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BBC and Evasion of History

KD | 25.04.2007 01:11

How to masquerade as a public broadcaster providing a factual history series and evade the facts at the same time.


From the BBC website:

Composition involved, in Gaelic parts, the commutation of the chief's right to take up supplies for his household and quarter his kerne and galloglass on his subjects for defence. This practice, known as coign and livery, had also spread to outlying English parts. Its English equivalent, purveyance for the army and governor's household, was also commuted, so reducing the queen's overall charges but generating fierce resentment in the Pale where it was seen as a new, unconstitutional, system of military taxation, levied without the subject's consent.

In short- The poor were made to pay the wages of the occupying army- refusal meant legal expropriation.

The use of Olde English terms is a classic method informing while at the same time evading the truth.

Democracy- don't you love it!


KD

Comments

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Beyond the Pale

25.04.2007 08:24

English readers might not recognise the word Pale except in the phrase 'beyond the Pale' or outside the bounds of decency. A Pale was any fenced area in hostile territory claimed and taxed by an occupying force - mainly the English as in Calais. The original and most famous Pale was an area twenty miles around Dublin in the 14th and 15th centurys. Nowadays we call a Pale a 'Green Zone'.

Danny
- Homepage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale

That's a misleading bit of BBC-bashing

25.04.2007 11:30



You're accusing the BBC of "masquerading" as a public service broadcaster because it publishes an academic piece by Professor Steve Ellis of Birmingham university on a history section?

What are you on? Unlike a lot of the BBC's output, the piece is firmly educational and not dumbed-down. How is that not a public service?

Norville B