David Vance intends to tell the BBC a thing or two, to their faces:
‘I believe the License Fee should be scrapped forthwith and ALL subsidy to the BBC ended. The BBC must stand, or fall, on it’s own two financial feet. As far as I am concerned state broadcasting is anachronistic and totalitarian – time to end it.’
A merry thread ensued.
Ritter and co:
Wickedly funny and perceptive post on the Beeb and Easter.
A few months ago I was watching the Beeb’s ridiculous Sunday (ir)religious programme “The Heaven and Earth Show”, coming from an exhibition of UFO guff at the science museum, when the enthusiastic bright-eyed pubescent presenter turned to the camera and said as a link to another item: “Many people believe in UFOs but some people believe in God!”.
I kid you not. Honest.
Cash for Honours is up!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4906504.stm
“Angry Young Man etc” – TV Cream has a lengthy and interesting feature of the BBC’s Play for Today strand.
Some of the plays were very good and have become classics. But the general political theme is of sympathetic coverage of left-wing causes and endless plays about heroic workers setting up unions etc. And this was at a time when the government was also left-wing, and so the BBC can’t argue that it was challenging the prevailing viewpoint etc. If anything the plays seem to have been written by a mindset that was upset with Wilson / Callaghan not being left-wing enough. It is odd that the strand seemed to vanish in the 1980s, perhaps because it would quickly have become so obviously left-wing pro-Militant propaganda as to be an embarrassment for the BBC.
However, Mike Leigh’s “Nuts in May” is one of the most superb skewerings of a certain kind of left-wing person. It is a big prescient metaphor for the left wing’s disgust and sense of betrayal with the Thatcher-supporting working class of the 1980s. The main character is a tree-loving macrobiotic hippy who appears to be outwardly pleasant, but at the slighted provocation he turns in a violent and bigoted hate-filled control freak. He is nice to his wife because she nods and smiles and would never dare talk back to him. He is driven to mania by the very kind of liberated person he pretends to be. His supposed rebellion against society is artificial and constructed and as reactionary as the people he despises.
I was reminded of that by this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/13/newsid_2830000/2830895.stm
It is the anniversary of Neil Kinnock throwing in the towel as labour leader after losing the 1992 general election. He blamed the Tory press for brainwashing the proletariat, and by extension the voters who were free to choose to buy The Sun etc.
Kinnock went off to work for the EU. There is a bit of unintentional dry humour in the BBC’s neutral summary of his career:
“Mr Kinnock became a member of the European Commission in 1995 and its vice-president in 1999.
In 2000 he announced plans to rid the Commission of corruption, malpractice and waste.
He retired from the European Commission in 2004.”
“Could someone please explain to me why Jack Hughes thinks that the BBC think that “science is dangerous.”
I read B-BBC quite a lot and I can honestly say that I’ve never heard that acusation before.”
one good example is the Global warming hysterics that you get on the BBC. no alternative theories are mentioned.
another one is Bird Flu hysterics.
A previous one was MMR
I have said this previously but i’ll do so again – have a look at the TV schedules for the week, and pick out the programmes to do with science or engineering on the BBC.
you’d be hard pressed to find them.
Bear in mind that the BBC’s charter mentions that its duty is to inform and educate.
iranians could have enough enriched uranium for a nuke in “16 days”:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000100&sid=aduNTcpDuDd4&refer=germany
BBC must have choked to give out the transcript of the last minutes of Flight 93, what with the innumerable invocations to “Allah” as the murderers did their work… no doubt our pal John Reith would claim that is no evidence they were actually muslims (still waiting for him to recall his defence of the censorship over the Paris murder some time ago… to say nothing of his copious list of examples of BBC mentioning Hamas’ aim to destroy Israel)
what with the innumerable invocations to “Allah”
No doubt you’ve “misinterpreted” it Bob……they were probably saying “Ah…land—–ing….” but got cut off before they had finishing praying !
They have built a World Trade Center in Bahrain now so they won’t need to fly all the way to New York next time…………..no doubt the BBC will do a TV programme where plucky Muslim youths rush to stop a fundamentalist Christian group from crashing into the Temple of Mammon and get Congressional Medals of Honour from a grateful nation……………..no Hollywood/Burbank has probably bought the script first
Bob
There was no ‘censorship’ about the religion of the suspect from the Cote d’Ivoire. My point then -and now- was that the BBC was right to wait until it found out whether the guy WAS a Muslkim or not. At the time, the BBC didn’t know. He had a name that could be Christian or Muslim. What’s so wrong with waiting 12 hours ’til you can CHECK the facts?
