Mean spirited, perhaps, to laugh at typos, but this is unintentionally rather amusing – BBC News Online have stopped their fatuous “Allies on trial“ online poll (just as the no votes were gaining ground), and have posted bar graphs of the results instead.
I knew we were bad and all, deposing poor innocent Saddam, but breaching “the convention on the methods and means of WELFARE” is beyond the pale!
Update:It’s taken the Beeboids until Sunday afternoon to correct their typo – so much for sub-editing and quality control!
How many peolpe who said yes actually know the terms of the Convention, on Welfare or Warfare? Do you reckon it’s fairly close to ‘none’?
the bbc kicks the americans in every broadcast on the hour.
This is hilarious. I’ve noticed that the BBC’s usually impeccable standards of English have dropped.
Could this be because they are employing more and more people of a certain Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance whose mother tongue is not English?
And when/if they correct the mistake, will it be a result of visiting this site?
the bbc and global warming:
“it was michael crichton who pointed out in his commonwealth club lecture some years ago that environmentalism has become the religion of western elites.” james schlesinger
thus the bbc and global warming.
The BBC (& other media) display a total lack of curiosity on the whereabouts of “peace activist” Kember since the “hostage takers” deadline expired a week ago.
Is that because they feel strongly that it was a staged event, but are not prepared to call it?
So basically you lost the vote. By 2:1.
BBC4 runs a copy of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” called “The Late Edition”, presented by Marcus Brigstocke.
The copy even extends to placing the host in a higher position than the guest & as Brigstocke is a giant, he towers above.
This height advantage made the king of smug, John Humphrys, look particularly small on his appearance last week.
Humphrys was making much of The Times’ exposure of his £multi public speaking gigs. Humphrys claimed to have been worth a double page spread in The Times – so exhibiting his usual selective memory.
He then spent the rest of the appearance telling the same “recollections” that had been printed in The Times, trouble was the L3 audience still laughed at the familiar material.
Bryan, you speculate about the ethnicity of BBC employees and their standard of English.
But BBC management and editors are always caucasian and white. As the announcements about rearranging the deckchairs in the BBC editorial ranks continue to emanate, look at the names and the faces – Unsworth, Farnsworth, Bakhurst, Sambrook, Clifton, Horrocks, Boaden. A celebration of Celtic caucasians! Not exactly an ethnic spread, bringing different cultural histories to contribute.
And Popescu and Rybczynski are going now, at least they sounded like they could have had east European forebears, quick get rid of them!
Where are the Patels, the Levys and the Khans – not in the “hideously white BBC” – and Greg Dyke said it was that!
I doubt they’d want to work for the BBC. Remember, the loudest voices shouting about racism are usually self-hating whites. Nobody else gives a toss.
Hazel,
When Dyke said it’s ‘hideously white’ he must have been looking in the mirror.
I notice a degree of affirmative action in the staff of the World Service but I guess that’s understandable because it is, after all, aimed at a world audience. And spelling skills don’t have to be perfect when you’re a radio presenter.
I suppose the BBC staff, for example, on (D)HYS who don’t know the difference between ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ and spell ‘crescent’ without the second ‘c’ could just be poorly-educated whites.
Or they could be Mediterranean-type people who Dyke didn’t notice when he made his ‘hideously white’ claim because they are hammering away on keyboards and not attending upper crust meetings.
Steve
That is dishonest and you know it. A vote was made from a biased population (the Beeb being left-wing media outlet) on a subject that very few of those voting actually understood. The vast majority of those voting lied – they could not say “yes” or “no” as they had no idea of the terms of the Convention and very little idea of the means of warfare actually employed (the Beeb give no indication as to what actions might have contravened the Convention) – so how do they compare two things they don’t know and come up with an honest answer?
All the poll shows therefore is that the anti-war campaigners have twice as many people either dishonest enough to vote on something they know nothing about or stupid enough to think they can judge this issue. A win either way for those approving of the war and occupation.
