Latest entry
- Tom Giles
- 17 Dec 08, 08:28 AM
It's never easy to make documentaries in Pakistan - especially for journalists who, like those on Panorama, aren't based there.
Given the startling access Jane Corbin and her cameraman/producer Nikki Millard got - not only to the troubled areas around Peshawar, but also to the Pakistan army's battles with militants linked to al-Qaeda and the Taleban in the tribal areas - the new civilian government at least appears serious about showing (some) of what it's up to.
And, despite a war of words over the Americans' use of Predator drones to target militant bases in these areas, Pakistan's efforts have so far been welcomed by many in the US. And that matters. President-elect Obama has made a great deal out of promising to shift the focus of the "War on Terror" to Afghanistan.
Many are sceptical that he can pull off what will be one of the biggest issues of his administration. So both Washington and London will be exerting maximum pressure to ensure that future troop deployments won't be undermined by a porous Afghan-Pakistan border and an ambivalent Pakistani government.
Just how damaging this ambivalence has been in the recent past is eye-poppingly chronicled in this, highly-influential book. None of which makes the job of reporting or filming there any easier.
Jane and Nikki took sizeable, if considered, risks in getting some of their footage. They arrived in Peshawar - already a very tense city - on the day an American aid worker was shot dead and an Iranian diplomat kidnapped.
There are regular threats to Western journalists in Kabul too. So there had to be a clear reason to take such risks. The title, Britain's Terror Heartland, gets to the nub of it. Obtuse - even provocative - perhaps, but the facts and figures bear it out.
Separately, Gordon Brown stressed this on Sunday. British security services are believed to be monitoring some 2,000 individuals - and an estimated 30 active terror plots - the majority connected to Pakistan in some way.
Perhaps as a consequence, we also had to obscure or drop the identity of at least one person in the film for legal reasons. This will be a sensitive, challenging, subject for a long time to come.
Tom Giles is deputy editor of Panorama
Recent entries
- Steve Herrmann
- 16 Dec 08, 03:16 PM
The team of journalists, developers and designers who produce the graphics, maps, tables and multimedia projects for the News website have been researching and compiling data on homicides of teenagers in the UK over the past year, in order to piece together a detailed picture of what has been happening across the country. They have just published a map, searchable table and graphics showing this information, and team leader Bella Hurrell has written about how it was done and the thinking behind it here.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website
- Peter Horrocks
- 5 Dec 08, 04:10 PM
I'd like to explain about a mistaken report which BBC News carried yesterday. Around 1915 GMT yesterday there was a security alert at Delhi airport sparked by reports of gunshots, which the BBC News channel in the UK reported at 2010 GMT.
A BBC News correspondent who was travelling through the airport was involved in the security alert and reported on air that airport staff had told him that six gunmen had been killed. Versions of this initial report were subsequently carried by the BBC World News TV channel and by BBC News online.
Following urgent checks by BBC News teams and denials by the Indian authorities we subsequently and rapidly reported that six gunmen had not been killed. The security alert had apparently been sparked by a false alarm. We made clear in the online story that our earlier report had been wrong and this remained in the story subsequently.
Clearly we shouldn't have given the reports the weight that we did, and I regret that we did so. At the time we believed them to be correct on the basis of the information received by a BBC reporter on the ground but it is clear that we should have continued with further checks before going as far as we did.
Peter Horrocks is head of BBC Newsroom
- Peter Horrocks
- 5 Dec 08, 08:25 AM
There has been comment about recent coverage on the BBC and elsewhere of changing attitudes towards Down's Syndrome. My colleague Rob Ketteridge, editor of the documentaries unit in Audio and Music Factual, explains.
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On Monday 24 November the Radio 4 documentary "Born With Down's" and BBC News reported that more babies are being born with Down's Syndrome than at any time since prenatal screening began in 1989. In 1989 there were 717 Down's Syndrome births. This figure then fell to a low point of 572 in 2001, since when there has been a steady increase to 749 in 2006 - the last year for which figures are available. Since 2001 the proportion has risen ahead of the overall birth rate.
So far so good and accurate. But do the headline statistics support the idea that more parents are choosing to continue with pregnancies after Down's Syndrome has been diagnosed or when it is a high risk? And if so, is there any evidence that a reason for this could be that social attitudes towards Down's Syndrome are changing?