That list is shaping up………nicely.
Yeah – strange how it was ONLY the BBC who “didn’t know”. You’d think the cries of “Allah akbar” during the torture sessions might have given a few clues… Glad to hear that the BBC did apparently, allegedly, eventually supply the full info (not that I ever saw it – I’ll take your word for it)
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?table=§ion=&issue=2006-04-15&id=7616
This is interesting in the latest Spectator…..not sure PM will report it though
Did anyone else hear Dr Robert Beckford being interviewed on Five Live this afternoon? He was plugging his Channel 4 program ‘Passion’ about religion in movies and the controversies that inevitably follow, which will be shown this Saturday. I was a little puzzled why the BBC allowed such airtime to showcase their rivals shows.
The penny dropped after the fifth or sixth mention of ‘the Neo-Con religious right’ in the US and their power over what’s released. The good doctor forgot to mention Islam. He also forgot to mention Theo Van Gogh.
But he remembered to mention how right wing Mel Gibson is.
Susan and fellow Americans. Watch out. The Beeb (and Al-Guardian) is coming. To change your country with it’s sick brand of PC multi-culti leftism.
AIM Report: British Media Invade the U.S.
http://www.aim.org/aim_report/4488_0_4_0_C/
“If the U.S. doesn’t wake up to the threat, monitor it, and deal with it, the likelihood is that within a generation the United States will end up like the inured P.C. basket-case that is now Great Britain.
Thanks directly to The Guardian’s hold over the BBC, British society has changed much for the worst, almost certainly irreversibly. The Conservative Party never woke up to the threat and so is now forced to court favor from these, their conquerors, so desperate are they to win back office.
And so, having achieved the emasculation of the Conservatives, the BBC-Guardian axis has turned its sights on the last bastion of conservative thinking: the United States of America. That’s why they are in America.”
Re: AIM report.
Yeah, inured PC basket-case aren’t we? I’m off out to spend some of my exhorbitant salary on some champers in Le Grande Marque. God, if only I could be in North Dakota.
Cockney writes:
“Yeah, inured PC basket-case aren’t we? I’m off out to spend some of my exhorbitant salary on some champers in Le Grande Marque.”
Champagne socialists are nothing new.
The report might be exaggerated, but only the purblind could deny its essential truth.
“another one is Bird Flu hysterics.
A previous one was MMR”
Come on – that applies to the WHOLE MEDIA. And I remember watching a programme with that little guy of Top Gear, that had lots of doctors saying that MMR was safe and that it was important that children should have the jab.
Some good points about the BBC do get raised here, but I’m not convinced that this science thing is one of them.
To change your country with it’s sick brand of PC multi-culti leftism.
Our country has already been changed by the same sick brand of PC multi-culti, unfortunately. This will just be more of it.
The Guardian with its constant errors and flat-out lies etc. will not win favor with the general US readership. The Nation crowd wil read it but who else? Air America “progressive” talk radio was a huge flop. Still, maybe the imprimatur of a “foreign view of America” may boost the legitimacy of this type of British “media” in some American eyes.
It seems like journalistic shenanigans get “outed” here on a much more frequent basis IMHO, than in the UK. Hell, the New York Times is constantly having to apologize for its lies — almost every week they have to retract some grotesquely distorted story — and the Grey Lady has much higher standards than the Guardian (such as they are).
Even in Britain it took an expat American to expose al-Guardian’s Hizbutter connection in the Dilsassy affair.
BBC Blogs
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/
Oh puke. Can’t they just leave it alone without having to storm into the [blogsphere] room, throwing their fat, bloated state funding around???
Just a reminder (incase you’d forgotten) that ‘Africa Lives on the BBC. (God knows why, buy you’ll dam well pay for it anyway).
Africa Lives on the BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/africalives/myafrica/
But he remembered to mention how right wing Mel Gibson is.
Noel | 13.04.06 – 4:30 pm | #
Is he ? I thought he was a Roman Catholic who rejected Vatican II – is that a “political statement” ? If so we can see that the Left are still obsessed with religion which they like to tell us is dead, but in reality it is politics which has failed to excite because of the twists and turns of the amoral and the simply deceitful.
The BBC is inspirational for anyone who has a religious faith simply because its attacks consolidate belief. It is the Church of England which undermines religious belief through its apostasy and espousal of BBC values
Ritter, Susan, GCooper,
Thanks for your comments on my AIM piece.
