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February 28th, 2025 (Permalink)

Too Good to Fact Check?

  • Jamie Whitehead & Francesca Gillett, "BBC review finds 'serious flaws' over Gaza documentary", BBC, 2/28/2025.
    The BBC has apologised and admitted "serious flaws" in the making of a documentary about children's lives in Gaza. The documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, was pulled from iPlayer last week after it emerged its 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official. It said it has "no plans to broadcast the programme again in its current form or return it to iPlayer". … The BBC removed the documentary after concerns were raised that it centred on a boy called Abdullah who is the son of Hamas's deputy minister of agriculture. … It also launched a review into the film, and the BBC's Board met earlier on Thursday to discuss it.

    In the statement, a BBC spokesperson said both the production company and the BBC had made "unacceptable" flaws and that it "takes full responsibility for these and the impact that these have had on the corporation's reputation". It added the BBC had not been informed of the teenager's family connection in advance by the film's production company. The spokesperson says: "During the production process, the independent production company was asked in writing a number of times by the BBC about any potential connections he and his family might have with Hamas. "Since transmission, they have acknowledged that they knew that the boy's father was a deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas government; they have also acknowledged that they never told the BBC this fact. "It was then the BBC's own failing that we did not uncover that fact and the documentary was aired."

    If this account is correct, the documentarians concealed the boy's familial connection from the BBC. However, it's obvious that the Beeb also didn't fact-check the documentary with any care, which is underlined by the fact that the boy's relationship to the Hamas official was uncovered in short order after it aired by journalist David Collier1.

    … The BBC spokesperson said the incident had "damaged" the trust in the Corporation's journalism―and "the processes and execution of this programme fell short of our expectations". … A separate statement from the BBC Board added: "The subject matter of the documentary was clearly a legitimate area to explore, but nothing is more important than trust and transparency in our journalism. While the board appreciates that mistakes can be made, the mistakes here are significant and damaging to the BBC."

    This damage was self-inflicted: the documentarians may have deceived the BBC, but the Beeb was either incompetent or wanted to be deceived.

  • Katie Razzall, "Questions still remain for BBC after damaging Gaza documentary", BBC, 2/28/2025. Emphasis in the original.
    After an initial investigation, the BBC said the programme, which had been commissioned by the BBC and made by an outside production company, "fell short of our expectations". … It's a reputationally damaging mess, but how could it have happened? How did the commissioners of the programme not know that the child narrator's father was a deputy minister for agriculture in the Hamas-run government?

    The BBC says it had asked the production company "a number of times" in writing during the making of the film about any connections he and his family might have with Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation by the US, UK and others.

    This is the BBC's way of admitting that Hamas is a terrorist organization without actually saying so2.

    In a statement on Thursday the BBC said Hoyo Films, the maker of the film, acknowledged it "never told the BBC this fact". But what did it tell the BBC about the child? Crucially, the BBC failed to uncover the information itself.

    Embarking on a documentary about one of the most polarising and contested issues of our age was always going to be challenging. … The BBC commissioners in current affairs will have known the programme wasn't without risk. In circumstances like this, it's even more difficult to understand how the failings that have driven headlines for days―and done terrible damage to the BBC's reputation―could have occurred.

    Programme-makers and commissioners have previously told me they draw up risk grids to ensure they have the answers to any criticism thrown at them about their documentaries. They check and check and check to ensure they won't face problems after their programmes go out―or if they do, that they have the counter-argument ready.

    Dorothy Byrne, Channel 4's head of news and current affairs until 2020, told BBC Radio 4's Media Show she would have done her own checks rather than relying on the independent company. "If I was making this film, I wouldn't just ask who the boy was, who his father was, who his mother was, I would ask for the entire family tree. They could easily have found out about him, it shows that due diligence was not done. …I didn't wait for people to inform me of things," she added. "I asked them the right questions." …

    The BBC brand is based on impartiality―on being trusted around the world. All of us in news and current affairs take fact-checking very seriously. Mistakes are sometimes made, of course. But on this occasion both the independent production company and the BBC made serious errors which threaten trust in the corporation. …

    This isn't the end of the story and questions still remain. What exactly did the BBC ask about the boy and his family's potential connections to Hamas? Hoyo Films has said it's "co-operating fully with the BBC and Peter Johnston to help understand where mistakes have been made". … What's happened has damaged trust in the BBC in so many ways. Those who argue the corporation is biased against Israel will feel vindicated.

