A New Scam - The BBC Honesty Course

[Teddy Bear]

Honesty between human beings is the basis of morality, leading to a 'higher' plane of consciousness and communication. Lying to another shows a contempt and disdain both for that person and the principle of honesty itself.

Liars are stupid beings, because it shows that they really don't understand the value of honesty. They apparently have lost any concept of energy and vibration, as they don't appear to realise that humans can sense lies and deceit. One can watch a liar going through the thoughts they need to maintain to uphold their lie, and see they don't seem to realise that their machinations are observed. They believe the logic of their twisted thoughts is sufficient to 'prove their case'. Some know that they need to avoid blinking or averting their eyes while lying, and keep a fixed inanimate stare, as if we can't tell the difference between a genuine openess and a contrived act.

In an effort to show everybody their intent to now be honest, all BBC staff will be required to undergo a course in it. This very farce shows the contempt and disdain those that run the BBC have for its fee payers, its audience, its fellow beings, its society. As if we're really taken in by it.
Who are these adults that need to learn honesty?
Who are these adults that having been shown to be dishonest, try to impress us that by undergoing a course in the theory of honesty will then become so?
Pure charlatans, conmen and women.
They really don't know how stupid they really are!
They see what they want to gain, not what they lost.
Fools!

Note that to cover themselves for future deceptions that come to light Byford states "Mr Byford, standing in for Mr Thompson who was on a delayed family holiday, acknowledged that further deceptions might come to light. "We cannot be 100 per cent certain that we have captured everything. Some investigations are still going on," he said."

Further deceptions???
This 'honesty' course is one of them.

I'd like to rig them to a lie detector which every time it sensed a lie it sent a heavy electric shock through their bodies. That's my idea of an honesty course that might work.

BBC to teach its stars honesty
By Andrew Pierce
Last Updated: 2:52am BST 25/07/2007

John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman will be required to join Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC, on a mandatory new training programme to teach honesty to BBC staff.

The Safeguarding Trust course is being set up as part of the damage limitation exercise by the corporation after the revelation that six children's and charity television programmes had misled viewers.

Mark Byford, the deputy director general, giving evidence to a Commons Culture Select Committee yesterday, said all employees, no matter how senior or famous, would have to attend the course if involved in making programmes.

Mr Byford, who was giving evidence with Caroline Thomson, the chief operating officer, said: "Everyone must be reminded about what the BBC stands for and what trust is."

But the BBC may find some presenters more resistant than others. Andrew Neil, who presents the Daily Politics show on BBC2 and This Week on BBC1, was contemptuous.

"All 16,000 of us are going to be sent to re-education camps, a bit like Pol Pot's Cambodia," he told his viewers.

Philip Davies, a Tory MP on the select committee, also questioned the need for the course as he thought the requirement for honesty ought to be obvious.

Mr Byford, standing in for Mr Thompson who was on a delayed family holiday, acknowledged that further deceptions might come to light. "We cannot be 100 per cent certain that we have captured everything. Some investigations are still going on," he said.

Michael Grade, the chairman of ITV, also giving evidence to the committee, gave a hint that production company RDF, which has been suspended while the inquiry into wrongly edited footage of the Queen for the BBC is ongoing, might not work for him again.

"If anyone is found to have deceived or lied to viewers, we won't do business with them. Anyone who wants to make programmes for me should be aware that if you are caught deceiving the public it is one strike and you are out," he said.

ITV is awaiting the outcome of an audit ordered after allegations against GMTV and shows including The X Factor, Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway and Soapstar Superstar.

Channel 4, in partnership with Five, will publish an Independent Producer's Handbook that will provide a guide to the regulatory rules governing the making and broadcast of programmes and will also beef up its own training programme.

[Teddy Bear]

The Daily Mail also covers this story

BBC staff are sent on courses to learn they shouldn't lie
By BENEDICT BROGAN - More by this author »

Last updated at 00:09am on 25th July 2007

BBC bosses have been accused of wasting licence-fee money on teaching their staff not to lie.

