this afternoon about a BBC News Twenty-Bore reporter asking:
“What have you got to say about reports that people are selling bottled water AT A PROFIT from the side of the road?”
Which is of course shocking – shocking that the Beeboids should make such an assumption – how are they to know what the costs are of providing bottled-water at the side of the road? Perhaps those selling bottled water at the side of the road are merely covering their own costs without making a profit.
And even if they were, are they any worse than Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda etc. who have the cheek to charge for bottled water too? Or does the BBC expect people who manufacture and distribute bottled water (even at handy road-side locations!) to do so free of charge?
If so, as Tom points out, why are all those Beeboids being paid (and in many cases being paid handsome overtime) to cover the flood story? Is that not profit on their part? Or are they providing their services for free?
It’s time that the BBC realised just how much damage they have done to the UK over very many years, decades even, with their natural, knee-jerk presumption and presentation of words such as ‘profit’, ‘private’ and ‘privatisation’ as if they were swear words.
P.S. What’s the difference between a flooding catastrophe and a flooding nightmare? They’re the same, but in the nightmare you have crabbit-faced Caroline Hawley & co. sticking their noses into your misery, and pocketing a decent wedge of tellytax cash for doing so!
And if the good and unfortunate people of Tewkesbury and its environs haven’t suffered enough, they get the BBC weather presenters arriving on their doorsteps!!! Why??? And at what cost to us tellytax payers??
[Mind you, it’s a good time to bury (or drown?) news on the EU Constitution….]
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
If you want something done, you need to let people make a profit doing it.
Another advantage of so-called ‘price gouging’ is it discourages hoarding. People only buy what they need.
I watched the very amateurish BBC coverage of the floods.poor quality reporting all round and why do they keep referring to ‘middle England’ when they obviously do not mean the geographic location?.The flooded areas look a bit ‘hideously white ‘to me.Perhaps this is what the BBC does not like.No doubt the London based production teams and reporters find the troubles in the English shires not quite what they are used to.The ITV coverage is much much better.
It’s poorly phrased (but then standing around in floodwater for ten hours can take the edge off your live game) but I would presume the reported meant “profiteering” which is different of course.
We’re heard reports in the newsroom of bottles of water being flogged for a pound and a loaf of bread for £4.
Tesco on the other hand have distributed 10,000 bottles of water for free.
BBC reporters don’t get overtime. You stay till the job is done.
Dave: I haven’t heard anyone say “Middle England”. I haven’t used the phrase myself.
The BBC pay Jonathan Ross £6 million a year. After Ross has paid his bills and fed his kids and himself, the rest is pure profit.
I find the flood coverage totally uninformative.
1. we’re told that there are 4 sever flood warnings on the Severn and the Thames. But we’re not told which towns/villages are expected to face flooding. how many people are working to defend the towns, are volunteers needed? Where can one go help fill sandbags etc etc
2. No comparison with earlier floods, peaks, condition of dams and other defences, just generalisations like “worst flood for a generation (how long is a generation anyway?)
3. loads of personal views from reporters like ‘I’ve never seen such bad flooding’, I covered disasters abroad and wouldn’t have ever thought I’d do that from Britain one day (this one was especially silly I think)
The sense I get from the coverage is that all the journalists are somehow stand in awe and are unable to move beyond their emotions. It’s all very strange for me.
(quite a few typos above, apologies)
Reminds me of the Dasani debacle. Remember that? The Coca-Cola company decided to get itself some of the bottled water action, and, following its tried and tested formula of flavouring and carbonating, came up with a recipe of various minerals to add to purified water in order to avoid the cost of shipping the main ingredient around the world. Pretty smart, really.
The BBC (and various newspapers with a similar disregard for journalistic integrity, such as the Daily Mail) took against this brilliant idea, and put it about that Coca-Cola was simply selling bottled tap water at an “obscene” mark-up. Dasani was withdrawn from the UK within weeks.
Tesco on the other hand have distributed 10,000 bottles of water for free.
What, a vast multinational profit-crazed behemoth giving stuff away for free? But surely that can’t be?
The thing that finished off Dasani in the UK was the that it turned out in the UK it was contaminated with some kind of cleaning compound – I suspect that it was pulled permanently because of the preceding bad PR though.
