(from Blithering Bunny)
Another example of the subtle bias at BBC News 24. In a report on the Balfour Beatty/Railtrack trial, the reporter made sure to get this comment from the prosecutors into the report:
Mr Lissack also told the court the crash was a “catastrophe” which marked the beginning of the end of wholly privatised railways in Britain.
This wasn’t particularly germane to the charge, but because it came after the reporter’s making sure that the prosecution’s claim that the rail network was riddled with dangerous faults had been quoted, the impression created was that only a fool would allow “commercial interests” to look after the railways.
Will the BBC ever provide anything like this news from The Times:
Total subsidies are now running at £5 billion a year compared with about £1 billion in real terms under British Rail. The taxpayer’s contribution to the average ticket has risen from 25 per cent five years ago to 55 per cent today.
P.S. I’m watching the BBC News 24 talking to Carla Lane, the former writer of pretentious sitcoms, and now an animal rights campaigner, about the proposed new laws to stop animal rights protestors. The reporter said to her that “This is fair enough, surely?”, and seemed genuinely surprised when Carla – looking pretty mad, it has to be said, and speaking a bit like Ozzy Osbourne – disagreed. Scientists only have a right to be protected from violence, not anything else, such as continual harrassment in their daily life, she said. (There was then a good response from a scientist.)
(Not a bias issue, really, just interesting).
The rail subsidies stat is misleading, and the Times article – not the Beeb report – is the biased one.
The rise in subsidy came because of the financial black hole created by the failure of Railtrack: suddenly the effects of years of dodgy maintenance under BR and RT, plus RT’s absurdly optimistic cost planning (the WCML is just one example) became apparent.
The only options open to the government were changing the safety rules to lower maintenance budgets, providing massive cash injections, or Beeching-style track axings. Of these three, the cash injections were the only politically viable solution.
The rise in subsidy came because of the financial black hole created by the failure of Railtrack:
Rump-Railtrack not Railtrack Plc which escaped with a huge property portfolio of mainline stations and goods yards, property and buildings………..
It was Bob Horton the man who broke BP and screwed Premier-Farnell that did for Railtrack – stripping it off engineering capacity and outsourcing everything, recruiting Gerald Corbett as the duffer to front the Potemkin Village that was left – while Bob Horton grew fat on property-development profits…………as everyone knew the privatisers would