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.
: academic, writer and anti-semitezionist, Tom Paulin:
Paulin, who appears regularly on the panel of the BBC2 arts programme Newsnight Review (formerly Late Review), allegedly made the comment in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.
The interviewer wrote that Paulin, a consistent critic of Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians, clearly abhorred “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers. Paulin, a lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford, was then quoted as saying: “They should be shot dead.”“I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them.” Earlier in the interview, he was quoted as saying: “I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all.”
On the subject of suicide bombers, the paper quoted him as saying: “I can understand how suicide bombers feel. It is an expression of deep injustice and tragedy.”
“I think, though, that it is better to resort to conventional guerrilla warfare. I think that attacks on civilians in fact boost morale. Hitler bombed London into submission, but in fact it created a sense of national solidarity.”
And here was me thinking it’s a long time since we’ve seen that dreadful old bore on Newsnight Review, maybe they’ve done the decent thing and quietly dropped him. Alas not.
More on Paulin in Wikipedia and of course Google.
Update: Oh dear. He’s just blabbed out a crucial plot development while discussing Awake and Sing.
:
The BBC has admitted that Alan Yentob, the corporation’s creative director, has performed “noddy shots” on interviews that he did not personally conduct for his arts series Imagine.
In the first instance of a senior BBC executive being drawn into the TV trust issue, a senior corporation source admitted to MediaGuardian.co.uk that Mr Yentob often does not conduct all the interviews on Imagine – even though he appears nodding or reacting to them.
Mr Yentob, one of the BBC’s most senior figures and widely seen as the corporation’s ambassador, conducts many of the major interviews for the series…
However, it is understood that scenes featuring Mr Yentob reacting to some of the more peripheral figures and experts featured in his programmes were edited in even though he was not actually present. Editing work on the programme later gave the impression that he was present.
Oh dear. And I thought all the recent contoversy was just down to sub-contractors and ‘work experience kids’. Do read the rest.
Update: More on noddy and friends from Rod Liddle in the Spectator: The end of the ‘noddy shot’ is a ray of hope for television:
Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it’s a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal — processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you…
There has been much photogenic hand-wringing and crocodile tears, but in the end I doubt very much that there is the will to change things a great deal…
So, along with the noddy shots, let’s consign a few more of those hackneyed TV devices to the bin. The ludicrous knocking-on-the-door shot, for example — the staple of every TV documentary and something I’ve had to do in almost every film I’ve made. The audience is enjoined to believe that this is a wholly naturalistic event — the presenter, followed by a film crew, wandering up to some interviewee’s front door, knocking and being admitted. I once had to do the door-knocking thing 14 times when about to interview a very thick lady in Leicester, because no matter how much we told her not to, through gritted teeth, she kept opening the door and saying hello to me and then offered a cheery ‘And how are yow?’ to the rest of the crew. Who, of course, the audience is not meant to know exist…
But for too long the television industry has been mired in a self-disgust occasioned by its implacable belief that it must always appeal to the lowest common denominator, that its audience has the IQ of a lamprey. This is as true of even some of the most serious documentaries; it is especially true of evening news reports.
Amen about the evening news. Another article worth reading in full.
Thank you to The Fat Contractor for the Spectator link.
on BBC Views Online yesterday – a fawning and uncritical analysis of Labour’s school building program – a nice companion piece to last night’s BBC Ten O’Clock News that featured Gordon Brown visiting the very same school on the same day – what a happy coincidence.
Gordon Brown: “This school’s great!”, BBC: “It really is a school of the future!”
Biased BBC reader Ayayay commented:
The story basically says, aren’t Labour’s school building plans wonderful.
No analysis of whether it is necessary to rebuild or refurbish every single secondary school in England. No analysis of whether the PFI involved is good value [or] that the schools will still [be] being paid for long after Labour has gone. No analysis of whether the money would be better spent elsewhere (e.g. teacher training, teacher pay, better equipment, school vouchers etc.). No analysis of whether school buildings truly affect teaching quality (as opposed to good teaching).
As ever an underlying BBC assumption that public expenditure is always justified. The only note of controversy touched on in the article is whether the money is being spent fast enough.
Reader 1327 saw the story on BBC Breakfast:
It really was breathtaking… I suspect the “reporter” simply took a Government or PFI contractors PR handout and then read it out over the air. There was nothing about how it would all be paid for in the years to come or anything about the improvement (or not) in similar schools to judge if all that spending is worth it. Even worse was the way children were used in parts of the report saying just how wonderful the new school was in obviously pre-rehearsed statement.
