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BBC censors its own archives

165 points by temp8964 5y ago

Proven 5y ago
KineticLensman 5y ago
> But the BBC is a de facto government agency — an agency for which all Britons who own televisions are forced by statute to pay — and, as a result, the material that it is modifying is effectively publicly owned. This is a massive simplification which somewhat undermines the overall article. The government does not automatically own or have the copyright of the material broadcast by the BBC, definitely not in the strict IP sense. The BBC is a 'public corporation': neither a private corporation nor a government department. Furthermore, it generates revenue independently of the license fee, e.g. from sale of content overseas (and advertising on its .com site, as opposed to the .co.uk site we see in the UK). I'm not saying that the BBC is right or wrong to modify it's historic content, just that the argument that the content is publicly owned is flawed.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  I don't care what the technical status of the BBC is. It is publicly funded and thus the public has an interest in ensuring history is not being rewritten.
  - ghusto 5y ago
    It is not "publicaly funded" in the same way that the roads or NHS are. I didn't pay a penny to the BBC the entire time I lived in the country because I never had a television. I still paid for the roads though, despite not having a car (yes, everyone actually pays for the roads, not just motorists). So while I agree they shouldn't be doing this, I wouldn't use the "publically funded" argument. It muddies the waters and makes rebuke easier.
    - speedbird 5y ago
      Cough fuel duty
      - andyjohnson0 5y ago
        >> (yes, everyone actually pays for the roads, not just motorists). > Cough fuel duty Revenue from fuel duty isn't exclusively used to pay for the road system. Same for vehicle excise duty. As with most government spending, road building and maintenance is paid for out of general government funds. Hypothecation is rarely used in the UK tax system.
      - edent 5y ago
        The UK doesn't have Hypothecated taxation. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01480/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      I would absolutely use the "publicly funded" argument, because the public was forced to pay for BBC productions if they had a Television (a device for viewing them). When much of this content was made, there were not even VHS tapes or streaming sticks, meaning the only thing a television would have been used for was the BBC. And you can't argue that it was not compulsory - BBC ran scare campaigns for decades about their "TV Detector vans" to fine people who didn't pay. To me, the method might be different, but that doesn't change the publicly funded status. I don't care if it wasn't funded the same way as roads. It was still publicly funded, just in a different way. I believe that anything that had compulsory public money going into it should be properly archived, be it film, or software, or old documents.
      - edent 5y ago
        > I believe that anything that had compulsory public money going into it should be properly archived, be it film, or software, or old documents. You'll be pleased to know that the archives are intact! You can even view off-air recordings at https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/bob/ https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/bob/ The article is only talking about broadcast repeats.
  - lwhi 5y ago
    > I don't care what the technical status of the BBC is. It is publicly funded and thus the public has an interest in ensuring history is not being rewritten. The organisation has a duty to serve all members of the UK. Removing language which degrades segments of this audience, is clearly within its remit. A dogged determinism to 'not rewrite history', is not. I'm thankful you're not on the board.
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      In the US there were Senators who defended the practice of lynching in newspaper pieces. Should we go back and edit historical records to remove this on account of those opinions degrading some segments of the modern audience?
      - notahacker 5y ago
    - temp8964 5y ago
      > The organisation has a duty to serve all members of the UK. > Removing language which degrades segments of this audience, is clearly within its remit. If this logic stands, it can be used by any government/ organization as a reasoning for censorship. Well done.
      - lwhi 5y ago
        We're talking about content that's designed to entertain; this is not the same. Slurs against minority groups, aren't necessary.
        temp8964 5y ago
        Lol. Actually, slurs against minority groups are only OK in entertainment, not in any other content. You got it reversed. Please think first.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
This reminds me of the adage that the winners write the history. This has always been going on, it’s just now so easy to track. The funny thing about editing the past is that those living automatically win, so it isn’t much of a fight. It seems people would rather edit the past than be offended. This behavior certainly fits well with our understanding of modern sensibilities.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  its much easier to get people to go along with historically bad ideas if they've never been allowed to know how badly the previous incarnations have been for the world. Other comment mentioned "Peter Pan," and the unsuitability of some of it for modern kids... Why aren't kids allowed to know that people once thought of things differently than we do now? We tell them "someone discovered the earth was round" even though thats arguable, but on this subject the fear of controversy mandates ignorance and silence? I don't wanna teach my kid that, and didn't.
  - zimpenfish 5y ago
    > We tell them "someone discovered the earth was round" even though thats arguable It's arguable that "someone discovered the earth was round" or that "the earth is round"? Because I'm pretty sure that neither of those is actually arguable.
    - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
      You absolutely can argue the Earth isn’t round. You won’t win the argument, but it’s an acceptable idea to challenge. Indeed, having to defend the position that the Earth is in fact round can help you gain understanding and have confidence in your conclusion. Not to belabor the point, but the idea that the Earth is flat is actually natural. It seems to be flat based on our senses. I think it’s a great teaching moment about how things are not as they seem.
    - h2odragon 5y ago
      It's certainly arguable that a particular namable someone first found some way to communicate the concept that the earth is spherical to someone else... but it was many someones and the actual origins are lost to us. Its easy enough to say "the earth is a ball" because you've been told, but how can you prove it?
soniman 5y ago
When I would watch BBC Shakespeare productions and follow along with the text, I noticed BBC would change things like "O Jesu" to "O Lord" or change complicated medieval political terminology to "we are fighting for our rights against the king." If they'll do it to Shakespeare, they'll do it to Dr. Who.
- flonkyflonk 5y ago
  You can blame James I for that, not the BBC. Blasphemy was banned on the English stage in 1606 (the "Restraint of Players" act) and so later publications are usually expunged. The BBC production could have been using a later edition (possibly based on the First Folio from 1623) which censors all the references to God and other blasphemy like "zounds", which is short for "God's wounds". You where almost certainly following along with an edition where the editor had restored the original published text from before the act was created.
gwbas1c 5y ago
