A couple of days ago, I reported on the BBC’s interview with cerebal palsy sufferer Jody McIntryre, who’d been dumped out of his wheelchair during the student fees demonstration. Along with repeatedly asking McIntyre if he’d been throwing missiles (despite McIntyre saying he was incapable of doing so), Ben Brown offered the following gem, more than once:

There’s a suggestion you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair.

The YouTube video going viral has resulted in the BBC’s Kevin Bakhurst responding on a BBC blog. Predictably (and sadly), Bakhurst defends the interview and offers no apology. In fact, he seems nonplussed regarding the fuss that’s been made about it.

I am aware that there is a web campaign encouraging people to complain to the BBC about the interview, the broad charge being that Ben Brown was too challenging in it.

In once sentence, Bakhurst manages to miss two points, which is some kind of record for anyone who’s not a politician. There’s no online campaign, just a viral video clip. And the broad charge has nothing to do with Brown being challenging—it’s to do with Brown repeatedly suggesting someone did something they are incapable of doing, showcasing either ignorance or extreme arrogance. Brown’s questioning was little different from repeatedly grilling a blind man on why he didn’t dodge something thrown at him. “You’re just making it up,” is a line one could almost have expected to hear next.

I have reviewed the interview a few times and I would suggest that we interviewed Mr McIntyre in the same way that we would have questioned any other interviewee in the same circumstances

This, at least, is pretty accurate. The BBC’s news output has been getting steadily worse for a number of years now. So, presumably, this is the way the BBC questions interviewees:

• Go into interview with clear agenda to ‘out’ interviewee in some way.
• Ask ‘challenging’ questions, hoping to get your story/agenda across.
• Ignore all responses, especially those counter to your agenda.
• Repeat until, hopefully, interviewee gets frustrated.
• End interview abruptly.
• Pull smug ‘I’ve won’ face.

BBC News should remember that it’s not Fox News. It should write it on its face using a Sharpie.

Bakhurst again:

Mr McIntyre was given several minutes of airtime to make a range of points, which he did forcefully

I’m not sure he did so ‘forcefully’; I’d say, given his condition, he did well in terms of clarity, and, given the nature of the repeated stupid questions, with a surprising amount of grace.

Mr McIntyre says during the interview that “personally he sees himself equal to anyone else” and we interviewed Mr McIntyre as we would interview anyone else in his position.

McIntyre isn’t equal to anyone else physically, though. He’s in a wheelchair, and is a cerebral palsy sufferer. This, Kevin Bakhurst, is the crux of people’s complaints, not that you were too rough in general on an activist or a disabled person. If Stephen Hawking was mugged, it would not be OK for Brown to say “did you punch your attacker in the face?” repeatedly, especially having already been told that the interviewee is incapable of such actions. But that’s more or less what Brown did, and what Bakhurst is now not fully understanding and yet is defending.

Oh dear, Joshua Kors, ‘Investigative Reporter’, if only you could find your way to investigating a manual. Then you wouldn’t have had to tell everyone why you’re returning your iMac.

Kors’s story is more than a little astonishing, because it reads like something torn from a Microsoft marketing exec’s wet dream, but it’s so unbelievably bad and stupid that it’s the kind of thing even Microsoft wouldn’t run with, because they’ve too much class. Really. And yet Kors’s Onion-like article made the Huffington Post’s tech section.

The journey begins when Kors got bitch-slapped by a news director. Kors said he was working with a video editor to compact a hearing into a YouTube clip, and the director said even his interns can edit videos. Thinking video-editing skills could give his career a shot in the arm, Kors decided to invest in a Mac. (Why at this point he didn’t buy Premiere Elements for his PC is never explained. Maybe Kors thought he could grab a Mac, learn Final Cut Pro in eight seconds, and then go back to the news director and yell WHO’S THE DADDY NOW?, while rubbing his nipples in the director’s face.)

But things went wrong right away for Kors when he booted his Mac:

Turns out there’s a video camera embedded in the screen, and before I could boot her up for the very first time, she wanted to take my picture.

This is true—all Macs with a camera do this. (I’m not sure they’re overtly feminine though. Maybe Kors got a ‘special’ iMac, with boobs.) It also happens to be optional and a really nice touch. But Kors seemingly considers this neat idea for a little personalisation of your computer some kind of BIG BROTHER EVIL.

Next up, Kors discovered that those bastards at Apple hadn’t installed Microsoft Word on his computer, for free:

I had an article to write, but the only word processor I could find on my iMac was TextEdit, essentially a stripped-down version of Notepad.

