the world (tons of evidence).
As you can tell, I'm disappointed - the independence of the judiciary is once again called into question, and we still have the liars in charge.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!