The decision to send 16,500 employees on an "integrity" course in the wake of the fake TV shows scandal was condemned by MPs.

Two of the corporation's top executives appeared before a Commons committee investigating the affair.

Director general Mark Thompson is on a family holiday, so his deputy Mark Byford and chief operating officer Caroline Thomson were asked to explain how viewers were deceived by a string of shows including Children In Need and Comic Relief, as well as the doctored footage of the Queen

They were accused of "fighting a rearguard action" and being "dangerously out of touch" with the way programmes are made.

Tory MP Philip Davies asked: "Is funding a training programme to tell your staff not to lie and cheat viewers a good use of licence-fee payers' money? Perhaps you need to look at your recruitment process if you have to train them on such fundamentals as not lying or cheating?"

But Mr Byford insisted the training programme, called Safeguarding Trust, was a good idea.

He branded the deceptions totally unacceptable and said honesty was at the heart of the relationship between the BBC and its viewers.

Mr Byford said he had been stunned by the six new deceptions revealed last week in a scandal which began when Blue Peter was found to have faked a competition winner.

He admitted: "We can't be 100 per cent certain we have captured everything. Some investigations are still going on."

The BBC is also investigating why staff did not come forward to reveal the latest six deceptions as soon as the Blue Peter faking was made public in March.

Mr Byford was asked about apparent inconsistencies in the way the BBC has responded to the crisis.

Three senior editorial staff across the corporation have been suspended - but DJ Liz Kershaw is still broadcasting despite the fact her BBC 6 Music radio show was arguably the worst offender. The programme was prerecorded, but presented as if it was live.

All "prize winners" were members of the production team or their friends, and the prizes did not exist.

Committee chairman John Whittingdale MP said the show had operated "serial deliberate deceptions".

"Why, then, is Liz Kershaw still broadcasting?" he asked.

But Mr Byford declined to give detailed answers about the deceptions, saying investigations were still going on.

Mr Davies told him: "That is a typical Government tactic of hiding behind an inquiry saying 'I can't comment further'."

[indikit]

Andrew Neil, who presents the Daily Politics show on BBC2 and This Week on BBC1, was contemptuous.
"All 16,000 of us are going to be sent to re-education camps, a bit like Pol Pot's Cambodia," he told his viewers.


Comparing a licence fee paid piss up and smokescreen meeting to the worlds biggest genocide, all I can say is...Let's just hope that for once in his career Andrew Neil is proved totally right.

[Teddy Bear]

indikit said:

Comparing a licence fee paid piss up and smokescreen meeting to the worlds biggest genocide...

Indi you have a deliciously succinct way of putting things ;D

[steevo]

This is amusing and maybe a taste of justice but its not focusing on the real problem: their left-wing agenda. Maybe it will be easier now for critics to point out because it is lies and intentional manipulation but still, largely a different beast and a 'problem' doubtful the Beeb will seriously acknowledge. I can't help to wonder, if we have no more blatant insults and phoney competitions, will they be more emboldened?

[Teddy Bear]

Their 'reputation' has undoubtedly been dented. I see the recent scandals are being reported internationally, which serves to reduce their effectiveness as a propaganda machine.

Their 'chickens' will eventually come home to roost.


An article in Time magazine

BBC Facing Scandal Over Contests
Wednesday, Jul. 25, 2007 By EBEN HARRELL/LONDON At least six BBC programs have breached editorial standards by faking phone-ins.

Known in Britain simply as "Auntie," the British Broadcasting Corporation has guided the country through wars and social convulsions with the steady hand of a trusted relative. But now this 85-year-old pillar of British society finds itself at the center of a widening scandal that threatens its worldwide reputation for accuracy and impartiality — and not for the first time.

Yesterday, senior BBC executives went before a House of Commons committee to discuss revelations of viewer deception and editorial misconduct, including phone-in trivia competitions in which the BBC encouraged viewers to call in answers — only to award the prize to an employee posing as an enthusiastic contestant.