I think it's important to keep an archive of unaltered content. But, given that much of this content is for entertainment, curation is important. For example, when Disney Plus was new, I decided to watch Peter Pan with my kids. One was 4, and one wasn't even two. Curiously, I couldn't find Peter Pan in the "kids" mode, so I switched back to the adult mode and put it on. There was a very subtle warning about "outdated cultural references," but I didn't think much of it as I've seen Peter Pan a few times. The Disney Plus version reintroduced "What Made the Red Man Red?", an extremely racist musical bit. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Made_the_Red_Man_Red%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Made_the_Red_Man_Red%3F) In the past, this song was cut from the VHS and DVD version. (And I have vague memories of wondering why the lost boys returned to their tree dressed as Indians.) I had no idea that this was put back in the movie. My jaw dropped when the song came on. I was in so much shock that I didn't think to skip the scene. Now, I have no problem preserving the uncut film, and making it generally available! But I also would prefer to show my young children the cut version of the film, and only show them racist material when they're old enough to understand why it's wrong. (After all, those who forget history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history.)
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  >In the past, this song was cut from the VHS and DVD version. Having grown up with Peter Pan on VHS I can assure you it was not cut from the US VHS release (at least not the ones in the white plastic clamshell cases that Disney VHS releases in the 80's/90's came in).
- nix23 5y ago
  >the lost boys returned to their tree dressed as Indians. Watch your mouth young man! It's "dressed as native Americans".
  - krastanov 5y ago
    Maybe you are sarcastic or maybe you are trying to make a point in a light-hearted way, but while the word has plenty of history, "American Indian" is not a term particularly frowned upon. The museum in DC is called that way, and plenty of tribes prefer to have ownership over the term instead of it being unilaterally changed. I personally use the two interchangeably (which would probably make *someone* uncomfortable because of some connotation, and I will just be respectful and talk with that person).
deleted 5y ago
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orlovs 5y ago
> “Out of public view, the state-owned broadcaster has been altering old episodes of its shows to make them ‘suitable’ for modern listeners.“ I don’t get why grown ups need to be threated as kids. I am doing same for little ones, but why for grownups. Times changes, what is or not ok changes. In that case maybe adding some context commentary would be fine for those who dont know history. But erasing it is not cool
- Consultant32452 5y ago
  The beauty of the internet is there's at least a chance for us to catch them erasing history. Before, if it wasn't mentioned on the 3 TV networks, no one would ever know.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  It's important to erase it so people don't know how racist their parents/grandparents were.
  - orlovs 5y ago
    Did not get is it sarcasm or real thing. those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it
krastanov 5y ago
What is the problem with editing a show for rebroadcast? If the archive is destroyed or inaccessible, that is certainly terrible. But seems perfectly normal to edit a show broadcast (the same way a modern version of a Shakespeare play is different than the original).
- tpoacher 5y ago
  Depends on the broadcast. If it's barney the dinosaur to make the dinosaur less pink, I don't care. If it's stuff which was used to haul the country to war on Iraq, I do care.
  - krastanov 5y ago
    Well, good thing that it was the former, right? Which is what is being described in this article: editing entertainment programs for today's broadcast, not censoring the archive copy and definitely not touching newscasts.
    - washadjeffmad 5y ago
      I'm assuming you read the article, but the BBC is sanitizing historical programming concerning entertainers who have been involved in and recently convicted of certain crimes, notably organized paedophlilia and sex trafficking. That seems less like harmless cleanup as much as it does a directed PR campaign on behalf of the perpetrators and their associates at the BBC.
      - krastanov 5y ago
        I am (sincerely) missing something in your second paragraph. Why is that on behalf of the perpetrators? It sounds more like taking away from the perpetrators (they are not celebrated as great entertainers anymore) and ensuring the people they have targeted do not need to see their faces on TV presented to unaware watchers as some great "nice funny guy".
        5y ago
asow92 5y ago
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
- asow92 5y ago
  Why would someone downvote this?
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Fortunately I have all Monty Python DVDs, so BBC can not censor my copies. The show was already offending back then, but today it is beyond measure.
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  Just wait until the Spanish Inquisition shows up and demands to swap out your dvds.
  - jjgreen 5y ago
    I wasn't expecting that ...
- krastanov 5y ago
  I very much doubt that it would ever be difficult to access the archive copies. It is unsurprising that a new broadcast is edited, but this is no more censorship than editing Shakespeare for modern audience is. If you are curious what the original was (and you should always be, no matter how old the media is), you can always check out the archive (which are becoming more and more easy to access, not more difficult as this article is implying).
- CountDrewku 5y ago
tpoacher 5y ago
Nonsense. We were always at war with Oceania.
disruptalot 5y ago
Where is the evidence? I think it's extremely important that mass media organisations are held accountable to what they publish, given their reach. As such I always wonder if there is a collection of revisions that major news articles have made, especially in this age that it's simply a page on a URL. There is archive.org but has someone identified the noteworthy alterations?
ilikejam 5y ago
Editing shows for rebroadcast is not the same as censoring archives.
efitz 5y ago
What the hell went wrong with the western world that a nontrivial number of people think that free speech is bad, censorship is good and it’s ok to rewrite history when it’s inconvenient or unpleasant?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- krastanov 5y ago
  My read of the article gave me very different impression. No archives were actually censored. Entertainment programs were edited to fit the zeitgeist as has been done with theater plays for centuries and with TV for decades. If anything, today it is easier to access unaltered archives than ever. This hand-wringing is cheapening the word censorship and making real censorship more difficult to notice in the noise.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    >” making real censorship more difficult to notice in the noise.” Just about every debate about ‘censorship’ I’ve encountered ends up with people debating the meaning of the word itself. And, there is a sizable contingent of people asserting only the government can censor. It’s already too late.
- edent 5y ago
  When do you think that wasn't the case? The Family Shakespeare publication shows that was the case back in the 1800. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler
  - an9n 5y ago
    Ah yes, the good old 'it's always been that way!' fallacy
    - edent 5y ago
      The original said: > What the hell went wrong with the western world This, to my reading, implies that there was a time when things were "right" in the western world. And, at some point, something went wrong.
joshuajill 5y ago
Netflix does this also. I've noticed in a documentary, I believe it was "The Social Dilemma", which now includes comments about COVID-19 disinformation campaigns.
- an9n 5y ago
  [flagged]
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Books are revised. Publishers stop distributing old editions. Is this different?
edent 5y ago
I've read through that article, and it doesn't seem to give any specific examples. The through-linked article has said that they removed some racist jokes and mentions of child abusers. And, much like in the comment, I'm like well... yeah. > Because it is so old, much of the material that the BBC has been altering is not available to purchase or download, nor broadly owned on physical media, That's not true. The majority is available to download via either official or unofficial archives. Huge amounts of BBC material was released on cassette and CD. If you watch a movie on an aeroplane, it will quite often be edited - both to remove excess sex and violence and - duh - mentions of plane crashes! If you watch BBC shows syndicated in the USA, they'll have advert breaks edited in. This is such a non-story.
