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BBC

I, David McFarlane, dislike the BBC intensely - I think this comes from having a big pile of bullshit delivered, courtesy of their news and current affairs output, on a fairly regular basis.

On Monday night, their consumer rights programme Watchdog had a piece on Internet shopping and the dangers associated with it. To try and highlight how easy it is to scam people, they decided to create a website that sells gifts at competitive prices (such a wonderful use of taxpayers money, don’t you think?).

Allegedly it only costs £60 to set up a site like theirs, but if you believe that then I’m afraid you have as much intelligence as Jade Goody after twelve pints. Many companies would gladly charge you upwards of £800 for such a site (which reminds me - if Watchdog want somebody to look into, how about those idiots who "create" websites for around £2,000?), so to suggest this would cost the average punter £60 is frankly rubbish.

Now the whole point of doing this was to show how easy it is to scam people on the Internet, but not once did we hear anything about how to avoid encountering such sites in the first place. In fact there were only two people intereviewed that had been victims, along with an "Internet expert" (quite how he got this title, I don’t know) - not exactly a crisis, is it?

The cherry on top of the bullshit pie is that while Watchdog harp on about deceptive online practices, they admit that they intentionally falsified domain registrant information - which is in breach of the domain registration terms of service. Well done.

The BBC continuously spout out crap that is just simply not true - another example is a piece they did on Panorama about Wi-Fi connections being harmful to children. Without any actual evidence, they decided to carry out some "experiments" to try and work out if children would be affected by radiation coming from the connections - radiation was used multiple times, when in fact you get the same amount of radiation from a light as you do from a Wi-Fi connection. Of course, these "experiements" found that the danger risk is quite high (when it’s actually probably more dangerous to go to the toilet in the dark).

The BBC employs morons and presents lazy journalism as fact - the sooner we stop paying for this rubbish, the better.

Although it still has one redeeming feature I suppose - Charlie Brooker.

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