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A lovely christmas story!

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/7762855.stm

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage...cle2002669.ece

A security guard at a Lapland-style theme park criticised by visitors as "hell" and a "scam" said he resigned because he was "ashamed to work there"...
"Santa got attacked, one of the elves got smacked in the face and pushed into a pram.

"I was punched in the forehead in the ticket office by an irate customer.

My sides! :clap:

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The wonderful British tourism industry!

Basil Fawlty would be proud.

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Damn you brits for trying to steal our tourist attraction.

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Beautiful. The best bit is that the owner, despite it being so evidently crappy in the photos, is blaming all their problems on "a small group of professional troublemakers".

Nice work if you can get it? :)

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Well, technically, that wasn't the owner it was the guy in charge of the marketing. I do wonder what's going to happen over this. Did anyone watch the video on the BBC? (Investigative journalism... shock!) Could the owners REALLY think they'd done a good job?

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The bbc's video really pissed me off.

I hate it when journalists just turn up at someone's home, hammer on their door as if they're owed an interview and then somehow suggest that it's further evidence of how much of a bastard this person is when the door is slammed in their face. It's such a cheap and easy way to paint someone as the villain.

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Jesus, what a depressing article.

Also, I really hate what appears to be the British journalistic convention of paraphrasing quotes for headlines and subheads, but leaving them in quotes. This might not be specific to the UK, but I always see it done when I'm linked to the BBC, The Guardian, etc.

What I mean by this is stuff like "Punched in face" put in quotes, when the actual statement is "Smacked in the face" -- I don't understand why they don't just use the actual statement? This is, obviously, a very innocuous example of this practice, but I've often seen it used in ways that are much more inaccurate, to the point that they connote a not-insignificant difference in meaning from the original reported statement.

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I think I know what you mean Chris. It's as if editorialising and opining within the report is fine as long as you say it is paraphrasing.

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And the BBC is probably our finest news source (actually, to be fair, it is rather good).

I definitely think the BBC is a great news organization. That particular convention really irritates me though. I'm sure it's just a matter of accepted practice in certain countries' journalistic standards, and not intended as sensationalism, I just think that if you quote something and you don't clearly modify it with ellipses or brackets, you need to stick to the source, period.

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And the BBC is probably our finest news source (actually, to be fair, it is rather good).

It certainly used to be, but recently it's budget and staff have been slashed and the emphasis is far more on getting ratings than good journalism. Whenever I watch BBC news now 90% of it is human interest pap. celebrity gossip with sycophantic interviews or a daily update on who's been voted off some vacuous reality show.

Or it may have always been like this and I'm the one whose changed. Changed into a grumpy old man shaking his fist and bemoaning how much better things were "In my day".

I just can't tell anymore.

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I watch BBC News 24 very frequently and haven't observed any of what you've described at all, actually. :erm:

I find they tend to deliver the most objective and non-sensationalist view of everything happening at the time, even when it concerns two of its parent organisation's own staff being lambasted, etc (I was surprised by how much the BBC News anchor grilled the BBC director or whatever).

Site is good, too — although I only subscribe to the technology/science areas.

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Well if nobody else is noticing it then I suppose that does lend credence to the grumpy old man theory.

To the above article as an example though, does nobody else think that the parts about a family with terminally ill mother and a gentleman resigning are just there to provoke an emotional response? These facts don't really have anything to do with whether or not fraud was committed do they?

Anyway, get off my lawn!

EDIT: OK I've just been watching the 9 o'clock news on bbc news 24 and I was completely and entirely wrong. I don't know if I happened to keep tuning in at a weird time of day when they catered for a different audience or what, but I stand very much corrected.

Edited by SignorSuperdouche

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Well, if the security guy who quit specifically mentioned that family as the reason, I can't see why BBC should've cut it from the story.

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Well if nobody else is noticing it then I suppose that does lend credence to the grumpy old man theory.

To the above article as an example though, does nobody else think that the parts about a family with terminally ill mother and a gentleman resigning are just there to provoke an emotional response? These facts don't really have anything to do with whether or not fraud was committed do they?

