Thanks to Henry and Richy in comments here, to Little Bulldogs, and to several anonymous commenters for the tip. Both the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard carry stories about how
“a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.
The quote from Andrew Marr (“The BBC is not impartial or neutral … It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias”) might join the others on the sidebar eventually, including the earlier one from him (“Every time I ask people – show me a case of that bias … they seem to be unable to do so”). Compare and contrast, you might say. Another potential addition to the sidebar is the fact that Washington correspondent Justin Webb “said that the BBC is so biased against America that deputy director general Mark Byford had secretly agreed to help him to ‘correct’ it in his reports.”
Before we get into gloating, let us acknowledge that the fact that the BBC was sufficiently aware of the problem to hold the “impartiality summit”, an account of which has been leaked to the Evening Standard, is a good thing. It is encouraging that Mr Marr does now see what he could not in 2001. Mr Webb did better not worse than some others when he became aware of the problem and took steps to correct it.
Then we can – er, never mind.
Expect more on this story.
NB: Post expanded a little from the original version.
Pounce.
Those were good stories from Al Jazeera. Seeing as they seem to be far more impartial than Al Beeb, maybe we should offer the charter and the licence fee to them instead.
Congrats to all the blogs concerned on this result but the battle is far from over. Keep up the good work.
BTW, JR, Anon and DifferentAnon. Will you still be sparring with us? I do hope so otherwise life might become a bit dull!
Allan@Aberdeen | 22.10.06 – 9:38 pm
I generally agree with this but when I used to listen to TMM michael burke would ride heavily on the token right-winger (Janet Daley or David Starkey) and let the weak-minded lefties have free rein.
The advantage of H&C is that there is no chairman to steer the program to the left and none needed.
TMM would need a neutral chairman or a system of timer interrupts to apportion time AND an equal number of panellists from left and right AND an equal number of “witnesses” from left and right.
G-B, exactly so, but I did say ‘balanced biases’ and on H&C the biases are definitely balanced. Particularly as there are only two questioners, and generally fair to each other, there is no need for a chairman.
But who would you select to couner-balance Naughtie on Radio 4 in the morning?
The problem is not confined to politics. As we all know climate change is the big BBC thing…hordes of respected scientists counter the BBC’s push and according to Blair we have 15 years to save the planet. Bloody ‘ell Tony you had 24 hours to save the NHS and you’re still struggling nearly ten years later!
Menawhile via the englishman and The Times yet another story where the BBC screams loudly then shuts up when other facts come to light:
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/archives/003292.html
The Aral Sea that favoured ‘woe is us’ climate change example is in fact recovering thanks to human intervention to repair the ravages of a socialist state.
Again:
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/member/
Tim Blair points out yet more highly respected organisations and scientists who are refuting the Lancet study but we see nothing of this on the BBC. Surely we should be getting both sides of the story Beeboids?
“Researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London and Oxford University have found serious flaws in the survey of Iraqi deaths published last week in the Lancet.
Professor Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway’s Economics Department, and physicists Professor Neil Johnson and Sean Gourley of Oxford University contend that the study’s methodology is fundamentally flawed and will result in an over-estimation of the death toll in Iraq.
Among other Lancet critics: Paul Bolton, a professor of international health at Boston University; Stephen Apfelroth, professor of pathology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City; and mortality studies expert Richard Garfield. Labor’s Kevin Rudd puts the death toll at 50,000, some 605,000 below the Lancet study’s estimate. ”
Time and again we see this bias by omission or failure to correct the initial story. Well done to all especially Nat and Andrew and Laban ably backed up by my favourite sapper pounce and the others.
Versus Naughtie? Maggie Thatcher!
Allan@Aberdeen | 22.10.06 – 10:33 pm But who would you select to couner-balance Naughtie on Radio 4 in the morning?
Freddie Forsyth or Lord Forsyth but not bruce forsyth.
John Redwood.