Since the documentary was broadcast these questions have become a matter of fierce debate, with some of the medical experts and statisticians as well as some journalists challenging these hypotheses. One issue they have raised is that there has been an increase in the number of older mothers with a higher risk factor for Down's Syndrome during this period. They argue that the rising trend is therefore predictable and without prenatal screening it would be significantly higher. They also state that from 1989 to 2006 the proportion of women choosing to terminate a pregnancy following prenatal diagnosis of Down's Syndrome has remained constant at around 92%.
To shed more light on this, we need to look at the data in more detail. Bear with me because things are about to get more complex.
The figures are published annually by the National Down Syndrome Cytogenetic Register run by Joan Morris who is Professor of Medical Statistics at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine in London. Follow this link [pdf] and look at Table 7 on Page 8 of the latest report for 2006. The table shows that in 1989 there were 1033 diagnoses of Down's Syndrome in total, of which only 30% approximately (318) were prenatal. There were 717 live births and 290 terminations that year. In 2006 there were 1877 diagnoses, of which approximately 60% or 1132 were prenatal, leading to 749 live births and 767 terminations.
So: in 1989 there were 318 prenatal diagnoses and 290 terminations; in 2006 there were 1132 prenatal diagnoses and 767 terminations. On the face of it, the proportion for those choosing to terminate after a prenatal diagnosis in 2006 doesn't look anything like the 92% figure.
But - and it is an important but - the 2006 figures also reveal that in that year there were 293 cases of "Unknown Outcome" - a figure that has also been rising over the years. If a high proportion of these were in fact terminations then the 92% figure starts to look accurate.
Last week I contacted Professor Morris to ask about this. She said: "To obtain the true proportion of women who decide to terminate their pregnancy we had to analyse a subset of the data from cytogenetic laboratories for whom we had excellent follow-up (in other words areas of the country in which we had extremely few unknown outcomes). In these laboratories we found that 92% of prenatal diagnoses were terminated." A footnote to the published tables also states that: "A large proportion of the missing outcomes are from one single large private cytogenetic laboratory in London, which analyses samples from women throughout the South East of England."
So: there is little evidence here, according to Professor Morris, for a shift in social attitudes leading more parents to continue with a pregnancy after Down's Syndrome has been diagnosed prenatally. Some have argued that the consistency of the 92% figure over this period isn't in itself very surprising: the diagnostic tests (such as amniocentesis) carry a small risk of miscarriage and the argument is that most parents who go ahead with them are likely to be decided on termination already if a positive diagnosis is received.
However none of this tells us much about the still large number of cases where a conclusive prenatal diagnosis isn't made. In some cases parents might have refused diagnostic testing because of the miscarriage risk or because they had decided to continue with the pregnancy whatever the outcome might be.
What do we know about the views of parents in this last category? There has so far been little evidence. Surprised by the rising numbers, the Down's Syndrome Association conducted a survey of some of its members to coincide with the programme. In many cases religious reasons were given for continuing with a pregnancy when Down's Syndrome had been diagnosed or was a high risk. But, as we reported, a significant number also cited changing social attitudes towards people born with Down's Syndrome.
Such evidence is interesting but inconclusive. What is more certain is that the original documentary and other reports could have included more information about the complexity of the data underneath the headline figures - as necessary qualification and context - and more fully represented the debate about how to interpret it.
Better understanding - not just of the data and other evidence, but also of Down's Syndrome itself and social attitudes towards it for which we are all responsible - seems to be clearly needed. Primarily, though, the documentary focussed movingly, and from more than one point of view, on parents who have Down's Syndrome babies and it engaged with their experiences.
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I would just add that one of the claims made by Ben Goldacre in his Bad Science blog and Guardian column is that when Professor Morris issued her clarifications after the story was initially covered in newspapers and online, "everybody ignored them, nobody has clarified". That's not true - our website's health pages were updated as soon as we had spoken to her.
Peter Horrocks is head of BBC Newsroom
- Steve Herrmann
- 4 Dec 08, 10:25 AM
There's been discussion of the role played by Twitter in the reporting of the Mumbai attacks and of the way that we made use of it on the BBC News website.
During the crisis, we monitored this microblogging service, along with the material being filed by our own reporters and a wide range of other sources, and referenced or linked to all of these on a "live updates" page as the events unfolded.
Our aim with these pages (we did something similar during the US election) is to provide news, analysis, description and comment in short snippets as soon as it becomes available. It is a running account, where we are making quick judgments on and selecting what look like the most relevant and informative bits of information as they come in, rather than providing the more considered version of events we are able to give in our main news stories of the day.
