As part of the discussion of this post an anonymous commenter said the following:
So what U.S. party was Gary Condit a member of?
Chandra Levy: Accusation and denial
Hmm, no clues there. How about this page?
Condit passes lie detector test
No joy there either. Strange. How about this page?
Condit battles resignation calls
Why, no. He mustn’t be in any party. Well, let’s see what this page says – Stephen Sackur will surely enlighten us:
Levy soap opera puts press in lather
Why Stephen, you’ve not put the party affiliation. Pressure of space I’m sure.
Well, let’s try Kevin Anderson:
Mystery overwhelms US airwaves
Nope, no joy there either.
This one maybe:
Condit launches ‘PR offensive’
Er, no – nothing either.
Well, Mr Condit is mentioned here…
Levy police question park attacker
…But still no clue which party he belongs to.
Nor here:
Profile: From small town to big city
Sigh – can you imagine the BBC reporting a scandal involving a GOP Congressman with this number of stories and not mentioning his political ties?
The original comment had just URLs; I have given the titles of the BBC stories.
“spot the party” – this is turning into quite a sport!
almost as bad as an outbreak of “plumbers”.
If this does happen it must just be sub-conscious. All the political parties have very effective media monitoring units so the days of political inbalance are well and truly over; whether this requirement to be balanced has actually created an atmosphere of intense dislike for the Conservatives (pre-Cameroon model) I don’t know but I suspect that it is the case.
As an aside, if I was a hard core lefty I wouldn’t be too happy with the BBC. With Andrew Neill presenting two of the most important political programmes on the BBC, there has been a real shift to the right and little time for the more extreme forms of socialism.
If this does happen it must just be sub-conscious.
Well, it has been demonstrated that it does happen.
In the words of Jeff Randall: “It’s not a conspiracy. It’s visceral.”
Peregrine
But Andrew Neil’s midday politics prog has a very small audience – as does The Week. They are all broadcast way outside peak hours. And Neil keeps them fairly balanced anyway. It is hard to see them as “two of the most important political programmes”.
Well as I am not a hard core lefty and have to work for a living I only get to see the show on Thursday night.
You shouldn’t underestimate the power of these programmes as they are directly aimed at activists and it is probably their angst that is going to lose NuLab the next election rather than the promise of new pastures in the sun from Cameron.
When Canadian PM refuses to condemn Israel following the tragic death of six members of a Canadian family, BBC has no choice but to label him a “Conservative prime minister”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5189380.stm
“If this does happen it must just be sub-conscious.”
Well, yes. As anonymous said, it has been demonstrated that it does happen, and it probably is subconscious bias arising from the climate of opinion at the BBC and/or the sort of people who get hired there in the first place.
That’s what this blog is about, really.
The BBC’s defence against allegations of leftist bias is, broadly, to nitpick and obfuscate. The Andrew Marr quote on this blog’s homepage is a good example of this sort of intellectual dishonesty. The accusation is not, as Mr. Marr no doubt well knows, that the BBC is biased in favour of the Labour Party, but that it is biased in favour of the left generally. Its pervasive leftishness is thus seen most nakedly in its anti-Israeli, pro-Islamofascist, anti-American propaganda, none of which are specifically pro-Labour views but all of which are thoroughly leftist. In asserting that the BBC is not pro-Labour Marr is refuting, with typical BBC casuistry, an accusation I haven’t heard anyone seriously make.
It has no need to use such tactics against allegations of rightist bias because this accusation never arises. It would be utterly impossible to even begin to formulate such a charge. It is this as much as anything else I have read here which concludes the case for me that al-BBC is in effect the Ministry of Truth.
The various BBC shills who come on here from time to time insisting that the BBC is not a leftist organisation do so, of course, because they all think that a leftist perspective is neutral. Jeff Randall said as much.
You make much on this site of Jeff Randall. Fair enough. But why do you not make just as much of Tim Llewellyn, also former senior BBC reporter, for many years head of its Middle East bureau, who has repeatedly gone on record to say that the BBC is systematically biased in favour of Israel. If Randall’s views ‘prove’ bias, what about Llewellyn’s?
As camp commandant might say, those of you who see the BBC as hopelessly leftist do so because you see a hopelessly rightist perspective as ‘neutral’. It works both ways, surely.
I make no claims for the BBC’s perfection, but find little on this site to persuade me of systematic left-wing bias. Every time I open the main BBC news page, I am always struck by ‘Business’ being included on the left side bar. Where are the sections on ‘Workers’ Rights’, on ‘Poverty’ on ‘Injustice around the World’? Why is ‘Business’ so prominent? Hardly a left-wing preoccupation.
And a last word on Randall – isn’t the fact that the Beeb’s main business reporter was someone who eventually would go to work for the Telegraph a sign of serious right-wing bias for all the years he was there? Just a thought.
randall’s statement is borne out by the BBC’s behaviour, whereas Llewellyn’s aren’t. There is a very noticeable bias against Israel in the way the BBC reports things, and there is an apparent believe that the BBC line is the centre ground when it palpably isn’t.