Somebody with a loaded gun to point at nogtee’s head? (nogtee would be allowed to sit on a commode.)
does reith work for the bbc? if so, he really ought to be ashamed of himself, IMHO. i hate to get personal, but is he trying to refute the charge that the bbc isn’t or can’t be biased because it isn’t monolithic?
if so, then reith, you must agree that the KKK aren’t racist or biased in matters of race because they aren’t monolithic, either. picture it: some of them want to put blacks back into slavery, others want all blacks deported, still others want a u.s. style of apartheid…
for me, the bbc ranges from pink, to pinker, to reddish pink…
but still, all pink, all the time
if you do work for the bbc, reith, tell us all, please, all those in-house bbc debates, were they over degrees of pinkness, or were more fundamental disagreements generally in play?
amimissingsomething | 22.10.06 – 11:10 pm | #
he should be ashamed because he must have known better all along
Look at this cringingly anti-semetic piece dressed up as humour in the Guardian. You wouldnt catch left wing rags doing a similar piece on whether “its good for the Paks”
Its only a matter of time till we see its variant on the BBC. Trust me.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1928999,00.html
I am gobsmacked, bowled over and knocked down with a feather, both by the admission of bias from the BBC and John Reith’s sudden metamorphosis into a supporter of the aims of this blog. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone change course in midstream as quickly and thoroughly as Reith just did. It’s truly Orwellian.
Over the years we’ve had nothing but a tiny flicker of honesty here and there in the BBC darkness and now suddenly we are being asked to believe that major struggles of conscience and journalistic ethics have been taking place all along in its murky depths.
Well there sure as hell was precious little evidence of any of the upheaval that Reith would have us believe was happening all along.
The Impartial BBC and half a story;
Hungary remembers 1956 uprising
Hungary has begun ceremonies to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the uprising against Soviet rule.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6074138.stm
Funny how the BBC doesn’t give any exact figures on how many died?
(Can’t go round slating Stalin can we?)
Even funnier the 3 links to the top right;
CBS news
Charleston gazette
News 4
Do give figures on how many people died.
The BBC and half a story.
The BBC is a legacy from the feudal period. They are a substantial part of the rump of the population who believe that the lower orders need to be controlled for their own good.
I’d like to see the BBC go down.
But here’s my dilemna… I could gladly live without TV, but the rest of my household couldn’t.
I’ve already dropped the idea of buying any BBC DVDs. But what else is there I can do?
Now that the BBC has admitted bias, will it be revising every TV and radio broadcasts and web article whereby it spread its bias across the planet? That would take an army of journalists a lifetime to accomplish, even if the will were there – which I seriously doubt. So I imagine that the best we can hope for is the occasional BBC teaspoon dipped timidly into the ocean of its bias and held up reluctantly to the light.
But there’s another obvious, but none the less important question here. Where does the admission of bias leave BBC apologists such as the contributors to the The Editors blog?
For months now we’ve told, in an apparently open, frank and even humble manner, that impartiality is a holy concept to the BBC and that the BBC “tries to get it right.”
So where does The Editors go to from here? The contortions they will probably go through to try to make sense of the admission of bias will make for interesting reading should they take that route.
Of course, they could simply ignore the issue or try to shield it from the spotlight. That’s what BBC editors do.
But what else is there I can do?
Complain. Kick their collective butt. Hard.
Hey chaps, to the extent that you’ve been involved in putting this in the public domain many congratulations.
Even some of us who aren’t of a particularly conservative bent politically can appreciate that the bullsh*t PC dogma and endless reliance on cliched liberal attitudes rather than intelligent analysis is wrecking their coverage. Hopefully they can now ditch the morons and bring a bit of thought into their output.
The BBC is still at it.
They quote one thing from a newly discovered radical Islamic group while the groups own website says the complete opposite!
http://littlebulldogs.blogspot.com/2006/10/absolute-shocker-from-bbc.html
This is absolutely shocking.
Hold on! Before you all get too excited, let’s just get things in proportion.
No-one has ‘admitted’ that the BBC’s news output is consistently biased. It isn’t.
In her re-worded post Natalie invites us to ‘compare and contrast’ Andrew Marr’s statements about bias. Here goes:
In his May 11th 2001 statement Andrew says no-one has ever shown him a case of party political bias in favour of the Labour Party.