    It's certainly the most obvious explanation of what happened.

Notes:

  1. "BBC put on a Hamas Propaganda Pantomime", David Collier, 2/18/2025
  2. Fighters, Gunmen, and Militants?, 10/22/2023

Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with everything in these articles, but I think they're worth reading as a whole. In abridging the excerpts I have sometimes changed the paragraphing.

February 26th, 2025 (Permalink)

Quaffed or Coiffed?

A webpage for a collage sold by Christie's auction house contains the following sentence: "At the heart of the composition is an elegantly quaffed, bobbed head of hair, carefully cut out to preserve the shape and style of the hair-do, which looms large above all the other elements in the scene.1"

Since "to quaff" means to drink deeply2, this would seem to mean that someone not only drank the "bobbed head of hair", but did so elegantly, which seems unlikely. In contrast, "coiffed" is an adjective meaning carefully arranged, invariably referring to hair3. Surprisingly, there seems to be no corresponding verb, "to coif", in the English language, though there is a noun, "coiffure", referring to a hairdo4. As far as I can tell, "quaffed" and "coiffed" are pronounced exactly the same, which would seem to account for the confusing sentence. Presumably, the author meant that the hair was "coiffed" elegantly.

Both "coiffed" and "quaffed" are uncommon words, which may partly explain their confusion in this sentence. Anyone who has only heard the word "coiffed", and never seen it, could easily think that it was spelled the same as "quaffed". Considering that both words are uncommon, this mistake must be even more uncommon. Unsurprisingly, none of the reference books that I usually consult lists it as a confusion to avoid. Nonetheless, I found it funny and interesting.

Searching for other examples of the phrase "elegantly quaffed", I came across one from, of all people, the late actress Ingrid Pitt of Hammer horror movie fame. In a column describing her attendance at a film premiere, she wrote that she: "Made sure I was photographed with all the right people, elegantly quaffed champers and told outrageous lies about the Hollywood producers who were lining up to offer me gainful employment.5" "Champers", in case you don't know, is English slang for "champagne"6, so Pitt was indeed gracefully drinking the stuff. That may be the only time in the history of the world that the phrase "elegantly quaffed" has been correctly used in a sentence.

As usual, I checked the sentence from Christie's in several online spelling and grammar checking programs. While none objected to "quaffed", two did object to the hyphen in "hair-do". Also as usual, I checked the sentence with an "artificially intelligent" program, namely, Grok. Here's a transcript of the interaction:

Me: Can you check an English sentence for spelling and grammar?

Grok: Yes, I'd be happy to help! Please share the sentence you'd like me to check.

I pasted in the example sentence and Grok replied:

Grok: Your sentence is well-written and grammatically sound, but there's one word that seems out of place: "quaffed." "Quaffed" means to drink something heartily, typically alcohol, and doesn't fit the context of describing hair. I suspect you meant "coiffed," which means styled or arranged, especially in reference to hair. Here's how the corrected sentence would read:

"At the heart of the composition is an elegantly coiffed, bobbed head of hair, carefully cut out to preserve the shape and style of the hairdo, which looms large above all the other elements in the scene."

A couple of minor notes:

  • "Hair-do" could simply be "hairdo" (no hyphen), as both are acceptable, but "hairdo" is more common in modern usage.
  • The sentence is a bit long and could be split for clarity if desired, though it's fine as is.

Let me know if you'd like further adjustments!7

Yet again as usual, the AI chatbot was a better copy-editor than the dedicated spelling and grammar checkers.

Notes:

  1. "Das schöne Madchen", Christie's, accessed: 2/26/2025.
  2. "Quaff", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 2/23/2025.
  3. "Coiffed", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 2/23/2025.
  4. "Coiffure", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 2/23/2025.
  5. Ingrid Pitt, "The Ingrid Pitt column: when Ingrid met Hammer Films", Den of Geek, 1/15/2008.
  6. "Champers", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 2/23/2025.
  7. "Chat with Grok", Grok, accessed: 2/26/2025.
Puzzle
February 25th, 2025 (Permalink)

A Puzzling Bookshop

A small bookstore that I occasionally visit specializes in three types of book: mysteries, puzzle books, and philosophy. On a recent day, forty people visited the shop, though one of them just browsed and didn't buy anything*.