nmstoker 5y ago
The distinction between excising content from the actual archive as compared to editing a version for broadcast is an important one. The former would be awful but the latter is reasonable, unless the broadcast is part of a series about past approaches to such matters (and is available with suitable warnings). The whole thing should be a non-issue though now, because they have their own platform (iPlayer) with which they ought to be able to provide both versions in a user selectable manner (with necessary age checks if that's deemed necessary, as it is for certain content already on there). This gives the ideal compromise, as it doesn't rewrite history whilst ensuring that people who may be offended have an option suitable for them. This leads into the other thing they should be pushing to achieve, which is to get much more of their archive accessible to UK license payers - clearly 100% would be a tall order but it's a good target.
deleted 5y ago
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r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
From reading the article it doesn't seem that the BBC is actually censoring its own archives. It's just choosing whether or not to rebroadcast certain episodes in their original form or omit them entirely. You can still access the originals, admittedly you may have to leave your computer and actually go to the archives themselves. This is... fine? Or is the demand that you must have access to absolutely everything all of the time?
- VancouverMan 5y ago
  Intentionally limiting the access of others to information, including by omission or by imposing artificial barriers, is still inherently censorship.
- Bud 5y ago
MarkusWandel 5y ago
Why can't the now-offensive stuff not just go behind a clickwall? A big full-screen disclaimer. That this material no longer conforms to current standards, or was made by persons who are now considered bad. Continue at your own discretion. Or even have a scrolly banner or watermark in the material itself to prevent it from being stripped of the disclaimer by others. But preserve the historical record.
- NeoTar 5y ago
  Because for the most part these are actually broadcast, that is to say the archive that the BBC makes available have been sent out over TV or radio waves within the past few weeks. It's not a matter of someone actively seeking out content on a webpage. Its a matter of, say, leaving the radio on in the background when you are cooking, and hearing content with outdated language and ideas.
denton-scratch 5y ago
Isn't the whole point of an archive that it can't be altered? If you're allowed to alter it, then you aren't allowed to call it an "archive".
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  The original archive isn't altered. If you want to go to the British Library in person or if you want to obtain an academic pass to the BBC archive you can still see the originals. This article is about repeat airings.
friendlydog 5y ago
Should we expect the quote of George Orwell of "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped." To be rewritten as "Everything is fine, trust the government."
NeoTar 5y ago
As an example where I imagine this may have happened, in the early two-thousands I listened to a radio show (Brothers in Law) from the 1970's. It was in general a light-hearted comedy series starting Richard Briers - something people may know him from playing Tom in 'the Good Life' sitcom. One episode of the show was particularly uncomfortable to listen to. It was an episode which featured an abused wife - beaten by her husband. I can't recall the full context of the episode, but basically it turned out that she was happy when her husband beat her - 'because it showed he loved her' (not a direct quote). Whilst I agree this episode should be available in some form - it could be important to show some people's attitudes at the time towards domestic abuse, I think that it would be totally appropriate to remove it from the series if the series were being broadcast at tea-time, in a slot which would normally be a light-hearted comedy.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  But this is just a single person's viewpoint. It's not like the BBC is taking the position that husbands who beat their wives actually love them. And in fact, you will find many abused women who, yes even in 2022, would say something like that.
- xdennis 5y ago
  Why would people want to listen to a historical show but not experience it as it was?
Angostura 5y ago
This is a a strange article. I have no doubt that the 'archived' version is retained. However, yes if they are rebroadcasting some radio show from the 1950 for a contemporary entertainment, it's possible they will edit the content. They don't repeat the black and white minstrel show from the 1970s at all. Shoud they? No.
- shellac 5y ago
  > I have no doubt that the 'archived' version is retained. Working in the preservation area, and being aware of what the BBC has lost over time, the title immediately had my interest. But this isn't a serious piece of journalism at all. The author doesn't make any attempt to verify the claim, and liberally decorates his piece with specious references to Orwell. He doesn't appear to know what an archive actually is, and thinks the BBC is 'state owned'. It appears to serve little purpose than to ensure the header and footer are visually separated in a pleasing way.
- mahogany 5y ago
  This article is a pretty fascinating experiment showing how propaganda (or, to be more generous: click-bait) works in real time. Look at how many comments in this thread think that the archive versions were censored based on the misleading title. You could probably argue that the title is technically correct and that's what makes propaganda so effective. It's unfortunate, because there is a nuanced discussion to be had here, about whether re-broadcasts should be modified (e.g. should we be okay with that if there is a disclaimer?), but the conversation gets derailed immediately because many people only read headlines. But of course, they know what they are doing, trying to get a rise. They could have easily used a more accurate, but boring, title such as "BBC re-broadcasts differ from archived versions."
Bud 5y ago
[flagged]
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  >”and burning of books” I assume this merely metaphorical?
  - Bud 5y ago
    No. It's literal. And I don't mind eating a few downvotes for saying so; it's a fact. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/11/virginia-school-board-book-burning https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/11/virginia-school-boar...
buildsjets 5y ago
I wonder if they edited "The Dambusters". In the American release, Guy Gibson's little black dog's name was overdubbed as "Trigger." The BBC version always aired the original name, which was NOT "Trigger."
yob22 5y ago
RickJWagner 5y ago
All this history-erasing is going to become so confusing that you'll need a cheat-sheet to decide if you want to be offended by something or not. Somebody really said that? Hmmm, do they align with my politics or not? I'd better find out before deciding to be outraged or dismissive....
finite_jest 5y ago
The title is slightly misleading. It would be more accurate to change "its own archives" to "its reruns of the old shows". That's bad enough though. They are making "woke cuts" [1] to old shows, lest their viewers question the universality of cultural norms by being exposed to an unfiltered version of the past. Sure, the unaltered versions are probably accessible somewhere, but that doesn't make what they doing "not censorship" and ok. It would be like saying that the Hogwarts Library wasn't censored because you could find the banned books in the Restricted Section or elsewhere. At least Hogwarts had the defence of being something of a high school. [1]: The Telegraph: BBC makes 'woke cuts' to archives, including Dad's Army https://archive.is/Y5nJw https://archive.is/Y5nJw
deleted 5y ago
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165 points by temp8964 5y ago

