Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may be moderated.
OK actually I dont think its been that bad here in Brum (unpleasant yes I agree) but consider the BBC weather reporting:
Up to 4 inches of snowfall fell across the midlands
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7101333.stm
Or maybe three inches described as a flurry that has cleared
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7101122.stm
Only a flurry is less than that in any normal dictionary
“flurry – a light brief snowfall”
or
“flurry – a sudden short period of snowfall”
Obviously it is the usual BBC weather definition
Wales/Scotland Flurry – snow less than 1 foot. Mostly unreported, after all its hardly news, when it is its just the ‘far north and west’.
Northern and Central England Flurry – several inches of snow. Obviously unforecast. Though you are lucky to have it reported at all as England is really London.
London and the Home Counties ‘Flurry’ – a few flakes. ‘Snowstorm’ – a few flakes for more than a minute. Blizzard – a ‘snowstorm’ with a wind of more than 5 miles an hour. There is an outcry if this is not forecast with major warnings in several languages every few minutes.
OK so I exaggearate, but not by that much, what will they do when they are all moved to Salford…
Here we go. I said a while back we will start to see the BBC “big up” Hilary Clinton and Radio 5 with the awful Simon Mayo is at it already.
I’ll keep a note of how many “positive” books the BBC reviews on Republicans like Juliani and mcCain.
If the last Us election was anything to go by the result was “positive” for Republicans (i.e. George Bush) Zero. “Positive” for Democrats (i.e. Kerry) numerous.
It’s interesting that the BBC call the snow fall ‘flurries’. Why? The snow fell for a prolonged period and accumulated in a number of areas.
Definition: A snow flurry is a brief instance of light snow, with no accumulation of snow on the ground.
Could it be to admit that it was a reasonably substantial snowfall at this time of year goes against the Beeboid groupthink and is contrary to their obsession with MMGW.
BBC not being very polite about King Juan Carlos, and rather generous towards their pet socialist dictator, Chavez:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7101386.stm
It begins
“The king of Spain’s recent undiplomatic outburst at the Venezuelan president has become a ringtone hit across Spain. ”
Not terribly diplomatic of the BBC, describing it as an outburst.
Here’s the Telegraph’s take:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/19/wjuan119.xml
“The King of Spain’s irritable intervention at a summit earlier this month, in which he told Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to shut up, has become a smash hit across his country.
Around half a million people have downloaded a mobile phone ringtone featuring the words “Why don’t you shut up?”, uttered by Juan Carlos in frustration at Mr Chavez’s repeated interruptions.
The King asked Mr Chavez to shut up as he repeatedly interrupted Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, during a speech at the Ibero-American summit in Chile.
Mr Chavez continually shouted criticism of Mr Zapatero’s predecessor, Jose Maria Aznar, calling him a “fascist”.
The Venezuelan leader afterwards suggested he was being persecuted like Jesus Christ.”
And later in the BBC article, there’s a dig at George W Bush:
‘Mr Chavez called former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a close ally of US President George W Bush, a fascist, adding “fascists are not human. A snake is more human.”‘
It is fair to report what Chavez says, but the distinction between The Telegraph’s ‘The king asked’, and the BBC’s ‘king’s undiplomatic outburst’ is rather striking.
Moreover, while the King is described by the BBC as having an ‘undiplomatic outburst’, Chavez is said to have ‘called [the PM]’, and having ‘added’, both much less provocative verbs.
Finally, the fact that they have juxtaposed the words “fascists are not human. A snake is more human.” within THREE WORDS of ‘George W Bush’ (who is not in the least bit relevant to this article), just demonstrates their bias.
Tom:
Climate change report comes out – snow in November. What are the odds?
Tom | 19.11.07 – 2:01 pm | #
This is a phenomenon known as “the Gore effect” 😀
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gore+Effect
Chuffer:
I think that link you provided regarding ‘weasel words’ is of significant importance to Al Beeb, being as they are one of the worst perpetrators of using news articles to enforce their own opinions.
