In the Guardian John Humphrys justifies a great social evil:
“Independent journalism is too ingrained in the BBC. It is our lifeblood. It is the main reason for the BBC’s existence. It is by a mile the most important thing we do”.
Really? Not as important as presenting Mastermind, surely?
Haha, the suggestion that the BBC is actually leaning towards being anti-Labour must have you all fuming.
It’s the other way round of course, they are EVIL advocators of vile socialism!
Did I mention they were evil?
Hank Scorpio writes: ” Haha, the suggestion that the BBC is actually leaning towards being anti-Labour must have you all fuming.”
Not at all. The BBC is appalled by Za-NuLabour because it is insufficiently socialist for them.
Humphrys and his fellow travellers regard Bliar as positively Thatcherite.
It’s very amusing that the BBC thinks the elected government and the opposition are insuficiently coerced-collectivist for them.
They only got 70-80% of the votes.
Proof the BBC is a minority group imposing itself on formerly free UK citizens. Kill it NOW, before even more irreplacable British culture is lost.
Look at this….
On the (dont)Have Your Say MAIN page…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/2804227.stm
The “chosen” comment for the subject “Are you affected by Katrina?” – this is on the MAIN TITLE page remember – is……
“New Orleans and Gulfport have suffered a major catastrophe. President Bush is likely to spend more on New Orleans and less on Africa etc. Comments?
Peter, La Marque, Texas”
WTF! you couldnt make it up!
Also – my suggestion of “UN Corruption” has been ignored.
Or at least get the BBC back to the glory days when they reported the news and nothing else. No opinions, no sneering remarks, no Matt Frei, Hawley, Guerin, Wells Webb et al.
Humphrys is right. The news is the most important, at least since The Woodentops went off the air.
So, the BBC is a mouthpiece for New Labour or it’s a socialist engine exasperated with New Labour’s centrist stance?
Which is it?
Either/or, depending on which stereotype helps your far-right agenda?
Methinks yes.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4229048.stm
Fourth paragraph…
…someone prod me. Did I just read that correct?
Mr Reynolds
I suggest you have a look at this article lifted from the Irish Times.
Because it exactly sums up the whole blinkered BBC approach to Katrina.
http://www.sluggerotoole.com/archives/2005/09/ill_wind_may_no.php
And please read the comments, especially from the Americans who point out the constitutional realities.
Is there any hope, even at this late stage after 10 days of lousy reporting by the BBC, that it cold get back on track ? Any chance tht at least the editors in your huge News Department could inform themselves about what is being said in the US. So that they can see that it is a lot different to the one-note anti-Bush BBC approach.
“far-right agenda?”
Yes Hank, I read a chapter of Mein Kampf every morning.
Seriously, the main issue isn’t that the BBC is pro or anti NuLab, it is that the BBCs has taken certain stances on broader issues:-
Very anti-Bush
Very anti-Iraq war
Hence anti Balir
Anti-Israel
Anti-Tory (except Clarke and Rifkind cos they opposed Iraq)
Anti-Christian (except for the wet types who think God says that homosexual relations between priests are just fine and dandy)
etcetc
Now these are issues where people have different points of view, which is fine, but the BBC relentlessly address these issues from a stance which can broadly be positioned on the editorial page of the Guardian. And I have to pay for it by what is, in effect, a tax.
Here’s an example. For the last week the Today programme has endlessly tried to blame Bush, in any way it can, for Hurricane Katrina (Global warming, racism, Iraq have all been trotted out). Then this morning we have someone on criticising Kofi Annan and saying he should resign, but this time we have Montague/Quinn pulling out all the stops to defend St Kofi. Honestly, the bias is just so obvious.
How many times on Today do we have to listen reverently to the idiotic conspiracy theories of the left from the likes of Meacher, Benn, Gore Vidal and others, whilst anyone with vaguely centre-right politics is treated like a leper by St James and his associates?
A bit of balance would be nice, as there are many out there in the UK who, like me, read the Times and Telegraph and have broadly conservative outlook.
If you want actual news without al-beeb’s gloss, you can click online on virtually any American newspaper — for free!
Big Mouth
I find the website
http://realclearpolitics.com/
gives an excellent cross-section of articles from US press and journals each day.
Mr Reynolds
Here is another photo you may like to work on.
Indeed you could write a whole story about the failure to use buses to evacuate people from New Orleans.
Even after 10 days, it would be a SCOOP at the BBC.
That’s how sloppy the BBC is.
Mr Reynolds
The link to the photo.
If you use it, please acknowledge it was this blogsite that alerted you to it !
http://www.blindmanphoto.com/images/Stop-Blaming-FEMA.jpg
Hank are you claiming that the BBC exhibits no political leanings?
Try this, at the start of an interview with a politician. Guess from what angle the questioning will come. It will always be from the positions Eamonn listed, & in addition will favour more tax spend, less restriction on immigration/asylum, greater income redistribution etc etc.
There is no good reason why the questions should always be so slanted.
I have also sent a suggestion for a ‘Oil-for-Food / corruption at the UN’ thread in the (Don’t)’Have Your Say’ section.
tick, tock, tick, tock.
From Humphrys’ column in the Guardian, he claims the The Times’ article was
inaccurate, misleading and clearly designed to give the impression that I have nothing but contempt for Labour ministers.
