Y Safle

have you ever heard of the Happy Endings Foundation? Well neither had I until Sunday morning when I saw on the BBC news an article about their campaign to ban books with sad endings for children.

The BBC paid for two experts - a child psychologist and someone else - to come into the studio and pontificate on how this campagn was misguided. What a pity though that these experts, and the BBC news researchers (and the Daily Mail, who were also taken in) were not so expert in the realm of critical thinking.

The first clues that all was not well could be found in the web site itself. Rewrite Lemony Snicket? Are you allowed to do that? Why would you want to? Also the BBC admitted they could not actually contact anyone from this web site to come on to their programme.

Also, what an odd list of books they were saying had happy endings.

But one skill that should be taught to school children up and down the country when we teach them basic IT skills is how to find out who pubilshed a web page. This is not actually very hard. Point your web browser at any of the whois services, but I particularly like this one:

http://www.whois.sc/

Look down the page for the registrant details. In this case we have a registrant as follows:

Registrant Name:Peter Rope Registrant Organization:ArtScience

Usually this is enough (and it is here, if you know who ArtScience are - a promotional company trying to promote Lemony Snicket!) but this whois search has a great feature. It will do a reverse domain lookup to find out what other web sites are hosted on the same web server as this one. In this case we find:

Artscience.net Artscienceclick.com Charlie-bone.com

And a quick click on any of these links will quickly show you that these people are in the business of marketing children’s books.

The BBC was duped by marketeers. I hope an apology will follow for using license payers money to advertise someone’s books.

The Daily Mail was also duped - but that is par for the course.

But the BBC really should know better.