As for the Telegraph, they’re to the right of the BBC, for sure, and slightly right of centre, but they aren’t even remotely as far to the right as the BBC is to the left.
Ah Tim Llewellyn, the voice of reason
In South Africa, the BBC made it clear that the platform from which it was reporting was one of abhorrence of the state crime of apartheid. No Afrikaaner was ritually rushed into a studio to explain a storming of a township. There is no such platform of the BBC’s in Israel/Palestine, where the situation is as bad – apartheid, discrimination, racism, ethnic cleansing as rife as ever it was in the Cape or the Orange Free State.
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040115_Ducking_Palestine_1.HTM
(if you follow the link, Llewellyn refers to a programme “The Road to Armageddon” as “a peculiarly crass, inaccurate and condescending programme about the endangered historical sites of “Israel” – that is to say, the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories”
Read how it is described by Cruickshank of Arabia at
http://www.elmandjra.org/guardian020603.htm
& reconcile his sympathetic account of West Bank Palestinians with Llewellyn’s description.)
Gareth Price
Tim Llewellyn is unapologetically, explicitly pro-Palestinian. He admits it. Fine, some people are, but the BBC employed him for a decade as their Middle East correspondent. I would go on and give my own opinion on Llewellyn, but the moderators of this site would be pulling it before Llewellyn’s lawyers started making calls.
But let’s have a look at your bias. You describe Llewellyn as a “former senior BBC reporter, for many years head of its Middle East bureau, who has repeatedly gone on record to say that the BBC is systematically biased in favour of Israel.” No moree, no less. Let’s now put his name into google and see what we come up with:
BBC journalists have long expressed their animus towards Israel both in their reporting, and in revealing actions after leaving the region. Thus, Tim Llewelyn, twice the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, has repeatedly expressed extreme hostility toward Israel since his departure from the network in 1992. Last year, for example, at a London conference entitled “The Palestinians: A Continuing Exodus 1948•1997,” Llewelyn, who chaired one of the sessions, declared “everything Israel is doing today is aimed at getting the Palestinians out of Palestine.” Referring to his review of a book written by the former Israeli President Chaim Herzog, who had recently died, Llewelyn exclaimed, “I have just given his book a good banging. Three days later he died!” — drawing applause and appreciative laughter from his audience. It is telling that such statements did not disqualify Llewelyn from writing for the BBC website a series of essays titled “Israel at Fifty,” which predictably declare that the “Judaisation of Arab East Jerusalem proceeds apace,” characterize Israel as an “implant in the Middle East,” and explain American support for Israel as based not on shared democratic values but on the power of the “Jewish lobby.
http://world.std.com/~camera/docs/oncamera/ocbbc.html
The electronic intifada interviewed former BBC Mideast reporter Tim Llewellyn, who openly acknowledges his pro-Palestinian sympathies.
http://backspin.typepad.com/backspin/2005/04/former_bbc_repo.html
Or:
In the Boston Herald, Clifford May describes his participation in a debate hosted by the Trinity College of Dublin’s Philosophical Society. Though the topic of debate was the Bush presidency, the discussion degenerated into a bash-Israel affair. May went on to call participant Tim Llewellyn, who once worked for the BBC, an anti-Semite. Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East bureau chief, announced: “George Bush is a threat to world peace on so many levels we can’t begin to discuss it.” So he didn’t try. Instead, he turned to the topic that really fires him up: Israel. Yasser Arafat, he said, had been correct to reject the offer of Palestinian statehood made at Camp David in 2000 because it was “a pro-Zionist type of approach.” It would have allowed the Jewish state to survive. He found that a distasteful prospect. I was not surprised. Before the debate, he’d noted that he had heard a BBC host cut off a caller who wanted to discuss Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map.” The caller didn’t see what was so terrible about this idea. Llewellyn lamented that there now seems to be a taboo against expressing such opinions….I told Llewellyn – politely, but to his face – that he was an anti-Semite. That term, I explained, used to mean those who wanted a Europe with no Jewish population; today, it means those who want a world with no Jewish state.This is not the first time Llewellyn’s hostility to Israel was expressed so openly.
http://backspin.typepad.com/backspin/2005/11/dubious_dublin_.html
There’s your esteemed former BBC Middle East correspondent, Tim Llewellyn, Gareth Price. He seems to have a problem with Jews. No doubt he can think of a solution to this Jewish problem of his.
Sigh.
Pete_London. I never said I ‘esteemed’ Llewellyn. I never said I agreed with him. I merely said that quoting former BBC employees as to the bias or otherwise of the organisation is ‘proof’ of nothing.
But as a result of what was, I hoped, a reasonable comment, you imply that I ‘esteem’ someone who supports the Holocaust. There is something deeply depressing about the comments section on this blog, where even the mildest dissent from B-BBC orthodoxy meets such a reaction.
Gareth Price writes:
“If Randall’s views ‘prove’ bias, what about Llewellyn’s?”
And who else? With the (very questionable in my opinion) exception of Andrew Neil and his chum Portillo, who else employed by the BBC in news, arts, or current affairs broadcasting could you, by any stretch of the imagination, suggest is Right of centre?