Whilst an anonymous reader summed up the BBC’s reporting most succinctly:
Is tractor production up?
I particularly liked the second paragraph:
There is a real “wow” factor when you walk through doors of the £24m Bristol Brunel Academy, the school’s new principal Armando di Finizio says.
By paraphrasing the Head’s words and quoting just the word ‘wow’ it makes it read as if it’s the reporters opinion, with extra emphasis on ‘wow’, rather than the Head speaking. Why not just tell us what he said, and put his name up front too?
“It’s incredible really – it’s a cross between a shopping mall and Hogwarts because there are all these stairs criss-crossing.”
The whole school is a wi-fi zone. It features independent learning areas and uses biomass boilers to provide about 80% of its energy. It really is a school of the future.
“When you first walk in there is this ‘wishing wall’ which has a whole load of wishes from staff and pupils carved into stones,” Mr Di Finizio says.
Ah, I see why the Head needed help with his words. “When you first walk in there is this wishing wall”. Is the Head a victim of comprehensive education himself? I’m sure there is a wishing wall every time, whether you walk in or arrive on a Nimbus 2000 broomstick.
And is that second paragraph the reporters own words, or is it another quote, without quotation marks?
And didn’t Hannah say this was the first time the pupils saw their new school? Getting those quotes etched in stone and up on the wall must have been done a bit sharpish – especially allowing for the inevitable time to correct their spelling and grammar.
One reads: “I wish more children could enjoy having a school like this.”
Poor child. When you’re a bit older you’ll understand that the quality of your education is mostly to do with the dedication of your teachers, your parents and yourself, rather than wonderful school buildings. Unless you want to get a job with the BBC that is.
The Beeb does Fred Thompson.
Here.
“The BBC’s Justin Webb in Washington says the former senator from Tennessee is enormously popular on the right of the party where he is seen as a new Ronald Reagan.
He is known for his conservative views on issues like abortion and gun control.”
Well, not really. Three things the BBC overlook. Deliberately.
Firstly, the debate on the Right is specifically whether Thompson really has Reagan’s qualities, or not. So he is not seen as the new Ronald Reagan as Webb glibly states. For those citizens as opposed to journalists who deal in comparisons of that kind, the real interest on the Right is to “trust but verify” that appearance.
Fred Thompson’s record on abortion has been questioned already, with facts about his stance, including lobbying for a pro-abortion group, having come to light.
Thirdly, Fred Thompson is not so much conservative on “gun control”, as assertive on “the right to bear arms”. He is also a constitutionalist, which means that he would see the debate not in the BBC’s statist controlling terms, but in terms of the Second Amendment.
I was also going to comment on this article on Thompson’s run by Laura Smith-Spark, but really there is nothing interesting in it- and that’s fundamentally the problem the BBC have in covering the US. Characters don’t get much more interesting than Fred Thompson, and his run-in to this announcement has been remarkable. The profile (compiled a while back; updated very recently) is also pretty naff.
More Fred Thompson stuff here, including his announcement that he is running for President.
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, informing us that:
Germany, which has soldiers in Afghanistan but did not send troops to Iraq, has been largely spared terrorist attacks.
Cause and effect you see. Apart from all the Islamist terror attacks and atrocities in countries that didn’t send troops to Iraq or Afghanistan…
Thank you to Biased BBC reader champagne bottles for the link.
, referring throughout to his ‘militancy’. Does this mean that, in common with many Londoners, the BBC regards Mr. Crow as some kind of terrorist? Or is it just further evidence of the BBC’s egregiousness in referring to real terrorists as ‘militants’?
The BBC has cancelled its planned Climate Relief day. Messrs Horrocks and Barron weighed in with criticism of the event and it’s been shelved. Barron (Newsnight Editor) came up with the very quotable, almost Paxmanesque, “It is absolutely not the BBC’s job to save the planet”.
Well, that’s the spin, anyway. My guess is the BBC feel that because the science is not at all that settled, they don’t want to overextend. They can always save the world another day, after all.
Hat-tips to Damian Thompson, who is gratified, and Iain Dale, who says “well done” to the Beeb. Not sure congratulations are in order here.
Oh yes, and I shouldn’t forget, Andrew had some good thoughts about this topic earlier.
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.