Three of eight bogus competitions uncovered in internal reviews were in support of charity — Comic Relief, Sport Relief and Children in Need — and one, Blue Peter, was a children's show.

In a separate, widely-publicized incident, a promotional clip for a BBC television documentary on Queen Elizabeth manipulated footage to make it appear that the monarch walked out in a huff from an Annie Leibovitz photo-shoot. (The producer of the independent film company commissioned to make the documentary has since resigned, although his production company has refused to accept his resignation.)

The current scandal involving phone-in competitions broke after similar revelations from another public broadcast television channel, ITV. But the BBC holds an exalted place in British society because it receives public subsidy from viewers — Brits must pay $280 a year for a "license" to watch television — specifically designed to protect its two national channels (plus a range of digital channels) from competitive pressures and rating wars.

"It is totally unacceptable and it goes to the heart of what the BBC stands for, which is trust, accuracy and openness," BBC deputy director general Mark Byford told the Commons committee. "We are the most trusted broadcaster in Britain; what we can't have is very damaging incidents like this."

Most of the staged phone-in competitions occurred when phone lines failed during live broadcasts and staff decided to stage winners rather than reveal the technical glitch, a BBC spokesman said. However, one program, a cooking show made by an independent production company, asked viewers to phone in to vote for a dish they would like to see prepared even though the program was recorded.

"What we have to make absolutely clear to all our staff is, 'when in doubt, don't do it…better to go off the air [than be deceitful]," Mr Byford added.

In response to the crisis, the BBC announced last week the appointment of an editorial standards board to oversee programming and the creation of an independent inquiry into the misleading footage of the Queen. Around 16,500 staff will also undergo mandatory training in the standards of the BBC.

But Tuesday's hearing, designed as a sort of theatre and described by the former BBC head Michael Grade as a "catharsis," was still a public embarrassment for the BBC executives, whose testimony interspersed contrition with the obfuscating language of the very politicians their hardened journalists are supposed to hound: "We asked people to step aside who may have knowingly known," Mr Byford told members of parliament, in a redundancy he used more than once.

Speaking before the hearing, David Jordan, the BBC's Controller of Editorial Policy, told TIME that the BBC's review of its practices would be thorough, and may uncover further instances of malpractice as "[the BBC] discover what other skeletons might still be in our closet". In 2004, a British judicial inquiry scrutinized a controversial BBC report of a year earlier that claimed the British government had deliberately overstated Iraq's nuclear capability. After the inquiry concluded that "the editorial system which the BBC permitted was defective," the BBC's chairman and director general both resigned.

Whatever further revelations emerge this time around, Britain's confidence in its national broadcaster has been shaken, and public grumbling over television license fees is bound to gain in volume. When the BBC introduced television shows alongside its stalwart radio broadcasts in 1936, it promised a new world in entertainment. But for BBC watchers, despite the fantastical nature of the medium, television was never meant to be make-believe.

[Teddy Bear]

Call me cynical, I don't think it will make a blind bit of difference to BBC output, but it will permit me to say about BBC transgressions in the future that "this is after they have done a course about 'trust'.

BBC restoring trust for £500,000
By Neil Midgley, TV & Radio Editor
Last Updated: 2:20am GMT 05/12/2007

The BBC is spending up to £500,000 on teaching its staff how to avoid misleading viewers, it emerged yesterday.

The initiative was launched after a series of scandals, including deception on Blue Peter and a wrongly edited trailer on the Queen.

More than 16,000 members of staff at the BBC, including the presenters Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, will be required to take part in one of the workshops, which are called Safeguarding Trust.

Mark Byford, the deputy director general, has already taken the course, and Mark Thompson, the corporation's director general, will attend on Friday.

Each workshop lasts up to two hours, with staff shown clips of BBC programmes and encouraged to debate the ethical issues that arise.

More than 4,300 staff have already attended the course.