Dumb BBC: Biased BBC reader John Gentle comments:

Thursday's BBC Newsnight has just informed its viewers that the FTSE was up 80 odd points, but the Dow was down 210 points. That's funny, it was down 210 points on Wednesday as well. And closed Thursday for the start of the Thanksgiving holiday.

Oh dear. I can imagine a Beeboid flunky checking the stats and not noticing this, but for it to get all the way to being on air is surprising (or at least would be, if we didn't know the BBC so well).

Update: Will reports that Radio 4's midnight news was the same. Doh!

Update: Bryan points out that Peter Barron, Editor of Newsnight, has apologised for this mistake, writing:

Our economics editor Stephanie Flanders was mortified - "unforgivable and embarrassing" was her verdict. This is, I am ashamed to say, not the first time we have made such a mistake. The markets information is almost always the last thing we do on Newsnight and in the scramble of a particularly lively programme last night we neglected to notice that the US markets were shut and blithely reported the day before's figure. I'm sorry and I'm determined this won't happen again.

Kudos to Peter for fessing up and taking steps to avoid a repeat, though I can't help thinking that it'd be more reliable to look up American public holidays a year or two ahead and then annotate the Newsnight diary accordingly, rather than expect a flunky to check daily for something that only happens once in a while.

No news yet from Radio 4 re. their boo-boo over the market data.