In any case compliance with the terms of a Convention cannot be judged by a poll – it is a fact of law, and can only be judged in court with all the facts available.
hazel,
i don’t think the world service audience should matter. i don’t pay for it, so why should i, being non-uk of whatever ethnicity, have any expectations of presenters? seems to me the poor sods (i mean that in the nicest way!) forced to pay for it should be the ones “reflected” (what were those percentages again of uk ethnicities?) …
and i can assure you, i would not in the least be surprised or offended, should i tune in to “beijing world service’, to find every single face “hideously chinese”
dyke’s very phrase suggests to me some self-serving attempt at suggesting a britain that does not exist
“see, we want so much to be diverse that even we are ashamed at our failure. aren’t we wonderful to be so up-front about it?”
amimissingsomething hits the nail on the head. It was a self-serving attempt to suggest a Britain that isn’t. Total non-Caucasian ethnicity in Britain – 6%. The Brits really don’t want more black newscasters because in their real lives, they can go days without ever seeing a black person (except reading the news on TV). Britain is a white country with a small, non-white immigrant population. Yet the BBC bulldozes its agenda through by running only shots of black or hijab-clad people to illustrate its stories. If it’s a police story, they run a photo of a black officer. Nothing wrong with black officers – when we want the help of the police, a black officer turning up is most welcome – but they are not typical. A story about schools? Why, all the children are Asian, some with hijabs on, or black, with a blonde child sitting fuzzily in the background. Hospitals? Any surprise that all the surgeons and nurses pictured are ethnically not British – unless accused of a crime, of course, in which case, large photo?
Ninety-four percent of Britain is inhabited by indigenes or other Caucasian immigrants. Why does the BBC insist on pretending otherwise? I can only conclude, to further its tranzi, One Worlder, socialism uber alles agenda.
amimissingsomething,
You make good points, but I was the one who mentioned the World Service (since I don’t live in the UK and mostly access the WS for my miseducation at the hands of the BBC thought police). Hazel was innocent of that observation.
Verity,
There’s much food for thought in your post. I suppose the BBC’s agenda could be summed up in the words of an old song:
What we need is a great big melting pot
Big enough to take the world and all it’s got
And keep it churning for a huundred years or more
And turn out coffee-coloured people by the score.
Of course, that kind of loss of identity and individuality is the very last thing we need. But the BBC would no doubt love to have it happen. A bland, unthinking, undifferentiated, cloned audience would be so easy to lead around by the nose.
Bryan… Ah the World Service. An institution whose original purpose was to spread the English language and British values around the world. And, of course, to being a little bit of the UK to all the expats dotted around the globe.
Now an Insitutionally Leftist cabal whose purpose is spread the socialist globalist one-world view of “multi-culturalism”.
Who are the real anti-globalist protestors? Not the jobless leftoid rabble who roam from city to city rioting at the WTO.
In fact, it is they who are the GLOBALISTS. They are the one world viewists, they are the ones who want us all to be the same. Miserable and poor and proles all under the malignant system of socialism.
Nah… the real ant-Globalists are conservatives. We’re the ones who believe in real diversitym, not the ersatz or faux “diversity” of the left, which means tolerance to everyone, except those who disagree.
Maybe we need a riot, all of our own, to quote the Clash.
Verity, I don’t know where you live but you obviously don’t travel on the London Underground, when you say “Brits ……….can go days without ever seeing a black person”. Everybody on the Tube is from somewhere different and I see nothing wrong in that.
The point I was trying to make is:
Britain, and especially London, contains people of many cultures who mostly contribute positively to national life.
Where the BBC reports on any of them contributing negatively, I feel it takes an editor of that ethnicity to say “don’t be so silly, tell it how it is.” Rather than the all-white management of the BBC, actively racist in their staffing, but falling over themselves not to notice ethnicity in certain news reports, such as about the “honour killing”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/4520682.stm
when they should say they are Muslim. And should say a lot more about how disgusting such behaviour is.
Hazel – Thank you for stating the obvious: Verity, I don’t know where you live but you obviously don’t travel on the London Underground, when you say “Brits ……….can go days without ever seeing a black person”.
