10pm news coverage of David Davis speech – BBC showed a man with his
head down, apparently sleeping during the speech.I saw that same man at two fringe meetings – he has some problem with
his neck that causes his head to slump over permanently – it never
changes, and I know that he was wide awake at those meetings. All
praise to him for staying involved and in the fight despite his
problem – and SHAME, SHAME, SHAME on the BBC by using that shot as
propaganda against Davis – they MUST have seen and known that this
man always has his head slumped down.YET AGAIN the BBC show their true colours.
I don’t know whether or not the BBC knew of this man’s condition, but there is so much media scrutiny at any event these days, especially at party conferences, that it is easy for journalists and producers to sift through acres of footage to select the briefest of images that “tell the story” they want to tell, either in ignorance of their proper context, or worse, regardless of their proper context.
To depict a private individual in this way, implying that they were asleep when they may not have been (understandable though that might be in the case of David ‘IDS with hair’ Davis), and then broadcast it nationwide, is an abuse for which the BBC ought to broadcast an apology, naming the producers and reporters involved – to encourage greater diligence and responsibility when it comes to ‘telling’ the news.
I’m not that familiar with this story, but someone brought it to my attention, and I didn’t see it here. I apoligize if it’s old news.
It looks like the BBC is to broadcast a documentary that claims that Bush claimed to go into Iraq, and Afghanistan on “a mission from God”.
The Whitehouse denies these claims:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4317498.stm
Hi i’m new here..
Re: Davis, doesn’t surprise me…but that said despite Cameron’s stirling performance he’s hardly been mentioned in the BBC news..?
i created this one:
http://davidcameronleader.blogspot.com/
I missed the Daily Politics this morning and, expecting an in-depth report on the Perception Panel results, I decided to watch TDP from the web.
Sad to say it was the usual biased collection of unsupported anti-Tory subjective opinions and included multiple shots of “dozing” spactators as described in the thread header.
One lighter moment was at the end where Sally Magnusson said something like join Andrew Neil and ?????? ????? on Monday.
They had rather coyly censored her admission about who will be the next presenter but it didn’t really work since I had started the programme playback from a sidebar alongside the DP web article about new presenter Jenny Scott.
It’s almost as childish as the fact that it made me bristle.
Yep, the BBC should have been more careful this time.
For instance, ITN used other Tories in the audience who were sleeping during the David speech, and the BBC should have picked one of those up.
That ingenious “fake but accurate” defence, eh Hank, much beloved of lefties. That’s a good ‘un.
I’ll bet you there wasn’t a single set-piece speech at any of the major party conferences where it wasn’t possible to take a picture of a delegate (or a stooge if need be) asleep – there’s enough late-night politicking that I’m surprised there’s as many awake as there are for these things.
Nor does what you say change the fact that, in this case at least, some unfortunate individual has been misrepresented by the BBC.
Tony
With this story, the BBC gets a swipe at its two favourite hate-targets, Dubya and evangelical Christians.
And look at the source. A Palestinian negotiator. No advantage to him to smear Bush then!
Hank, since you’re here, I posted in comments a reply to your comment on my National Poetry Day post. I would be interested to see what you make of it.
Uh ho:
This World
Wed 12 Oct, 9:00 pm – 10:00 pm 60mins
“The Hurricane that Shook America”
Katrina stunned America – but before she hit, many knew the festering secret behind the city’s flood defences – that they were not built to withstand the strongest kinds of hurricane. Emergency planners talk candidly about the impending disaster and who knew what – and when – as the devastation drew closer. An insider from the government’s crisis team says the blame lies with incompetent leadership.
And, forgotten by their own politicians, there are stories of how the residents took matters into their own hands – including a 20 year old black refugee who stole a bus to drive to safety with a cargo of passengers left homeless and abandoned.
Hang on … including a 20 year old black refugee who stole a bus to drive to safety with a cargo of passengers left homeless and abandoned. Black? Refugee? I heard (not from the BBC) that a young man had commandeered a bus to do what Nagin had forgotten to order, but what relevence is his colour?
Hank – you’re one of those bleeding heart liberal types – what is the relevence of this admirable fella’s colour? What with me being an unreconstructed, old fashioned conservative I need it spelled out to me.
Link to above:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/listings/programme.shtml?day=wednesday&service_id=4224&filename=20051012/20051012_2100_4224_35348_60
Re Daily Politics Perception Panel results, there was a summary piece on thurs pm.
I was surprised that the Fox graph was almost flat. I would have thought that he was the most likely to cause the biggest range of positive & negative reaction, not the least.