Statements such as “critics have said” or “a spokesman for the company” or “it is believed” are all used to conceal the writer’s own opinion on the matter, and are highly effective for gullible readers/viewers of which Al Beeb has very many and Wikipedia has far less.
But Wikipedia and Web Blogs are undoubtedly the future of news reporting, just as Youtube and Google video are the future of broadcasting. The fact that Wikipedia are enforcing such a rule now to kill off such future bias in it’s articles is good news for us all.
Another death knell for BBC reporting.
Dr R,
Quite agree about Al Bowen’s report.
“The Bowen logic (sic) is that these creeps are somehow different from the Saudi, Iraqi or Iranian creeps……………”
……………….obviously, because they saved Ali Johnston.
And nothing on El Beebio about Chavez’s new powers that he gains in 13 days time which ensure he will be like Castro – president for life and in charge of the central bank etc etc. Funny how Human Rights Watch and the other BBC favourites are also all ignoring what is going on in Venezuela…..
BBC news muppets at it again. Interviewing some vegetable eater about the “environment” the BBC show various images of pollution.
Er, except they spent some time showing some shots of clouds comning from power station cooling towers. Er which as any child knows actually only give out STEAM.
Pathetic useless moronic BBC idiots.
Reg Hammer. Spot on with those comments. The classic is the awful Niki Campbell on 5 lite. Who when he wants to give his own opinion (which sadly is too often) uses the phrase “some people might say….”
A pathetic cowardly way to put questions.
Tony Juniper, Friend of the BBC.
As heard at about 4.20pm today on Radio Five Live.
Welcome to 5 Live Tony! Please feel free to spend the next 5 minutes or so commenting on the Prime Minister’s speech on global warming, and to expand on your own envirodoom agenda in general. Please be assured that we will not question anything you say, however outragous, because we at the BBC have a duty to prevent the catastrophe of global warming by making sure our listeners see the greater truth.
And the BBC think of themselves as unbiased. It beggars belief.
The BBC’2 “expert” on the enfironment (yes that man with a degree in English) Roger Harrabin was spouting the Nu Labour bile on the 6pm news.
But here’s a question Mr Harrabin. You “claimed” that one of the measures to cut Carbon emissions is to make houses more efficient. So the extra 3 million homes to be built for immigrants alone won’t create ANY additional CO2? Or the extra 3-6 million cars that will go with those houses?
Oh and how nice that the BBC “dodged” the question about including Nuclear as renewables.
Nice one BBC.
Nice to see the BBC giving this story the same level of publicity that it did when the complaint was first made by the Police. NOT!!!!!!!
Shoved away under “West Midlands”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/7101728.stm
Abandon ship – Yep, Friends of the Earth are no longer an independent organisation. As the ‘eureferendum’ blog pointed out, they are more than 50% taxpayer funded, and basically a govt/EU dept. It is disgraceful that the Beeb still treats them as independent, and simply allows all their claims to pass unchallenged.
Nice to see Channel 4 giving Hilary Benn a kicking over governments double standards over the environment, unlike the BBC which simply allowed Harrabin to spout the Nu Labour party line.
Pathetic.
NEWSFLASH: all carbon to be removed from Great Britain ASAP. I presume we’ll start by removing all carbon-based organic material. (P.S. Brown is Sexy!)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7102382.stm
I volunteer carbon-based lifeform Richard Black to be first.
Martin | 19.11.07 – 2:08 pm |
The propaganda broadcast (they call it “news”) tailor made for the BBC’s vision of the US has been indoctrinating us for weeks now in Hillary worship.
We have been told on several occasions that the hopes of the entire world are pinned on electing a Democrat (specifically Hillary, when they mention a particular one). The only way our reputation can be salvaged from the abyss is by electing Hillary so that Bubba Clinton can be the sainted Ambassador to the World.
As far as I can tell, the BBC News department (domestic and abroad) has been quietly ratcheting up a campaign similar to that of the Grauniad from the last election. The rag made speech after speech from the bully pulpit, rallied the troops, and organized a letter-writing campaign aimed at those of us to dim to see the beautiful truth: we are evil, the world hates us, and our only hope is to elect the Democratic candidate.