In comments attributed to him more recently he says ‘not so much a party political bias……..as a cultural liberal bias.’
The statements are, therefore, broadly consistent in ruling out ‘party political bias’.
So, what should we make about Marr’s supposed ‘admission’.
First, he is not speaking about the BBC’s journalistic output. He is speaking, rather, about what the BBC IS (as opposed to what it DOES): that the BBC’s staff is more urban (and metropolitan) /gay/ethnically diverse than the general population. He might have added ‘more middle-class’ or ‘better educated’ and ‘more affluent’ too. This, he argues, means that a ‘culturally liberal’ outlook is likely to be more prevalent within the BBC than in the general population.
Well, that ain’t news to anyone. In any case that ‘culturally liberal’ outlook is probably shared by somewhere between a third and a half of the general population anyway.
And it is by no means universal in the BBC (as these reports of the impartiality summit prove – and as I have been arguing here for months).
Does the fact that there may be some sort of institutional weighting matter?
Well, the whole point of the charter requirement for impartiality, the framework of openly published editorial guidelines and the checks and balances of the editorial oversight system is to make sure that any inherent institutional biases DO NOT express themselves in the form of biased journalism. Is the system infallible? No. Does it work fairly well most of the time? Yes.
An illustration: Andrew Marr is a Scot. He has a great affection for things Caledonian. In that sense he has a personal ‘bias’. But is his journalism Sassenach-bashing or anti-English? Not that I’ve noticed.
John Reith has never claimed the BBC was unbiased. John Reith has never disagreed with people who said it was. Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
John Reith wrote;
“An illustration: Andrew Marr is a Scot. ”
Actually Mr Reith using the rules as applied by the BBC he is British. or are the so called poor people in Guantanamo no longer british? The knife cuts both ways.
It is not claimed that there is a bias within the BBC in favour of Labour. What is claimed is that there is a bias in favour of that party which shares the BBC’s view on any given issue, and it usually turns out to be Labour, although the LibDhims get pretty favourable coverage nowadays.
Take any issue of importance – EU, Iraq, US, islam, multi-culti stuff etc. Whichever party holds the leftist view gets the favourable coverage and soft-tone interviews from the BBC. It’s that simple.
I, for one, have never really been bothered so much about the BBC being party politically biased. It is – and Marr is clearly far too close to Labour to see it – but that is almost beside the point. People can usually spot naked political bias for themselves and apply the necessary correction.
Far more consistent damage is done by the underlying liberal-left attitudes that pervade the Corporation. And at least a part of the reason for that is, interestingly, down to the single shared characteristic that John Reith forgot to include in his list (paging Dr Freud). The Corporation’s staff is disproportionately young.
As for Reith’s claim that a ‘culturally liberal’ outlook is shared by between one third and a half of the population, I would make two observations.
The first is that the very term ‘culturally liberal’ is misleading. What we are talking about is bias in favour of the whole package – not just cultural mores. We are talking about innate anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Thatcherite, pro-welfare state, pro-‘big government’, pro-‘Green’, pro-EU, pro-immigration, pro-United Nations. The BBC is all that too.
And, anyway, what on earth excuse can Reith offer for his employer, working from Reith’s own guesstimate, alternately insulting and ignoring somewhere between a half and two thirds of its owners?
“alternately insulting and ignoring somewhere between a half and two thirds..”
I suppose there wasn’t much chance of you getting the ontological/operational distinction in one go.
Try again.
Doctors ARE richer than the general population.
Doctors play golf more than the general population.
Doctor are more likely to be of Indian
descent than the general population.
You cannot reasonably extrapolate from the above that the medical profession
will give less good treatment to poor, non-golfing Jamaicans (tempting though it may be for docs to behave this way).
Particularly not if they all sign up to an oath to treat patients on the basis of medical need alone and if their work is peer-reviewed against published guidelines.
In any case that ‘culturally liberal’ outlook is probably shared by somewhere between a third and a half of the general population anyway.