Mysteries, of course, tend to be the most popular books sold, but on this occasion fifteen people did not buy any. As you might expect, philosophy is the least favorite category, and just three customers bought philosophy books only. In contrast, seven patrons bought both mysteries and puzzle books but no works of philosophy. An equal number of people bought books of all three types as bought both mysteries and philosophy but no puzzle books, whereas half as many bought only puzzle books as bought just mysteries. Finally, one less person purchased philosophy books only as bought both philosophy and puzzle books but no mysteries.

How many customers bought all three types of book?

* That was me.

Disclosure: The above puzzle is a work of fiction as is the bookstore.

New York Magazine Cover
February 12th, 2025 (Permalink)

How to Tell Half-Truths with Photographs1

When you think of fake photographs today, you may think of Photoshop or even "deep fakes" generated by computers. Before the advent of digital photography, it was impossible to use such sophisticated means to create misleading photographs, and cruder techniques were used such as double exposures and airbrushing. An even simpler technique is cropping, that is, simply cutting off part of the photograph. The resulting photo would not be a false image, but a true image that tells only part of the story: the photographic equivalent of a half-truth.

Cropping is innocently used to change the composition of a photograph or to remove unwanted parts of the image, and no one should object to that. The problem occurs when cropping hides important parts of the picture. Consider the cover of a recent issue of New York magazine2―shown to the above right.

The story illustrated on the cover, "The Cruel Kids' Table"3, is a lengthy first-person account of the author's attendance at a party for internet "influencers" celebrating Donald Trump's inauguration as president. As one might expect, the "young, imposingly well connected, urban, and very online" party-goers are portrayed in a negative light. It's a sort of left-wing version of "Radical Chic", the famous article by Tom Wolfe―which was also published in New York4, amazingly enough. If only the author, Brock Colyar, wrote half as well as Wolfe.

The article claims that "almost everyone [at the party] is white", which is a very vague claim and almost impossible to falsify. How many non-whites would have to be there for it to be false? Moreover, who counts as non-white? The cover of the magazine seems to support this claim since not a single non-white person is shown. Nonetheless, at the top of the article itself is the photograph shown below from which the cover was clearly cropped. New York Magazine Story

I've added white lines to show how the cover was cropped from the full photo, and it's obvious that it was no accident the three black attendees in the left-hand side of the image were cropped out. The left cropping line―which determines where the right line must fall in order for the resulting image to fit the cover dimensions―just grazes the right side of the head of the black man in the blue jacket. There's no obvious compositional reason why the image should be cropped just there. Cropped

Because it's a crowd shot, from a visual standpoint, any cropping that adjusted the dimensions of the photo to fit the cover would have worked compositionally. In particular, chopping off the right side would have brought the beautiful young women in the lower left hand corner of the cover closer to its center and leave all three black attendees in frame; here's what that would have looked like, without the magazine logo, story title, and teaser―see the image to the right. I, of course, cropped the original photo to make this point, but that just goes to show that there's nothing inherently wrong with cropping.

If the magazine had not included the uncropped photograph at the top of the article, it's doubtful that the cropping would have ever been discovered. This highlights why cropping is such an insidious technique: you can't tell by simply looking at a photograph that something important has been left out. Moreover, unlike PhotoShopped pictures, there are no tell-tale clues in the image that reveal that it has been manipulated5.

In comparison, there are several additional photos sprinkled throughout the article, none of which show any non-white faces. Did the photographer avoid taking any photos of non-white partygoers? Did the photo editor carefully avoid printing any such photos that the photographer took? Were any of the printed photos cropped to remove non-whites? We'll probably never know.

Notes:

  1. Previous entries in this series:
  2. "Issue Contents", New York, 1/27/2025.
  3. Brock Colyar, "The Cruel Kids' Table", New York, 1/27/2025. Warning: Contains once offensive language.
  4. Tom Wolfe, "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's", New York, 6/8/1970. Warning: Contains now offensive language and misspelled French phrases.
  5. Compare the photograph discussed in: Seeing is Disbelieving, 3/13/2024.
Doublespeak
February 4th, 2025 (Permalink)

21st Century Doublespeak, Part 21

Over fifteen years ago, I documented the phrase "undocumented immigrant" as a euphemism for "illegal alien"2. Google's Ngram viewer shows that "illegal alien" was rather rare from about a century ago until the late 1960s when it shot up, peaking in the late 1970s3. In contrast, "undocumented immigrant" was virtually nonexistent prior to 1970, after which its occurrences gradually increased until they peaked in 2017. Surprisingly, the euphemism didn't surpass in frequency the older phrase until 2016.