> But the BBC is a de facto government agency — an agency for which all Britons who own televisions are forced by statute to pay — and, as a result, the material that it is modifying is effectively publicly owned. This is a massive simplification which somewhat undermines the overall article. The government does not automatically own or have the copyright of the material broadcast by the BBC, definitely not in the strict IP sense. The BBC is a 'public corporation': neither a private corporation nor a government department. Furthermore, it generates revenue independently of the license fee, e.g. from sale of content overseas (and advertising on its .com site, as opposed to the .co.uk site we see in the UK). I'm not saying that the BBC is right or wrong to modify it's historic content, just that the argument that the content is publicly owned is flawed.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
I don't care what the technical status of the BBC is. It is publicly funded and thus the public has an interest in ensuring history is not being rewritten.
- ghusto 5y ago
  It is not "publicaly funded" in the same way that the roads or NHS are. I didn't pay a penny to the BBC the entire time I lived in the country because I never had a television. I still paid for the roads though, despite not having a car (yes, everyone actually pays for the roads, not just motorists). So while I agree they shouldn't be doing this, I wouldn't use the "publically funded" argument. It muddies the waters and makes rebuke easier.
  - speedbird 5y ago
    Cough fuel duty
    - andyjohnson0 5y ago
      >> (yes, everyone actually pays for the roads, not just motorists). > Cough fuel duty Revenue from fuel duty isn't exclusively used to pay for the road system. Same for vehicle excise duty. As with most government spending, road building and maintenance is paid for out of general government funds. Hypothecation is rarely used in the UK tax system.
    - edent 5y ago
      The UK doesn't have Hypothecated taxation. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01480/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    I would absolutely use the "publicly funded" argument, because the public was forced to pay for BBC productions if they had a Television (a device for viewing them). When much of this content was made, there were not even VHS tapes or streaming sticks, meaning the only thing a television would have been used for was the BBC. And you can't argue that it was not compulsory - BBC ran scare campaigns for decades about their "TV Detector vans" to fine people who didn't pay. To me, the method might be different, but that doesn't change the publicly funded status. I don't care if it wasn't funded the same way as roads. It was still publicly funded, just in a different way. I believe that anything that had compulsory public money going into it should be properly archived, be it film, or software, or old documents.
    - edent 5y ago
      > I believe that anything that had compulsory public money going into it should be properly archived, be it film, or software, or old documents. You'll be pleased to know that the archives are intact! You can even view off-air recordings at https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/bob/ https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/bob/ The article is only talking about broadcast repeats.
- lwhi 5y ago
  > I don't care what the technical status of the BBC is. It is publicly funded and thus the public has an interest in ensuring history is not being rewritten. The organisation has a duty to serve all members of the UK. Removing language which degrades segments of this audience, is clearly within its remit. A dogged determinism to 'not rewrite history', is not. I'm thankful you're not on the board.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    In the US there were Senators who defended the practice of lynching in newspaper pieces. Should we go back and edit historical records to remove this on account of those opinions degrading some segments of the modern audience?
    - notahacker 5y ago
  - temp8964 5y ago
    > The organisation has a duty to serve all members of the UK. > Removing language which degrades segments of this audience, is clearly within its remit. If this logic stands, it can be used by any government/ organization as a reasoning for censorship. Well done.
    - lwhi 5y ago
      We're talking about content that's designed to entertain; this is not the same. Slurs against minority groups, aren't necessary.
      - temp8964 5y ago
        Lol. Actually, slurs against minority groups are only OK in entertainment, not in any other content. You got it reversed. Please think first.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

