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About

Thought Sniper

Welcome to Thought Sniper, where we train the crosshairs of reason on the BBC's
Thought For The Day

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.

It’s popularly known as the god slot and it provides a platform for a variety of thinkers, who are often faithful and churchy types, to address a daily audience of about four million listeners. The BBC describes the content of the broadcasts as, 'reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news.'

However, these 'reflections' often contain nonsensical claims and numerous other affronts to reason, with no apparent accountability to facts or logic.

Thought Sniper aims to provide that accountability.

We’re not here to mock faith, the faithful or religion. We are here to shoot holes that deserve to be shot through the false premises, unsupported claims and any other logical fallacies that we find that the BBC has allowed through the Thought For The Day transmission vent.


Our objectives

The BBC is obliged to adhere to two guiding principles: those of impartiality and accuracy. 

It seems to us that the Thought For The Day (TFTD) god slot is routinely given a pass from the principle that demands accuracy.

  • Presenters will commonly make groundless claims and unsupportable sweeping generalisations.  
  • You will hear statements in which the speaker presumes to know the minds of the listeners.  
  • Comparative statements are regularly left hanging wide open.  
  • You will be confronted almost daily with statements that are simply inconsistent with fact.

Any deviation from logic or from fact is a breach of accuracy and, hence, a breach of the BBC's obligations.  The god slot, rhetoric and religion are not, in our consideration, grounds to make exceptions.

Our objectives, then, are these:

  • To document, and occasionally to ridicule, the inaccuracies that pepper the broadcasts of TFTD
  • To illustrate the ease with which the logical inaccuracies we find could easily have been avoided
  • To illustrate how reliance on logical fallacies is dishonest, undermines credibility and distorts truth
  • In whatever small way we can, to encourage the presenters on TFTD to embrace accuracy
We will not restrict our commentary on the broadcasts just to the above objectives.  We shall flag and lampoons as we see fit whenever we have evidence that a broadcaster is being disingenuous, mean or is in some other way making inappropriate (in our estimation) use of the TFTD platform.