BBC Backtracks on Correction of Children's 9/11 Guide

Wow! This story is wearing me out! The editor of NewsRound, Sinead Rocks, speaks out about the outrage from Americans to her biased 911 guide for children in her Editor Section. You can read the whole non apology there, but I'll summarize for you here. In short she said that the majority of people clicked through Drudge to an older version and provides a Drudge Archive. As reported earlier, she said she took that page down (we will come back to this). Down a few paragraphs in her piece she says that she later realized that many blogs were actually complaining about the newer version...which you can find here. She wants it to be known that her apology did not apply to the newer version and that BBC stands by it. Problem #1: The Drudge Archive she links to links to the exact same web address as what she claims is the newer version. A Blog called Biased BBC has the entire transformation history captured from google caches.

Even more curiously, having retrieved the original guide on 11SEP2007, watched it disappear on 12SEP2007 (page not found) to reappear as a sanitised single page version, it now seems today that the 11SEP2007 guide version is back online (compare with versions retrieved from Google's cache at Biased BBC) - or is it still not fully purged from your systems (even though the timestamps have been updated to say 12SEP2007)? What gives?

This leads us to problem #2: No matter which link that she provides...if you follow it, it now has the page that was removed yesterday. The same page that Drudge linked to and we all complained about. The quote below:

The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like the Middle East has made some people very angry, including a group called al-Qaeda - who are widely thought to have been behind the attacks. In the past, al-Qaeda leaders have declared a holy war - called a jihad - against the US. As part of this jihad, al-Qaeda members believe attacking US targets is something they should do. When the attacks happened in 2001, there were a number of US troops in a country called Saudi Arabia, and the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, said he wanted them to leave.

Sinead ends her editorial saying that the "old version" will not return but they stand by the new version. Well...either the old version returned or the BBC is standing by the "new version" we all complained about. I think Sinead needs a few more complaining emails to get the picture.