While it was true that it was, in effect, expensive tap water, there’s nothing wrong with that – it was in a convenient sealed, portable, packaged form, was cheaper than other soft-drinks, and, apart from the rogue cleaning compound, was free from a lot of the ‘E’ numbers and gunk found in them.
>I would presume the reported meant “profiteering” which is different of course.
>We’re heard reports in the newsroom of bottles of water being flogged for a pound and a loaf of bread for £4.
David Gregory’s defense is indicative of the economic ignorance that pervades the BBC. (In general, whenever you hear the term “profiteering”, you know you’re in for a lecture from a know-nothing). I suggest he read Thomas Sowell’s intro textbook on economics where this topic is dealt with very early on.
1. It is the very prospect of higher-than-average returns that provides the incentive for an entepreneur to move very fast to the front-line of an emergency scene with much-needed resources.
Of course, it’s always nice if people can pitch in and do such things for free, but most people don’t have the time or the money to do so (the emergency services, for example, are all being paid, and fair enough too). And getting there often requires ingenuity and sometimes danger.
If you only relied on charity in such cases, you’d be in trouble. Take away the profit motive, and you take away the incentive to provide valued resources (which is why, as if it needs saying, leftist economies are so bad at providing for their people).
2. High prices are a way of allocating scarce resources, and making sure they get to the people who value them most. That’s why it makes sense for a shop to raise its prices in an emergency.
Sowell’s example is torches in an emergency where they are needed. If the shop doesn’t raise the price of its torches, then the first people who come in will buy far more torches than they need, on the basis that these torches are currently very valuable, but can be had cheap, so let’s get plenty. Pretty soon there will be no torches left for other people.
But if the price is raised dramatically, then customers will be more prudent in how many they buy, leaving more for other people who also badly need them.
This is not just a neat coincidence, it’s a basic economic mechanism — price just reflects the current value of a resource (in a free market, that is), the value being how much that resource is desired, and in doing so it provides an efficient and very quick way of allocating that valued, scarce resource amongst the people who really need it.
3. No-one is forced to buy this water or bread at these prices, so anyone who does so thinks that the trade is worth it. Just because a a person would not have paid £4 for a loaf of bread a week before doesn’t mean they don’t think it worth it in this situation. They buy it if they think it worth it, otherwise they say “No thanks, I’ll pass for now”. They buy it if they think it worth an extra £3 to save them the trouble of somehow getting to a shop through the floods, when they’re cold and hungry and would rather go home as soon as possible.
(And £1 for a bottle of water seems pretty low to me anyway, that’s not much more than they normally cost).
4. The people selling this stuff are not going to be fat cats driving around in Rollers, but people who need the money enough that they bothered to do this. If you’re a New Class smeg, your life is comfortable enough that
you don’t need to be going to a flood scene, standing by the side of the road in the cold and wet selling bottles. But the person who does so is doing more for the people there than those who are not selling them bottles of water. This is proved by the very fact that they are voluntarily being given money in exchange for the service they are providing.
5. The people buying these bottles are not starving refugees with no money, but normal people with resources (ie. money) of their own. And if you, flood-hit victim, didn’t baulk at spending £25 on a fancy bottle of Scotch last week that you didn’t really need, why should you baulk at paying £4 for a loaf of bread that you really want?
It’s not that BBC types are against this sort of bog-standard economic analysis as blissfully unaware of its very existence. They think that the very invocation of the term “profiteering” means that they have won the argument, and there is not even a hint of a suggestion that there is not only an alternative view, but that this alternative view is the standard view in the field (“scientific consensus” anyone?), and that it is the BBC’s view that is the dubious one. This is the method by which the BBC has dumbed-down the nation’s economic understanding.
Excellent, Blithering Bunny.
David Gregory could do us all a favour and explain what he means by profiteering and why it’s a bad thing (and how it is to be distinguished from overtime for firemen etc.) There’s clearly some concept of “profits, well OK” and “big profits, not OK” going on, but it would be really useful to home in on the border between the two as it would reveal hitherto secret clues to the Beeboid minset.
Blithering Bunny:
David Gregory’s defense is indicative of the economic ignorance that pervades the BBC.
Perhaps he goes supermarket shopping with the BBCs economic editor?