We all know how well that worked out for them. The BBC is doing the exact same thing. I had hoped it was effort wasted purely on US broadcast propaganda, but apparently they are trying to instigate something with the British public.
This is not a vague impression, or just inference by an angry partisan mindset. These ideas have been literally spelled out for us by Matt Frei and various panelists and talking heads.
There is no other way to describe this than deliberate interference with the political exercises of a sovereign nation, which, although not spelled out in the Charter, is probably against the law all the same.
pounce,
I did wonder about that. It seemed to me that the only “human rights” anyone was really concerned about in that little segment were the rights for first aid for Pally victims of nasty Israeli aggression. Any thoughts that maybe they shouldn’t send rockets indiscriminately into residential areas were immediately dismissed out of hand.
This seemed more like an exercise in helping Palestinian victims of nasty Israeli atrocities than in the actual human rights and international laws of war, which is what they pretended this was supposed to be about.
Yet another BBC faking it scandal. Tonight on Nigella Express, the pan Nigella took out of the fridge before cooking the tagine was, according to Mrs NotaSheep, empty and not full of lamb tagine. It’s a scandal, we may never watch Nigella again…
Gaza is still ‘one of the most crowded’ places in the world. I know because the BBC told me so. Apparently because it is a piece of land not a city, unlike Monaco, Macau, Singapore, Hong Kong and Gibraltar. Strange I always thought that cities were built on land. 🙁
Apologies for a long post but I have no way to link at present.
Below follows the text of a complaint to the BBC.
The BBC Trust,
BBC Complaints,
PO Box 1922,
Glasgow G2 3WT
Dear Complaints Assessment Team,
The BBC constantly refers to the Gaza Strip as having, “one of the highest population densities on earth” or being, “one of the most crowded places in the world” . This is inaccurate and misleading. The density of its population, achieved by dividing the population figure by the land area, is not even close to the most densely populated ‘countries or territories’ in the world. If the BBC were to describe Gaza accurately it could say it is in the top one hundred and fifty places for population density i.e. nothing exceptional. Should you have figures which contradict those below I would be glad to hear them.
Taking figures from BBC sources, Gaza, population of 1.4 million living on a land area of 365 km2 has a density of 3,836 persons per square kilometre. That gives it a population density about 16% of ‘hotspots’ Monaco (23,660 per km2) and 22% of Macau (17,699 per km2). It also falls behind Hong Kong (6,407 per km2); Singapore (6,200 per km2) and Gibraltar (4,654 per km2) .
If we take urban population density into account Gaza is less crowded than London (4,699 per km²) or Portsmouth (4,689 per km²) and just about any major city you could name . Ironically, Israeli cities Tel Aviv (7,445 per km2) and Bnai Brak (20,076 per km2) are far denser than Gaza although no one would consider that extraordinary, as similar figures are so common .
Using the Wikipedia listing we find that at least 114 cities are more crowded than the Gaza Strip. That 114 figure does not include districts within those cities although the expression ‘places’ would allow them to be taken into account. For your interest Malé in the Maldives is twelve times denser than the Gaza Strip. The district of Freguesia de Santo Antonio (98,776 per km²) in Macau has about twenty-six times the population of the Gaza Strip.
Finally, the figures assume that the standard United Nations statistics are reliable. There are academic studies claiming that the figures are way too high. Zimmerman, Seid and Wise have published that overall Palestinian population figures exaggerate by as much as one million. According to the study Gaza’s population in 2003 was about 1.07 million, possibly 300,000 less than the BBC claims. If the authors are correct or even partially correct in their calculations this further weakens BBC claims that Gaza is in any way exceptionally crowded.
The figures show that Jeremy Bowen should not be surprised that, “even though Gaza is one of the most crowded places in the world, there is a surprising amount of open agricultural land” . However, we have a right to wonder why he and the BBC do not ask why the land is not used for housing or why Gaza conspicuously lacks the high rise, high density housing typical of hundreds of other places on this earth of equal or greater population density?