This reminds me of the adage that the winners write the history. This has always been going on, it’s just now so easy to track. The funny thing about editing the past is that those living automatically win, so it isn’t much of a fight. It seems people would rather edit the past than be offended. This behavior certainly fits well with our understanding of modern sensibilities.

h2odragon 5y ago
its much easier to get people to go along with historically bad ideas if they've never been allowed to know how badly the previous incarnations have been for the world. Other comment mentioned "Peter Pan," and the unsuitability of some of it for modern kids... Why aren't kids allowed to know that people once thought of things differently than we do now? We tell them "someone discovered the earth was round" even though thats arguable, but on this subject the fear of controversy mandates ignorance and silence? I don't wanna teach my kid that, and didn't.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  > We tell them "someone discovered the earth was round" even though thats arguable It's arguable that "someone discovered the earth was round" or that "the earth is round"? Because I'm pretty sure that neither of those is actually arguable.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    You absolutely can argue the Earth isn’t round. You won’t win the argument, but it’s an acceptable idea to challenge. Indeed, having to defend the position that the Earth is in fact round can help you gain understanding and have confidence in your conclusion. Not to belabor the point, but the idea that the Earth is flat is actually natural. It seems to be flat based on our senses. I think it’s a great teaching moment about how things are not as they seem.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    It's certainly arguable that a particular namable someone first found some way to communicate the concept that the earth is spherical to someone else... but it was many someones and the actual origins are lost to us. Its easy enough to say "the earth is a ball" because you've been told, but how can you prove it?