Last week the BBC’s economics editor, Evan Davis, on the Today programme was asked the question ‘What was the average weekly amount spent at supermarkets by families in the UK’ He replied, off the cuff, “Oh, let me see, oh, I’d say 80-95 quid”, The other BBC journalist surprised him somewhat and corrected him “No Evan, it’s £45.” The co-host of Today, Edward Stourton who gives the BBC’s flagship news programme such wonderful aristocratic pedigree, related as he is, to the ancient barony of Mowbray, started to laugh and wryly commented “its not often we hear the BBC economics editor £50 out” ha, ha, ha, ha.
As soon as we are not forced to pay these BBC cretins such diabolical wages (think Jonathon Ross lite), the quicker they will probably lighten up.
£50 out, says it all really, about a BBC Economics Editor!
Blithering Bunny, Lee Moore:
Let me see. Did the reporter turn to camera and say “profiteering is a bad thing”? No. They asked what someone caught up in the floods thought of those who are flogging products at higher than normal prices.
Today we heard of the first £5 bottle of water.
There is nothing to stop the people we ask about all this explaining this is just economics and certainly not a “bad thing”.
But funnily enough those who are actually caught up in this disaster say they would rather throw such people “in the river.”
Afternoon David Gregory (BBC)
I didn’t see the report. But it was YOU who distinguished between profits and profiteering. I was interested in what YOU thought profiteering was. It is obvious from your remarks that YOU think profiteering is bad thing. What is it and why is it a bad thing ?
That a journalist would even bother asking anyone what they thought of this practise is an indication that they think it’s an issue (when it isn’t, because no-one is being forced to buy), and what’s more, an issue that they could make hay out of in the current situation.
And it’s not surprising that the BBC could get people to spout off about it, as over the years the BBC and many other media types have constantly created the impression that “profiteering” (and even profits) are immoral (a view clearly you also hold). So if you stick a microphone in people’s faces and ask them about “high prices” then even at the best of times you’ll get plenty of people ready to complain about “high prices”. Those who don’t think it’s an issue don’t bother to respond, and don’t end up on TV.
Lee Moore | 24.07.07 – 3:18 pm
It is obvious from your remarks that YOU think profiteering is bad thing. What is it and why is it a bad thing?
For what it’s worth, the American Heritage Dictionary defines profiteering as:
To make excessive profits on goods in short supply.
The same dictionary defines excessive as:
Exceeding a normal, usual, reasonable, or proper limit.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/excessive
But what does ‘proper’ mean? Is it a moral or a social term? Or a bit of each?
Should the Good Samaritan have submitted an invoice covering his out-of-pocket expenses and a fee?
What is the correct form for an Englishman during a flood in Gloucestershire?
To seek to make a fortune?
Or to make sacrifices for the sake of distressed fellow countrymen?
And should we take our moral lead from Blithering Bunny or two thousand years of Christian tradition?
So many questions.
Seems like the bloke on News 24 was on to something.
I see you’ve been busy selecting definitions from the BBC Library’s dictionary shelf!
This is all somewhat beside the point – the post is not about profiteering – it is about the BBC’s knee-jerk presumption that profit is bad and its promulgation of that idea in programme after programme, bulletin after bulletion, stretching back at least as far as the 1980s.
As for your question: “And should we take our moral lead from Blithering Bunny or two thousand years of Christian tradition?”, you are such a comedian – as if the BBC these days takes a moral lead from two-thousand years of Christian tradition! What a wag – you’re wasted in the newsroom. With a bit of effort you might be able to get some Jonathan Woss style wonga from your paymasters 🙂
>And should we take our moral lead from Blithering Bunny or two thousand years of Christian tradition?
That should be Blithering Bunny AND a great deal of standard economics.
And a BBCoid must have become pretty desperate to be invoking the Bible in their defence, which only has a tenuous connection to this topic anyway — yes of course charity is good, but most people involved with helping out in emergencies are paid, and usually paid better than the sort of poor saps who try to flog water by the side of the road for £5 a bottle. It’s just the costs in that sort of case are in-your-face, whereas the salary of the ambulanceman has already been taken care of at a few steps remove.
JR “And should we take our moral lead from Blithering Bunny or two thousand years of Christian tradition?”
Blithering Bunny.
The BBC position on profit-making was set out in an item on Monday’s Today programme about how the USA nearly became a right-wing dictatorship in the 1930s (it’s always a right-wing dictatorship, never a left-wing dictatorship).