There’s a difference between between conservative and tolerant on the one hand, and socially liberal on the other. Only someone mired in the culture of a left-liberal, institutionally homosexual organisation (hey, they said it) could fail to see the difference. I can assure you, John Reith, that outside the confines of your metropolitan, noncy poncy, left-liberal enclave we are still a conservative nation, we are still eating British beef, we are still hunting foxes and shooting little fluffy things and we still don’t give a damn what a small number of liberals think in Islington and Hampstead.
I like the way John Reith’s argument is now shading from ‘We’re not a bunch of lefties’ into ‘We are a bunch of lefties, but we’re a scrupulously fair minded bunch of lefties’.
Give the licence fee to Fox News. They cannot do worse.
Let us show some pity for jr, for he is surely suffering from post traumatic stress disorder after having been traduced by the very people whom he has striven so assiduously to defend.
For him it must be like starting an innings only to find that his bat had been broken back in the pavilion by the team captain.
(To coin a phrase serially relished by the beeb.)
‘outside the confines of your metropolitan, noncy poncy, left-liberal enclave we are still a conservative nation, we are still eating British beef blah blah blah’
To be fair I often find that it’s quite shocking how the poorly dressed uncivilised inbreds of the gruesome semi-rural backwoods of England and beyond continue to believe that they constitute a vast ‘middle Britain’ unheard voice – little realising that the urbanite majority has long since started caring more about Schezuan cuisine and the Fratellis than French lorry drivers and the trouble with darkies (and veil-ies). There’s a reason for David Cameron and it’s not a vast anti-Thatcherite voting fraud.
Having said that it’s clearly morally unarguable that a publically funded broadcaster has a duty to offer programming for the entire public so as far as I’m concerned an admission that they’re politically biased and have been for years is pretty close to a terminal blow.
“You cannot reasonably extrapolate from the above that the medical profession
will give less good treatment to poor, non-golfing Jamaicans (tempting though it may be for docs to behave this way).
Particularly not if they all sign up to an oath to treat patients on the basis of medical need alone and if their work is peer-reviewed against published guidelines.”
That’s the difference though. Medicine is based in science. Politics isn’t. So, if you are to have a state broadcaster, then you should represent the views of the nation without bias.
Personally, I think it’s impossible. People are biased without knowing it. Better for government to keep out of the broadcasting game.
Dear me, you pop out for lunch and miss seeing John Reith so busy trying to sneer and condescend at the same time, that he trips over his own feet.
There is no analogy to be made between medicine and what it pleases the BBC to call journalism.
If there were I’d have Naughtie, Simpson et al up before the GMC in the twinkling of an eye.
JR seems to think that Marr’s two comments are mutually exclusive, that party political bias is an entirely separate beast from pervasive liberal bias.
It isn’t. I think a cardinal issue is how in succumbing to pervasive liberal bias they automatically exclude, or screen out, the conservative interpretation of society, which has natural and intended consequences for conservative politics, which includes the Conservative party.
JR:
you’re surely familiar with the warning about holes and digging? Best get back to holding forth on the distinction between lone/single parents, you do it so much better!
RB
… than French lorry drivers and the trouble with darkies (and veil-ies).
Oh come now, RB, you can surely do better than that. It is rather tiresome, these accusations of racism which pour forth from the minds of liberals without any actual basis for doing so. It’s tiresome partly because it’s now so booooring. It’s all a bit 20th Century, RB. It’s tiresome because it’s all so unimaginative. It’s tiresome because of the snidiness of the comments and it’s tiresome because, as we know, racism is just hunky dory to liberals as long as they are the ones perptrating it. Behold, Trevor Phillips, Enforcer-in-Chief of the Liberal Police, quite casually damning thousands of white people:
Race boss claims EU migrants are bigots
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23371783-details/Thousands%20of%20migrants%20are%20racist,%20warns%20race%20chief/article.do
Now, accuse me of being a racist if you like (I couldn’t care either way, I’ve been hearing it for years from liberals) but do try and back up your accusations with some evidence.
