If you ever doubted the Daily Mail's journalism has certain characteristics in common with works of fiction try a simple experiment. Try reading one of its stories from the bottom up and see the deliberate twists and turns reveal themselves. In the same way the fabrication of an Agatha Christie whodunnit is instantly unwound by reading the final page first so Mail articles suffer by skipping the deception and deliberate misdirection woven in higher up the article.
Take these closing paragraphs from an article today about the BBC's use of AD and BC in dates, versus CE (common era) and BCE (before common era) :
The BBC said last night: 'The BBC has not issued editorial guidance on the date systems...the decision on which term to use lies with individual production and editorial teams."
You would never guess that that was the denoument of a story which was originally set up thus:
The eventual conclusion that the BBC hasn't in fact turned its back on the use of AD and BC is reached via several levels of misdirection that Christie would be proud of:
The BBC's religious and ethics department says the changes are necessary to avoid offending non-Christians.
So we have a motive. We even have a couple of suspects:
Some of the BBC's most popular programmes including University Challenge, presented by Jeremy Paxman, and Radio 4's In Our Time, hosted by Melvyn Bragg, are among the growing number of shows using the new descriptions.
But ultimately this particular whodunnit concludes, in its final chapter, that nobody has actually done anything.
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