These accounts move more quickly and include a wider array of perspectives and sources, not all verified by us, but all attributed, so that in effect we leave some of the weighing up of each bit of information and context to you.
During the Mumbai attacks, we gave prominence in our running account to the latest information from our correspondents on the ground, but we also included breaking lines from news agencies, Indian media reports, official statements, blog posts, Twitter messages ("tweets") and e-mails sent in to us, taking care to source each of these things.
Some of the many e-mails we received and the follow-up contacts contributed directly to our reporting, with first-hand accounts of the events including that of Andreas Liveras, who was, sadly, later killed in the violence.
As for the Twitter messages we were monitoring, most did not add a great amount of detail to what we knew of events, but among other things they did give a strong sense of what people connected in some way with the story were thinking and seeing. "Appalled at the foolishness of the curious onlookers who are disrupting the NSG operations," wrote one. "Our soldiers are brave but I feel we could have done better," said another. There was assessment, reaction and comment there and in blogs. One blogger's stream of photos on photosharing site Flickr was widely linked to, including by us.
All this helped to build up a rapidly evolving picture of a confusing situation.
But there are risks with running accounts that we haven't been able to check, and my colleague Rory Cellan-Jones has written about one piece of unsubstantiated information circulating on Twitter which we reported, suggesting that the Indian government had asked for an end to Twitter updates from Mumbai.
Should we have checked this before reporting it? Made it clearer that we hadn't? We certainly would have done if we'd wanted to include it in our news stories (we didn't) or to carry it without attribution. In one sense, the very fact that this report was circulating online was one small detail of the story that day. But should we have tried to check it and then reported back later, if only to say that we hadn't found any confirmation? I think in this case we should have, and we've learned a lesson. The truth is, we're still finding out how best to process and relay such information in a fast-moving account like this.
Is it confusing to have reports from our own correspondents, along with official statements, pictures, video, accounts from other media, bloggers, emails and Twitter, all together on the same page? It's true that normally we separate them out - news stories in one place, correspondents' reports in another, Have Your Say comments and links to blogs somewhere else.
But on a major unfolding story there is a case also for simply monitoring, selecting and passing on the information we are getting as quickly as we can, on the basis that many people will want to know what we know and what we are still finding out, as soon as we can tell them.
So as the story progresses, as one element of the coverage, we will select, link and label the emerging information. Further assessment, equipped with this information, is left to you. At the same time, we will continue to work on writing fuller news stories containing the most definitive and authoritative version of events we have, as established by our own correspondents and newsgathering teams who are there.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website
- Alistair Burnett
- 4 Dec 08, 09:32 AM
"I was very surprised we didn't do the Baby P story."
That was the comment of one of our team when we were reviewing the previous night's programme during our editorial meeting the day after the publication of the report into how Haringey Council in London failed to protect Baby P who was on the child protection register. The boy's mother has pleaded guilty and her boyfriend and a lodger have been convicted of charges relating to his death.
The report was published on Monday and that night the news bulletin which opens our programme of course had a report on the story, but we did not cover it further in the programme, which we led with the story of the announcement by President-elect Obama of his national security team that afternoon.
Our colleague's surprise triggered a discussion amongst us - which is an ongoing one on the programme - about how we cover big British stories.
A little background is needed here to explain why this is an issue for The World Tonight.
The programme focuses mainly on global news - we think it is the main place on daily national BBC news where international stories are reported and analysed. However, we also have a remit to cover major British news and breaking news, which we do. You can read about what we try to do on the programme here.
The challenge - or if you prefer the difficulty - for us is that we aim not to repeat stories or angles on stories which have already been covered on our sister programmes on Radio 4 - Today, The World At One, PM and the half-hour 6 O'clock news bulletin.
The problem we often face with big stories - like the Baby P story - is that there has been a lot of coverage on these programmes and new angles are not always obvious. Hence the debate on how we do them.
The ideal solution is that we think of an interesting angle or an interesting interviewee with a view on the story that has not occurred to our colleagues. When we are at our best, this is what we do. But it's not always that easy.
So another solution - which we adopted on the day of the Baby P story - is not to do any more than have a short report in our news bulletin. The criticism of this approach is that it sends the message that we don't think the story is important.
When we do this, we argue that by the end of the day, our listeners may have heard enough in-depth coverage of the story in question, and they will be happy to have the brief summary of the story in our bulletin and then hear about the other things going on in the world in the rest of the programme.
I'd be interested to know what you think.
