Entertaining to read the BBC’s coverage of Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe’s visit to Rome to attend – irony of ironies – a Food Summit! Criticism of Mugabe’s presence on European soil has to be muted by the BBC because he is in Rome care of that vast corrupt organised hypocrisy – the United Nations. Since the BBC likes to portray the UN as the world’s highest moral authority, it has to be careful not to say too much about the fact that this august body invites a man who starves his own people to a summit on Food. I also enjoyed the line the BBC spun that because the UN had invited Mugabe, the EU was therefore unable to prevent him attending this conference. Of course the EU could have insisted that Mugabe be kept out, but just like the UN it too lacks any sense of even vestigial decency.
WHEN MUGABE BECOMES ACCEPTABLE.
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Maybe the BBC should invite Mugabe on to discuss homosexual rights in Zimbabwe…
Normally gayness trumps everything at the Gayb, except for their lust for brutal Marxist dictators who love to parade in military uniforms (calm down Evan…)
They love them more.
Move along, there is nothing to see here simply because this doesnt involve that great anti-satan, Uncle Sam.
Mailman
Only in your rather odd parallel universe does an article entitled “Mugabe food talks trip ‘obscene'” with several and various unflattering quotes and facts about Mugabe’s regime and record qualify as “muted” criticism.
Clearly if an article about Israel featured the word “obscene” in the title you’d be at pains to point out the obvious – there’s nothing muted about the criticism at all.
p+chip:
You just don’t get it, do you?
Bias exists when:
1. The BBC reports anything. Anything at all.
2. The EU is involved and the BBC mention it. In any context.
3. The UN is involved. Context irrelevant etc.
4. It is not necessary to demonstrate or define bias because we already know that the BBC is biased and any mention of anything confirms it….
5. …because everything comes with an agenda. It must do, because the BBC is reporting it…
6. …and the BBC always has an agenda.
7. We just know that. Everyone does.
Got it?
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1. Yup, Jeff Randall is right!
2. If The Times mention anything about News International they have to mention their affiliation. Why doesn’t the BBC mention they are financed by a group committed to European integration every time they report on the matter?
3. It should be mentioned in every report that the UN is undemocratic. Any utterance by the UN on Israel should be prefaced with the fact that Muslim states outnumber Jewish 53:1 in the UN.
4. If you need to define bias buy a dictionary.
5. A state-owned organisation couldn’t possibly have an ‘agenda’ now could it!
6. Of course the ministry of truth has no agenda…
7. Pretty much. When ‘comment is free(sic)’ commentators and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown demand their left-wing Beeb become even more left-wing its a fair assumption that any sane, and many insane, know about BBC bias.
Bias exists but of course the wilfully blind never can see it.
Clearly if an article about Israel featured the word “obscene” in the title you’d be at pains to point out the obvious – there’s nothing muted about the criticism at all.
p and a tale of one chip | 02.06.08 – 1:06 pm
In the article Australia’s Foreign minister, Stephen Smith used the word obscene. This is indicated by the double inverted commas – “obscene”. The BBC headline used single inverted commas – ‘obscene’. In BBC scare quotes usage normally indicates some doubt or controversy. It is the BBC way of distancing itself.
If an article about Israel featured the word “obscene” in the title I would assume that I was looking at late edits. The first headline is usually the most offensive.
I grant the article was not the ‘most’ biased the Beeb has produced but if I knew nothing about Mugabe I would come away with great doubts about whether he had been libelled not.
Could be evidence of Western racism. The UN would hardly give him speaking rights if there were any doubts – would they. 8)
Mr Vance:
Bias exists but of course the wilfully blind never can see it.
Couldn’t agree more.
Just a tiny doubt arises: How, exactly, does a BBC story which leads with the idea that Mugabe is obscene and recounts in detail the failures of his regime classify as biased?
.
In the article Australia’s Foreign minister, Stephen Smith used the word obscene. This is indicated by the double inverted commas – “obscene”. The BBC headline used single inverted commas – ‘obscene’. In BBC scare quotes usage normally indicates some doubt or controversy. It is the BBC way of distancing itself.
If an article about Israel featured the word “obscene” in the title I would assume that I was looking at late edits. The first headline is usually the most offensive.
deegee | 02.06.08 – 2:40 pm
No quotes, ‘scary’ or otherwise in the title here:
Tutu: Gaza blockade abomination
PLEASE can we get that wanker hillhunt banned? I really can’t abide his stupidity and infantile attempts to be ‘sarcastic’.
Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu has called Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip an “abomination” –
I’d love to know just how the Nobel peace prize confers on him the slightest expertise on the ME. IMO, it’s totally irrelevant. It’s like saying: Former peanut farmer Carter calls Israel worse than the Nazis.
This is just the BBC bending over backwards to remain impartial. They feel like they can’t really criticize Mugabe themselves, but can report facts like how he turned a net exporter of food into a starvation zone, his supporters are responsible for killing loads of people, etc. The BBC deserves a little credit for that, anyway.
I don’t think the Beeboids are fans of Bob the Butcher anymore. They used to have high hopes for him, seeing as how he spouted quasi-Marxist drivel on occasion and made it clear he was going to purge his realm of that nasty white stuff. Never mind how he went about it, the idea that he was undoing the wrongs of the white man was good enough, at least for a while. But even the Beeboids realize that Mugabe is a total failure. They won’t overtly criticize him on air or in print, though. Must remain impartial, mustn’t we?
It’s too bad they don’t take the same care to be so dry and impartial with regard to certain other topics.
I agree with David Preiser, though I would add that the BBC and others on the Left were the ones who pot ‘Comrade Bob’ in power in the first place.
This is a problem of the Left’s making and a few apologies wouldn’t go amiss.
Neither, of course, would a few heads on pikestaffs.
GCoop:
the BBC and others on the Left were the ones who pot ‘Comrade Bob’ in power in the first place.
D’you know…I always thought it was the first government of dear Mrs T which brought about the elevation of Killer Bob, thanks to the Lancaster House Talks.
Principal mover and shaker was Lord Carrington. In the light of your revelation, I presume that he must have been moonlighting for the BBC on the quiet. Most of us naively thought he was Mrs T’s Foreign Secretary at the time.
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“I don’t think the Beeboids are fans of Bob the Butcher anymore”
The BBC has been banned from Zimbabwe since 2001.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ifs/hi/newsid_4400000/newsid_4401700/4401767.stm
Frankly, the commentary, such as it is on B-BBC these days, looks increasingly like the product of some bizarro parallel universe.
It certainly is, or at least the part coming from you, hillwanker, Joel and Troll.
Clearly (much as expected) Hillhunt wasn’t alive in 1979.
Clearly (much as expected) Hillhunt wasn’t alive in 1979.
Do you call what he’s engaged in now “a life”?
Coop:
Clearly (much as expected) Hillhunt wasn’t alive in 1979.
Alive and about in the big world in 79, I’m afraid to say. But I’m not afraid to add that Carrington had me duped… until you took the scales from my eyes.
Well done.
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Why are the likes of Joel, Hillhunt & p/chips not manning the barricades with bedroom anarchist Korova down at “Worst BBC moment”? There’s enough material there to bury the Beeb’s claims of impartiality for good!
Selectivity, Bob. They get training in it.
It’s like the threads where the BBC is shown to be up to its corporate neck in ‘Green’ campaigning – never a peep out of them.
p and a tale of one chip | 02.06.08 – 6:30 pm |
The BBC has been banned from Zimbabwe since 2001.
Yes, we all know that. I was being slightly sarcastic. In any event, it took the BBC a very long time to come round to the reality of what Mugabe was doing to his country. They allowed him to play on white guilt far too long. If the BBC had been more honest, he would have banned them even sooner.
Of course, it took the BBC years to finally report enough truth for them to be banned. Before that, they ran not-so-critical pieces like this, allowing plenty of space for Bob the Butcher’s side of the story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/705340.stm
Frankly, the commentary, such as it is on B-BBC these days, looks increasingly like the product of some bizarro parallel universe.
Is there something else about my comment you find unfathomable?
D’you know…I always thought it was the first government of dear Mrs T which brought about the elevation of Killer Bob, thanks to the Lancaster House Talks.
Principal mover and shaker was Lord Carrington. In the light of your revelation, I presume that he must have been moonlighting for the BBC on the quiet. Most of us naively thought he was Mrs T’s Foreign Secretary at the time.
I’m afraid there is a difference between leading the negotiations to end white rule in Zimbabwe and enabling Mugabe’s reign of ugliness. I realize this is a difficult concept, but just because Mugabe rose to a leadership role in one of the main African parties at the top of the pile when it was time to take over from the whites doesn’t mean that Carrington and Co. put him there. He finagled his own rise to power in ZANU (via assassination an other fun activities). Unsurprisingly, Mugabe’s major constituency was the Shona tribe, in other words, the majority population. Everybody gave a wink and a nudge at his socialist leanings as well.
Carrington and the Tory government at the time are not responsible for the elevation of Mugabe. Responsible for helping lead things to the creation of a Zimbabwe under native African control, yes. Responsible specifically for Mugabe, not at all.
