Why is the Foreign Minister Jewish David Milliband with again obvious dual loyalty towards Israel ???

Where is John Pilger ??? Where are the Palestinian voices ?

All the people who are silent are COLLABORATORS !!!!!

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.a….asp? partid=519

It’s a completely accurate one mathmatically, unless your blog has more than 51% of your audience commenting.

Basic child level statistics points out that a self selected sample (blog commentators) isn’t an accurate sample to base anything on. Hence a “vocal minority” is a completely true statement.

It’s a shame that the BBC (as proven by the Ross/Brand debacle, where the number of licence fee payers supporting the broadcast on Facebook outnumbers the complains, and Facebook’s validation of those people’s identity is *much* better than Ofcom’s) doesn’t actually act in such a statistically robust way.

“It should foster a ‘learning curve’ of interactive engagement, encouraging audiences to move from passive consumption to active participation online.” (bbc.co.uk Service Remit)

And so it has invited comment throughout it’s websites, without apparently giving much though on how to quantify, qualify, analyse or respond to what they get.

It would be a great pity if the BBC was to respond to it’s own failure in this area, by backing away from user-generated content just because they haven’t yet worked out what to do with it.

It’s worse than that. The ABCe specifically dumped the measure when used on its own two years ago as misleading, and switched to unique users !

Rgds

Matt

And this brings me to Mathew’s point about community. You are spot on in saying that reporters should be listening to their readers and, yes, at times stepping in to clear up misunderstandings.

I wonder if Helen Boaden will respond to any of the comments on her post?

In a literal sense, what the BBC News director said is true. In most cases, there are far more readers than there are commenters, so they are in some ways a “vocal minority.” That doesn’t mean their opinions are minority opinions, however. I like to go by the old rule of thumb about letters to the editor, which holds that for every letter, there are hundreds of other people who hold the same opinion but don’t write.

In that sense, thinking about them as just a minority is the wrong way to look at it, I think. And I also agree with your view on having writers become active participants in the comments themselves — that’s one of my goals at the Globe. It not only sends a signal that someone is listening and interested, but can short-circuit misunderstandings quickly as well. Done properly, I think it can raise the level of discourse better than just about anything else.