Monthly Archives: July 2007

in the world at the moment is ‘No sun link’ to climate change – a journalistic cut and paste job by a Richard Black of a new study by Mike Lockwood and Claus Froehlich published in the Royal Society’s journal ‘Proceedings A’.

Black’s article is even more partial and one-sided than is admitted in the Jeremy Paxman quote here in our sidebar. He writes, for instance:

“This should settle the debate,” said Mike Lockwood from the UK’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.

It would have been more honest to put Lockwood’s quote after the bit about who he is – given that he’s one of the authors of the new study he’s really rather likely to feel that “this should settle the debate” isn’t he!

Black continues with:

Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain’s Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis.

Ah yes, another one of those Channel 4 documentaries that it is beyond the capability of the tellytax-funded BBC to produce.

“All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that,” he told the BBC News website.

“You can’t just ignore bits of data that you don’t like,” he said.

Followed some way down with:

Mike Lockwood’s analysis appears to have put a large, probably fatal nail in this intriguing and elegant hypothesis.

– which looks to me like it’s Black’s own opinion on this debate. I wonder what his qualifications are.

Having let Lockwood make his accusations about the scientists behind the cosmic ray hypothesis, you might expect Black to let them respond to this slur on their work before rushing to publish his article, but wait, what do we find tucked away at the bottom:

Drs Svensmark and Friis-Christensen could not be reached for comment.

And how hard did you try Mr. Black? Couldn’t you have waited a little longer until one or other of them were available? If they are unavailable for a longer period, why don’t you tell us that? If Svensmark and Friis-Christensen do review Lockwood’s study and come up with counter arguments in response, will you write them up so eagerly and have them published so prominently on BBC Views Online? Call me cynical, but I doubt it.

P.S. It was refreshing to see Nigel Calder (former editor of New Scientist and father of travel writer Simon Calder), co-author of a book with Henrik Svensmark, The Chilling Stars, on BBC News 24 at the weekend, expressing scepticism, albeit briefly, about the Live Earth concerts that were otherwise filling the BBC News schedules. More please.

Thanks to commenter Will for the link.

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last night, The War on Britain’s Jews?, was excellent and informative. Whilst we don’t often stray off of the BBC on this blog, I couldn’t help but wonder as I watched, why doesn’t the BBC do stuff like this?

And then I read Littlejohn’s piece in last Friday’s Daily Mail, in which he wrote:

A couple of years ago when the BBC approached me to make what they called an ‘authored documentary’ on any subject about which I felt passionate, I proposed an investigation into modern anti-Semitism to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Cable Street last October.

My thesis was that while the Far Right hasn’t gone away, the motive force behind the recent increase in anti-Jewish activity comes from the Fascist Left and the Islamonazis.

It was an idea which vanished into the bowels of the commissioning process, never to return. Eventually the Beeb told me that they weren’t making any more ‘authored documentaries’.

I couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if I’d put forward a programme on ‘Islamophobia’. It would probably have become a six-part, primetime series and I’d have been up for a BAFTA by now.

But I persevered and Channel 4 picked up the project. You can see the results on Monday night.

QED. Time and again Channel 4 produces investigative programmes, from a variety of perspectives, of the sort that the BBC like to think that they do.

Sadly, the reality at the BBC is that we now have a lobotomised Panorama-lite, cut to barely thirty minutes, divested of quality journalists like John Ware, presented a la Tonight with Trevor McDonald by the somewhat lighweight Jeremy Vine.

Update: Commenter George Whyte points out that the programme has now made it on to Youtube, in six parts:

Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4,
Part 5 and
Part 6,

for the benefit of those who missed it, including you Beeboids out there.

Hat-tip to Marc of USS Neverdock for the Daily Mail link.

Here are a couple of quotes from BBC reporter June Kelly’s package on the Ten O’Clock News covering the verdicts in the 21/7 terror trial:

“A week earlier, they were part of a group of Muslim fanatics who brought chaos to the London transport system.”

and:

“It was said that these men wanted to stage a bigger and better attack than the 7th of July. They did come very close to causing carnage. A day of terror almost became another day of tragedy.”

Did you spot the ‘M’ word and the ‘T’ word? It was almost enough to make me check that I’d tuned in to the BBC. And just to make sure I hadn’t misheard, here’s a quote from BBC News 24:

“The men convicted today were also Muslim fanatics, intent on suicide.”

I wonder if this is a new departure, or if it’s just the usual BBC sleight of hand where ‘militancy’ abroad becomes terrorism when it happens in the UK.

in their coverage of the publication of Alistair Campbell’s sanitised diaries – you’d almost think they have a three-part series to promote (BBC2, Wednesday 8pm, Thursday 8pm and Friday 7pm – just to catch you out).

Michael Crick on Newsnight concluded his filmed piece on the Campbell diaries with:

Crick: “This journal doesn’t match those of Richard Crossman, Tony Benn or the right-wing Tory Alan Clark, [pause] seen in these pages as a surprisingly close Campbell chum.”