But I suppose you expect us all to be too stupid to spot the difference.
Of course he is.
The expectation in Britain at the time was that ZAPU would share power with ZANU, if not form the government on its own. Claiming that Britain is responsible for Mugabe’s reign of terror and mass-murder is the usual, utterly stupid ‘Whitey is always to blame’ racist crap.
So, no surprise there, then.
Mugabe was the darling of the British Left throughout the period – hence the ‘comrade Bob’ tag.
Naturally, anyone who had their suspicions about him was ‘a racist’.
David P:
Carrington and the Tory government at the time are not responsible for the elevation of Mugabe. Responsible for helping lead things to the creation of a Zimbabwe under native African control, yes. Responsible specifically for Mugabe, not at all.
But I suppose you expect us all to be too stupid to spot the difference.
Forgive me, David, of course not.
Just stupid enough to swallow Mr Cooper’s insane suggestion that the BBC and others on the Left were the ones who pot ‘Comrade Bob’ in power in the first place.
Snr/Snra Figures:
Claiming that Britain is responsible for Mugabe’s reign of terror and mass-murder is the usual, utterly stupid ‘Whitey is always to blame’ racist crap.
And blaming the BBC (among others) is not saying Whitey is always to blame’? The BBC is those days was not known for its racial diversity. If it was them wot done it, they were, indeed, hideously white.
Bob:
Why are the likes of Joel, Hillhunt & p/chips not manning the barricades with bedroom anarchist Korova down at “Worst BBC moment”?
Can’t speak for the others, but I’ve been busy tipping off all my friends in media law that fat fees are up for grabs if wild-eyed evidence-dodgers like Mr Vance ever get around to turning your collective fantasies into book form, as promised. I’m hoping for a percentage, so keep churning it out…
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Hillhunt: “Just stupid enough to swallow Mr Cooper’s insane suggestion that the BBC and others on the Left were the ones who pot ‘Comrade Bob’ in power in the first place.”
Thank you for confirming that you haven’t the slightest clue what you are writing about.
Mugabe was actively supported by the British Left and his cause routinely advanced by what the late Michael Wharton memorably dubbed ‘Hampstead thinkers’ – among whom, naturally, BBC luminaries figured then, as now.
That Mugabe was able to assume power in Rhodesia was, to no small degree, due to the fools chorus backing him in the UK.
No doubt, had you been there at the time, you would have been one of the boy sopranos.
CooperG:
Mugabe was actively supported by the British Left and his cause routinely advanced by what the late Michael Wharton memorably dubbed ‘Hampstead thinkers’ – among whom, naturally, BBC luminaries figured then, as now.
Y-e-e-e-s…. actively supported…Hampstead thinkers…. Good to see you quoting Michael Wharton, a comic columnist far to the right even of his contemporaries on the Telegraph in those days.
Quite a long way from your assertion that the BBC among others put ‘Comrade Bob’ in power in the first place, do you not think?
No doubt, had you been there at the time…
I think I have already said that I was around at the time. But if it works better for you to imagine I wasn’t, feel free…
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I don’t blame Mugabe; he’s come to the UN bird-table for a decent meal. When he’s filled his crop he’ll fly out again.
I don’t doubt you were around then, Hillhunt, if that’s what you say.
It’s just a shame that you haven’t progressed beyond a kindergarten understanding, since.
And, yes, bluster all you like: the British Left put your chum Mugabe in power. The BBC, as ever, fully on-side.
“And, yes, bluster all you like: the British Left put your chum Mugabe in power. The BBC, as ever, fully on-side.”
“His chum” Bob ,please.
I don’t blame Mugabe; he’s come to the UN bird-table for a decent meal. When he’s filled his crop he’ll fly out again.
Fleur | 02.06.08 – 11:58 pm |
Good call :). The “Mugabe food talks trip ‘obscene'” has dropped off the radar to be replaced with Eyes on Mugabe at Rome summit. Although critical (or even hypocritical), because Mugabe is hardly the only leader to be living la dolce vita in Rome, it is much gentler than the earlier piece. Not to say the ‘obscene’ story didn’t also pull its punches.
What we see is a typical BBC Internet practice. The ‘obscene’ story is now a SEE ALSO to the Mugabe in Rome.
Some stories last a day or two before being ‘hidden’. In a matter of days only expert searchers can find them, if they are looking for them. Other stories have a shelf life of months with clear, illustrated links. My prediction is the ‘obscene’ Mugabe will be first category.