Yours faithfully,
deegee
BBC Profile: Gaza Strip, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5122404.stm
Mid-East diary: Keeping perspective By Jeremy Bowen Middle East editor, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7005237.stm
BBC Profile: Gaza Strip, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5122404.stm
BBC Country profile: Israel and Palestinian territories
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/country_profiles/803257.stm
List of countries by population density, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density
, List of selected cities by population density, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selected_cities_by_population_density
Bennett Zimmerman, Roberta Seid and Michael L. Wise,
The Million Person Gap: The Arab Population in the West Bank and Gaza
THE BEGIN-SADAT CENTER FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES
BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY
Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 65
Click to access MSPS65.pdf
Mid-East diary: Keeping perspective By Jeremy Bowen Middle East editor, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7005237.stm
BBC’s answer to Gaza complaint. My comments in bold.
Our Ref 14762381
6 November 2007
Dear Mr deegee
Thank you for your letter of the 6 October addressed to the BBC Trust. As I am sure you will appreciate, the Chairman (Sir Michael Lyons) and other members of the BBC Trust receive more correspondence than they can deal with personally, so once letters have been read they are forwarded by their office to BBC Information. The Chairman and members of the BBC Trust have therefore authorised us to reply on their behalf. I wonder if the BBC Trust ever read a letter of complaint?
Turning to your concerns, I discussed the issue with the relevant editor at BBC News interactive. The key point we would make in response is that there is a clear difference between the expression ‘one of the most’ (I wrote ‘places on earth’) and ‘the most crowded’, which would clearly be wrong.For many years ‘most’ was standard We feel most readers understand the context and usage of such a phrase.
It also seems that the comparisons you make with cities such as London and Portsmouth are not like-for-like. The Gaza Strip is a piece of land, not a city.Many large, dense cities spread over a greater area than Gaza and all are built on a piece of land.
Finally, whilst we are always interested in sources of information there’s no reason why we would take the figures of academic study that you quote specifically over the relevant CIA factbook entries. What would persuade you, if proper research doesn’t? The Zimmerman study amplifies the complaint. It doesn’t replace it.
However, I am sorry if you were concerned and can assure you that your comments have been registered and added to our daily log which is made available to programme makers and senior editorial staff.I hope the paper is soft
Yours sincerely
Stewart McCullough
Complaints Coordinator
BBC Information
The answer to have your complaints read by someone is apparently to write a letter on paper.
The Associated Press and a number of other news outlets feature this story:
“A suicide bomber detonated his explosives as American soldiers were handing out toys to children northeast of Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least three children and three of the troopers, U.S. and Iraqi authorities said.”
Full story at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/iraq/2004022371_iraq19.html
I can’t see this story on the BBC news website at all – although they do have space for several stories where US action has resulted in civilian deaths.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7058355.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5105284.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7041708.stm
An unbiased organisation would give (intentional) terrorist victims as much prominence as (unintentional) US ones.
Congrats, deegee. I ain’t never had no detailed response like that from the BBC to my complaints.
But they do have a great talent for missing the point and skirting around the issues.
deegee | 19.11.07 – 10:04 pm
I see you are back on your old hobby-horse of producing false and misleading statistics about Gaza’s population density.
You persist in using the whole area of the Gaza strip in your comparisons – which is a bit like comparng Paris, Tokyo etc with New York State rather than with New York city.
Gaza City has a population density of 8,800 people per square kilometre.
http://www.mogaza.org/afd.htm
Yet more garbage from Brown and lapped up by the Nu Labour “GOATT’s” at the BBC (I will let you work out what GOATC means, if you know what GOATS is 🙂
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7102382.stm
Read through this rubbish and see if you can find a mention of the building of new Coal fired power stations, or the expansion of our airports.
Oh no. Ladies and Gentlemen, global warming is down to YOU leaving your TV on standby or the fact you own an old gas boiler. Well perhaps if we were not taxed so much and instead of throwing £24 billion down the toilet pan for Northern rock we could all have our windows and boilers replaced.
Only the BBC seem to be so dumb here. Why?