– which is a bit rich – if Alan Clark really needs a prefix of ‘right-wing Tory’, surely Tony Benn merits a prefix of ‘left wing socialist’ – though on playing it back a second time, to give Crick the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he was trying to contrast Clark’s politics with his chumminess with Campbell, but that’s not how it came across on first hearing.

While we’re on the subject of Newsnight, I thought Richard watson’s lead item and follow up discussion were interesting and informative – and deserving of greater length than the puff for The Blair Years.

in the run up to the Southall by-election on July 19th 2007.

And how does our fearless, impartial, unbiased tellytax-funded state broadcaster cover this blow to the Labour campaign?

Well, for a start you have to go looking for the story – it’s tucked away on the sidebar of the Politics page and about to fall off the bottom of the UK page – though it’s not on the England page. Stranger yet, nor is it on the BBC London News page*.

Found it yet? Well, if it was Conservatives who had defected to Labour we know that the headline would have been:

Five Tory councillors defect

– without even the courtesy of using the party’s proper name. So, naturally, the cub journos at BBC Views Online go with:

Five Southall councillors defect

Was that a spot of downplaying the negatives? Could be…

Once you’ve found the story you find that five councillors have indeed defected from Labour to the Conservatives and that, in the BBC’s own words:

Kuldeep Singh Grewal, an independent candidate for the by-election, has urged his supporters to vote Labour instead on 19 July.

Another independent candidate – Golbash Singh – is now supporting the Tories.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell is visiting Ealing Southall with his party’s candidate, Nigel Bakhai.

Mr Cameron is doing the same with the Tory contender, Tony Lit.

But wait, in a story that is supposedly primarily about five Labour councillors defecting to the Conservatives during a by-election, what’s this at the bottom:

Mr Grewal said he was throwing his “full weight” behind Labour candidate Virendra Sharma.

He said he had always been a Labour member but had decided to stand as an independent following “some internal grievances” with the party.

Was that a spot of accentuating the positives? Could be…

Good old BBC Views Online – no quotes from any of the five defectors, but they get in another bit, this time with quotes, about disgruntled Labour member Kuldeep Singh Grewal who has seen the error of his ways and is now “throwing his ‘full weight’ behind Labour candidate Virendra Sharma”… just as the cubs at BBC Views Online very helpfully make clear, twice…

* this isn’t too much of a surprise – BBC London News is produced by wannabe cub-journos who aren’t even good enough (in BBC terms that is) to get a job at White City – which is perhaps why, for example, when they report on Harrods, they often describe Harrods as being “in west London”…

Update: Blink and you’ll miss it – within a few minutes of posting the story has gone from the UK page and appeared on the BBC London News page.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

I’m sure I speak for all of BBBC when I say we’re very pleased about the release of Alan Johnston.

Let’s now hope :

a) the BBC resist the temptation to give Hamas any more free PR than the facts and the story require.

b) a couple more stories are devoted to the FIVE Brits kidnapped in Iraq a month ago.

It’s been a long-established BBC tradition that where a foreign national commits crimes in the UK, his nationality and immigration status should be downplayed or ignored entirely in their news reporting.

Hence we see the Algerian illegal immigrant transformed into a man from ‘Shepherds Bush‘, the Moroccan drug dealer (obsessed with beheadings and al-Quaeda videos) who becomes a man ‘from Lisson Grove, north-west London‘ (with no notable habits), the Somali ‘of Small Heath, Birmingham’, the Nigerian nationals and illegal immigrants who become ‘South Londoners’ (see next paragraph for the links).

There’s one notable exception to this rule – if the foreign national is American the BBC goes to town on the story. Even if he’s a naturalised British citizen he’ll always be American to BBC news.

Yet BBC coverage of the latest UK terrorist attacks is going out of its way to emphasise the ‘non-Britishness’ of the attackers.

None of the suspects involved in the Glasgow attack and the foiled London car bombings are British in origin.

“British in origin” ? It’s the “in origin” bit that gets me. Only a year or two back a politician using language like that would be getting the John Humphrys treatment on the Today programme. Are they channelling Norman Tebbit here, or Nick Griffin ?

‘Terrorist’ suspects ‘not Scots’ : Mr MacAskill said the suspects were not “born or bred” here but had lived in Scotland for a “period of time”.

The BBC has learned those arrested are believed to be of varying Middle Eastern nationalities.

According to his father Jamil, he obtained a medical degree in Jordan in 2004 and came to the UK in the same year to gain a specialisation in neurology. Dr Abdulla is said to have qualified in Baghdad in 2004 and first registered as a doctor in the UK in 2006.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing if the BBC are straight with the licence payers when it comes to reporting the nationality and immigration status of alleged or convicted criminals. It’s just such a departure from previous practice. Have some major decisions been taken in editorial conference, or are they following the SNP “they’re not Scots” lead instinctively, like pilot fish keeping up with a shark ?

UPDATE – “the men, who are not believed to be of Scottish origin“

“Iraqi Bilal Abdullah will be taken to Paddington Green police station … Dr Mohammed Asha, 26, who was brought up in Jordan“