Monthly Archives: September 2007

, so the second most important Entertainment story, in their view, is the stunning revelation that Theron ‘wants US soldiers home’ – a masterpiece of investigative reporting. Quite coincidentally, she’s also plugging her latest film that just happens to be about an American soldier who goes missing after serving in Iraq.

Meanwhile, just for balance, we have this tacked on to the end of the same article:

Meanwhile, director Ken Loach also premiered his new film, It’s A Free World at the festival.

The movie takes a look at the exploitation of migrant workers in the UK.

Loach said he hoped it would generate attention on the plight of immigrants – legal or otherwise – who have flocked to the country from eastern Europe in recent years.

“On the one hand people say the economy couldn’t survive without the immigrant workforce. On the other, the right wing is saying, ‘Get these people out of our country’. It’s hypocrisy,” he said.

A free advert for the leftie film-maker’s latest tosh, and a platform to express his bigotry about his political opponents. Funnily enough Ken, the people who say that we need immigrants for the sake of our economy are not the same as those who wish to get rid of immigrants. I know that’s a complicated idea Ken, but it’s not hypocrisy when two different groups express different views, is it? Though of course what you’re ignoring completely is that most people just want, and would be happy with, some form of reasonable control over immigration to the UK – something that our Labour luvvie government has failed to manage.

P.S. The most important Entertainment story, at least according to the BBC, is BBC’s DJ held ‘over order breach’, which isn’t a story I want to comment upon beyond the dodgy headline. Surely it should just be BBC DJ – they do have more than one DJ on the tellytax-teat don’t they?

Thank you to David for the Theron link.

Update: Ms. Theron’s comments are now more important than the BBC DJ in jail story, at least according to Views Online.

, BBC Views Online bring us news that TV’s McGovern calls BBC ‘racist’:

Asked by Mayo whether the country was less racist than it once was, McGovern said: “I have got to say this, you will not like this. But I’ve worked a lot in the BBC, you know.

“I love the BBC as an institution and as an organisation and you do see lots of black faces in the BBC. But you see them in the canteen. You do not see them in positions of power.

“It would appear to me that one of the most racist institutions in England is in fact the BBC.”

You could’ve fooled me, but there’s no shortage of “black faces” all over the BBC’s output. Perhaps an over-representation in strict numerical terms even. To present for BBC London it seems that being a good-looking Asian female is a big advantage, and nobody can say that the Black and Asian community of Mull isn’t more than amply represented in Balamory for instance.

Fortunately, the BBC does defend itself against this nonsense:

Mayo reacted by saying it was “a very serious allegation to be making”, adding that the BBC would be responding.

He later read out a statement from the BBC. It said: “What really matters is that we reflect our audiences through our programmes.

“The BBC’s ambition is to reflect the ethnic and social mix of people around the country. We’re actively seeking and nurturing ethnic talents both on and off the air.

“This has been coming through in our output with a range of presenters and reporters across our peak-time programmes for example Freema Agyeman in Doctor Who, the forthcoming Omid Djalili show, Dance X, and dramas such as Waterloo Road.

The BBC can certainly be accused of having too narrow a cross-section of people running the BBC – but it’s not so much that there are too few “black faces” (to use McGovern’s loaded term) – it’s that there are far too many lefty-liberal arts types who’ve never had proper real world jobs and who’ve never had to worry about where their next wedge of tellytax salary and pension were coming from.

Someone at BBC Views Online does have a sense of humour though:

In March, Jonathan Ross said during his live Radio 2 show that too many black people at the BBC were in low-paid jobs.

To which one can only respond that there are too many Jonathan Ross’s at the BBC in extremely highly paid jobs (£18m over three years). No one’s forcing you to take that much Jonathan. If you want to share it with the BBC’s poorer employees, black or white, there’s nothing stopping you.

Thank you to j0nz for the link.

laying in to Stephanie Flanders over that Cameron interview on Newsnight (see Biased BBC yesterday and the day before) didn’t get a mention in the regular BBC In The News section of the BBC Editors Blog on Friday, at least not until after 5.44pm, when one Elliot Spencer commented (see no. 2):

I see Littlejohn’s piece in the Mail didn’t make your list, I wonder why?

…complete with a link to the article. The Littlejohn article was then dutifully added, with a note linking to Mr. Spencer’s comment. Must just have been an oversight. Oh the fun of blogging!

Update: And now an apology comment has been added too, though considerably later than the time on the comment’s timestamp.

, I watched the first of this week’s Panorama programmes, the one about Weekend Nazis, and was thoroughly unimpressed. It was a weak and ineffectual edition that achieved little beyond undermining the reputations of Panorama and John Foghorn Sweeney for genuine investigative reporting.

In short, a small number of people get a kick out of dressing up like Nazis and play-acting second world war battles at a show in Kent attended by 100,000 people. David Irving was there quietly flogging some of his books. Some people were selling various bits and pieces of allegedly genuine WW2 memorabilia.

The worst that Foghorn exposed was, shock horror, that one of the weekend Nazis is a police officer and that a couple of others (one of whom was a Dutchman not even from the group Foghorn was investigating), late at night and after much drinking, privately expressed some unpleasant opinions on the subjects of race and immigration, though probably no worse than you’d find in any pub in the land near closing time about any racial group not of the speaker’s own (whether they be Black, White, English, Scottish, whatever).

And that was about the sum of it. The two comments broadcast were recorded on a hidden BBC camera – though of course we were shown none of the preceding context of the conversations or any encouragement that the undercover Beeboid might have given to the speakers. And of course we all know how honest reporters and editors are when it comes to getting the story!

Whoever tipped off Panorama about this enormous threat to society should be crossed off their list of contacts immediately. It might have made for an amusing ten minutes on one of Louis Theroux’s weird weekends, but it certainly wasn’t the ‘telling of stories that powerful people don’t want told’ that Sweeney specialises in.

Here’s a tip for John: Keep sticking it to the real SS threats in Britain:

• the Social Services Nazis who think it’s okay to take children in to the State’s care from loving families on flimsy evidence, get the children adopted by new ‘parents’ (separating brothers and sisters even) and then after that irreversible process is complete, find that there was an innocent explanation all along – and yet still keep their jobs and neither admit their mistakes nor apologise for them. It is such a monstrous and horrific abuse of the State’s power that you should keep banging away at it, for all our sakes please – even if you do a whole series on this topic alone;

   

• the Culthurch of Scientology Shysters. ‘Nuff said.

Thank you.

Strangely, the Weekend Nazis edition of Panorama hasn’t been included in Panorama’s online archive (though a later programme has been). Can any of our resident Beeboids tell us why please?

You can, however, read John Sweeney’s own Times article about the programme, and also The Times’ own, equally unimpressed, review of it.