Will the BBC please write headlines a little better

The “hero” business is as old as aviation itself. Every crash supposedly involves the heroic pilot steering the doomed machine away from people. I think it was Chuck Yeager who commented on this, stating how ludicrous it was.

WH904. Have you ever considered that the use of this is more for the sale of comforting families and friends. For a husband and wife to have a died a ‘hero’ might be something that maybe helps in years to come. Just a thought. It’s the same when a soldier dies and we hear about what a hero and good person the deceased was. They can’t all be can they but it would be bad form to write anything other in most peoples eyes.

You must remember that the fundamentals of journalism, whatever the medium, include:

– never let the facts get in the way of a good story
– it’s easier and cheaper to rework existing news that to go out and find something new

Most journalists are pathologically lazy. Most of their employers are pathologically parsimonious.

That’s just wild stereotyping and I wonder what you base it on. Cliches as old as time itself by the sounds of it. I would counter that being a journalist requires a certain amount of drive.

Sometimes though those badly-written headlines are pretty funny 🙂

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-17701948

Thank you, Mothminor. Now I realise that I’d missed the point. BBC News is not about information, but entertainment. I may not know what they’re on about, but they do make me laugh!

Ah yes, the infamous Tintagel saga… think that particular Hunter suffered from hydrophobia 🙂

If I remember the accident report correctly, banging out cleared the engine stagnation and it revved up again. The canopy being gone changed the trim and off he went………….

Sometimes though those badly-written headlines are pretty funny 🙂

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-17701948

Thanks avion ancien for bringing the thread back onto topic. I should have known better than to start a ‘light blue touch paper and retire to safe distance’ thread.

It would only be considered worthy of attention if it accidentally landed in someone’s back garden 🙁

No, that would never happen. Heroically it would be steered away from that back garden by its hero pilot and his hero crew to make an heroic landing in open countryside! Then the BBC can interview someone living several miles from the back garden who can claim that they were in terror of their lives when they received a text message concerning the aeroplane’s plight, but that they can’t say more as they need to post a terrified selfie on their facebook page, tweet all their followers to say that they’ve survived the ordeal and then get on the mobile to their solicitor to make an appointment to discuss their PTSD claim against the Vulcan’s operators!

‘Richard Clarke, from the Vulcan Bomber project, told BBC reporter Clinton Rogers, he was “devastated” the Vulcan had to retire this year’

I suppose one could argue that if it was a serious news story (rather than the usual disposable soundbite stuff we’re used to), then someone could have looked into assertions such as this. Obviously XH558 doesn’t have to retire next year, it’s simply a decision that has been made based on circumstances. But then I don’t suppose anyone from the Beeb (or anywhere else) would ever invest more than a few seconds of attention in a subject like XH558. It would only be considered worthy of attention if it accidentally landed in someone’s back garden 🙁

Come on lads, let’s stick to historic aviation before a moderator kicks this thread out to General Discussion! And with that in mind, I’ve returned to the original post and carefully looked at the BBC report to which the hyperlink was provided. It’s most interesting as, hopefully, the following will demonstrate.

‘Last flying Vulcan Bomber retires after Somerset air day’

On this analysis, it would be equally correct to claim that the last airworthy Vulcan is to retire after Harald Godwinson is killed in the Battle of Hastings!

‘Crowds at Yeovilton Air Day in Somerset were able to see the last flying Vulcan Bomber take to the skies before it is retired next year’

Ergo, we’ll have to tell the truth but not before putting our spin on the story in a vainglorious attempt to make something out of nothing.

‘Technical support which secures the permissions to be permitted to fly is being withdrawn due to a lack of resources’

Ah, here’s someone well versed in Byzantine bureaucracy – where one has to apply for the authority necessary to make an application to do something!

‘This is supplied by a number of bodies, which check the engines and aircraft frame’

Yes, of course, ‘bodies’ in the plural (and well done for not spelling this as ‘bodys’) – the one to whom one applies for authority to make an application and the other to whom the application is made if the first application is granted. Now are you keeping up? The journalist evidently couldn’t be bothered to ascertain and report the identities of those bodies. Oh, and by the way, is an aircraft frame similar to an airframe or is it something more akin to a Zimmer frame?

‘Richard Clarke, from the Vulcan Bomber project, told BBC reporter Clinton Rogers, he was “devastated” the Vulcan had to retire this year’

Hold the front page! The facts have changed. Originally it was reported that the Vulcan will retire next year. Now it is being obliged to retire this year. Surely that justifies changing the headline to ‘BBC reporter discovers that private sector bomber is to fly illegally!’.

