BBC lunchtime news is appealing to the great unwashed for "their stories" in a rather weedy attempt to be relevant and cutting edge. Yeah, whatever.

As a result, we get non-stories like today's, in which we learn that "Student Kris Athi has spent two months trying to delete his MySpace profile while he applies for jobs."

As if that wasn't newsworthy enough, we are told that, actually, he could just have made his profile private to hide it (RTFM, Kris), and [allegedly: Ed] the only reason he didn't get the "are you sure you want to delete your profile" confirmation email was because it was spam-trapped.

Call me stupid (or even too clever by half) - but if said Kris is really an IT graduate - shouldn't he have known that this was a very likely explanation? I for one won't be rushing to recruit him. [Ed: see below for why, in the light of feedback on what really happened] What a clueless wally.

Read the 'news' story here

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 had me spluttering into my tea this morning, with news of a new genus of palm recently identified in Madagascar by botanists. Apart from its large size, the main point of interest is that it flowers and then dies. So - let's make that really exciting for our stupid listeners and call it a "self-destructing palm" shall we?

No mention of the proper botanical term for this - monocarpic, nor of the well-known century plant, which does very much the same and is well known for it!

According to The Telegraph - which to be fair to the Beeb makes the same silly observation - "The palm will be called Tahina spectabilis which is Malagasy for blessed or to be protected. Tahina is the name of one of Xavier Metz's daughters."

I am confused. Is the French Mr Metz's daughter given a Malagasy name? If so, that makes sense in part - but spectabilis is a very common Latin specific name meaning "showy". So a bit more care in constructing the sentence to make it clear what that tricky "which" refers to would have been worthwhile.

Read the story at The Telegraph, and the BBC - and weep

Another jolly wheeze from the Beeb that I have noticed, to make our licence £££s go a bit further:

Find a documentary programme being aired later in the schedule, and invent some tenuous connection with current news, then put in a few edited segments to pad out the coverage.

Example from today's lunchtime news:

It's been raining lately, and there are some flood warnings. So our announcer perkily tells us that we can see some previously unseen footage of the floods last summer. Clue several minutes of Mr Plod telling stupid motorists not to be stupid. How is 'police camera action' footage from last June news, pray?

<< Part I

On the BBC lunchtime news, there was a piece about the current norovirus outbreak. The presenter blithely pointed to this garish CGI graphic of a red, blue and yellow lumpy ball and said, with a completely straight face "This is what the virus looks like under a microscope".

Does she actually think that a virus really looks like this - or understand that you'd need an electron microscope to see such detail? If so, she is strangely ignorant for a health correspondent; if not, she is patronising those of us who are not complete dunces, and misleading those who might benefit from knowing more.

In either case, it is rather pathetic - but entirely to be expected in these days of dumbing down, especially for "difficult" topics like microbiology.

Read the full story here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7169347.stm