Oi – what are you doing reading the bible of metrosexual fashionista liberati elites that is the Evening Standard? Had the village store run out of the “Rural Essex Chronicle” or is it just that nothing’s happened there this week?
jr
If I’d realised that by asking if you were aware of the bias report and its content I would be causing you any problems, credibility or otherwise, I wouldn’t have posed the question. My apologies.
RB ” it’s clearly morally unarguable that a publically funded broadcaster has a duty to offer programming for the entire public”
I think complaints should be made about the amount of time the BBC are lavishing on the Jews tonight.
We have a clash at 9pm with “Spooks” on BBC1 & “Suez” on BBc2. Then at 10.20 BBC4 provides them with a programme on the difficulties of being a lesbian in the theocratic entity.
Current Bun political editor T.Kavanagh Esq’s comments in the Sun today might almost be lifted direct from these pages……going on about Frei’s sneering anti-Americanism, Orla and Fergal’s “snatch gloom from the brightest of days” style reports and that Christians and most other religious groups get a raw deal compared to Muslims. Glad to see he and The Sun are finally catching up… 😎
This post will be in two parts due to Haloscan limits. Part I
John Reith’s stupidity is truly outstanding.
“Hold on! Before you all get too excited, let’s just get things in proportion.
No-one has ‘admitted’ that the BBC’s news output is consistently biased. It isn’t.”
Reith, why in the hell do you think the BBC called “an ‘impartiality summit’ in the first place?
Then there’s this:
“It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism. ”
This site and mine have documented the the left wing output of the BBC that this dominence has produced. Here’s a long list of that evidence with much of it in the words of the BBC themselves.
http://ussneverdock.blogspot.com/2005/01/bbc-is-turn-off-its-official.html
Not consistenly biased eh, Reith? Listen to Justin Webb of the BBC.
“Washington correspondent Justin Webb said that the BBC is so biased against America that deputy director general Mark Byford had secretly agreed to help him to ‘correct’, it in his reports. Webb added that the BBC treated America with scorn and derision and gave it ‘no moral weight’. ”
That’s the BBC admitting that it is “consistently” biased agains the US.
This is the same Justin Webb, the BBC’s Washington Reporter, that openly bragged in a BBC article that he deliberatly paints a false picture of America.
“America is often portrayed as an ignorant, unsophisticated sort of place, full of bible bashers and ruled to a dangerous extent by trashy television, superstition and religious bigotry, a place lacking in respect for evidence based knowledge.
I know that is how it is portrayed because I have done my bit to paint that picture, and that picture is in many respects a true one.”
“often portrayed” – did you read, and more importantly, do you understand what that means Reith?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4400865.stm
Part II
There’s more.
” BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians. ”
When you’re admitting you are “deliberately” promoting something, you’re admitting that you are being deliberatly biased in your reporting.
Since the BBC admits it is dominated by left wing pro Islamists, is anti American and “it is so deeply embedded in the BBC’s culture…” it is admitting that its output reflects that. Adrew Marr admits to just that when he says “Britain is not a mirror image of the BBC or the people who work for it.’
That’s an astounding admission from the BBC, that they do not reflect the values of the people who pay for their existence.
What’s more astounding is Reith’s ignorance. Listen to this clap trap.
“In comments attributed to him more recently he says ‘not so much a party political bias……..as a cultural liberal bias.’
The statements are, therefore, broadly consistent in ruling out ‘party political bias’.”
Bullshit. The culture that he’s taking about is Islam. The party political bias is proven by the BBC’s relentless support of George Galloway, the MCB and the MAB.
Then Reith gets totally wacked out with this insane comment.
“First, he is not speaking about the BBC’s journalistic output. He is speaking, rather, about what the BBC IS (as opposed to what it DOES): “
In Reith’s world you can be a duck and bark.
So Reith, let’s remind ourselves of what the BBC admits it “IS”.
“At the secret meeting in London last month, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley, BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians. ”
Reith would have us believe that, despite all that and despite the overwhelming documentation here and on my site, some how this duck can bark.
We are truly grateful that you posted this comment Reith. This added to the BBC’s own admission, perfectly illustrates the morons who work at the BBC.
