Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC slander

[Tom Chance]

On Friday 06 Feb 2004 15:43, P.L.Hayes wrote:
> On Friday 06 February 2004 14:54, Tom Chance wrote:
> > Could you post your letter here before you post it off? People in the
> > UKCDR are quite interested in this too. Perhaps the AFFS and the UKCDR
> > could come together and do a bit of a letter campaign, or a joint formal
> > letter, to Ofcom?
>
> Yes I will do so but first I need to check out the Programme Complaints
> Unit as suggested by MJ Ray and I'm still waiting for a reply from ofcom as
> to whether they handle BBCi stuff or not. The UKCDR would seem to be the
> place to coordinate a more wide-ranging campaign about the inadequacies of
> the BBC perhaps? There seem to be few avenues of attack though. The charter
> review process is one possibility. On the BBC science message boards there
> was talk of a petition, possibly even using the BBC's own local campaign
> thingummy but that was about the poor quality of Horizon programmes
> recently - a whole different kettle of worms game ;)

I don't think we want to spread this too wide, since we're hardly in a 
position to critique the BBC's reporting as a whole ;) But perhaps, based 
upon any responses you get from Ofcom, it'd be a good idea to write a formal 
letter from any interested orgs (e.g. UKCDR, AFFS, FSFE) to the right people 
highlighting just their reporting of the SCO case at first. Then, based on 
the responses we get from that, maybe widen it to issues like piracy where 
they seem to take a very biased, uninformed or misleading line.

The charter review might also be a good place to air these wider concerns.

I'm not sure who would/could coordinate it. My impression from promoting 
various schemes I've thought up on the UKCDR list is that everybody likes to 
e-mail and not many people like to do anything, so I'd suggest those that 
want to do it just go ahead and do it, and see if others want to jump on.

As someone else said, either on this list or the UKCDR (I forget which) 
bombarding people with e-mails probably isn't the best course of action at 
the moment, but if it did become a good idea, we could then try to get 
something written up and slashdotted maybe.


> > p.s. the UKCDR also have a bone to pick with the reporting on issues like
> > piracy
>
> Yes, Stephen Evans's name comes to mind again methinks. What of the
> non-appearance of their promised Ogg streams too - I've harried them about
> their destructive and exclusive addiction to the Real formats before but to
> no avail. Is the UKCDR interested in such matters?

I have no idea, I'm not the UKCDR ;) Like I said, it would be worth raising (I 
can if you're not on the lists) but I don't know what will come of it.

Tom