Want to see BBC News reported right? Try this
Worried that the BBC is going to start replacing all instances of ‘cuts’ with ‘savings’ in their reports, and drive you mad with rage?
We have the solution.
Say hello to the ‘Honestificator’, by Robert Manuel of b3ta.com (with thanks to @bengoldacre).
He says:
Ben Goldacre wrote me an email, “Apparently the govt have leaned on the bbc to use the word “savings” instead of “cuts”. be nice if someone made something that resubstituted “cuts” back in. “thehonestificator”. whatever.”
Two seconds of googling for “search replace bookmarket” finds me this script by sixthgear, which I can quickly hack to make the BBC tell the truth.
So this is how it works.
1. You drag this link –> The Honestificator <– to your bookmarks bar in your browser and it should become a bookmark.
2. Go to a BBC story where they’re trying to be desperately nice to Tory ‘savings’.
3. Press the link you just saved and it will tell you the truth!
Much thanks to @RobManuel again.
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Sunny Hundal is editor of LC. Also: on Twitter, at Pickled Politics and Guardian CIF.
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Reader comments
lame
I don’t know – since people want their news stories pandering to their own agenda (and I’m as guilty of this as anyone else – I won’t watch or read the news if Arsenal have lost (anything interesting happen on Sunday incidentally?)) then there is a place for this.
But first of all we have to run a script to change ‘honestifier’ to ‘personal agenda suitifier’, since it is honest to call what the government is doing both cutting and saving (since the two are complementary concepts, not mutually exclusive).
No – it’s correct to call it “cutting”. It’s dishonest to call it “saving”, because that isn’t actually what it’s doing at all.
If we’re being honest, perhaps government organisations which have had their budget increased, but by not quite as much as their greediest fantasies, could stop using the word ‘cut’ to apply to their situation.
Does it replace “investment” with “tax” for all the stories during Labour’s era?
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Want to see BBC News reported right? Try this | Liberal Conspiracy http://t.co/dOLkgXg via @libcon <No "savings"
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