As for being exaggerated, well, The Guardian sets the BBC’s thinking, the BBC sets the nation’s thinking, the nation is certainly losing its values, if not exactly going to the dogs.
Join the dots.
And take a look at: http://www.guardianlies.com/Contents.html. Next time John Reith pops up with the old “The BBC is impartial and airs a wide range of views” line, remind him that there’s a major story of alleged press corruption out there to which the BBC has turned a blind eye, despite the written endorsements of its own staff, for the last nine years …. and counting….
BBC1 6pm News has US based reporter telling us
Moussaoui started his testimony with an attack on his court-appointed defence lawyers whom he accused of pursuing a “vested interest”. & that he considered that they were wanted him killed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4906572.stm
Newsreader responds by saying cryptically “His defence team didn’t want him to give evidence”.
Was she suggesting that Moussaoui may have a point?
What was not said in the broadcast, but is at BBC online, Moussaoui’s doubts are
He argued that they (his defence lawyers) did not have his best interests at heart because, he said, “first you are American, and second, you are Jewish”.
That AIM article was an excellent primer to BBC bias and its threat to the gullible in America. I hope it gets picked up by blogs in the US.
Why is the BBC leading on the trial of the RAF officer who refused legal orders ? Silly question really !
It is the second main story at 6pm on the radio. More important eg than the nuclear news from Iran.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/default.stm
Notice the placing….
“Bigotry a Scottish problem – Uefa”
is above
“Man, 20, held under Terrorism Act”
As far as I know, this is the first Scottish muslim terror bust.
And there is no mention of the terror arrest on the front page.
Nothing to see here, move along please.
Last night’s South park episode in the US satirised the craven refusal of US networks to show the Danish cartoons :
http://malcontent.typepad.com/malcontent/2006/04/comedy_central_.html
Please do excuse me for linking to my own journal, but I rarely do it and I believe that the following instance of BBC bias is significant and outraging enough for self-advertisement to be justified in the interest of information: BBC News attempts to pass Palestinian militant deaths off as civilian deaths. The title pretty much says it all: BBC News cites a number of Palestinian deaths, the great majority of which are militant, though the BBC omits to mention this detail (B’Tselem style).
Southpark whacked their own network!
They showed Jesus being crapped upon, but didn’t show Mo at all.
Comedy Central walked into that one.
🙂
“AWB was named in a UN report as one of dozens of companies from 66 nations that allegedly paid bribes to the Saddam Hussein regime.”
Cripes! Who’s going to pick up the pieces?
c.MMVI Bad Pop Puns Ltd.
And a little Easter wish: if you want to say “it is”, use “it’s”; if you want to say “belonging to it”, use “its”.
Christopher Hitchens tells us what a liar and a fool Joe Wilson is – and then has a serious swipe at Seymour Hersh.
http://www.radioblogger.com/#001539
An indication that the US could take out Iraq’s nuclear capabi;lity iof they have to :
http://www.radioblogger.com/#001538
discusses the military options behind the diplomatic pressure. War being diplomacy by other means, of course. He too pours scorn on the Sy Hersh idea of the US using nuclear strikes on Iran.
Thanks Grumpy Troll this is a useful link – and something I’ve often noticed comparing with reports from other sources. It’s bad enough not using the ‘t’ word – but making them sound like plain civilians is truly misleading. I noticed that the LibDem who has just come back from his ‘fact finding’ tour of the territories and chat with Hamas leaders, was allowed to assert on Today this morning that Hamas had observed a year long cease fire – with no contradiction from Sarah Montagu (or was it Caroline Quinn – I can hardly tell them apart). This is sheer disinformation.
Amusing conversation with a BBC fan (or was it Matt Frei) at a Florida airshow.
http://boortz.com/nuze/200604/04102006.html#brit
(Via Tim Blair)
I understand your concern with the mainstream media referring to terrorists as “militants”; I was going to surround each instance of the word “militants” with inverted commas in my post, but it seemed a little excessive (stylistically at least), and would perhaps not have been understood by some readers.
C4 news right now has a puff piece about a UK Muslim rapper, pissed off about Muslims being blamed for terrorism.
staggering.
so, its really the Mormons who are letting off those bombs in Iraq everyday, eh?
I noticed that the LibDem who has just come back from his ‘fact finding’ tour of the territories and chat with Hamas leaders, was allowed to assert on Today this morning that Hamas had observed a year long cease fire
Even if that were true could the LibDem tell me anywhere else he would feel safe if his neighbours had only managed 12 months…………..and still wanted to evict him from his home ?
aka “I haven’t burned your house down in the past 12 months……but I still intend to………..
