BBC gobbles up fat ban dating 'sham'

Internet dating site BeautifulPeople.com has reportedly axed 5,000 members who put on weight over Christmas and thus became no-longer beautiful in the eyes of site users. The story has been picked up all over the place, but nowhere more prominantly than on the BBC.

And why not, it's a great story, an interesting talking point and a fascinating insight into how shallow people can be.

The only downside of course is that it's surely a fabrication.

I'm willing to stick my neck out and say the story is nothing more than a publicity stunt, albeit a pretty good one for a slow-news day.

Which of course raises the question as to whether the BBC should really take such tabloid fodder? Even if it was true, and that's an 'if' of near Biblical proportions, how could the BBC possibly verify the story?

The answer of course is they didn't, couldn't and wouldn't have even tried to lest they talked themselves out of running it.

The 'water-cooler' potential of such a story, not to mention the seasonal New Year angle, must have made it all too tempting to choose clickability over credibility. 

From BeautifulPeople.com's point of view it's a massive home run and score one for the PR professionals in whose direction my hat is tipped.

All they key messages are in there:

Made a New Year's resolution to sort out your love life? Well look no further, we're a popular dating site full of Beautiful People. We're so popular in fact we can ditch a round - no pun intended - 5,000 members at a stroke and still only have beautiful people to offer you. In fact we're so beautiful we openly shun "fatties" - and you can too. So if you're shallow as a tinker's bath what are you waiting for... 

And to cap it all, the BBC even posts a link to the BeautifulPeople.com website.

You can't buy advertising like that.

Comments

[Jimbo]

1) Would people so shallow that they've signed up for BeautifulPeople really post pictures of themselves looking a little porky? No, of course not - certainly not 5,000 of them.
2) Is this story a complete work of fiction? Yes, of course it is.

But never mind, it gave us something to talk about for 10 mins in the office. Sadly it was a discussion about the terminal decline in editorial standards at the BBC.

[Guy Clapperton]

I agree it's a trivial story - but can you offer substantiation for the idea that this is a fabrication?

[Jimbo]

Surely it's the BBC's job to stand up its stories Guy and to do so more voraciously than simply cutting and pasting a press release (see how many times those quotes appear verbatim online) from their one source - the company who stands to directly benefit, commercially, from the coverage.

I'd have thought with 5,000 disenfranchised ex-members it wouldn't have been too hard to find some willing to corroborate a story that otherwise reads like advertorial, even if they were just slagging off the service on Twitter.

In theory this story should have been a complaint story - requiring a complainant, until those come forward what is the story here?

It's one-dimension is that of a company bragging about behaviour it believes will make it money. That's advertorial.

Any journalist worth their salt knows the need for balance, and to find either a second source or a counterbalance before reporting something as fact. This story, as it appeared on the BBC, and elsewhere, has neither.

Even a search on Twitter and blogs, finds only the story; no sign the individuals who have been kicked off.

Ultimately though, you're right it's trivial and probably, true or not, shouldn't have passed any other kind of quality test I'd still like to believe the BBC employs.

[Imng]

Extremely poor show by the BBC. They have the resources to check out stories properly before running them.

[Darren Moore]

Crazy! It's a good job a few more pounds is just fine for dating websites such as www.LargerDate.co.uk