Moderation in action?

This is the sort of thing with which we respectfully disagree.

The BBC published a story with a headline which misrepresented the nuances of President Bush's speech on the progress of the war in Iraq, and later replaced the phrase "Bush speech hails Iraq 'victory'" with "Bush says Iraq invasion was right". What Bush actually said was The surge has ... opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror.

I have no beef with the suggestion that this is an editorial misjudgement by the BBC and that they were right to replace the headline, nor that the original headline misrepresented the president, and probably relied more on stereotyped views of Bush's policy than on a close reading of the text. But does serving justice on a misleading headline really require the marvellously-named Monkey Tennis Centre, despite its commendably thorough coverage and checking of this little volte-face, to be bandying around a clutch of accusations that this is "a thoroughness worthy of Orwell's Ministry of Truth"; "deceitful editing of the story, and [an] equally deceitful headline"; "dishonestly headlined, mendaciously edited"; and "spectacularly dishonest"? Perhaps. But our line is that it doesn't. The BBC, like all news agencies, offers its reportage as products in the marketplace of ideas, and it's up to us to take or leave, learn or ignore as we see fit.

We can't expect to have both constant, around-the-clock, up-to-the-minute coverage of everything and 100% impartiality of language. That's not to say we shouldn't expect accuracy, but we can take into account the pressures of maintaining this level of self-imposed pressure by the media and consider how well organisations are doing overall. Political bias is one thing, but this is a matter of subtlety of phrasing, and launching a little anti-BBC tirade is taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I've heard twenty-four-hour news described beautifully as "a stream of information unleavened by understanding or analysis", which seems to sum up what happened here. And it was fixed, after all.

(Another tension, it seems to me, is that between the world of "Web 2.0" and user-generated content on the one hand, and the idea that we are all helpless consumers in that marketplace of ideas, forced to choose only between the sparse millions of pieces of information provided for us and completely unable to make our own judgements and hold our own counsel, but perhaps that's for another day).

Of far more importance is another point in the same post: is it reasonable for a fully-moderated comments section to publish opinions by members of the public that Bush and Blair should be "hanged" for their "crimes"? On that one, as on the general insistence on the highest standards in the media, we are fully behind the Monkey Tennis Centre. But perhaps these aims can be better achieved by moderation than by tubthumping.