soniman 5y ago

When I would watch BBC Shakespeare productions and follow along with the text, I noticed BBC would change things like "O Jesu" to "O Lord" or change complicated medieval political terminology to "we are fighting for our rights against the king." If they'll do it to Shakespeare, they'll do it to Dr. Who.

flonkyflonk 5y ago
You can blame James I for that, not the BBC. Blasphemy was banned on the English stage in 1606 (the "Restraint of Players" act) and so later publications are usually expunged. The BBC production could have been using a later edition (possibly based on the First Folio from 1623) which censors all the references to God and other blasphemy like "zounds", which is short for "God's wounds". You where almost certainly following along with an edition where the editor had restored the original published text from before the act was created.

gwbas1c 5y ago

I think it's important to keep an archive of unaltered content. But, given that much of this content is for entertainment, curation is important. For example, when Disney Plus was new, I decided to watch Peter Pan with my kids. One was 4, and one wasn't even two. Curiously, I couldn't find Peter Pan in the "kids" mode, so I switched back to the adult mode and put it on. There was a very subtle warning about "outdated cultural references," but I didn't think much of it as I've seen Peter Pan a few times. The Disney Plus version reintroduced "What Made the Red Man Red?", an extremely racist musical bit. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Made_the_Red_Man_Red%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Made_the_Red_Man_Red%3F) In the past, this song was cut from the VHS and DVD version. (And I have vague memories of wondering why the lost boys returned to their tree dressed as Indians.) I had no idea that this was put back in the movie. My jaw dropped when the song came on. I was in so much shock that I didn't think to skip the scene. Now, I have no problem preserving the uncut film, and making it generally available! But I also would prefer to show my young children the cut version of the film, and only show them racist material when they're old enough to understand why it's wrong. (After all, those who forget history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history.)

HideousKojima 5y ago
>In the past, this song was cut from the VHS and DVD version. Having grown up with Peter Pan on VHS I can assure you it was not cut from the US VHS release (at least not the ones in the white plastic clamshell cases that Disney VHS releases in the 80's/90's came in).
nix23 5y ago
>the lost boys returned to their tree dressed as Indians. Watch your mouth young man! It's "dressed as native Americans".
- krastanov 5y ago
  Maybe you are sarcastic or maybe you are trying to make a point in a light-hearted way, but while the word has plenty of history, "American Indian" is not a term particularly frowned upon. The museum in DC is called that way, and plenty of tribes prefer to have ownership over the term instead of it being unilaterally changed. I personally use the two interchangeably (which would probably make *someone* uncomfortable because of some connotation, and I will just be respectful and talk with that person).

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orlovs 5y ago

> “Out of public view, the state-owned broadcaster has been altering old episodes of its shows to make them ‘suitable’ for modern listeners.“ I don’t get why grown ups need to be threated as kids. I am doing same for little ones, but why for grownups. Times changes, what is or not ok changes. In that case maybe adding some context commentary would be fine for those who dont know history. But erasing it is not cool

Consultant32452 5y ago
The beauty of the internet is there's at least a chance for us to catch them erasing history. Before, if it wasn't mentioned on the 3 TV networks, no one would ever know.
pessimizer 5y ago
It's important to erase it so people don't know how racist their parents/grandparents were.
- orlovs 5y ago
  Did not get is it sarcasm or real thing. those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it

krastanov 5y ago

What is the problem with editing a show for rebroadcast? If the archive is destroyed or inaccessible, that is certainly terrible. But seems perfectly normal to edit a show broadcast (the same way a modern version of a Shakespeare play is different than the original).

tpoacher 5y ago
Depends on the broadcast. If it's barney the dinosaur to make the dinosaur less pink, I don't care. If it's stuff which was used to haul the country to war on Iraq, I do care.
- krastanov 5y ago
  Well, good thing that it was the former, right? Which is what is being described in this article: editing entertainment programs for today's broadcast, not censoring the archive copy and definitely not touching newscasts.
  - washadjeffmad 5y ago
    I'm assuming you read the article, but the BBC is sanitizing historical programming concerning entertainers who have been involved in and recently convicted of certain crimes, notably organized paedophlilia and sex trafficking. That seems less like harmless cleanup as much as it does a directed PR campaign on behalf of the perpetrators and their associates at the BBC.
    - krastanov 5y ago
      I am (sincerely) missing something in your second paragraph. Why is that on behalf of the perpetrators? It sounds more like taking away from the perpetrators (they are not celebrated as great entertainers anymore) and ensuring the people they have targeted do not need to see their faces on TV presented to unaware watchers as some great "nice funny guy".
      - 5y ago

asow92 5y ago

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

asow92 5y ago
Why would someone downvote this?