Readers of this site and mine will note the very conspicuous absence of Paul Reynolds. My visitor logs indicate several visits from the BBC, some coming there from this site, which would inidcate many in the BBC are on the defensive. Reith proves that.
Nice one marc.
Yeah, and what about this one, JR, from the Times 18 months ago?
“THIS WEEK Gavyn Davies, the former Chairman of the BBC, told a Lords committee on charter renewal that “the culture of the BBC cannot be centre left”. The perception that it is worried him.
To someone like Mr Davies … it is painfully obvious that the corporation is saturated with left-wing values … Views prevalent in liberal universities percolate through every aspect of policy. Political correctness and cultural relativism are holy writ. Democracy is usually good, but not in America where it produces the wrong result.
This progressive orthodoxy did not incense me when I joined the Today programme. I had started my career as an adviser to Labour’s Shadow Cabinet. I believed Conservatives were morally deficient and was delighted that most of my colleagues agreed. Those who thought otherwise were considered oddballs to be pitied. But as I climbed the BBC ladder the atmosphere began to grate. Producers argued when asked to consider private schools in a report on educational standards and complained when instructed to interview a French opponent of the Euro.
BBC journalists are aware of their duty to be impartial but they understand it intellectually not instinctively. While the BBC would never endorse one political party, its dominant attitudes are rigidly social democratic. Those values are so dominant that they are treated as virtues not opinions. It is why a BBC correspondent cried when Yassir Arafat died and a Today presenter referred to the Labour Party as “we”.
These political prejudices are innate because too few BBC employees have ever experienced life in the free market and those who have are often refugees from it. The corporation grows its own managers in preference to recruiting from outside and advertises for staff in left-wing newspapers.
The left-wing consensus can only change if the BBC reforms its selection procedures and eradicates a hierarchy that is modelled on the Civil Service. Changes proposed by the present Director-General do not address these issues. They must, because the BBC does not accurately reflect the diversity of opinion in Britain. Mr Davies is right to worry.
Tim Luckhurst is the author of This is Today, a Biography of the Today Programme”
(The Times, 8 April 2005)
marc
Part I
“Reith, why in the hell do you think the BBC called “an ‘impartiality summit’ in the first place?”
A couple of days earlier the BBC tested its fire alarms. It didn’t mean the building was burning down.
Impartiality is one of the BBC charter obligations. So discussing it is a perfectly sensible management activity.
You quote the Daily Mail’s spin on the story as if it were fact, highlighting tabloid hyperbole such as ‘dominated by trendy, left-leaning liberals…..’
Even eight-year-old Mail readers know those are the bits you’re not supposed to take literally.
Webb was right to object to some of the US coverage recently. I agree with him. (If I had a £ for ever time someone here has complained ‘Reith never defends the BBC’s Katrina coverage’ ……….). However, when I say some, I mean some. Again the words you choose to highlight (‘so biased’……….’scorn and derision’ ) are the Mail’s loaded paraphrase, not Webb’s direct speech.
You draw the conclusion:
“That’s the BBC admitting that it is “consistently” biased against the US.”
No it isn’t. It’s the Daily Mail reporting that Justin Webb thinks it is sometimes. Quite a difference.
Then you print the quotation from Neverdock’s masthead. This time – accidentally I imagine – you give the last bit, which I’ve never seen before. It reads: ‘….and that picture is in many respects a true one.’
The moment you see the full article you realize that the Neverdock masthead is itself a lie, or at least a calculated deception. Webb’s words, torn from their context and paraded as some sort of admission or mea culpa. Which they never were. USS Nevertrust Again.
RB
Oi – what are you doing reading the bible of metrosexual fashionista liberati elites that is the Evening Standard?
Keeping an eye on you wierdo metrosexualista liberalista nonce bags, that’s what I’m doing. As well as spotting the link at samizdata. I do note, in passing, no condemnation of Trevor Phillips from certain metrosexual quarters.