William Lutz, in his book Doublespeak Defined from 1999, defines "illegal alien" as "undocumented worker"4. The Ngram viewer shows the latter phrase also nearly nonexistent prior to 1970 when it suddenly surged, peaked ten years later, declined for about a decade, then spiked once more around 1990, hit a lower peak in 2006, then declined since5. So, the word "undocumented" seems to have been introduced around 1970 as a euphemism for "illegal" when applied to immigrants.

I've previously discussed what I call "euphemism inflation"6, which is the way that euphemisms wear out over time and must be replaced. This is why there are so many euphemisms for people who bury dead people, that is, undertakers, morticians, and funeral directors. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a non-euphemistic word for the job. Obviously, dealing with dead bodies is unpleasant, and people don't like to think about death, so a euphemism is de rigueur. However, over time the euphemism becomes tainted by association with the job, and a new one becomes necessary.

Given the phenomenon of euphemism inflation, we can predict that any given euphemism will eventually lose much of its euphemistic force, and there will be a felt need to replace it. Given that "undocumented" has been used as a euphemism, coupled with "worker" or "immigrant", for over a half-century, it is surely past time for replacement. This brings us to the USA Today news report that prompted this entry, which begins with a "Story Summary", probably prepared by an editor, in which we read:

The Laken Riley Act would require ICE to detain immigrants without legal permission who commit theft-related crimes. The bill, named after a Georgia nursing student killed by an immigrant without legal permission, passed with bipartisan support and now heads to the Senate.7

When I first read this, I was confused because the first sentence sounds as though the immigrants in question lacked legal permission to commit thefts, which should go without saying; either that or it was Immigration and Customs Enforcement that lacked permission to detain them, which makes no sense given that the Act in question requires ICE to do so. Similarly, the second sentence seems to say that an immigrant lacked legal permission to kill a student which, again, should be unnecessary to mention.

However, the first sentence of the article itself clears up the mystery: "The new Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed its first bill Tuesday, the Laken Riley Act, named for the 22-year-old Georgia nursing school student killed by a Venezuelan immigrant living in the country without legal permission." So, the immigrant lacked legal permission to live in this country rather than to steal or murder.

Thus, the phrase "immigrant living in the country without legal permission", and the truncated "immigrant without legal permission", appear to be attempts to create a new euphemism for the taboo "illegal immigrant"8? The phrase "illegal alien" occurs once in the article, but only in a quote of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, whereas the word "undocumented" never appears.

While wordiness is often a feature, not a bug, of doublespeak9, the full phrase is rather a mouthful and the truncations lead to ambiguous sentences, such as those quoted above from the summary. For this reason, I doubt that this particular attempt at replacing "undocumented immigrant" will succeed, but it is evidence that "undocumented" has overstayed its welcome.

Notes:

  1. For part one, see: 21st Century Doublespeak, 1/18/2025.
  2. Documented Doublespeak, 9/16/2009.
  3. "illegal alien,undocumented immigrant", Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed: 2/4/2025.
  4. William Lutz, Doublespeak Defined: Cut Through the Bull**** and Get the Point (1999), p. 58.
  5. "undocumented worker", Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed: 2/4/2025.
  6. See, for instance: Doublespeak Dictionary, 1/14/2010.
  7. Fernando Cervantes Jr., "House passes Laken Riley Act, which heads to Senate with increasing Democratic support", USA Today, 1/8/2025.
  8. Oddly, the article does include the phrase "immigrants in the United States illegally", which means the same thing as "illegal immigrants".
  9. See: Another New Four-Letter Word, 6/5/2020.
February 2nd, 2025 (Permalink)

Headline

Arctic Blast Prompts Rapid Turtle Rescue Efforts*

Isn't "rapid turtle" an oxymoron? Also, shouldn't they concentrate on the slower ones?

*"Arctic Blast Prompts Rapid Turtle Rescue Efforts", The Weather Channel, 1/29/2025

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