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

Fortunately I have all Monty Python DVDs, so BBC can not censor my copies. The show was already offending back then, but today it is beyond measure.

onionisafruit 5y ago
Just wait until the Spanish Inquisition shows up and demands to swap out your dvds.
- jjgreen 5y ago
  I wasn't expecting that ...
krastanov 5y ago
I very much doubt that it would ever be difficult to access the archive copies. It is unsurprising that a new broadcast is edited, but this is no more censorship than editing Shakespeare for modern audience is. If you are curious what the original was (and you should always be, no matter how old the media is), you can always check out the archive (which are becoming more and more easy to access, not more difficult as this article is implying).
CountDrewku 5y ago

tpoacher 5y ago

Nonsense. We were always at war with Oceania.

disruptalot 5y ago

Where is the evidence? I think it's extremely important that mass media organisations are held accountable to what they publish, given their reach. As such I always wonder if there is a collection of revisions that major news articles have made, especially in this age that it's simply a page on a URL. There is archive.org but has someone identified the noteworthy alterations?

ilikejam 5y ago

Editing shows for rebroadcast is not the same as censoring archives.

efitz 5y ago

What the hell went wrong with the western world that a nontrivial number of people think that free speech is bad, censorship is good and it’s ok to rewrite history when it’s inconvenient or unpleasant?

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krastanov 5y ago
My read of the article gave me very different impression. No archives were actually censored. Entertainment programs were edited to fit the zeitgeist as has been done with theater plays for centuries and with TV for decades. If anything, today it is easier to access unaltered archives than ever. This hand-wringing is cheapening the word censorship and making real censorship more difficult to notice in the noise.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  >” making real censorship more difficult to notice in the noise.” Just about every debate about ‘censorship’ I’ve encountered ends up with people debating the meaning of the word itself. And, there is a sizable contingent of people asserting only the government can censor. It’s already too late.
edent 5y ago
When do you think that wasn't the case? The Family Shakespeare publication shows that was the case back in the 1800. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler
- an9n 5y ago
  Ah yes, the good old 'it's always been that way!' fallacy
  - edent 5y ago
    The original said: > What the hell went wrong with the western world This, to my reading, implies that there was a time when things were "right" in the western world. And, at some point, something went wrong.

joshuajill 5y ago

Netflix does this also. I've noticed in a documentary, I believe it was "The Social Dilemma", which now includes comments about COVID-19 disinformation campaigns.

an9n 5y ago
[flagged]
pseudalopex 5y ago
Books are revised. Publishers stop distributing old editions. Is this different?

edent 5y ago

I've read through that article, and it doesn't seem to give any specific examples. The through-linked article has said that they removed some racist jokes and mentions of child abusers. And, much like in the comment, I'm like well... yeah. > Because it is so old, much of the material that the BBC has been altering is not available to purchase or download, nor broadly owned on physical media, That's not true. The majority is available to download via either official or unofficial archives. Huge amounts of BBC material was released on cassette and CD. If you watch a movie on an aeroplane, it will quite often be edited - both to remove excess sex and violence and - duh - mentions of plane crashes! If you watch BBC shows syndicated in the USA, they'll have advert breaks edited in. This is such a non-story.

nmstoker 5y ago

The distinction between excising content from the actual archive as compared to editing a version for broadcast is an important one. The former would be awful but the latter is reasonable, unless the broadcast is part of a series about past approaches to such matters (and is available with suitable warnings). The whole thing should be a non-issue though now, because they have their own platform (iPlayer) with which they ought to be able to provide both versions in a user selectable manner (with necessary age checks if that's deemed necessary, as it is for certain content already on there). This gives the ideal compromise, as it doesn't rewrite history whilst ensuring that people who may be offended have an option suitable for them. This leads into the other thing they should be pushing to achieve, which is to get much more of their archive accessible to UK license payers - clearly 100% would be a tall order but it's a good target.

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r_hoods_ghost 5y ago

From reading the article it doesn't seem that the BBC is actually censoring its own archives. It's just choosing whether or not to rebroadcast certain episodes in their original form or omit them entirely. You can still access the originals, admittedly you may have to leave your computer and actually go to the archives themselves. This is... fine? Or is the demand that you must have access to absolutely everything all of the time?

VancouverMan 5y ago
Intentionally limiting the access of others to information, including by omission or by imposing artificial barriers, is still inherently censorship.
Bud 5y ago

MarkusWandel 5y ago

Why can't the now-offensive stuff not just go behind a clickwall? A big full-screen disclaimer. That this material no longer conforms to current standards, or was made by persons who are now considered bad. Continue at your own discretion. Or even have a scrolly banner or watermark in the material itself to prevent it from being stripped of the disclaimer by others. But preserve the historical record.