The picture of the man apparently sleeping and the coverage of the Bush said “God told me to invade Iraq” story both utilised the technique Andrew mentioned of hunting through large amounts of footage to get the “right” image.
In the Bush story both the Indy and the Grauniad used images of Bush with an apparent halo.
Still on the Bush story, I wonder if the whole thing wasn’t the result of a mistranslation?
Suan, Roxana, Denise W, anyone in the US
Are there any recent developments in the case of the bombing outside a football stadium in Oklahoma? LGF is linking to this:
“Islamic Terrorism in Oklahoma likely”
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/124635.php
I never heard a peep about this on the BBC, nothing when it happened, nothing since.
They are still trying to get political mileage out of Katrina even when the Democrats have dropped it?
Give it a rest, Beeb. The city’s dry, people are streaming back, and Congress and the Bush Administration are pumping a gazillion federal dollars into rebuilding it, much of which will be stolen by the Democratic mafia/actual Mafia that run local and state politics in Louisiana.
Business as usual.
Pete,
It’s not really being reported in the US MSM either. Only the blogosphere cares about it, with a few assists from the Oklahoma local media.
Looks like another Rathergate situation — no one to do the heavy lifting but the blogosphere.
For anyone wanting a preview of the likely manner of coverage of the upcoming ‘Elusive Peace’ documentary to be aired first on BBC this Monday at 10pm, one can follow the link on this page to see an interview with the producer on the BBC newscast which covered the ‘Bush God’ story.
In the above article titled Bush God comments ‘not literal’
PM Abbas was quoted as saying:
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who attended the meeting in June 2003 too, also appears on the documentary series to recount how Mr Bush told him: “I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state.”
‘Strong faith’
But in an interview for the BBC Arabic service on Friday, he said the president – who had just announced an end to hostilities in Iraq, was merely expressing his heartfelt commitment to peace in the Middle East.
“President Bush said that God guided him in what he should do, and this guidance led him to go to Afghanistan to rid it of terrorism after 9/11 and led him to Iraq to fight tyranny,” he said.
“We understood that he was illustrating [in his comments] his strong faith and his belief that this is what God wanted.”
Contrast this with what the Palestinian negotiator claimed, which is that Bush said the US president said he was “driven with a mission from God”.
“God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did, and then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq… And I did.
“And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East. And by God I’m gonna do it.”
So instead of the BBC questioning this divergence, which presents a very different meaning to what Bush might have said, they, along with the presenter in the video, prefer to go with the one that makes Bush look a fool.
The real fools are them and those who suck this rubbish up.
Re Katrina, strangely enough they had a programme – the World Today, I think – on the World Service yesterday. Mike Williams was the intrepid reporter sent to investigate and I was bracing myself for more of the blame Bush fest.
This is how they introduced the programme, most of which I recorded and transcribed. Here’s some of it:
….their failure to respond effectively to the disaster, and the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was forced to resign. But how much were local officials at state and city levels to blame?
At this I nearly fell off my chair. But it got better. MW began by interviewing a hurricane expert who had this to say:
Many scenarios had been run prior to Katrina and these scenarios should have been taken seriously. The mayor of New Orleans and even the governor of Louisiana – some of their actons were highly questionable….We’ve been telling people all over the world that New Orleans was a nightmare waiting to happen and certainy someone at the state level and the local level has got to be held responsible for that.
MW: This is the Superdome…. This is where people were told to go to save themselves from the storm and it was here that many of them believe that they were let down by their government at state and local level. they were left here without food, without water, without medical help, without transport out of here and without security and it’s these five failings that Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin will have to answer for.
This is the BBC?
Mike Williams then interviews a woman in a New Orleans bar:
The president declared this a state of emergency on Saturday night before the storm hit. Under emergency powers, both the mayor and the governor could have gotten a lot of these people out of here on Saturday and Sunday. Instead they spent the whole day – at least the mayor did – trying to figure out the legalities of whether they could do a mandatory evacuation. And it took our governor until Wednesday to give the president permission to put security….
Then there’s a tough interview with Mayor Nagin, with Williams eventually getting him to concede that he could have done things better re his “planning on the finance” and could have tried “to figure out a way to do evacuation much better.”
Governor Blanco wont grant an interview with the BBC though they’ve apparently been trying for weeks to arrange one, but Williams manages to get hold of a spokesman for the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. According to him they were caught off guard by the number of people who remained behind in New Orleans. Also, apart from the question of the flooded New Orleans buses, apparently the mayor had asked the state for buses two days before the hurricane hit but they had not been provided. Why? Apparently because New Orleans wasn’t their only concern. Then, after the storm hit, communication was down throughout the state.