Mugabe in Rome – your comments now appears in Africa not Europe news. Comments are about 50/50 pro/con and neatly organized so a pro Mugabe attending comment is followed by an anti Mugabe comment. I wonder if that is the order they reached the Beeb?
—————————————-
David Vance. I think it is about time for a general thread.
Hillcunt talks about evidence-dodging …
ROFLMAOWMP
What a wanker.
dg:
The “Mugabe food talks trip ‘obscene'” has dropped off the radar to be replaced with Eyes on Mugabe at Rome summit.
Excellent. The BBC is now biased for publishing an update on an (in news terms) old story.
Although critical (or even hypocritical), because Mugabe is hardly the only leader to be living la dolce vita in Rome, it is much gentler than the earlier piece.
First class. Journalists should now always match or up the ante on condemnation reported in previous stories. Otherwise, they’re biased.
What we see is a typical BBC Internet practice.
Y-e-e-e-s. SKY, CNN, FOX would all leave a story heading their pages even though it’s beginning to get stale. Wouldn’t they…
The ‘obscene’ story is now a SEE ALSO to the Mugabe in Rome.
Yes indeed. They’re now biased for linking to a story you – kind of – approve of. Inspired.
Some stories last a day or two before being ‘hidden’. In a matter of days only expert searchers can find them, if they are looking for them. Other stories have a shelf life of months with clear, illustrated links.
No kidding. Editors choose stuff so that the most relevant stays for longer. Bias. Bias. Bias.
Comments are about 50/50 pro/con and neatly organized so a pro Mugabe attending comment is followed by an anti Mugabe comment. I wonder if that is the order they reached the Beeb?
That very question keeps me awake. Night after night. After night…
Snr/Snra Figures
ROFLMAOWMP
The incontinence pads are in the post. Don’t let it get you down. It’s good that you’re not suffering in silence.
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Sort of OT
Mark Mardell did a bit of a travelogue about farming on Toady this morning, starting near Munich and ending up at a dock in Rotterdam (it’s got “a big green crane”!) watching malt from Britain being loaded for Venezuela. The question is, did he say whether the export is being subsidised by the EU taxpayer, to the detriment of Venezuelan famers? Did he mention the effects of EU export subsidies on the developing world in general? I was brushing my teeth at the time and the noise of the motor drowned him out, so I don’t know whether he did or not.
Hillhunt and all his friends in ‘media law’ (sic) – now there’s a get-together to warm the cockles…
I was wondering why he hasn’t been arrested for genocide or crimes against humanity?
Surely he should be charged with crimes against his own people, and put in an international court for trial?
It looks like the perfect opportunity to knick him and lock him up has been missed… Is it me?
Mark W | 03.06.08 – 6:01 pm |
Nobody’s going to do anything other than quietly hope Mugabe dies eventually.
Post-colonial guilt informs nearly all decisions taken by European (and, by extension, North American and Australian) decisions on the problem children of Africa. We were told by our betters on several different occasions that it would be best to let the more responsible (using that term loosely, to be sure) African leaders handle things. This rule has held true for disputes in the Congo, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Darfur, and, more recently, Kenya. The lone exception, as far as I can recall, was the French using military force to save their own people and assets in the Ivory Coast.
Any attempt at intervention by white people other than dialogue, light sanctions, and other forms of pulling angry faces, is right out. Sending food and money is the only acceptable action from anyone other than African leaders.
How’s this for synchronisity;I recieved a house of commons letter from my mp yesterday(Bob Ainsworth)in reply to an email I sent concerening Zimbabwe.He forwarded me a letter from Lord Malloch Brown containing the very same info about the EU’freezing asstes,arms embargo and banning Mugabe from the EU’.Furthermore he states how all UK funding to hep Zimbabwe(all £253 million pounds of it) is channeled through the UN so Mugabe cannot get his grubby little hands on it.What is going on ?I think we should be told.
Lord Malloch Brown
What a know-nothing, George Soros funded, corrupt, US/Israel hating jerk HE is.
The perfect pal of Brown.
‘I also enjoyed the line the BBC spun that because the UN had invited Mugabe, the EU was therefore unable to prevent him attending this conference’
This is mentioned because the EU imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, prevent Zanu PF leadership from travelling to the EU.
A perfectly reasonable and consistent explanation for why it was mentioned, known to those informed about the situation. Not a example of the laughable notion that the BBC is biased in favor of Mugabe!
Ground control to Major Tom…
“This is mentioned because the EU imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, prevent Zanu PF leadership from travelling to the EU”
Can someone remind me where Rome is situated? And whether the UN has any sovereignty over it?
Even Joel might know this one.