‘Lt Col Derek Stafford, from RNAS Yeovilton, said the day was also “poignant” as the Sea King helicopter was also going out of service’

Yes, but in 2016. Never mind, Clinton probably thought he was getting a scoop when he was told. Either that or his editor had told him to file copy of at least 100 words and he realised that he’d only produced 80 to the end of the preceding paragraph. At least he identified the Sea King as a helicopter. But then, he did only have to write down what the naval officer had told him. So he must be able to write. Now I know how he got a job as a journalist with the BBC!

Ah yes, the infamous Tintagel saga… think that particular Hunter suffered from hydrophobia 🙂

The “hero” business is as old as aviation itself. Every crash supposedly involves the heroic pilot steering the doomed machine away from people.

Tintagel?

I suppose I’ve fallen into the “Grumpy Old Man” trap but I really do think that as time goes by, television just gets progressively worse, not better.

Leaning against an open door there WH904! We live in the age of every story having to have an ‘angle’, and even something like Guy Martin helping (a little bit) to build a replica Spitfire has to either be done against the clock or with some daft, “If he mis-drills this split-pin hole, his whole family will be shot” statement.

But there are odd glimmers of hope: in a world seemingly full of Bear Grylls, the odd Ray Mears does occasionally get air time (substitute your own ‘ridiculous’ vs ‘sublime’ comparison here).

Several options for feedback and complaints in here
Ahh yes, the complaints procedure. I have used it a couple of times even though I realised before I started that it would achieve nothing. As one might expect, the response usually comes in the form of platitudes and excuses. For example, I raised the issue of sports with the local BBC network and the Editor’s response was that it “was a contentious subject” that split viewers almost fifty-fifty. Apart from the obvious point that neither I or anyone I know has ever been asked about viewing preferences (which suggests that his “fifty-fifty” assertion was merely his own biased view), he completely failed to address my point that the local BBC news broadcast is very short, and to have ninety percent of it devoted to sport (and this happens regularly) was a clear contradiction of the programme’s advertised content. Needless to say he didn’t even bother to reply to this. The complaints procedure simply takes complaints and provides the most plausible answer. If the answer is utter nonsense, then the usual “we are sorry but we do our very best to…” platitudes are issued. At no stage is there any interest in listening to complaints and/or acting on them. It’s simply damage limitation.

Same applies across the networks. I regularly watch Matthew Wright’s morning programme on Channel 5. The pre-advert question captions are regularly misspelled and although it is a trivial matter, people evidently do email the show to point-out these errors. Matthew responds with a laugh and an apology and we wait for the next howler to occur. But one has to wonder just who these people are that get these jobs, how much they are paid for their inabilities, and why someone with a decent grasp of spelling and grammar can’t be employed instead. As has been said above, it’s just laziness. Anything goes. Some say that this doesn’t matter, and English usage has to move with the times. Even the sainted Stephen Fry espouses this notion, but catering for the abilities of the lowest common denominator is a dangerous game. Ultimately it will destroy whatever is left of journalistic standards and it will degrade our language until it no longer functions. Taken to an extreme it will eventually take us back to exchanging grunts prehistoric style; Some would say we’ve already reached that stage!

The aviation aspect is only part of a whole. I guess the classic examples of lamentably poor aviation journalism are the “enthusiast” programmes seen on Discovery and other channels. Okay, I don’t profess to be an expert on anything, nor do I claim to be particularly competent in terms of English usage, but some (most in fact) of the aviation programmes are just awful. The information is often questionable, the historical information is often clearly wrong or misleading, and it is usually presented either in dreary, monotonous tones, or in an aggressively loud style that is presumably aimed at kids. Foolishly, the programmes often use “celebrity” (or at least vaguely familiar) figures to present the shows, and yet it is always clear that they don’t know what they’re talking about. John Nichols is one famous example – spouting endlessly about subjects that clearly mean nothing to him. Presumably the programme makers (wrongly) assumed that if he’d worked as a Tornado Navigator he would somehow be an expert on all aspects of aviation. I often wonder why air shows are never screened on television any more, and I presume it’s because the TV executives imagine that there isn’t an audience of any significance. I can’t believe that this is true though, especially when one considers the huge numbers of people that go to air shows. Mildenhall’s show often pulled crowds of 200,000 or more which puts the event on a par with major sports events or concerts etc. But where’s the television coverage? My hunch is that the viewing figures were indeed probably disappointing, but when I recall the lousy camera work, and the tedious content, presented by random “celebrities” (I recall Fern Britton and David Icke for example – I kid you not, I still have the tapes!), then it’s little wonder that air shows disappeared in the post-Raymond Baxter era. But how can this be when huge numbers of people watched Jeremy Clarkson playing with nothing more than cars?