After all, PCs are well known for arriving with suites of high-end software. I’m sure if you pick up a cheap Dell, it will be bursting at the seams with all the Photoshops and Offices of this world. (Also, TextEdit is, if you’re not a befuddled idiot, a surprisingly capable text editor. It can happily open basic Word documents, and it forms the text layer of many Mac writing tools. Of course, you actually have to learn how to use it, rather than dismissing it out of hand as somehow being inferior to Notepad.)

At this point, Kors also decided he hated the Mac mouse and had began to miss his old, five-button one. Oddly, it never occurred to him to plug said five-button mouse into his Mac. After all, he had more moaning to do:

I booted up my bank account before realizing the Mac keyboard had no number pad and was heartsick to learn that the thesaurus WordWeb, every author’s best friend, didn’t work on Mac’s OS. Neither did Ipswitch FTP, my file-uploader.

Man, Apple really are bastards, in not providing a full compatibility layer with software designed for their (formerly) biggest rival in software terms, Microsoft Windows. I personally find it hell EVERY SINGLE DAY having to dodder through life without a thesaurus on my Mac (apart from the built-in one) and an FTP client (apart from the several I have installed). It’s like some kind of tech nightmare.

Following Kors’s software pains are some simply bonkers claims. Unlike on a PC, he said, he knew he wouldn’t be able to connect one computer to another and transfer over documents. This is fair enough, because if I totally ignore all the many times I’ve happily connected Macs to Windows PCs, I know it’s literally impossible to connect Macs to Windows PCs. Kors decided to use an external hard drive to move files about, presumably while making burbling noises, ringing up his editor and yelling: “I’m technically incompetent! Why the fuck are you having me write for the tech column of your paper, you total dick?”

Next, Kors made more exciting discoveries:

Even moving over my iTunes playlist, I soon learned, was going to take intricate coding tweaks.

Last time I moved iTunes content between platforms, it did indeed take intricate coding tweaks. Mind you, I’ve suddenly decided that I’m a programmer and intricate coding involves ‘dragging a folder’ and intricate tweaks involve ‘dropping a folder’. Man, I’m such a great coder. Maybe the Huffington Post will give me a series of columns!

Oh, wait—Kors isn’t done!

My frustration beginning to boil, I figured I’d cool down with some swing dancing videos stored on my hard drive. But QuickTime wasn’t in the mood to play. My .flv and .mkv files triggered only error messages, and some of my .mpg clips opened to blank screens.

And, my, a moment of non-crazy. The lack of compatibility for Kors’s porn—sorry, swing dancing videos—is stupid. It’s not Apple’s fault—it’s down to the horror that is video codecs—but it is frustrating. I’ll now ignore the many apps and add-ons you could install for the Mac that would make said videos play, obviously. After all, I don’t want to make Kors look like he’s hopelessly out of his depth writing a tech column about using a Mac. No, wait:

I opened Mac’s Thunderbird, and my jaw dropped again. The font on every email was so small, I was going to need the Hubble telescope just to answer my morning mail.

This bit is followed by semi-comprehensible babble about font sizes and how they’re apparently really small on the Mac but giant-sized on a PC. Fonts do differ across platforms, but not to that extent. I’m guessing he was running his PC on blind-o-vision. Later in the article, he claims an Apple Store employee reckons:

Yeah, that small-font thing really is a problem. We have a lot of people who face that, then come back to return their computers.

First I’ve heard of that one, but we should all take Kors’s word for it; after all, the rest of his article is clearly full of win.

I had battled the QuickTime player, which proved unable to make playlists, […] and grimaced at the dock shortcut to my MP3 folder, which malfunctioned after one day, topping the inert folder icon with a question mark.

I can’t make playlists in QuickTime Player either, to be fair. Mind you, I can’t make toast in Photoshop. Question marks instead of Dock folders? That’ll be Kors either deleting the source or having it on a disk no longer connected to the Mac, then. Mind you, I do hate the way Macs cannot connect to things that they’re no longer connected to. Steve Jobs and Apple and Macs and unicorns really suck like that.

The final straw came when Mac’s Firefox took me to my website. To my horror, all the spacing was askew, the graphics tossed left and right like the wreckage of a hurricane. I asked myself: As a web designer, how can I design web pages when I can’t see what 90 percent of my viewers are seeing?