According to this same spokesman, “Governor Blanco accepts full responsibility” for the disaster – whatever that means and however that will be translated into action.
Mike Williams went down to the area a day or two before Hurricane Rita hit. So one has to ask the obvious questions: Did he concentrate on state and city failures because the BBC was stung by criticism that it had concentrated exclusively on the failure of the federal government? And why did the BBC wait until now to broadcast his report?
Still, one has to give credit where it is due.
I think I’ll send them an e-mail.
I’ll keep it a little shorter than this post. Sorry about that.
I meant to add that I searched for the programme on their website but it apparently ain’t there.
(Not that they have such a great search engine.)
Great Work Bryan :+:
Natalie, what you said was perfectly reasonable.
I’m not even a real lefty, just muddling in the middle.
All in all, I still think most of the people on here would convey their messages a hundred times better without the near-zealous, hysterical, paranoid tone they take (yes Rob Read, I’m nodding in your general direction. You really need to remember this isn’t America and you’re not Ann Coulter)
By the way, I picked up some marvellously cheap clothes today, made in China, and have no intention of taking them back even if I discover they were made by some poor sap toiling in working conditions I would find unacceptable. Although I do feel a twinge of guilt. *sob*
Thanks Teddy Bear. Much appreciated.
Uh, ‘Anonymous’ was me, and I was not anonymous.
I’ll learn how to use this thing one of these days.
Pete
Just as Susan said, I haven’t heard this reported from US MSM either. I even asked people at work if they ever heard about it and they said no. I’ll keep trying to find out something on it, though.
Further to the coverage of the conference and the Beeb’s website: Maybe it’s me being paranoid, but the video footage on the Beeb’s video news section of Rifkind’s, Clarke’s, and Cameron’s speeches shows the standing ovations that each of them received. The footage of the Davis speech is cut of abruptly when he says his very last word. The footage of Fox doesn’t even show him finishing the speech, cut off mid-sentence.
When I heard the Davis speech live on Five Live, the commentators immediately began mentioning how no one was standing up, and talking about how tepid the reception was, whilst the whole time one could hear thunderous applause while they spoke for about two minutes. Is it MiniTru at work? Or will the cognitive dissonance between the evidence of their senses and what they would like to report drive all BBC journalists mad?
When I said “no one was standing up” I meant, not as many as at Cameron’s or Clarke’s speeches. Sorry for the inaccuracy.
Pete_London – I totally agree! That chap who commandeered that bus and drove it to Houston was an enterprising young man and his heart was in the right place, because the people he rescued were the elderly and children. That some reporter would imagine that the colour of his skin has anything to do with any of that is bonkers. He was a quicker thinker, bolder and more pragmatic, than 99.99% of the people who had remained in NO, including the mayor and the police chief. Sounds like the BBC is still stuck on stupid.
The BBC isn’t just stuck on stupid – it’s stuck on lying. I heard on Thursday’s news that the head of the IAEA, Mr al-Baradei would be receiving the Nobel Prize for ‘peace'(?) which was due in part to “the IAEA’s efforts in bringing Libya to abandon its nuclear program” (words to that effect).
Rebuttal – no-one, not even the US, had any inkling of the existence of that program which Gadaffi abandoned, this before the IAEA knew about it. BBC lies again.
Then, running late for work on Friday, I heard Frank Gardner on Desert Island Discs being given the soft-soap treatment by Sue Lawley. Gardner states that he wants to find out more about the hate that drives fundamentalist islam. I would have thought that, in addition to its obscurantism and blind refusal to advance, islam is assisted by Finlandisers like Frank Gardner (and the BBC) who is utterly incapable of learning anything even through his personal experience of adherents of the ‘religion of peace’.
In all, a consistent drip-drip of lies every day of every week.
Allan,
Finlandizers! What an excellent term. I’ll keep for future reference!
Further fallout from the Tory conference:
Sorry, for some reason the above posted itself before I had finished!
to continue..
Further fallout (etc) …
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1817795,00.html
It’s not so much what TOL has collated on Cameron; it’s the potted summaries of the rest of the contenders thereafter that does them in. We can assume, methinks, that Murdoch is now a ‘Cameroon’ rather than a Brownie. We have to give it to the Beeb on this one, their Newsnight Luntz special has caused a sea change. And it looks as though Cameron, now dubbed by some wag as ‘Tory Blair’ has been the beneficiary. Prior to that segment I would have surmised that the Beeb were giiving Clarke an easy ride. What are the implications, guys? Lay your bets.