The last line was, and I paraphrase, “after the coup failed, the plotters got back to doing what they do best: making money”. The clear implication was “look what sort of people money-makers are”.
I notice that the BBC now has a story warning against the dangers of panic buying in the floods. The specific complaint is that some people are buying too much, leaving not enough supplies for others. One quote they’ve highlighted is this:
Some people are just going potty and panic buying and people who are being sensible are being left without supplies.
This is exactly the sort of situation I was talking about earlier in this thread. As I said there, an increase in prices is the most efficient way of rationing a scarce resource.
And a shopkeeper doing it on the basis of his own wish to make some extra money provides a much quicker mechanism than any control-and-command-style system of setting prices, which as we know from experience is vastly slower in responding in such cases.
Andrew 24.07.07 – 5:09 pm
the BBC’s knee-jerk presumption that profit is bad
What assumption?
Where is your evidence?
It seems to be …..er….that one contributor thinks he heard a reporter ask a question on News 24.
The fact that he (allegedly) asked the question is held up by BB as evidence that he thought it was an ishoooo…..
I’d say Mr Gregory’s report that some people want to throw these guys in the river is proof that there is an ishooooooo.
But to extrapolate from one question by one reporter on one network to a corporate assumption is a …….stretch
>Where is your evidence?
Er… the evidence is the fact that the BBC very often gets these sorts of views put across its network in a variety of ways.
>But to extrapolate from one question by one reporter on one network to a corporate assumption is a …….stretch
No, no-one’s extrapolating from one question, rather the question is just another piece of evidence in the larger body of evidence, and a example of the typical way the BBC operates.
>I’d say Mr Gregory’s report that some people want to throw these guys in the river is proof that there is an ishooooooo.
What some members of the public say is only an issue when it suits the BBC. You don’t see the BBC using this sort of logic when it comes to law and order, immigration, the EU, etc.
“In its coverage of the private-equity debate, Newsnight, BBC2’s main current-affairs programme, depicted those in the industry as stand-and-deliver Dick Turpins. When I asked the editor of another leading BBC news show about impartiality and the internal reaction to Newsnight’s approach, he said: “Nobody even mentioned it.”
We are, as a business-based economy, regressing, sliding backwards, dangerously close to the point where financial success is no longer admired; instead it has to be justified. Too many businesses that are doing well are pilloried rather than applauded.
The vocabulary of analysis is changing, too. New codes have crept in. Markets are “casinos”, profits are “rip-offs” and dealers are “spivs”.
When I was business editor at the BBC, I became bored by having to bridge the yawning gap between public concern that our pension funds should be well funded and general disgust that banks, supermarkets and pharmaceutical companies were making so much money. One, of course, is paid for by the other.”
Jeff Randall, formerly the business editor of BBC News.
We’re in danger of turning ‘success’ into a dirty word
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/03/07/ccjeff07.xml
Of interest:
BBC News 24 (I think it was that)late this afternoon had a BBC journalist (can’t remember name) confronting individuals who were taking more water than they needed or had been allocated. Apparantly people were asked to take just two of what looked like 9 bottles bound together.
The BBC journalist confronted a family who clearly could not speak English (looked Albanian?), who had stacked 5 lots in the back of a shiny silver 4 x 4. They protested their innocence with a lot of waving of arms…“No No No No”. He came away looking knowingly into the camera- clearly disgusted. It was live BBC TV that they will probably edit out later. We also saw further footage of Muslim women wheeling trolley’s full of water bottles.
I have no idea where he was filming from, but highly unusual to see on the news a journalist so outraged like this and challenge live like this…“Don’t you know you are only supposed to take two….”
I’m sure this same journalist was also in New Orleans?
Andrew: Fair enough. I stand corrected. I certainly recall a certain amount of sucking of teeth and looking down noses from the Beeb at the time, though.
johnj, it was Gavin Hewitt – and it wasn’t live, at least not the bit I saw – starting off in a car park with a silver car loaded up with water, then saying something like ‘a short while later we caught up with the silver car’, then the scene in the street that you describe. Strangely enough though, this clip didn’t make it on to the Six or the Ten news as far as I could see.
One thing that wasn’t made clear though, and which made me wonder about Hewitt’s approach, was whether the limit was 2 x 6-packs of water per person(/family member) or 2 x 6-packs of water per family. The former would be fairer but harder to enforce (since not all family members may be present, and would rely on honesty), but might account for mutliple packs of water.