Marc Mardell relished informing us on the BBC1 10pm News that the EU was proposing cutting farm subsidies to large farmers, eg the royals & trustafarians. He didn’t mention that this change would be of disproportionate cost to the UK, having larger farms, with the Queen giving up cash so that more could go to the Greek peasant with 10 olive trees (or 20 per the EU claim form).
i’m late i know but let me get this right: one head of state calls another democratically elected head of state a fascist, sub-human and less than a snake, and the beeb simply reports this wihtout qualification. A second (titular?) head of state tells the first to shut up, and the beeb lets us know that this is ‘undiplomatic’ and an ‘outburst’?
even wihout knowing who the two opponents are, and even without its pro-left and anti-monarchy credentials, reith, gregory and reynolds, are you telling me this is not a display of biased or partial ‘reporting’?
Well OFCOM have completely vindicated Channel 4 over their expose of hate-filled preaching at certain mosques, some of them on the patch of David Gregory.
Aside from this issue raising serious questions about the West Midlands Police (will this be followed up by Midlands Today I wonder Mr Gregory?) and the Crown Prosecution Service it also exposes the gullible idiots who fell for the antics of the CPS and PC Plod.
Let’s take a trip down Memory Lane and see what one Beeboid had to say…
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/patrickcrozier/1502687126413285216/#366578
John Reith:
I wondered when you were going to pop your head in on this thread John.
Cherry picking as always, you ignore about a hundred strong instances of BBC bias just to focus on a particular hobbyhorse of your own.
Pro Islam bleating.
Keep up the good work J.R, you are a credit to your colleagues at Al Beeb.
Another vomit inducing lickfest by bunny hugging Richard Black (BBC Environment correspondent) who has his tongue so far up Gordon Brown’s rectum he could lick the insides of his hat.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7102382.stm
I swear to god, the only thing missing from the saccharin picture they chose of Brown to complement their ‘advertisement’ is love hearts.
Nice to see John Reith picking and choosing information sources which suit him, as he’s just done with his last post on Gaza’s population density.
The worlds’ a big place John, and there are many sources of news and information. That’s why I resent having to pay for your employers version of the truth. I don’t want it and I don’t need it. I don’t need you, but I pay your wages. You views on BBC fairness are irrelevant. Unlike me and most people on here you have a vested interest in the BBC, and we cannot be sure that you are just arguing to safeguard you wagepacket.
Newsnight reached new depths last night in its coverage of Brown’s lunatic ‘climate change’ (higher tax, Soviet-style)measures.
The set-up was that a Greenpeace fanatic was allowed to lambast a colourless government spokesmen for ten minutes on the theme that the measures were not enough. Not an alternative view in sight. To his shame, Paxman aided and abetted the attack, and ‘science’ reporter Susan Watts has clearly become the harridan cheerleader for Beeboid climate change fascism.
This was the day when another report into BBC ‘impartiality’ was announced by the Trustees. What irony.
John Reith is simply following his leftist ‘programming’ by trying to misrepresent Gaza strip population density.
The leftists/BBC need the public to beleive that the ‘poor Palestinians victims’ are crowded into a kind of prison compound and forced to stay there by the ‘cruel and bigoted Israelis’! The BBC/leftist narrative wants/needs to portray the Gaza population as bullied and persecuted victims of Israeli agression. The fact that the Gaza strip is mostly empty and that Palestinians have very large families and CHOOSE to live in the city are facts that damage the BBC narrative so are hidden by the BBC?
You could almost feel the angry indignation of John Reith in his knee jerk response to critisism/dissection of the ‘Palestinian victimhood narrative’!
John Reith | 19.11.07 – 11:07 pm |
Gaza City has a population density of 8,800 people per square kilometre.
Unfortunately for your argument the quotes I give refer unambiguously to the strip as a whole. However just to be fair. Among cities with the highest population density (the Wikipedia entry has for some reason disappeared) Gaza ranks a ‘fighting’ 26th!. Well behind ‘fighting’ Bnei Brak (20,076 per km2).
If we refer to the map, so thoughtfully provided by Gaza Municipality, it is clear that Gaza City occupies about 1/5 of the strip.
http://thumbsnap.com/v/MBL1SI3L.gif
Yes, it is my hobby horse.
