Our coverage of the Arab Spring was over-excited, admits BBC

Egypt, Teheran, no matter--those big crowds are just pretty damned impressive.

Good that they're looking at their footage (sourcing) and attitudes. Never hurts to do a little introspection.

You see a crowd of 10,000 in a city of 10,000,000 and you assume that somehow that 0.1% is a truly meaningful, randomly selected and representative number. You've already assumed that the 10,000,000 in the city, 10% of the country's population, is the truly meaningful portion of the country's population.

So you're making a decision based on 0.01% of the country's population.

Then when you interview 10 out of the 10,000--those who will happily talk to you--you assume that that non-random 0.1% out of a non-random 0.01% is actually a very good representative sample.

This based on your reporter's required 1 year of statistics, semester of sampling techniques and the follow-up semester of error analysis in journalism school, no doubt.

Humility, good. Innumeracy, bad. Emotional attachment to and advocacy of one point of view in a story in a reporter (or a scientist) is just plain evil in a secular, rational society.

Now, if they could be a bit less field dependent and see the facts and problems aren't just found in one particular but also extend to other, similar cases we'd be getting somewhere. Instead, we'll have a round of panels in which reporters sit and say that they don't think they did this, they're the best qualified to judge their own ethics and behavior and that this person is just plain misguided.