Update [Friday 5 December 1100]: Due to legal risks, this thread is now closed to comments.
Alistair Burnett is editor of the World Tonight
- Jeremy Hillman
- 26 Nov 08, 01:08 PM
In my job I expect to spend most of the time obsessing about the financial crisis and looming recession, its implications for all of us and how we are covering it. Yet I was still surprised when it became the centrepiece of my seven-year-old son's school assembly which I went to before work this morning.
The theme of the assembly was choice and personal responsibility and the kids all did brilliantly with readings about a wise man and foolish man and a song to finish. Then the headmaster talked to the whole school about the origins of the global financial crisis. Not surprisingly there were no mentions of mortgage backed securities and collateralised debt obligations!
Instead, he talked to the children about personal responsibility, not spending more than you have, and about thinking about the consequences for the future of your decisions now. This Christmas, he told the children, you should decide what you can afford and stick to that - it was obviously a message too for all of us parents sitting at the back.
As we spend a lot of our broadcasting time discussing bank behaviour, corporate greed, and failures of regulation it did make me wonder if there is a simpler message we should be conveying more strongly in our coverage.
I suspect my son though will still want that remote control helicopter and damn the consequences.
Jeremy Hillman is editor of the business and economics unit
- Steve Herrmann
- 24 Nov 08, 01:45 PM
How do you get your news at different times of the day? When do you want headlines on the radio and when do you sit down and watch a TV bulletin or log on to see what's happening? And, of particular interest to us right now, how do you keep up to date if you're out and about or commuting?
We've been carrying out some audience research to ask people these questions, and we've been specifically asking whether and when they use their mobiles to get news (or sport, or weather or travel). And if they don't, whether they ever would.
As part of the research, volunteers were asked to fill in news diaries, drawing a chart to show when and where they normally get their news.
The results showed:
• Most people were getting their news and information in a whole variety of different ways and from different places in the course of a day or a week
• The researchers described each person as having a "news ecosystem", where an individual might read several papers, hear news on the radio, look at various websites and/or TV channels for news
• The habits of the modern news consumer were described as "increasingly eclectic and multiplatform"
• As for mobiles, people were typically using them for headlines, major stories and areas of specific interest
As mobile devices get smarter and connectivity better it seems reasonable to expect that people will increasingly be using them to do some of the things they already do on a desktop PC - look at a map, check a train time, buy something online, look at headlines or football results.
Take-up of news on mobiles is indeed increasing. For the BBC's mobile services overall, there are currently about 3.2m UK users a month, and this has grown by 25% over the past year.* But that number is still very small compared with those accessing the BBC website overall (22m unique users per week**). My colleague Paul Brannan wrote about some of the possible reasons for this earlier in the year - cost (data and handsets) being one of them.
But on the basis that more people might take to getting their news via mobile if they try it, we're running a campaign over the next few weeks to publicise how to get the BBC News website on a mobile phone, and simply to tell people it's there.
Here's what we'll be showing on the website. What do you think? Do you have a "news ecosystem"? Will your mobile overtake your PC one day as the way you get online news and information - or maybe it already has?
* This is claimed reach on the M:Metrics monthly survey; it was growing faster up until Sept 07, but is now 26% year on year (Sept 07-Sept 08).
** Unique users are not the same as "people" so the figures are not directly comparable but this is now our currency for reach.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website
- James Mallet
- 19 Nov 08, 11:00 AM
Well done to those of you who attempted our Newswatch grammar test. Between you, you managed to spot all the deliberate mistakes we put in - though no doubt there will continue to be disputes over some of the grammatical rules involved. If you got all of them, you did better than Breakfast presenters Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams, who scored 19 between them; Defence correspondent Caroline Wyatt (18); Newsnight's political editor Michael Crick (14); and the former Education correspondent Sue Littlemore (12). Here are the errors:
"said she is leaving" should be "said she was leaving"
"her family are growing up" should be "her family is growing up"
"momentarily" - "in a moment"
"there's no surprises" - "there are no surprises"
"between you and I" - "between you and me"
"Number Ten were trying" - "Number Ten was trying"
"mitigate against" - "militate against"
"in affect" - "in effect"
"partner with" - "partner"
"inferred" - "implied"
"effectively" - "in effect"
"none of his other ministers are" - "none of his other ministers is"
"try and move" - "try to move"
"one less opponent" - "one fewer opponent"
"fulsome" - "enthusiastic"
"ministers sung" - "ministers sang"
"Number Ten refutes" - "Number Ten denies"
"bored of" - "bored with"
"enormity of the subject" - "significance of the subject"
"disinterested" - "uninterested"
James Mallet is series producer of Newswatch
- Dominic Ball
- 18 Nov 08, 04:48 PM
Listeners to the Six O'Clock News on Radio 4 may, in recent weeks, have been surprised to hear correspondents broadcast live into the programme. We had Greg Wood from New York on the Fed Rate cut and Jane Peel live at the top of the programme on the day the controller of Radio 2 resigned.