NeoTar 5y ago
Because for the most part these are actually broadcast, that is to say the archive that the BBC makes available have been sent out over TV or radio waves within the past few weeks. It's not a matter of someone actively seeking out content on a webpage. Its a matter of, say, leaving the radio on in the background when you are cooking, and hearing content with outdated language and ideas.

denton-scratch 5y ago

Isn't the whole point of an archive that it can't be altered? If you're allowed to alter it, then you aren't allowed to call it an "archive".

Mindwipe 5y ago
The original archive isn't altered. If you want to go to the British Library in person or if you want to obtain an academic pass to the BBC archive you can still see the originals. This article is about repeat airings.

friendlydog 5y ago

Should we expect the quote of George Orwell of "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped." To be rewritten as "Everything is fine, trust the government."

NeoTar 5y ago

As an example where I imagine this may have happened, in the early two-thousands I listened to a radio show (Brothers in Law) from the 1970's. It was in general a light-hearted comedy series starting Richard Briers - something people may know him from playing Tom in 'the Good Life' sitcom. One episode of the show was particularly uncomfortable to listen to. It was an episode which featured an abused wife - beaten by her husband. I can't recall the full context of the episode, but basically it turned out that she was happy when her husband beat her - 'because it showed he loved her' (not a direct quote). Whilst I agree this episode should be available in some form - it could be important to show some people's attitudes at the time towards domestic abuse, I think that it would be totally appropriate to remove it from the series if the series were being broadcast at tea-time, in a slot which would normally be a light-hearted comedy.

oh_sigh 5y ago
But this is just a single person's viewpoint. It's not like the BBC is taking the position that husbands who beat their wives actually love them. And in fact, you will find many abused women who, yes even in 2022, would say something like that.
xdennis 5y ago
Why would people want to listen to a historical show but not experience it as it was?

Angostura 5y ago

This is a a strange article. I have no doubt that the 'archived' version is retained. However, yes if they are rebroadcasting some radio show from the 1950 for a contemporary entertainment, it's possible they will edit the content. They don't repeat the black and white minstrel show from the 1970s at all. Shoud they? No.

shellac 5y ago
> I have no doubt that the 'archived' version is retained. Working in the preservation area, and being aware of what the BBC has lost over time, the title immediately had my interest. But this isn't a serious piece of journalism at all. The author doesn't make any attempt to verify the claim, and liberally decorates his piece with specious references to Orwell. He doesn't appear to know what an archive actually is, and thinks the BBC is 'state owned'. It appears to serve little purpose than to ensure the header and footer are visually separated in a pleasing way.
mahogany 5y ago
This article is a pretty fascinating experiment showing how propaganda (or, to be more generous: click-bait) works in real time. Look at how many comments in this thread think that the archive versions were censored based on the misleading title. You could probably argue that the title is technically correct and that's what makes propaganda so effective. It's unfortunate, because there is a nuanced discussion to be had here, about whether re-broadcasts should be modified (e.g. should we be okay with that if there is a disclaimer?), but the conversation gets derailed immediately because many people only read headlines. But of course, they know what they are doing, trying to get a rise. They could have easily used a more accurate, but boring, title such as "BBC re-broadcasts differ from archived versions."

Bud 5y ago

[flagged]

BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
>”and burning of books” I assume this merely metaphorical?
- Bud 5y ago
  No. It's literal. And I don't mind eating a few downvotes for saying so; it's a fact. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/11/virginia-school-board-book-burning https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/11/virginia-school-boar...

buildsjets 5y ago

I wonder if they edited "The Dambusters". In the American release, Guy Gibson's little black dog's name was overdubbed as "Trigger." The BBC version always aired the original name, which was NOT "Trigger."

yob22 5y ago

RickJWagner 5y ago

All this history-erasing is going to become so confusing that you'll need a cheat-sheet to decide if you want to be offended by something or not. Somebody really said that? Hmmm, do they align with my politics or not? I'd better find out before deciding to be outraged or dismissive....

finite_jest 5y ago

The title is slightly misleading. It would be more accurate to change "its own archives" to "its reruns of the old shows". That's bad enough though. They are making "woke cuts" [1] to old shows, lest their viewers question the universality of cultural norms by being exposed to an unfiltered version of the past. Sure, the unaltered versions are probably accessible somewhere, but that doesn't make what they doing "not censorship" and ok. It would be like saying that the Hogwarts Library wasn't censored because you could find the banned books in the Restricted Section or elsewhere. At least Hogwarts had the defence of being something of a high school. [1]: The Telegraph: BBC makes 'woke cuts' to archives, including Dad's Army https://archive.is/Y5nJw https://archive.is/Y5nJw

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