MUMBAI: BBC World has been rated as the most trusted international news channel, according to International Air Travellers Survey (IATS), Global 2005.
BBC won with 46 per cent among those surveyed voting for it, ahead of TV5 (, CNBC, Bloomberg and CNN.
The survey was conducted across 25 major airports, investigating international travellers’ consumption of global television channels and publications.
When asked about their most recent television viewing, 9.8 per cent of international travellers surveyed had watched BBC World the previous day, 18.3 per cent in the last week and 25.8 per cent in the last month. As evidence of BBC World
Their copy editing sucks big-time, though. They’ve decided to refer to acquired immune deficiency syndrome as “Aids” rather than “AIDS.” What they will use for the verb which means ‘to help,’ when they don’t want to use the word “help,” I have no idea.
Yesterday I was reading a BBC story and in the same paragraph, South Korea was not capitalized, but India was. I mean, WTF???!!!
And you limeys claim to have superior English? :raspberry:
PS Aboriginal girl: providing a link to the story is enough. The moderators here deem it bad form to copy the entire text of a story into a post.
It is interesting about BBC. When I first moved to Taiwan I thought BBC was accurate, professional, reliable, unbiased and so on. But, about 5 or so years ago when I really started listening to their reports on Taiwan news I came to the conclusion that they:
were using “stringers” for their Taiwan news
since “stringers” only get paid for items BBC uses then there is a strong incentive for the stringer to make “big news” out of nothing, hoping the BBC editors use (and pay for) the item.
Ergo: the BBC stringer was making up shit (not completely “making up” but grossly overstating the news value of event x, y or z) and the BBC was running the items on slow news days which in turn
gives people in the outside world a very skewed view of what is what in Taiwan.
Now that may have been a temporary problem, there are better and worse stringers and I maybe completely wrong ;BBC may have a full time salary-man/woman here in Taiwan.
But the bottom line, which both my wife (a local and a former Big Fan of the BBC) and myself agreed on, was:
BBC is as screwed up as any of the other news outlets. As a result if I want to know what is going on in the world I simply consult my I-Ching…it is about as accurate.
Yes I thought you might say that. Sure, it does help differentiate the two meanings, but…
the word “Aids” is not an acronym standing for a disease with four separate words in its name. Just because I’ve gotten used to reading BBC stories and know that the BBC means acquired immune deficiency syndrome when they say “Aids,” that doesn’t mean it will be clear to others. “AIDS” however is clearly an acronym and everybody knows what it stands for without having to reread the sentence in which it appears twice.
I have not encountered any other information source that refers to the disease that way.
the word “aids” can be a noun and, if appearing at the beginning of a sentence, can be capitalized. For instance, a headline about a new type of hearing aid might read: “Aids sales boost Telex’s profit margins.” Or perhaps in the case of The Wall Street Journal which capitalizes all words in their headlines: “Entire Florida Retirement Community Given Free Aids.” Now, don’t you think the meaning might be mistconstrued if all news outlets were to adopt the BBC’s method of referring to AIDS?
[quote=“aprimo”]2) I have not encountered any other information source that refers to the disease that way.
the word “aids” can be a noun and, if appearing at the beginning of a sentence, can be capitalized. For instance, a headline about a new type of hearing aid might read: “Aids sales boost Telex’s profit margins.” Or perhaps in the case of The Wall Street Journal which capitalizes all words in their headlines: “Entire Florida Retirement Community Given Free Aids.” Now, don’t you think the meaning might be mistconstrued if all news outlets were to adopt the BBC’s method of referring to AIDS?[/quote]
Ooh, good point. Actually, the Guardian (which I otherwise respect very much) has done this for a while, and I’ve posted elsewhere about how much I dislike it. But this is the first time I’ve really given thought to arguments against it
rooftop, I believe under this “standard” the rule is that acronyms (defined as pronounceable) are capitalised in this fashion (Nato, Who), while non-pronounceable “initialisms” such as HTML remain all caps.
[quote=“daasgrrl”]
rooftop, I believe under this “standard” the rule is that acronyms (defined as pronounceable) are capitalised in this fashion (Nato, Who), while non-pronounceable “initialisms” such as HTML remain all caps.[/quote]
Which is exactly how the BBC are doing it.
The example of “Who” for WHO can’t be true, can it? If so, then I totally concur that it looks bad/is confusing.
[quote=“rooftop”][quote=“daasgrrl”]
rooftop, I believe under this “standard” the rule is that acronyms (defined as pronounceable) are capitalised in this fashion (Nato, Who), while non-pronounceable “initialisms” such as HTML remain all caps.[/quote]
Which is exactly how the BBC are doing it.[/quote]
Yes - I just meant that it wasn’t just Aids, but a general rule.
Actually, I don’t know, but this is the Guardian guideline itself - now I think about it, the general pronunciation for WHO is probably “double-u aitch oh”, so that would make it WHO, even though you could theoretically pronounce it:
[quote]Spell out less well-known abbreviations on first mention; it is not necessary to spell out well-known ones, such as EU, UN, US, BBC, CIA, FBI, CD, Aids, Nasa
Use all caps only if the abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters; otherwise spell the word out: the BBC, ICI, VAT, but Isa, Nato
[/quote]
One thing I do like about BBC’s absentminded copy editing: Bill Clinton is still referred to as “President Clinton.” I wonder if this is a conscious choice.
:raspberry:
I wonder if this is a conscious choice.