Second Thought podcast with Dan Beach

What we’re about and why

Who: SecondThought

What: Antitheist

Where: At large

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

The BBC

About

For anyone not familiar,  Thought For The Day is a three-minute radio show that is broadcast Monday to Saturday at about 7.45 in the morning on BBC Radio 4, right in the middle of Today, one of the UK’s most highly regarded news and current affairs programmes. It is commonly stated, including on the programme’s Wikipedia page, that Today sets each morning the national political agenda for the day. This is nationwide broadcast has an average live weekly listenership of around six million. It is this this daily three-hour cathedral to facts, balance and objectivity that is interrupted by Thought For The Day.

Accountability

It’s popularly known as the god slot. The BBC describes the content of the broadcasts as …

Reflections from a faith perspective

on issues and people in the news.

If you’re thinking that it sounds a little odd to shoehorn a short sermon into a news programme, you’re not alone.

It gets worse. Those reflections on people and events in the news frequently contain nonsensical claims and numerous other affronts to reason, with no apparent accountability to facts or to logic.

SecondThought  aims to provide that accountability.

Accuracy

Most criticism levelled at Thought For The Day is more or less consistent with what two Today presenters (Jon Humphries and Justin Webb) said when interviewed for the Radio Times in 2017.  The complaints levelled were that the content was routinely boring. 

“Deeply boring” was Humphries’ comment, or that the content is insufficiently diverse, being mostly Christian, never secular and some have accused it of falling short of the BBC’s requirement for due impartiality.

Standards

Our complaint is something else.  The BBC has a second requirement, one that demands that what it broadcasts is accurate.  More precisely, the BBC is required to ensure that everything it puts out can satisfy the standard of due accuracy. There’s clearly some wiggle room provided by the addition of the word ‘due’. It, though, is there for good reason and regardless of its presence, it’s our view that the BBC fails in its duty to hold Thought For The Day to any reasonable standard of accuracy, certainly not the due accuracy that is carefully outlined in the BBC Editorial Guidelines.

We believe that this failure takes two forms.  The first concerns facts. A failure to relay facts faithfully, or to present as fact something that is merely conjecture or belief.  The second failure is one of reason.  Logical fallacies litter many Thought For The Day broadcasts.  Every logical fallacy distorts the truth.  Any deviation from the truth is by definition an example of inaccuracy.  Hence, the BBC’s failure, we believe, in this regard.

Fun

We’re not here to mock faith, the faithful or religion.  We are here to shoot holes that deserve to be shot in the false premises, unsupported claims, hanging comparatives, groundless generalisations, non sequiturs  and any other logical fallacies that we find that the BBC has allowed Thought For The Day to trot out.

Whilst we’re not here to mock, we will if we think it’s at all justified.

What to expect

For the most part, the podcast will be forthright reviews of the daily god slots on radio 4. If we encounter a good one, we’ll be sure to praise what’s good. We’ve already done a few, that you’ll get to hear over the coming weeks. From what we’ve learned so far, good ones exist but they are, infrequent.

As well as the review podcasts, we also hope to get into some explanation and analysis of the errors we find. At some point we might even have a league table of the presenters who commit the most crimes against accuracy. Fingers crossed. We also hope to document and explore themes that we find. We hope that these will be relevant to more that the morning listeners to Radio 4, on the grounds that it won’t just be on Thought For The Day where people will try to deceive you with lovely things like rosy retrospection or information fauxverload. More on those, to come.

Largely, though, we’ll be poking holes in the thinking, reason and loose grasp of fact in the reflections of these faithful people who are very much out of their depth (we hope to demonstrate) in the middle of one of the finest live news and current affairs programmes in broadcasting.

Ultimately, we want to fundamentally change the quality of thought for the day so that it is consistent with the BBC’s editorial standards and so that is doesn’t contrast so painfully as it doesn’t now with programme it interrupts. If that doesn’t come off, we’d be happy with the slot being removed completely from any news programme of the BBC.

We hope you like it.

You can find out much more about us at secondthoughtfortheday.com.