I suppose I’ve fallen into the “Grumpy Old Man” trap but I really do think that as time goes by, television just gets progressively worse, not better.

I do wonder if we should begin a very off-topic random ‘Rants’ thread?

That sounds like a good idea, put it in GD.

Several options for feedback and complaints in here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/20039682

Oddly, Sky seems to be the most professional, and often gets news stories on air well in advance of the BBC.

I agree with that, even allowing for the constant add breaks.

Sky News coverage of the last royal wedding was far far better than that of the BBC. (yes I was the one who watched it :))

From the moment the royal couple left the abbey, to the moment they arrived back at Buck House, not one word of
commentary. Marvellous.
Against the BBC’s constant inane chatter.

You must remember that the fundamentals of journalism, whatever the medium, include:

– never let the facts get in the way of a good story
– it’s easier and cheaper to rework existing news that to go out and find something new

Most journalists are pathologically lazy. Most of their employers are pathologically parsimonious.

But the bottom line is, I suspect, that for the majority of the population the journalism they get, they deserve. After all, the lack of literacy in journalism probably reflects and seeks to emulate the target audience. There isn’t a mainly literate population and a mainly illiterate body of journalists. Maybe that explains the change, over a generation or more, in approach which the BBC appears now to employ. Once it led and the population followed. Then it tried to lead but the population would not follow. Now the population leads and the BBC follows. And who’s to say that this isn’t the right approach? Maybe those of us who are posting here are dinosaurs and should just learn to accept that we won’t change that with which the majority seems quite happy.

Chaps, while I agree that the XH558 headline is misleading, I think you have to be a little careful in which direction you aim your rants.

Unless I’m mistaken, quite a few of the inaccurate bits of journalism quoted earlier in this thread, are actually from other news outlets, and not the BBC.

In my opinion we are extremely lucky to have an impartial news source such as BBC News (which is a separate entity to the rest of the BBC) in this country.

The BBC, and BBC News have faced drastic cuts in their funding over the last government, and its not getting any better with this one. This headline is the sort of thing you get when there’s too much work and not enough resources to do it accurately. You might find that an email to the relevant person , correcting them with the facts would clear this up.

For many people I think it’s a case of not knowing what you have until it’s gone. This country would certainly be a lot worse off if we only had Fox / Sky / Mail Online etc to rely on. I’m certainly not happy trusting news from an organisation which has its own political and economic axe to grind – at least with the BBC mistakes are honest ones.

You have got to remember that the media are the experts on everything, including aviation. When they realize that they aren’t would someone please let me know then I can recover my TV from the local tip and re-instate my licence, all of which will never happen.
You’ve got it – I don’t have a TV, and life is much much better without. Try it.

The “hero” business is as old as aviation itself. Every crash supposedly involves the heroic pilot steering the doomed machine away from people. I think it was Chuck Yeager who commented on this, stating how ludicrous it was. If the aeroplane is going down, the only important action is to get out of it, and there’s obviously no time to consider the question of where it’s going to land. I guess it’s just typical of how reporters really don’t know anything about the subject they’re reporting on. It’s also evident in the reports of “planes crashing in flames” and this is often verified by witnesses who inevitably claim they saw the stricken machine falling in a ball of flames, even when in some cases we know for certain that there wasn’t so much as a spark.

Perhaps the problem with the BBC, as outlined by OP’s post, is that they haven’t come fully to grips with 24 hour rolling news.
Indeed, rolling news is mostly the same fifteen-minute news repeated again and again until something more exciting comes along. My pet hate is the bizarre confusion the news channels seem to have when distinguishing between news and sport. The BBC evening news is the classic example. Twenty minutes of news, then a sports story, and then the sports news, as if the previous story had been about something else. I can never understand why the news media seem to think that sports results and commentary are in any way connected with news. Remarkably, they devote much less time to the weather forecast even though that is at least relevant and useful information (even if it is a triumph of presentation over real content). The BBC news service is increasingly poor, and ITV (ITN) is even worse, often seeming to be aimed at five year-olds (if I have to hear Alastair Stewart over enunciating again I’ll scream). Oddly, Sky seems to be the most professional, and often gets news stories on air well in advance of the BBC.

It’s grim stuff. 24-hour broadcasting and yet the actual amount of news seems to be little more than the same fifteen minutes we get on the main TV channels. Surely, the world can’t be so dull? There really isn’t enough news to occupy at least an hour? Still, the inability to find enough material does sometimes have its advantages. I recall that when XH558 started flying again it went to Cottesmore for compass swings and BBC News 24 covered its departure live. I imagine that it left most viewers slightly confused as to what they were watching, but great for the rest of us!