He does nothing to present evidence to support his opinion of the Times’ report (the Times online provided a link to a video of the speech which showed that “inaccurate” & “misleading” can’t be supported).
But as usual the BBC wins the day without needing evidence. Humphrys is believed, largely because most people agree that the NuLabour crew are liars. But Conservatives enjoying Humphrys’ comments will find that their indulgence of him will come back to bite them should they ever gain office again.
Anyway Humphrys knows all about inaccurate & misleading, here is his intro to Gilligan’s claims (that he now persistently refers to as allegations of mere “sexing up”)
“Andrew Gilligan has found evidence that the Government’s dossier on
Iraq, that was produced last September, was cobbled together at the last
minute with some unconfirmed material that had not been approved by the
security services,”
G Cooper – “Humphrys and his fellow travellers regard Bliar as positively Thatcherite.”
With respect, I do not believe this is the case. This construct is to deflect attention from Blair’s real agenda in a way that doesn’t frighten the horses. Oh, Blair’s a damp squid! He’s not even a proper socialist! His hero is Margaret Thatcher! (Who put that one about, eh? Alastair Campbell.)
Blair is no conservative. He has picked apart the thread of our national fabric, some of it unmendably, with cold malice. He is a rabid Gramscian. His agenda is to destroy Britain. To perpetuate the fabrication that he is a bitter disappointment to socialists is to assist with the programme. Not one of the inner circle thinks Blair is a natural Conservative. They know exactly what the programme is.
Verity,
I agree. NU-Labours goal is 100% destruction of everything British.
Humphries is using the word ‘independent’ when describing BBC journalism in the same way the soviets used the word ‘democratic’ in naming the old German Democratic Republic.
Ian Barnes said somewhere that fat Cherie writes all Blair’s speeches. I asked him where he saw that, but I can’t remember what thread it was on so couldn’t find a reply, if any.
If that is the case it is as I suspected from day one: Cherie is running the country and Tony Dim is the front man. Give him a natty costume and give him his lines to say and lots of cameras and he is the glorious thespian he always wanted to be. Cherie, who couldn’t get elected is a drooling Gramscian with a hefty chip on her hefty shoulder. She’s also a very nasty, destructive piece of work.
Hank Scorpio
to paraphrase the great contemporary philosopher Chandler Bing “How Dumb are You?”
The BBC is a government mouthpiece. There are loose cannons within the BBC who are anti Labour because they are not Labour enough i.e. T Blair.
As you are so enamoured of the Biased News output and unentertaining entertainment of the BBC perhaps you would like to pay for my share. I dont use it.
Verity writes:
“With respect, I do not believe this is the case.”
Neither do I. I, too, believe that Bliar genuinely wishes to make fundamental and irreversible changes to this country.
But what I originally said is, I understand, what many inside the BBC believe.
Meanwhile, despite the apparent absence of his tongue being planted firmly in his cheek, juding by the accompanying photo, over at BBC News Online, their highly opinionated editor, Peter Clifton, has singled out the idiotic Matt Wells for special praise.
Not only does Mr Clifton clearly approve of Wells’s agitprop amateur dramatics, but so, he claims, did ‘many’. He goes on to say:
“This week the upbeat messages were for this piece from Matt Wells, a freelance journalist who writes for us quite often. It picked up some 400,000 page impressions last weekend.
It was certainly strong stuff, but it struck the right note for many. One wrote: “I am so grateful to Matt Wells for writing his article ‘New Orleans crisis shames Americans’. It is true to a depth that I can’t begin to express.””
Which leads one to wonder whether the gentleman is protesting too much in the face of a flood of criticisms. Or whether the usual suspects who get their comments published on (Don’t) Have Your Say, have been wetting themselves with glee at Mr Wells’s juvenile outpourings.
Then again, I can’t help thinking that what Clifton is really doing is waving two fingers at those who have protested about Wells.
“I am so grateful to Matt Wells for writing his article ‘New Orleans crisis shames Americans’. It is true to a depth that I can’t begin to express.”
The last sentence would indicate that this fawning letter was written by an American. Why didn’t this individual just watch American TV, rather that Matt Wells’s reports on what he was watching (American TV) from his condo in Santa Monica? Or maybe American commentators just weren’t expressing enough lefty hatred of the US. Better get it filtered through the Wells hate/cliché machine.
Re Wells ” It picked up some 400,000 page impressions last weekend.
I wonder how many hits resulted from the links from here, Rottweiler Puppy, American Expatriate, USS Neverdock & similar blogs – none of which directed readers to Wells’s piece in order to marvel at his well reasoned opinion.
Just how many questions on Mastermind would the over-rated J.Humphrys be able to answer in just the general knowledge section?
What are his educational qualifications for pontificating on Today? I heard he has an MA in rudology, and a BA in supercilous opinionology! He is rumoured to be working on his Pile it High and Deep.(PhD.)at the University of AntiLogicas.
For me there is no better than
Two degrees in be-bop, a Ph.D. in swing
He’s a master of rhythm
He’s the rock ‘n roll king
(Lowell George)
I think the way HUmphries thinks independence can be ‘ingrained’ is quite curious. Something that is ingrained is surely habitual. Habits are really the antithesis of independence since they imply thoughlessness, which can be manipulated. That’s just what I think about Humphrys. Despite his barking he’s a useful fool.