Unidentified Fixes Orrible
Sep 4th, 2007 by handolio
Now I wasn’t going to go on about the BBC again for a while, but this is interesting so bear with me. Last week I happened upon this BBC story, which informed this piece for Living.
You’ll notice that in the Living story I refer to “the BBC’s enthusiasm” which, to put it mildly, was gushing. In fact, the BBC’s story about Moller International was so unashamedly, leg-humpingly embarrassing that I was moved, perhaps uncharitably, to bookmark it on del.icio.us with the comment: “This really is one of the worst attempts at journalism that I’ve ever seen from the BBC.”
The main problem with the piece was that it was entirely uncritical, and seemed to have been written with exactly the same sense of excruciatingly unprofessional excitement that characterised the original video segment on which it was based. I’m using the past tense here because, as you may have noticed, there isn’t so much wrong with it now.
In fact, at some point after the story was posted on, I think, Thursday 30th August, somebody at the BBC came along and did a very thorough edit on it. This isn’t unusual in web journalism, but the scope is normally limited to minor grammatical or factual corrections. I haven’t been able to find a cached version of the story in its original form, but from what I remember I think the title has been modified and the following text added:
But customers may still have a while to wait.
So far, the flying car’s inventor has been hard at work for more than four decades - and despite frequent assurances that success is just around the corner, the vehicle has yet to get anywhere near the mass market.
…so far a one-off prototype…
But the promise has been made several times before.
In 2003, the US financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, filed a case against Dr Moller alleging that he had used “false and misleading statements” when trying to find fresh investors.
One example contained in court documents claimed that in 1997 his company’s promotional material had predicted 10,000 sales of a 400-mile-an-hour flying car by 2002, and had promised a stock market listing - and a sharp rise in share prices - which never materialised.
The case was later settled out of court, with the company paying a civil penalty of $50,000.
But eager amateur aviators may be well-advised not to hold their breath.
It’s clear that somebody at the BBC agrees with my assessment of the initial story, and felt the need to provide some balance. Even now there are still things in there that I’d want to double-check, such as Moller’s assertion that the M400 Skycar will be able to climb at 6,000ft per minute - faster, according to a bit of quick research, than pretty much anything this side of a military jet.
A quick digg
I wondered after the changes were made if the BBC’s new-found enthusiasm for social bookmarking extended to monitoring who was tagging its stories and what comments they were adding, so I decided to have a look. Only one other del.icio.us user seemed at all critical, asking “How is this news?”
Meanwhile, cynicism is alive and well and living on Reddit, where a user commented “Moller skycars and the like have been almost ready to take off for most of my adult life.”
But things start to get even more interesting when looking on Digg. I wasn’t able to find the original video report on the BBC’s site, but it’s been Digged (Dug?). The link is dead, suggesting that the BBC has removed the video. One user has added the comment “Geeze this guy again! Does anyone know how many years this guy has been trying to get those two models to work WITHOUT crane attached?”
To be fair to the BBC, it’s always been prepared to change or correct stories if you can be bothered to point out errors, and I’m not suggesting that it took a couple of critical bookmark comments to get it to fix a shoddy bit of journalism.
Still, if that is what happed it’s a sign that the corporation is paying more than lip-service to social networks.
