Aaqil Ahmed, the BBC’s head of religion and ethics, has responded strongly to reports that the Corporation has banned the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini). Last weekend it was claimed that BC and AD had been replaced across the BBC’s output by the modern, secular terms BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).
“The story was quite simply wrong,” Ahmed wrote on the About the BBC blog. “We have issued no editorial guidelines or instructions to suggest that anyone in the BBC should change the terms they use.”
This hasn’t prevented the Daily Mail from reporting: “Government to save Year of our Lord from BBC’s ‘Common Era’.”