I always keep some news feeds from the BBC in my RSS aggregator, both because they offer a non-American slant on the news and because of the occasional odd story that is just so very British.
From a recent example of the later comes the revelation that “The BBC Trust has upheld a complaint that the clock on the BBC homepage was “inaccurate and misleading”.”
The BBC Trust is the governing body that oversees the operations of the British Broadcasting Corporation and is supposed to represent the interests of the people who pay licensing fees to own a television set, aka the viewers.
In this case one of those viewers was upset that “although readers assume the clock is correct, it merely reproduces the time on the user’s computer” and thus may not be accurate if the computer itself has the wrong time.
The Trust ruled in the complainant’s favor saying that “having a clock which does not state it derives its time from a user’s computer is not consistent with BBC guidelines on accuracy”, and that the clock will be removed in the next update.
And the BBC management offers a very British apology, probably not unlike this wonderful example from John Cleese…