❓ Why do the BBC (and others) constantly repeat this most dubious piece of information if not to excuse Palestinian violence?
❓ Why do the BBC, even when they visit the Gaza Strip, ignore the evidence of their eyes? “Even though Gaza is one of the most crowded places in the world, there is a surprising amount of open agricultural land.” Jeremy Bowen duh!
❓ Why do the BBC ignore serious scholars who claim the population figures are seriously over estimated?
❓ If I ran an Olympic race and finished 26th (in my dreams) would the BBC refer to me as one of the fastest human beings on the planet or would it refer to me as just another ‘wannabe’ runner?
Robin,
The BBC are as ‘silent as the grave’ when it comes to things that do not fit the AGW/MMGW narrative, such as record AA sea ice,record low seasonal temperatures/early and heavy snowfalls around the world! Since 1998 the Earths real temperatures have been falling when the BBC narrative of ‘CO2 induced global warming’ tells us(repeatedly) that global temperatures must always rise.
It seems that their(BBC) house of cards is about to fall down? I for one cant wait to see and hear the BBCs backtracking!
See how far Mark Mardell gets before resorting to ‘weasel words’ – I make it one sentence:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markmardell/
A entry of a scientist about the different treedment of different persons at hardtalk;
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/bbc-hardtalk-with-vaclav-klaus.html
deegee,
You forgot the biggest “why”
Why does the BBC ignore the well documented facts that Gaza inhabitants (most of whom are indigenous rather than refugees) were ruled by Egypt 1948-69 and yet denied citizienship, which is why it became a hellhole in the first place. They don’t want to be part of Israel, nor do they want a separate state alongside Israel, so what do they want? This is something the BBC will never ask, because the answer is evident to anybody looking at the real facts on the ground.
Martin:
BBC news muppets at it again. [SNIP]
. . except they spent some time showing some shots of clouds coming from power station cooling towers. Er which as any child knows actually only give out STEAM.
Pathetic useless moronic BBC idiots.
Well this child doesn’t know that cooling towers give off steam – they’d be pretty inefficient if they did. It’s water vapour.
Referring to my previous response to a historian writing on the BBC in favour of historical distortion so long as its entertaining (see http://things.auditblogs.com/2007/11/18/distorting-history-for-entertainment/ ), I have now collected some of the replies that did make it through the BBC censorship: http://things.auditblogs.com/2007/11/20/im-not-the-only-one/
Of course my response didn’t make it…
It’s about time that Greenpeace and other groups were left alone for a while by the BBC. Like Shami Chakrabati they speak for their members only and not for all of us.
MattLondon,
With the greatest respect, Water vapour does constitute steam within certain temperature parameters. Used steam coming from the turbines is passed through a cooling system which turns it into hot water, this hot water is cooled further by running down inside the towers which are ventilated at the bottom to encourage a flow of cool air from bottom to top.
The ensuing heat exchange is considered to be steam due to its inherent temperature on exchange within this semi closed/open system. I am the daughter of a power station engineer, so I know a little about the systems involved.
The key is the threshold at which steam becomes water vapour(atmospheric clouds).
I hope this clears up any confusion.
Yours SC
Nice work deegee.
The standard BBC complaints process has been experienced by many (me included) as a fruitless waste of time. It also seems the next course of action, the BBC Trust, is little better, preferring wriggling over taking it on the chin and addressing complaints sincerely.
If one is still not happy, what is the next best course of action?
@Stephanie Clague
“Since 1998 the Earths real temperatures have been falling when the BBC narrative of ‘CO2 induced global warming’ tells us(repeatedly) that global temperatures must always rise.
It seems that their(BBC) house of cards is about to fall down? I for one cant wait to see and hear the BBCs backtracking!”
Stephanie, you know your stuff. But I think most scientists would say this fact is a classic case of “cherry picking” the data. Something both sides of the discussion need to be careful about.
In the run up to the coverage of the diamond wedding anniversary on the 10 o’clock news last night, the Beeb reminded people that she gets £475,000 farming subsidy from the EU, and Prince Charles gets £100,000 (no mention of any other farmer or landowner like, say, a NuLab fat cat like Lord Haskins, natch).