You hinted at a racist attitude on my part based on no evidence whatsoever. In fact, one could say that your attitude is based on a narrow-minded, Londoncentric, liberal form of bigotry 😉
Yet here you are, presented with real, actual evidence of racism:
Thousands of white immigrants from eastern Europe are deeply racist, the head of the race relations watchdog has warned. Speaking about the tensions in British communities, Trevor Phillips said many arrivals from former Soviet countries displayed prejudice against black people.
and there’s nothing to be heard above the faint rustle of tumbleweed blowing through liberal headquarters in London. Now, I really don’t mind being accused of racism. It’s something I’ve had since growing up in the 1980s in Walthamstow and discovering the true nature of islam. It’s all off a duck’s back and all that. In fact I welcome the accusation: call it the liberal equivalent of a white flag if you like:
“I’ve lost, my argument is dust, so I call you a racist.”
I’d just like a little consistency. Here’s Trevor Phillips making a statement which a white could never make about blacks without the knitted lynch mob forming and everything’s cool, man. What happened to all that stuff about “not stigmatising whole communities”? Whither “alienating immigrants”?
One would have to look at the evidence, weigh up the statements, balance the possibilities, the probabilities, the impossibilities and conclude that yes, it was just the usual bunch of empty, liberal rhetoric. Racism is good, you just have to be racist against the right types. As Trevor Phillips might say.
TPO
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be discourteous. I was once sent on an extremely interesting course given by members of 2 of your former professions on ‘techniques of interrogation’. Fascinating.
I suspect you were very good at your job.
May we leave it there?
Hey, everyone, the word is starting to spread. Copy:
-source:bbc_news bbc biased
and paste it into a Google search (and don’t leave out the minus sign).
Unlike the Beeb’s lies, these reports will not be undone through research, rather, research will confirm them.
What, with 18 Doughty Street Talk TV starting up, boy, how the Beeboids and their clones must wish they had their monopoly of thought back!!
marc
This site and mine have documented the the left wing output of the BBC that this dominence has produced.
Very true, and fair play to you. In truth though, the likes of John Reith won’t do what any reasonable man would do – that is, come in here, throw himself to the floor and beg forgiveness. No, he’ll carry on regardless. Even if he realises how wrong he is he’ll continue to bluff it our. No worries though, he can’t lie to himself.
FWIW, my view is that at least we know that the BBC has been forced into these (startling) admissions and that even senior staff have had to admit it. Time to lie back, cho,p on a cigar with a smug expression, and then get back into the fray because the BBC’s not for changing.
Sorry everyone, that should have read:
Copy:
-source:bbc_news bbc biased
and paste it into a Google NEWS search (and don’t leave out the minus sign).
marc
One other thing. This comment of yours:
Since the BBC admits it is dominated by left wing pro Islamists, is anti American and “it is so deeply embedded in the BBC’s culture…” it is admitting that its output reflects that. Adrew Marr admits to just that when he says “Britain is not a mirror image of the BBC or the people who work for it.’
How many times have we heard the mantra that the police or some other public and not so public organisations “must reflect the wider society”? It’s been trotted out so often it’s become like background music to life. So, will the BBC now begin a recruitment drive aimed at conservatives? Will they boll…..
jr
Thanks for your response. I’ve drawn my own conclusions.
I hope this isn’t impertinent, but you’re no spring chicken are you?
jr
Actually I was total crap at parts of my former job.
When the detector van came to my front door in 1984 I told zem nozzink…..
That course run by the Boy Scouts (Brecon Branch) must have worked!
But it worries me now that people can be charged and convicted DESPITE no proof being offered other than the statement of an official be it a Beeboid ref TV licences or a local council dustbin man who gets a bloke fined £200 with no CCTV, no pictures and no paper trail showing how a piece of paper got into the wrong recycling bag for example.
And we don’t have corrupt officials in this country no siree! /end sarcasm
Of Reith, TPO writes:
“I hope this isn’t impertinent, but you’re no spring chicken are you?”
Forgive me for intruding, but you don’t need to be very skilled at textual analysis to work out Reith’s (approximate) age and employment.
You don’t learn that slick facility with BBC-ese overnight – nor the patronising manner. You need to be pickled in the Corporation’s ethos – like an old walnut.