BBC news website

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Cidermanrolls
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BBC news website

Post by Cidermanrolls »

A piece on endangered cacti.
Unfortunate that the piece repeatedly mixes up cacti and other succulents, despite specifically referring to Cactaceae
A photo from a cactus nursery in Spain shows almost entirely succulents.
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Re: BBC news website

Post by MikeDom »

Mike

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KarlR
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Re: BBC news website

Post by KarlR »

That was a really poor piece of writing. No relevant sources other than the Kew worker, and the author makes a complete jumble of what is and isn't a cactus.
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Re: BBC news website

Post by gerald »

Many years ago I entered my beloved Notocactus leninghausii in the cactus competition of a local horticultural show.

You can imagine my dismay when it came 2nd - the winner being an Agave.
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Re: BBC news website

Post by ralphrmartin »

With the BBC's appalling ability to even get basic facts right, is it any wonder that the world is rife with "fake news"?

Apart from mixing up Allaudia with cacti, and showing photos of Ficus and Euphorbia, it also makes a serious error right at the start. The "most serious threat to cacti" is not smuggling. It is human development. If you visit countries where cacti grow, it is very obvious that more cacti have been and are being lost lost to building houses, dams, and roads, and clearing land for agriculture, than have ever been poached. Even the expert from Kew highlights climate change caused by human development as a serious threat.

A further stupidity is that in Southern Spain, cacti are not being devastated by the cochineal beetle, but are planted specifically to farm the cochineal beetles for food dye. As we all know, cacti are not native to Spain anyhow, so their "devastation" there by beetles is irrelevant to wild populations.

I'm fed up of the BBC peddling all sorts of propaganda, especially social issues, as "news". Why does it feel impelled to go on and on about say, just to mention one recent topic as an example, transgender issues, on its news pages? The items they post are not "news", but a very blatant attempt to alter public opinion. News should be about reporting facts, not propaganda. This cactus article is a further example of propaganda. At the very least, the BBC are being gullible and used as a mouthpiece by people pushing one side of a story. They lose all journalistic credibility by failing to check the facts before publishing. For the BBC to fail in this way is even more serious because of the trust in which the public hold the BBC.

The BBC and Kew should stop and consider who is the real culprit - mankind in general - rather than subjecting collectors to "trial by media". One day, people might even be glad that a few plants have been collected and preserved in cultivation when "progress" has wiped out their habitats.
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Re: BBC news website

Post by Tony R »

I agree, Ralph. The BCSS BOT should send a response to the BBC who clearly need putting into detention to write out their lines 500 times, something like "All cacti are succulents but not all succulents are cacti".
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Re: BBC news website

Post by BryanW »

Tony, if they give those lines to the folk that write the subtitles for the BBC News channel, it'll probably come out along the lines of "All Cat tie are suck you lent.." etc :lol:
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Re: BBC news website

Post by MikeDom »

Having read the article I went and checked the O. microdasys I brought back from Spain about 2 months ago. Those white patches turned out to be some sort of white flat stuff that flakes off and is stuck on the surface but definitely not the beetle. Suppose some good came out of it.
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Re: BBC news website

Post by gerald »

Ralph is right, but let's be straight here, it's not just the BBC.

Whenever I see an article in the media about something that I happen to know about, I often find it wanting in terms of bias, accuracy, detail and simple facts.

In which case when I read an article about something new or something I know little about, I have to be very careful with what to believe and what not to.
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Re: BBC news website

Post by KathyM »

A lot of science articles are just copy-and-pasted or bad rewrites of press releases from a university's publicity team. And when a case study is added they usually just go with the first person they find and try and make their story fit the article, rather than find a relevant one.

You can imagine they requested someone to talk about "threats to cacti" and got a nursery owner willing to talk about threats to cultivated cacti, and decided to shoehorn in his story instead of making an effort to find an ecologist, etc.

I'm not sure what study this is based on though; the BBC never add links but it doesn't even name the "researchers" in this one.
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