You are absolutely correct! I don’t travel on the rolling slum of the London Underground. Until recently, I lived in a town of 45,000 in SE England. There are a quite a few newsagents, one of them run by a Hindu Indian family. One of the chippies is owned by a Chinese family. There was a policeman of “Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance”. And that, basically, was your average richly multicultural average English market town. I did sometimes see a black woman, always alone and pushing a push chair. She may have lived there or sometimes come in from one of the surrounding villages.
This town is absolutely unexceptional and typical of the type of place most British live in.
The BBC is deliberately perpetrating a one-worlder myth on its paymasters, against their will.
Hazel also says: “Everybody on the Tube is from somewhere different and I see nothing wrong in that.” Yes, 50% of Londoners are endogenous. They have no roots in London and many are transient, staying for three or four years and moving on. They care nothing about the welfare of London, or its future. Unlike you, I see a lot wrong with that, although it isn’t an appropriate argument for this blog.
Hazel: “Verity, I don’t know where you live but you obviously don’t travel on the London Underground, when you say “Brits ……….can go days without ever seeing a black person”. Everybody on the Tube is from somewhere different and I see nothing wrong in that.
It depends on where you live Hazel. In London and the big cities you are right, but just last week for instance, I was in a large supermarket in Cheltenham, a fairly large well to do middle England town, and was quite struck by the complete lack of non-white faces – quite in contrast to my experience in London.
Neither situation is right or wrong – that’s just the way it is – but, it does get worrying if the predominance of other cultures becomes such that they subsume traditional British culture – as will likely become the case in decades to come if current immigration-levels and birth-rates persist.
Verity said somewhere that 6% of the British population are non-indigenous – which was true at the 1991 census. In 2001 the proportion was 9% – i.e. a 50% increase in just 10 years.
A few more decades of 50% increases, if the trend continues, will radically change Britain – even though those of us who were born here and who have children here have not had a chance to vote (except in the vaguest of terms at general elections) on whether or not we want Britain to change to this extent.
When the Beeb runs a positive story on the NHS, Police, et al you can be sure that ethnic minorities will feature strongly.
A negative story and the only people to get a look in will be the hideous whites.
Bryan: thanks
Hazel: apologies for the incorrect attribution
I wonder how teh BBC news would report a complaint that, say, the England Football squad was “hideously black”? So why is that any more racist (and it is racist, deply so; it is jsut that so is calling the Beeb “hideously white”).
The irony is that at the junior levels whites are under-represented, so that suggests that over many years recruitment has been (slightly) skewed in exactly the opposite way. Of course the senior people were recruited many years ago, and no neutral policy today will have an immediate effect there.
To add further irony the representation of non-whites there is not especially low, and might well reflect the UK ethnic mix when these people (who almost all came through the BBC, or at least the UK television industry) started their careers.
Verity, I can’t square the circle between your comment that there are comparatively few non whites in Britain (so they shouldn’t be all over the media) with the usual argument that we’re being overrun by non white immigrants??
I’m not convinced by the suggestion that we should have a referendum on further immigration. There have been plenty of other equally significant changes to British society over the years that haven’t been voted on specifically, and personally I think if we started having referenda at the drop of a hat we’d be bankrupt within months. What I do object to is the PC suppression of intelligent discussion of the issue.
Cockney – It is the manipulative evasions that infuriate me. The bullyboy forwarding of the leftist agenda and silencing of opposition.
Actually, I like the idea of referenda. I would rather have a direct vote on issues, via the internet, than leave decisions with MPs.
I mean, how would you like to have the future of your country decided by a Blair’s babe? Do you even know the name of one?
I’m not convinced that there’s anyone currently in Parliament who I’d much fancy running the country,
but having said that if the general public had a direct vote on issues we’d be Liberia within a month.
Hmmmm …. well, Cockney, if the denizens of [D]Have Your Say were the only ones voting, yes.
I just got back from the Middle East, and my friends there tell me that the BBC is loathed as a pro-Saddam and anti-Iraqi and anti-democracy network.
Far be it for me to argue with them when I wholeheartedly agree.