I asked myself: as a web designer, I wonder whether Joshua Kors is a web designer, or whether he threw together some shit in Dreamweaver years ago, and has in fact left it to fester on the internet, like a mouldy cabbage. I then discovered, as a web designer, that, indeed, Kors’s website looks the cat dragged it kicking and screaming from 1998, and then the cat thought “You know what? I’ll just put it out of its misery” before shooting it through the head. Twice. Kors: as ‘a web designer’, perhaps explore some trends and technology that’s standards-compliant as of this century.

For a second I thought, well, I could load Parallels, the Mac OS program that allows you to run Windows applications on your iMac. But that plan was squashed fast. Before I could complete Parallels’ installation, it asked for a copy of the Windows CD. I shook my head in disbelief

Yeah, those bastards at Parallels are nearly as bad as the ones at Apple. What they hell are they thinking in not giving you a free copy of Windows with their inexpensive, powerful and hugely impressive virtualisation software? Kors: you should sue. Hell, you’re American, so you probably already have.

I’m returning my iMac, then headed to Best Buy to snag a PC, one four-times faster than my current computer and $400 cheaper than that iMac. I’ll spend the difference on a video editing program, a new haircut and a first-rate pair of swing dancing shoes.

Maybe you should spend the difference on getting a clue.

Some of the devs on my Twitter feed have started complaining about the Mac App Store approvals process. Like the equivalent for iOS, it’s down to Apple what makes the store and what doesn’t, and mistakes are already being made.

The latest victim is LittleIpsum, an application that provides a quick and easy way to copy ‘lipsum’ text to the clipboard; while not something every Mac owner needs, dummy text is used by most designers at some point, and this seems the kind of 59p app that would work very nicely in a Mac App Store, but that would be pointless from an admin/infrastructure standpoint elsewhere.

Apple’s response is that LittleIpsum does not meet the following guideline:

2.8   Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected

What’s ‘not useful’ or doesn’t provide ‘lasting entertainment value’ is subjective and is the heart of the problem with the approvals process. Myriad games I’ve reviewed for iOS offer zero lasting entertainment value, yet the iOS App Store is littered with the things. And yet here is a Mac app that clearly has both a use and an audience being rejected, presumably because some poor sod at Apple is reviewing dozens of apps per hour and didn’t get why the app might be handy to have if you’re a designer.

The BBC’s hardly covered itself in glory regarding the student demonstrations, disappointingly following the same pro-police, anti-protestor line as most of the right-wing press (as compared to The Guardian and The Independent, both of which have offered more balanced coverage), but this may well be the nadir. On YouTube is a clip of a BBC interview that includes cerebal palsy sufferer Jody McIntryre being dragged from his wheelchair. Of course, justification is required for such actions, so the BBC master interviewer comes up with:

There’s a suggestion you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair.

What. The. Fuck? What next—“you were breathing air meant for the police, so they had to render you unconscious by smashing you with a baton”?

GAH.

The recent student protests haven’t covered the police nor demonstrators in glory. The former have in some cases, against regulations, covered IDs and turned into mini Judge Dredds, dishing out a particularly unsavoury and violent form of ‘justice’; a minority of demonstrators have been violent, stupid vandals, hijacking the news agenda and ruining the protest for the civil majority.

Although approximately 99.9 per cent of the recent news on the protests centred around OH MY GOD ROYAL CAR HIT A BIT (never asking exactly why the Royal car was driven straight through an area with thousands of angry protestors), but a few people have at least asked why the police response to children has been so brutal. It’s one thing to respond in kind to someone who’s attacking you; it’s another entirely to ‘kettle’ 13-year-olds for many hours in the most exposed parts of London, to hit a 20-year-old simply trying to leave a ‘kettle’ so hard he suffered bleeding to the brain (and then have hospital offers try to eject him from Chelsea and Westminster, despite his condition), and to throw a teenager to the floor and beat him until he’s throwing up blood, before casting him aside.

The reason behind these disgusting acts seems to be summed up by 17-year-old Rachel Bergan in the last of those linked articles. As someone concerned about the hike in student fees, she’d decided to protest. When the police kettled students on Westminster Bridge, things started to get ugly; Bergan contacted her mother, who on police advice told her daughter to move to the front line and asked to be released. Predictably, this was a bad idea, because she and friends were then sandwiched between violent protestors and violent, unsympathetic police. Bergan’s report notes that while the first line of police let her through, a second forced her into a ditch and beat her friends.

However, this had the effect the authorities were no doubt looking for. Bergan, keen to demonstrate her dissent now has the following to say about subsequent protests:

I don’t want to go through that again.

The actions of the police and government aren’t about stopping protests getting out of hand—they’re about stopping protests coming from a suddenly motivated younger generation.