It then had an item on the Diana inquest. Immediately after, the coverage of the service in Westminster Abbey then showed HM the Queen and Prince Philip with Charles and Camilla in the background just as old Cantuar was talking about fidelity.
Nice work Beeboids! Though I wonder if you’ll still be around to cover the 70th.
“Since 1998 the Earths real temperatures have been falling when the BBC narrative of ‘CO2 induced global warming’ tells us(repeatedly) that global temperatures must always rise.”
Stephanie – Can you show us where it says this?
deegee | 20.11.07 – 7:10 am
One reason that BBC journalists so often remark on overcrowding in Gaza is because they are amazed by the experience of such a press of humanity. These journalists are generally not ‘developing world virgins’ • some will have seen areas of high population density in India, Bangladesh or China. Yet the conditions they find in Gaza are physically very striking and remarkable.
Another reason is: that it’s true. According to the UNRWA:
The refugee camps in the Gaza Strip have one of the highest population densities in the world. For example, over 80,688 refugees live in Beach camp whose area is less than one square kilometer.
http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/gaza.html
On many issues you demonstrate considerable moderation and compassion. I’m sure that if you tried you could imagine how very different living conditions in Gaza City are from your nice apartment building up in the Karyot, or wherever.
When the British left in 1948, the population of the Gaza strip was around 80,000 and the infrastructure was consistent with a population of that size.
Not much in the way of infrastructural development has taken place since, but according to the same UN agency the population has grown to 1.4 million. Which is like trying to pour seven quarts into a pint pot.
Anat is wrong to claim that most of the population are indigenous. Refugees outnumbered native Gazans from an early stage.
Overcrowding does not ‘excuse’ Palestinian violence. I know of no BBC journalist who would claim it does.
I agree some of the statements you quote could be improved in order to meet pedantic objections. For instance, Bowen would have been more strictly correct to say: “Even though Gaza contains some of the most crowded housing conditions in the world, there is a surprising amount of open agricultural land too.”
What he actually said wasn’t agenda driven, but carping over details of phraseology probably is.
An interesting reflection on the demise of the doom-laden Independent here. It appears that tales of our impending destruction simply do not sell newspapers.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2007/11/doom-doesnt-sell.html
……..a fate that awaits the crass BBC once its tellytax days are over.
Ah, Sarah Jane may I suggest with respect that you look at greater sources of scientific data/evidence and not what is being served up by the IPCC/FOE/GP etc because they will tell you only what THEY think you need to know!
Now Sarah, I could give you the sources of scientific data that I have found BUT I would be as guilty as the above propaganda outlets if I did.
To find the REAL truth about the actual world around us the first and golden rule is that NEVER trust one source of data and information and ALWAYS take the trouble YOURSELF to gather the information you need! Having said that I would suggest that you might wish to make a critical examination of the way that the IPPC collects data and the way it takes that raw data and turns it into temperature averages? Then find temperature data from NASA for instance and try and find a genuine correlation between the two? The IPPC among other vested interest groups are very secretive about their data sets and correlation methodologies BUT if you take the time to separate the ‘wheat from the chaff’ you will be very surprised at what you will find!
Please accept that this reply to your question is written not to hide the truth but to help and assist you in finding it!
PS
My dad passed this advice on to me and it has served me well and I have tried to pass it onto others. Never trust interested/vested interests to pass on the whole picture!
Twenty years ago, a young black man walked into a pub in Bristol and ordered a drink. Behind him, a gang of white youths started a chant: “Nig nogs on the starboard bow, starboard bow…” Straightforward, everyday racism. Only this time, it was caught on camera and broadcast on BBC1.
Fast forward 20 years, and another young man walks into a mosque in Birmingham, one apparently committed to interfaith dialogue. The preacher, however, seems less than committed. “Christians and Jews are enemies to Muslims,” he says. What about a gay man? “Throw him off the mountain.” And women? “Allah created the women deficient.” Again, all caught on film, this time broadcast on Channel 4.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/11/20/do2003.xml