Yesterday on the BBC News they were talking about the .25% cut in the base rate and how this wouldn't necessarily be reflected in mortgage rates as the building societies use a different calculation to come up with a different rate.

The two rates were described as "now out of synchronicity".

Surely someone , somewhere in the organisation should have noticed thhat the wrong word had been used.

The same BBC that published a story about a three-headed frog, one about cow dialects, one about a telepathic parrot, and various nonsense about animals using grammar?

...they later removed the reference to telepathy but didn't change the date.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

Interesting, Goofy. Here is another BBC discussion we've had.

As I wrote back then, and still maintain now, although the Beeb is far from perfect it is much better than some broadcasting organisations. Its freedom from Government control or the influence of advertisers is almost unique and adds much to its quality.

Incidentally, I can now get Al Quaeda on my Sky subscription and have found it a remarkably good news channel. I would say that for international news it is at least as good as BBC24. I don't know whether it's the same for all its English language output but in the broadcasts I receive here, most of their reporters and announcers are English.

I didn't know that Al Qaeda was a news program. Did you mean Al Jazeera English?

Whoops

I obviously meant Al Jazeera but my typing fingers ran away with me!

Heard on the commentary to a snooker game on BBC yesterday (from John Virgo, I think)

"That was a very risqué shot to play."

I couldn't see anything sexually suggestive about it though I'll grant it was a little risky.

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:

I agree the BBC's standards have slipped. I was recently at a literary festival where well respected, long established BBC news readers and reporters commented with passion at the declining standards.
They have many problems. Poor inarticulate diction compounds the frequent misuse of words, often sounding like schoolboy howlers.
One particularly irritating habit is the playing of loud and wholly irrelevant background music (?musack) during conversation or reporting in documentary programmes. This frequently completely masks the message they are trying to deliver. It is a feature of other channels too, based presumably on the same mistaken idea that you would feel lonely or neglected in shops or lifts or other public places if you did not have background noise blaring.
Do the USA TV programmes have similar problems?

It seems a modern disease, akin to the obligatory continuous use of mobile phones in one hand and a bottle of impure bottled water in the other.
How do they have a good scratch when they want to?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: pearce,

And one more...
This quote is from an item yesterday about the amount of unclaimed pension benefits in the UK.

[pensioners should be able to...] "get their hands on an average of £4.8 billion per year".

Really? An average? So some will get more than that and some will get less? I must encourage my Dad to apply. Or do they by any chance mean a "total"?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

quote:

[pensioners should be able to...] "get their hands on an average of £4.8 billion per year".

I'd be happy with only half that average payout...

quote:

talking about the .25% cut in the base rate

One-quarter of a percent doesn't seem worth mentioning.