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Newsnight presenter pwned by snarky hack

Three Royal Television Society nominations - ouch

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Nothing like hacking the official profile of a BBC presenter and filling it with snide comments about how he's crap at maths, for a quick laugh.

Well, we assume it's a laugh that has motivated the bitter rewrite of the Newsnight Scotland presenter Gordon Brewer's BBC profile. See the screen grab below.

Gordon Brewer's BBC profile, credit BBC

The presenter bios tend to be light and jokey in style but this does not sound like the officially sanctioned version of the journalist's life:

"Gordon began his journalistic career on The Shetland Times after any hopes of a more technical pursuit were cruelly exposed by a short period working for the oil industry at Sullom Voe. He still keeps a nervous eye on the main flare stack, where he was supposedly monitoring the paint thickness."

We don't know who could behind this snarky little hack but it could have been a mathematician, annoyed by the former business journalist's supposedly weak grasp of mathematical concepts:

"This was his opportunity to stop being a business journalist and he reported from Europe, the United States, Russia and the Middle East without the slightest use of arithmetic."

It could equally have been a Japanese person, annoyed at Gordon's alleged failure to learn the Japanese language:

"Despite strenuous attempts to learn Japanese, the nearest he got to fluency was with cab drivers after an evening in the bar."

On the other hand, it might not be a hack at all and could have come from someone within the Beeb with access to these things... and a grudge.

The rewrite seemed to take place last night and lots of people on Twitter had a merry time passing it around, but despite the flare-up it's still in place this morning.

So, who did it then? Any of you commentards want to 'fess up? ®

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Everything the BBC do is seen is viewed as biased for whatever reason. To the right, they are biased to the left. To the left, they are viewed as biased to the right. To Scottish nationalists, they are viewed as inherently Unionist. To Rangers fans, they are Celtic through and through, and vice versa. Every utterance is seen as furthering their evil agenda, whatever it is. Spend any time on an internet chat forum with a singular purpose and the bias of the BBC is self-evident - indeed they are part of the 'plot' against whatever cause the chat forum is for!

This does not mean that sometimes the BBC gets it wrong, but I am now automatically sceptical whenever somebody suggests the BBC are always biased.

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Reads like it was written by Brewer himself. I guess many people don't understand the self-deprecating humour involved.

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Anonymous Coward

Bios?

"The presenter bios tend to be..."

Gordon Brewer has a bios?! Is this part of the BBC initiation process to ensure they all sing from the hymn sheet?

I wouldn't mind pressing that Kate Silverton's F2 button and tinkering with her hardware interface, fnar fnar.

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