On the Radio 4 Six O' Clock News (or simply "the 1800" as it's known within the BBC) historically, we've tried to avoid live inserts from correspondents. This is mainly because we try to create an atmosphere of calm, considered authority and we like to give the impression, at least, that everything has been prepared well in advance. It's also because taking a correspondent live shreds the nerves of both correspondent and editor.
However sometimes important news breaks so late that we have no other option. When it works well, as I believe it did with the two examples above, it can provide a wonderful sense of immediacy. That said, I'd like to reassure regular listeners to the 1800 that this is in no way a precursor to correspondents being interviewed by presenters, or, God forbid, Harriet Cass reading out texts.
Dominic Ball is editor of the Radio 4 Six O'Clock News
- Steve Herrmann
- 17 Nov 08, 02:06 PM
Following my recent post about this website's US election coverage preparations, I'm pleased to be able to report that the various new features we tried for the event all seem to have worked well.
There was clearly huge interest in the events. Usage of the site as results came through and the day after hit record levels - something which other websites have also reported.
We had 9.2 million unique users and 73 million page views from midnight on 5 November (UK time) through to the end of that day (Wednesday). Normally we'd expect around 6 million unique users in a day so that's an increase of about 65%. Those numbers broke down into about half UK and half international, of which half again (26% of the total) were from the US.
The new features deployed on the site included a different front page layout, new video and picture gallery formats and, most crucially, a multiplatform results service from a centralised BBC desk in Washington which drove results on all our services, from TV to web and mobiles.
The most popular element, unsurprisingly, was the results map. The page combining a live video stream with running text updates and results was also one of the most popular amongst those of you who stayed up to watch. And one in five (about 1.9 million) of those who came to the coverage accessed video or audio content, with the full Obama victory speech among the most watched items.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website
- James Mallet
- 17 Nov 08, 12:42 PM
Those of you who saw five BBC presenters and correspondents bravely attempting the grammar test we set them on last weekend's Newswatch might like to see how you fare yourselves. Remember, the journalists scored between 12 and 19 out of a possible 20.
The test is in the form of a fictitious 'two-way' or conversation between a presenter and a correspondent, so it's designed to be heard, not read. It contains what we think are 20 deliberate mistakes, though there are, of course, disputes over the rules involved in some of the words or phrases. Here it is - good luck!
Presenter:The Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, said she is leaving her job - the second ministerial resignation in just over a week. Ms Kelly says it's a hard decision but her family are growing up and she wants to spend more time with her children. We'll be joined by her momentarily but first, our political correspondent, Nick Robinson, is here. Nick, is there more to this than meets the eye?
Correspondent: Ruth Kelly asked to leave the cabinet several months ago - so in a way, there's no surprises here. But what is odd is the way the news has been broken: in the early morning, before her conference speech. Between you and I, it looks like No 10 were trying to mitigate against a dramatic departure - in affect, putting out a spoiler.
Presenter: It had been rumoured that Ruth Kelly might be the leader of a mass resignation or at least, partner with one other minister - is that no longer a possibility?
Correspondent: You're right - one minister in particular, inferred to me that he would be off but has since changed his mind. While he'd be loath to admit it, the current financial crisis has effectively done the PM a favour. None of his other ministers are planning to try and move against his or her leader at such a crucial time and so no, I don't think he'll have to face up to a revolt. Meanwhile, he has one less opponent in the cabinet, so Mr Brown's position may even be stronger as a result of this, particularly if his speech receives fulsome praise.
Presenter: Is the subject of the leadership likely to receive less attention, then?
Correspondent: Well, I wouldn't go that far. Ministers sung from the same hymn sheet in public but behind the scenes at conference, it was a different story. There certainly are people who say Mr Brown's not the right man to lead Labour into the next general election - an assertion that No 10 refutes, of course. The public might be bored of speculation but the question of Gordon Brown's leadership is not likely to go away, given the enormity of the subject, no matter how many people are disinterested in it.
James Mallet is series producer of Newswatch
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