Monthly Archives: August 2007

This August I’m sorry not to be in Edinburgh. Not because I’ll miss the Fringe. If I want left-wing propaganda masquerading as comedy I can always tune into Radio 4…

Sadly there’s much more than a grain of truth in Michael’s dig – far too often Radio 4 seems to be filled with the idiotic whining of unfunny class warriors like Mark Steel, Jeremy Hardie and so on – all spreading their prejudice while sucking on the telly-taxpayer teat. It almost makes Jonathan Woss’s £18 million for three years look like good value for our money…

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Arthur Dent for the tip.

see this editorial from today’s Sun:

Anti Auntie

THE BBC’s coverage of Tory plans for £14bn cuts in red tape and bureaucracy was a mockery of impartial journalism.

Instead of examining John Redwood’s arguments, it made a joke of them by unearthing his garbled version of the Welsh anthem from a decade ago.

The caustic bulletins could have been scripted by Labour ministers.

Mr Redwood may be a colourful character. But few can match his understanding of the way Labour and the EU have tied our economy in knots with pointless regulation.

Certainly not the BBC — a bastion of smug, self-satisfied bureaucracy which rightly stands accused by its own watchdogs of being “institutionally biased”.

Following on from Sunday’s post about the BBC using that Redwood singing footage, again, since what’s good for the goose is sauce for the gander, have a listen to this – James Naughtie interviewing Neil (now Lord) Kinnock, Leader of the Opposition, would-be (and almost was) Prime Minister, back in 1989:

Click the play button to listen online:

N.B. You might need to click play twice the first time.

To save yourself a copy:

Right-click on this link, Kinnock Kebabbed MP3, and select ‘Save As…‘, save it to your computer, and then play it using your own choice of media player.

This incident was covered up by the BBC for more than a decade until it was finally admitted to in 2000 in a Radio 4 series called, appropriately, Kebabbed:

But James Naughtie pressed Kinnock on the likely effectiveness of Labour’s alternatives.

What listeners heard was an abrupt pause in the conversation, followed by an explanation from Naughtie that the interview had been suspended when Kinnock objected to the line of questioning, before being resumed.

The tape recorders, however, whirred on to capture the unexpurgated exchange, never previously broadcast.

In it, Kinnock raged at Naughtie, telling him that he would not take part in “a WEA lecture” on Labour’s economic strategy any more than he was inclined to be “bloody kebabbed” by Naughtie.

We are grateful to Mr Kinnock for giving us the title for our series, along with permission to transmit the untransmitted material. Even across the passage of more than a decade, it makes your ears go pink.

Note the sickening thanks to Kinnock for permission to broadcast the full interview – as if the BBC would have waited a decade and asked for permission if a Conservative had given them such an explosive interview – it would have been on air the same day, leading every news bulletin!

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Dave T for link to The Sun. Thank you also to Hotlink Files for their excellent online file storage service.

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.

, co-author of the wonderful Yes Minister series, has been spilling the beans recently on the bias and attitudes inherent in the culture of the BBC. His latest article was in yesterday’s Sunday Times. Here are some excerpts – the first sets the scene and lists the things that the BBC was, and still is, largely anti- to:

The growing general agreement that the culture of the BBC (and not just the BBC) is the culture of the chattering classes provokes a question that has puzzled me for 40 years. The question itself is simple – much simpler than the answer: what is behind the opinions and attitudes of this social group?

They are that minority often characterised (or caricatured) by sandals and macrobiotic diets, but in a less extreme form are found in The Guardian, Channel 4, the Church of England, academia, showbusiness and BBC news and current affairs. They constitute our metropolitan liberal media consensus, although the word “liberal” would have Adam Smith rotating in his grave. Let’s call it “media liberalism”.

It is of particular interest to me because for nine years, between 1955 and 1964, I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Harold Macmillan’s premiership and I do not think that my former colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters.

But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-[British nuclear] bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place – you name it, we were anti it.

The second excerpt explains the mindset that makes it ‘okay’ for self-regarding Beeboids to shape the news agenda and massage their news stories in the way that they do:

We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual elite, full of ideas about how the country should be run. Being naive in the way institutions actually work, we were convinced that Britain’s problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge of the country.

This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to occupy the moral high ground. We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world.

And lastly, a truism of media in general, but of telly-tax-funded media in particular:

The Tonight programme had a nightly audience of about 8m. It was much easier to keep their attention by telling them they were being deceived or exploited by big institutions than by saying what a good job the government and the banks and the oil companies were doing.

Do read the rest (see link above) – there’s lots more good stuff.

Make sure too that you get and read Antony Jay’s significant treatise Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer (PDF), published by the Centre for Policy Studies.

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Dave T for the link.

:

I don’t know how this is being covered on other networks, but the BBC are starting all their news bulletins about John Redwood’s Competitiveness Commission reports with the words…

The Labour Party has today criticised…

This has happened many times before. Instead of concentrating on the substance of a Tory policy announcement the BBC seem to revel in giving Labour Ministers the microphone to explain how whatever the policy happens to be is making the Tories more right wing than Michael Howard. It is a disgrace. This morning they wheeled out John Hutton to slag off Redwood’s report, without even carrying any information about the report itself or indeed any comment from John Redwood or any other Tory.

Meanwhile, in Tory plan for red tape ‘tax cut’, Biased BBC reader Towcestrian notes there are three ‘pull-quotes’ highlighted in the story – all of them quotes from Labour and the TUC.

• “Cameron is letting the old guard sing the old tunes again”, Cabinet Minister Andy Burnham

   

• “The Conservative Party will put itself on the side of bad employers and undercut the good who are happy to obey these legal minimum standards”, TUC

   

• “If these reports are true the Conservative Party will put themselves on the side of bad employers”, TUC Spokesman

– the last pair of which appear to be two versions of the same quote – probably some Beeboid trying to spin it different ways, forgetting to get rid of one of them.

Biased BBC reader Tubby Round has spotted the BBC trotting out John Redwood’s cringeworthy first attempt at singing Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau in Welsh from waaay back in 1993 as suitable library footage for their reports today on policy announcements – a clip that is getting a bit hackneyed even for satirical programmes like Have I Got News For You, let alone for BBC News. By the same standard, every mention of Lord Pillock, sorry, Kinnock, would be accompanied by footage of him falling in the sea at Brighton and audio of his intemperate outburst, as Leader of the Opposition, at James Naughtie that was so scandalously hushed up by the BBC at the time.

Good old unbiased impartial BBC.

in a trailer for Any Qustions (quoted in its entirety):

In Any Questions today: the stock markets have fallen. Should we rejoice if greed is bad for us?

Dimblebore’s presumption of a correlation between stock market prices, greed and whatever is ‘bad’ (or good) for us is an awfully simplistic, ignorant view – the sort of view one might expect from someone who doesn’t need to worry about his pension or income, courtesy in part because of the unique way the BBC is funded.