Anyway, get off my lawn!

EDIT: OK I've just been watching the 9 o'clock news on bbc news 24 and I was completely and entirely wrong. I don't know if I happened to keep tuning in at a weird time of day when they catered for a different audience or what, but I stand very much corrected.

Well, the story WAS that the guy resigned, and the thing about the ill mother was part of the impetus behind his resignation.

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I have to disagree. The guy resigning was the angle, but the story itself was the (allegedly) fraudulent advertising. I'm not convinced that some bloke deciding to quit has any relevance to the story at all but, even if I was, I don't think we really know more about the story for having that level of detail.

What do we actually learn from all being given all the juicy details that we wouldn't have gotten from the sentence "One security guard has resigned over his concerns that the park was being fraudulently advertised."?

I feel like I must be coming across like a crazy person. When this many people disagree with you you do tend to be wrong. Am I completely off the trolley here?

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I just think that if you quote something and you don't clearly modify it with ellipses or brackets, you need to stick to the source, period.

A couple of months ago there was an amazing headline in several newspapers over here : "The Queen: 'I used to take cocaine at parties'"

By "The Queen" what they actually meant was "Actress Helen Mirren, who once played the Queen". I could not believe my eyes when I saw several versions of the crazy inflammatory headline.

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You'll learn your place, noob.

Nah, I get what you mean, but I don't think there's a journalist on this earth that would've left that stuff out. I understand keeping news neutral, but don't make them dry for the sake of it.

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I feel like I must be coming across like a crazy person. When this many people disagree with you you do tend to be wrong. Am I completely off the trolley here?

Not completely :)

The security guard resignation did immediately strike me as a very oddpart of the story to emphasise, and I do dislike when news sources use people who are sick, dying or disadvantaged in some way to enhance their angle.

I find the BBC is mostly okay, though they do sometimes put abysmal stories up. ITN tend to be far, far worse in terms of dramatising things and exploiting people.

Of course, there's an antidote for entertaining distraction to be had from all of this.

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This thread makes me think of the UK press. When I walk around Brighton a lot of kiosks have a poster of the daily headline of The Argus, the local newspaper, and it amuses me how they're always three or four words in huge bold font that sound super extreme. It could be something like...

WOMAN IN

RECYCLING

TRAGEDY

What?! They'd come up with some amazingly bizarre headlines sometimes, that just made no sense out of context. And often the actual stories associated with them would be super lame. I just searched for a bit and found there's actually a flickr group for it.

Anyway, the BBC pretty much rules, as far as I can tell. I don't have a TV connection anymore but I watched election night on TV while on holidays, and we kept flicking the channels between Sky News, CNN and BBC. The attitude of the BBC was really restrained and professional. Sometimes they'd say something like "ABC News has called this state for Obama. I should say that the BBC has not called this state yet. We repeat, BBC has not called this yet. We will let you know when enough votes are in." Which to me kind of said 'don't go to those dumbass channels, we're not jumping to any conclusions here'.

Also, the next morning I watched BBC News which had a broadcast from New York, and the old British journalist man got stuck with a nasty cough. He excused himself but when he asked his question again he had to cough again. So he took a sip of water and was like "Hmmyes, yes that's much better, really clears the throat" with a typical old man British accent and then he looked slyly at the camera and under his breath said "harumph it's a gin & tonic". Which was win. And completely besides any kind of point.

I don't know why I wrote about all that.

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Small town papers are particularly bad when it comes to sensationalist headline posters. Derby has particularly scintillating ones like "BT KEEP MAN ON HOLD FOR 8 HOURS" (No really), and once they had a story about a guy getting jailed for child porn, but the posters said something like "10000 CHILD PORN PHOTOS" making it look like they were advertising them.

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I just searched for a bit and found there's actually a flickr group for it.

Haha, that's awesome! Good find. :tup:

An instant lol was:

BUS IS

MISTAKEN

FOR

A CAR!

That's news right there.

I always just thought of the Argus headlines as advertising at the end of the day and not a lot more.

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