Please use this thread for BBC-related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.
Bryan there are quite a few things in your post I agree with. And quite probably about 16000 other people too. Ok, maybe 15,999 🙂
One other thing.
“But what did the long arm (which in this case extended right to the top) choose to do? Instead of flinging the people responsible out onto the street, it suspended them on full pay.”
Well, that all depends on who is ultimately responsible doesn’t it? The 23 year old runner told to ‘win’ the competition or never eat lunch in this town again might convincingly argue that it is the people who have created the current industry structure who caused the problem.
Of course one of them is too busy saying ‘it was never like this in my day’ at ITV without the slightest sense of culpability. The other would have to sack himself.
Cue crickets chirping…
>The staff like Gene Hunt in Life on Mars and Clarkson.
Nice to hear, but does that apply to the journalists and other BBC news people? Or Jeremy Hardy, Paul Merton and the other lefty comedians?
ok sarah jane if the word is not dhimmi then it’s dhimmi wannabe.
i could go on and on but i would just refer you to what is documented on this site day after day.
the word is dhimmi. there is a fear of islamists in the bbc. it is like a pact for security and in return for not receiving a blizzard of emails/fatwas/ death threats from mentalists the bbc must keep it’s head down.maybe the bbc is just institutionally feeble.
to give you all the benefit of the doubt i think it’s likely that he bbc is full of young naive media graduates whose hatred of bush/blair is such that they fail to have the nerve to pick up the islamic extremists and ask difficult questions of the tipton 3, give hizb, mcb, the islm human rights groups etc the same treatment they give the BNP.
i got onto this website after the appalling katrina coverage, the disgusting lebanon war coverage and the general failure to stand up to islamists who would destroy everything good about this country including the good bits of the bbc such as… um… er…charlie and lola and ….i’m sorry i haven’t a clue on r4.
over to you sj – prove to me that the bbc does not pull it’s punches with islamists.
I see our posts crossed by a few minutes, Sarah-Jane. I am also enjoying this debate, and thank you for regarding me as intelligent and articulate.
I am reasonably certain you will dismiss those last two points out of hand, but I guess that is your prerogative.
Sarah-Jane | 10.08.07 – 10:54 pm
Well, we had a debate on the coverage of Israeli and Palestinian deaths on this very blog in connection with the very report you mention. Actually the report itself had as one of its conclusions the fact that to judge bias by the amount of time spent on reporting on either side without taking other factors into account was inconclusive at best.
A reason for the lack of coverage of Palestinian deaths could simply be that the Palestinians don’t have the same structures in place or the same attitude towards journalists as the Israelis do. Could also be that they simply tell the journalists to get lost. (Note how Hezbollah handled its death toll during the war. It simply maintained that there wasn’t one and that all the dead were civilians. The BBC went along with this for weeks until it suddenly woke up, made a strenuous effort to ascertain Hezbollah casualties and then lapsed, if not into dhimmitude then into a fine imitation thereof. So we could be seeing similarities here in the way the Palestinians handle the issue.)
One thing is absolutely certain. There is no lack of reporting by the BBC on Palestinian deaths because of some imagined anti-Palestinian bias. Think about the whole Alan Johnston saga and you will see how absurd that notion is.
I’m not unwilling to discuss the other side of the coin. But in the face of relentless terror, there’s very little to discuss. Show me one compromise the Palestinians have made in the last few decades while Israel gave up the Sinai, withdrew from Lebanon (which was initially invaded to stem Palestinian terror from that country) and withdrew from Gaza. Just one will do.
Now I have to get some sleep. I’m closer to dawn than you people over there.
morning all. ahhh i love a bit of fisking in the morning.
History of Northern Ireland
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_1610000/newsid_1613000/1613043.stm
“A campaign to make Ireland independent started.In 1922, most of the island became independent from Britain. ”
amazing. a full scale (and brutal – on both sides) war gets demoted to a “campaign”. I guess Michael Collins was just waving placards so ,was he?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_%28Irish_leader%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_war_of_independence
Edited By Siteowner
Pounce, I deleted that army story comment. Sorry about that, but as op-ed said, there’s just not much of a bias angle there.
I’ve started a new open thread, so please reload/refresh your browser if you can’t see it yet.
Sarah-Jane:
You possess all the trademarks of a typical BBC apologist, the worst being your suggestion that the general weight of opinion toward the BBC from this board is ‘imagined’ rather than ‘real’.
You are also taking exception to such comments not because they are ‘right’ but because they may talk you out of a job, as you rightfully declare.
But that’s a fair trade, considering the BBC seem to be talking us out of a country.
But what strikes me the most about your contributions are your persistent reinforcement of the BBC’s denial at being pro Islam. Could I ask how this in turn effects your output at Children’s BBC? The one bastion of British culture we would hope would be protected from the peurile liberal politics that controls the mindset of Al Beeb. But somehow the BBC seem to think that the things that should be most prominent in a child’s mind isn’t video games, mobile phones, music and their own street culture, but the confused agenda of lefty politics.
Just browsing through the special reports on CBBC Newsround pages, it strikes me that all these reports seem special to the BEEB, and not to children in general. Just take a look at what’s on offer; all the major topics the BBC hold near and dear, interspersed with a few childlike distractions:
Antarctica
Arson
Asylum seekers
Bullying
Back to school
Beyond Blair
China Week
Climate Chaos
Commonwealth Games
Domestic violence
Drought in Africa
Election 2005
End of the slave trade
Euro 2004
Guns
Healthy Living
Hurricane Season
Islam
London bombings
Middle East
Lord of the Rings
Obesity
Review of the Year 2003
Review of the Year 2004
Review of the Year 2005
Russian Street Children
Star Wars
South Asia Quake
Sudan – In Search of Safety
Taking care
Wimbledon 2007
World Cup 2006
An entire section of the Newsround web site is devoted to the “worlds second biggest religion” but as far as I can tell, nothing has been devoted to “the worlds BIGGEST religion.”
An entire section devoted to Asylum seekers.
An entire section devoted to Iraq.
I did wonder why the Newsround desk hadn’t got round to a special report on it’s earlier lefty leanings such as feminism and animal rights. But then I remembered this piece of cynical indoctrination on the CBBC web site in which children are encouraged to write letters to MPs on a subject – to put in the BBCs phrasing – that it doesn’t matter if they believe in or not.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english/writingnonfict/writingtoarguerev2.shtml
What were you saying about us getting you out of a job Sarah-Jane?
The sooner the better is all I can say.
BBK | 11.08.07 – 4:50 pm
The point of Newsround is to cover topics that are in the news.
No John, the point of Newsround is to employ people at the licence fee payers expense. It’s not needed or wanted. As a a child I never wanted to watch it, and as an adult I have never come across a child who is interested in it. Children hate news programmes. It has an equivalent programme on BBC Radio 4 called Go for it, which no child ever listens to. There was a childrens programme on BBC Radio 3 at about 3.30pm for years. That was another act of self-indulgence by the BBC’s salaried staff.
BBK you may have noticed in some of my other posts that actually I am pretty open-minded about the future of the license fee and letting the free market decide.
Finding work is not a problem.
(I must also try and remember wry remarks rarely work well on message boards, and this one is no exception, especially if TPO isn’t around.)
Anyway, lots to do, wont be around for a few weeks.