Why is the BBC leading on the trial of the RAF officer who refused legal orders ? Silly question really !
I thought it was to highlight his absurdity……………funny really, I mean he’s been on duty in Iraq, but now he doesn;t want to obey any orders………….I wonder what campaign group his girlfriend belongs to ?
Each month dozens or hundreds of UK servicepeople are sent on active duty to Iraq. Many many thousands have done Iraq tours.
But the BBC chooses to put a big focus on one man who refuses to go, in spite of the fact that our presence in Iraq is covered by UN resolution and is endorsed by the elcted Iraqi authorities, as well as being entirely legal under UK law. A man described as arrogant by his trial judge.
Hmmmmm, HYS has a ‘Reactively Moderated’ topic:
Dan Gillmor: Your comments
Are we all reporters now?
In the second of his columns for BBC News, author Dan Gillmor describes how media organisations are beginning to recognise that their readers can be major contributors to tomorrow’s stories.
However, the move to involve citizens in journalism has caused a backlash by some in the traditional, professional media.
Do you agree with Dan Gillmor? Should audiences be more involved in reporting the news? Is this the future for journalism?
Published: Thursday, 6 April, 2006, 14:11 GMT 15:11 UK
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?sortBy=1&threadID=1487&edition=1&ttl=20060413195422&#paginator
But it’s been taken off the ‘Have Your Say’ main page and so the only people who know it’s there are those who cottoned onto it from the start and yours truly, who stumbled across it while searching for something else.
‘Don’t Have Your Say’ yet again.
Still, it’s such a novelty being able to post on HYS and see your post appear at a click of the ‘Refresh’ tab that a few of us have been chatting there.
Charlie – c.MMVI Bad Pop Puns Ltd.
Its more like MCMLXXV, I think. Sorry about the missing apostrophe.
BBC salaries……..
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1753303,00.html
david vance reports back on the license fee debate:
http://atangledweb.typepad.com/weblog/2006/04/reporting_back_.html
there was a time when you could just dump your waste at the local council rubbish dump.
now thanks to “environmental” laws , we now have more illegal dumping than ever before. the law of unintended consequences rears its ugly head yet again.
its on c4 right now.
http://www.channel4.com/news/microsites/D/dispatches2006/rubbish/index.html
Grumpy Troll – yes, isn’t that just typical of the BBC.
interesting. that c4 docu.
by law , if rubbish is flytipped on your property , YOU are responsible for the costs of clearing it up.
in the era before private “waste management”, you paid your taxes, the council collected the rubbish.
c4 docu again. interesting snippet – it costs £300 for a building contractor to dump just one lorry full of building waste at a landfill site.
end result , because of these crazy “environmental” laws? lots of illegal fly tipping.
now , if it was about a tenner to dump a lorry full, i suppose any business would take that hit. but £300 per lorry? somethings not quite right.
of course the C4 docu never investigates this £300 charge , or why it was set so high. instead , they just investigate the illegal fly tippers.
they also NEVER ask, why has illegal fly tipping become such a big business.
“(science hysteria) Come on – that applies to the WHOLE MEDIA”.
Is the BBC better or the same as the rest of the media? Its supporters say that it is better than tainted commercial tabloid trash such as ITN, because it is paid for by every one of us rather than being shat out of the diseased and doubtless warty backside of Rupert Murdoch, an uncouth rich man.
If the BBC’s coverage of MRSA and bird flu and so forth is just as hysterically poor as coverage of the same issue by ITN and Sky News etc then one of the biggest arguments in favour of the BBC – that it is unbeholden to mammon and that it is therefore pure and wholesome like Darcey Bussell rather than being fat and ugly like Silvio Berlusconi – is torpedoed as surely as HMS Royal Oak circa October 1939.
I imagine there are people who liken the BBC to Darcey Bussell. They’re both state-funded and I am unlikely to penetrate either.
God, I love the word unbeholden.
ashley – you hit the nail on the head precisely.
case in point about BBC bad science – the program this week about Venus Express.
in one clip, the presenter says that because Venus is closer to the sun, any oceans in the past would have boiled off . Now, since oceans can absorb CO2, there was no water left to absorb the Venusian CO2 – and thus you got a runaway greenhouse effect.
Minutes later, the same presenter is wondering “will the Earth end up being another Venus” because of “global warming” – thereby forgetting the closer-to-the-sun argument about Venus that she made in the first place.
Yet another example of sloppy science on the BBC.