Pity the Beeboids (and in fact most journalists) ain’t that good at asking and getting answers to basic question like that, even when they’re trying to hang a story on that issue…
Andrew: As Gavin clearly stated in his report it was 2 slabs (as the Aussies say) per family. These particular people had clearly taken more than they should have.
I don’t think they were Albanian, unless saris are more popular in Albania than I thought.
Fortunately the guy went off to flog them at £5 a throw to other people so at least Blistering Bunny will be happy. (I jest of course)
I don’t think they were Albanian, unless saris are more popular in Albania than I thought.
David
The woman was not wearing a saris, and the man was certainly not Asian!
He was white caucasian of an Eastern European appearance- and clearly didn’t speak English.
I thought the BBC paid you all to go on ethnic diversity lessons.
Gosh
(A thread based on a comment by me!)
David Gregory (BBC):
1.the comment was made by the presenter in the studio.
2. you don’t say if the hoards of BBC techies can claim overtime.
3.What about “allowances” for staying at hotels.
Hettie at 12.18 makes excellent points that are spot on – which I noticed you have not addressed.
In such situations, people need solid, detailed information not emotion from people who are being paid big money just to stand in a puddle yapping and then go home to an expenses paid hotel accomodation where they can drink £4/bottle beer out of the mini bar and book it to the licence payer!
“The BBC position on profit-making was set out in an item on Monday’s Today programme about how the USA nearly became a right-wing dictatorship in the 1930s (it’s always a right-wing dictatorship, never a left-wing dictatorship).”
Granted modern history isn’t my strong suit but as I recall Franklin Delano Rosevelt was president through out the thirties. Now I guess you could call this a form of ‘dictatorship’ but never ‘right wing’.
>I recall Franklin Delano Rosevelt was president through out the thirties. Now I guess you could call this a form of ‘dictatorship’ but never ‘right wing’.
They were presumably talking about another bunch of people who wanted to take over.
Leftists at the BBC (or the subsidised theatre) like to claim that a “right-wing dictatorship” may be imminent. Bogus victimhood is part of their stock in trade.
It is only a matter of time before those at the BBC who are responsible for faking programmes, or for insulting the Queen, claim to be victims of a McCarthyite witch-hunt.
…an increase in prices is the most efficient way of rationing a scarce resource.
The trouble with this, to the socialist mindset, is that all those who are prepared to pay up for something are assumed to be “the rich”. For al-BBC, “the rich” broadly means “people on high salaries that they have not earned in the public sector, but instead have earned through private enterprise, which is evil.”
It is, of course, a highly questionable assumption that it’s “the rich” paying stupid prices for anything. Many of those who pay £5 for a bottle of water, or £1,000 to have some gold teeth put in that they don’t clinically need, are not rich, but simply stupid.
Be that as it may, the left cannot abide “the rich” benefiting from being so, so instead the left prefers to ration everything by queue. This is why we had rationing all the way into the 1950s until the Conservatives got rid of it – rather than let the price rise to whatever level the market sets, the socialists preferred to limit the price with the result that demand exceeded supply.
Broadly speaking the left’s preferred economic model is Zimbabwe.
I read in another report that some bottled water was being given out free, so many per family (I think two). Some people were filling up their cars with bottles.
Now if these bottles were then being sold, is this profiteering?
The Rich: Having sufficient finances to support yourself in an emergency. More taxes is the only way to tamp down such self reliance.
Tom Atkins: Kudos on generating such an interesting thread!
Since you asked, to answer Hettie’s points. I think this is more a reflection of the difference between television and radio. So yes, in the big scheme of things TV at its best (and worst of course) is all about instant emotions, amazing pictures and a sort of direct connectivity. That’s what we’re seeing. But if you want to know where to get sandbags on the ground then BBC Local Radio (and increasingly the where I live website) is by far your best option. In disasters like this or foot-and-mouth say, BBC Local Radio is vital. IMHO
As for luxury 4 star hotels. Well many BBC reporters on the floods story in fact ended up at the house of Radio 5 Live reporter Phill Mackie right at the centre of the floods as none of them were able to get home.
Finally as a humble BBC journo I’m not allowed to claim alcohol on expenses.