Plainly, the answer is no one.
As camp commandant says – the only defence BBC supporters ever muster is casuistry: the single example from which a broad case is drawn, the point so trivial it is barely worth mentioning.
Don’t forget, when a right of centre person pops up on the BBC, they are often labelled as “rightwing” or some other pejorative while from the opposite end of the spectrum such labels are missing with complete moonbats introduced in neutral terms or with their die-hard allegances not explained.
It is similar in the U.S.
http://www.mrc.org/realitycheck/2005/fax20050509.asp
@ Gareth Price:-
But why do you not make just as much of Tim Llewellyn, also former senior BBC reporter, for many years head of its Middle East bureau, who has repeatedly gone on record to say that the BBC is systematically biased in favour of Israel.
If he is anti-Israel, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Because any coverage which is neutral annoys him by failing to be sufficiently anti-Israel. He needs to come up with some actual evidence. As a reporter you’d think he would realise this, but then again he’s only a BBC reporter. Perhaps, as a result, he became accustomed to broadcasting his personal views and having them reverently accepted as unchallengeable fact? If he had been able to cite a BBC reporter weeping over the death of some Israeli political figure, a la Barbara Plett over Yasser Arafat, I’d be more convinced, but such examples don’t seem to exist.
As camp commandant might say, those of you who see the BBC as hopelessly leftist do so because you see a hopelessly rightist perspective as ‘neutral’. It works both ways, surely.
Not at all. I can see that Fox News comes from the right also. What I object to is the structural and systemic antipathy to opinions right of its own that the BBC routinely displays. Paxman’s astonishing “interview” with Ann coulter, where he simply hurled insults at her for daring to be right wing, is a case in point. I can’t imagine anyone at the BBC treating Polly Toynbee like that, can you? Why does nobody ever complain that the BBC is structurally right wing?
Every time I open the main BBC news page, I am always struck by ‘Business’ being included on the left side bar. Where are the sections on ‘Workers’ Rights’, on ‘Poverty’ on ‘Injustice around the World’? Why is ‘Business’ so prominent?
The way in which it is covered is left wing, however – anti-business, the CBI routinely health-warned as “bosses” rather than “employers”, a priori hostility towards multinationals…you ask why it’s so prominent? Discussion of Jews was quite prominent in Oswald Mosley’s campaign rallies, I expect, but that wasn’t to say they were discussed in an approving way.
Could commenters please tone down the rhetoric. I don’t say Nazi comparisons are banned, but they seem to me to be unecessarily raising the temperature in this thread.
Gareth Price
You said: I make no claims for the BBC’s perfection, but find little on this site to persuade me of systematic left-wing bias. This was just after mentioning Tim Llewellyn. You can see the kind of man Llewellyn is, you can see what he thinks of Jews, you can what others think of him. This man was appointed the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, not once but twice! You’re welcome to bring evidence of similarly abhorrent right wing views from Jeff Randall.
Natalie
I’m not aware of anyone making Nazi comparisons in their own name.
Basic rule of thumb: Sex scandals are Democrats and Money Scandals Republican…though Clinton managed both.
To cite Llewellyn is surely a joke.
Randall was a highly experienced and respected financial journalist long before he joined the BBC. His views on the BBC culture in the relatively short time he was there are those of an outsider looking in. He had nothing to gain by declaring that the BBC is systemically, in-its-bones leftie. He is still a senior guy.
Whereas Llewellyn seems to have done little since leaving the BBC except rant against Israel. So his views on BBC bias vis-a-vis Israel can hardly be trusted.
Anyone who thinks the BBC is NOT left wing biased….
Is either a total moron….or a left winger……(Is there a difference?)
It’s so obvious it is laughable…..like the child with his face covered in chocolate who says he was not stealing Cookies…….
Cute in a child….utterly pathetic and embarassing in an “Adult” yet alone the BBC…..
The BBC is Obsolete…..let it die.
The BBC HAS to be biased to the left wing.
Why? Because of the way the BBC relies on extortion in order to fund itself.
People who beleive thay have an entitlement to other peoples money will naturally be attracted to a likeminded broadcaster.
It’s still interesting to see that Al Beeb even bothered to cover Chandra Levy’s murder in so much detail… after all she was Jewish and we all know that Al Beeb doesn’t like to focus on the killing of Jewish people.
Camp Commandmant: “The BBC’s defence against allegations of leftist bias is, broadly, to nitpick and obfuscate … In asserting that the BBC is not pro-Labour Marr is refuting, with typical BBC casuistry, an accusation I haven’t heard anyone seriously make.
Excellent points. It’s true. The BBC always responds to criticisms that no one is making.
An example – Question: Why does the BBC give the impression to viewers and listeners that it is presenting the news and analysis from a neo-marxist perpective?
Typical BBC/Marr answer: “Look, the BBC is not driven by ratings alone, and we take pride in our accuracy and gold standard journalism.”
I guess you just can’t argue with the only people with their hands on the dominant microphone.