About

Welcome to the home of the SecondThought Podcast.

For anyone not familiar, Thought For The Day is a three-minute radio segment that is broadcast Monday to Saturday at about 7.45 am on BBC Radio 4 in the heart of the Today Programme.

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.

However, those ‘reflections‘ 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 Programme 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, almost never secular and perhaps even falling short of the BBC’s requirement for impartiality.

Standards

Our complaint is something else. The BBC has a second broadcast requirement, one that demands that what it broadcasts is accurate. It’s our view that the BBC fails in its duty to hold Thought For The Day to a reasonable standard of accuracy.

We believe that this failure takes two forms. The first is simply 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, 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.

Contact

Please send questions, rants, etc. to: secondthoughtfortheday@gmail.com