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 also be moderated. Any suggestions for stories that you might like covered would be appreciated! It’s your space, use it wisely
Hi folks – been away for a few days and just back on terra firma. Here’s a new General BBC-related comment thread for you and I shall return tomorrow !
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Above, re: pro-Islamic Ken, suggest see a report of 9 months ago –
“Muslim leaders back Ken Livingstone for Mayor”
http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2008/01/muslim-leaders-back-ken-livingstone-for.html
Will the BBC ever get around to ‘Christianophobia’?:
“Vatican warns of growing ‘Christianophobia'”
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/022460.php
“BBC revolt over plans to move to Manchester months before London 2010”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2645173/BBC-revolt-over-plans-to-move-to-Manchester-months-before-London-2012.html
“Muslim leaders back Ken Livingstone for Mayor”
Of course they did Livingstone’s whole election strategy was to get the ethnic minnority (except Jews) and Irish Republican vote and hope that the white Bitish vote would split between Boris and who ever the liberal candidate was.
The HARDtalk interview with Steven Berkoff is worth watching. Not only does he handle the petulant Sarah Montague very well but also in the last part he delivers some hard criticism of the BBC’s dumbing down of its drama output in recent years.
Hahaha!
It appears that link from the page above to the full Berkoff interview instead takes us to the Sackur interview with the editor of The Independent.
Only excerpts of the Berkoff interview are available, not including his slagging off of the BBC.
They like to dish it out but sure can’t take it!
The link is even called berkoff28aug.ram
Sly, devious, cowardly bastards!
Try the link here, only if you are in the UK:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search/?q=hardtalk
But basically isn’t Berkoff your bog-standard rich, lefty nutter? O r has he changed recently?
You just know that anyone Muslims want elected would be a bad choice.
Jack,
Yes, he probably is all of that and I’m no fan of high-brow theatre, but it was good to hear him tear into the BBC’s current drama production. He even blamed Eastenders and other programmes for rising youth crime.
Another Saturday, another edition of radio four’s cringe-makingly dreadful new politics series Beyond Westminster/.
This series is fronted by outside (i.e. non-beeboid) hosts, so we should not expect impartiality in every programme, but the famous “impartiality over time” that never seems to happen.
So far the programme has been hosted by:
Sheena MacDonald • ex-girlfriend of Labour Prime Minister, Gordon McBean.
Eleanor Goodman • wife of former Downing Street staffer and economics adviser to Tony Blair.
Andrew Rawnsley – political columnist of pro-Labour paper, The Observer and avid recycler of Alastair Campbell’s dictation in his book “Servants of the People”.
Bias, anybody?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/beyondwestminster.shtml
Needlessly to say, these people are SO useless the Listen Again doesn’t work.
Not that that is a great loss to humanity in this case.
BBC ‘Today’s prejudiced presumption in its interview re-Ghaffur was that the Metropolitan Police was ‘racist’;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/listen_again/default.stm
(Scroll to 8:30 am on BBC site for Audio).
On the contrary, as argued below, it is the National Black Police Association which is racist:
“National Black Police Association: Racist”
[Extract]:
“Yet another senior police officer is whining that the Metropolitan Police is a racist organisation, full of prejudiced hate-filled bigots whose sole motivation in life is to turn the Met into the London branch of the Ku Klux Klan. Today’s politically correct moaner is Tarique Ghaffur, an Assistant Commissioner who is boo-hooing about not being allowed to handle security for the Olympics in 2012. Needless to say the National Black Police Association endorses his allegation that the Met – and Sir Ian Blair – are racist.
“If anyone is racist it is the National Black Police Association. It’s not as if white police officers would ever be allowed to have their own whites only organisation so why are blacks? In any event, Ghaffur isn’t black – he’s Asian. So why is the NBPA intervening?”
http://donalblaney.blogspot.com/2008/08/national-black-police-association.html
George, I have no problem with people associating with their own and the right to do so is exactly that: freedom of association. I do have a problem with non-whites having that right yet whites being denied it owing to ‘racism’.
Peter Sissons on BBC 1 claimed that Hurricane Katrina “destroyed New Orleans”
Well whilst a lot of damage was done as far as I’m aware New Orleans is still there.
Another Saturday, and more BBC climate change scare stories. I caught on the R4 1pm news the tale end of a piece that Arctic sea ice was in danger of vanishing. I also heard an item hyping up the strength of hurrican Gustav because, in the BBC eyes, every story about a hurricane is hadline news becasue it is proof among our greenie fascista comrades that ‘climate change’ is happening (even though there is not a shred of evidence to say there are more or stronger hurricanes now than there were 30 years ago).
Sure enough, the website is also at it full tilt, with a piece by the incorrigible and totally ignorant Richard Black, claiming that because polar ice has shrunk to 4.23m square miles, the second lowest since records began, scientists say we have reached ‘tipping point’.
Shock horror, let’s all commit suicide or at least flagellate ourselves in pennance for our carbon footprints. And commit economic suicide by abandoning fossil fuels, closing down nculear power and spend billions on windfarms.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7585645.stm
Not a peep of something called journalistic balance: that Antarctic ice is at record highs;
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Global_Warming_Politics/A_Hot_Topic_Blog/Entries/2008/8/28_Poles_Apart.html
that we don’t understand the mechanism involved in Arctic melting; that the records involved are only 30 years old; that in 1944, before these record began, a wooden vessel sailed across the North West passage; or that the media have been reporting – in uncannily similar language – scares about melting polar ice since as long ago as the 1840s, and regularly since then.
Richard Black and the BBC as a whole should be brought to account for terrorising needlessly through these lies a whole generation of children, and for crimes against journalism.
Richard Black – and the BBC collectively – show all the traits of what psychologist have come to call ‘cognitive dissonance’. Philip Stott, in his Hot Topic blog, described it brilliantly. Well worth a read if you want to understand the mindset of the comnrades:
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Global_Warming_Politics/A_Hot_Topic_Blog/Entries/2008/8/20_More_On_Cognitive_Dissonance.html
The bad news is that denial of the global cooling that is now going on is likely to become more fanatical the more evidence that is produced. And also that our friends at dear old Auntie are going to become simultaneously ever more strident in advancing the warmist case.
Sue
Not much attention yet to the fact that Palin’s hubby is a Native American. How will that play ?
I saw a press report that in the last snowsled race in Alaska he hit a barrel that threw him 70 feet away, but he got up and went on to win the race.
Sounds a desperate Dan kinda character – married to Annie Oakley !
The BBC is forced to admit that Egypt controls their own border with Gaza. Except…er…no they don’t, the nasty Israelis do:
Egypt opens Gaza border crossing
Long-time inhabitants of these pages might remember an interesting exchange I had with the long-lost John Reith about the BBC’s determined portrayal of the “Siege of Gaza”, or “Israel’s Blockade of Gaza”. My position is and has always been that Egypt has control over their own borders, while the BBC constantly uses the terms I’ve mentioned, without ever referring to Egypt’s own territorial sovereignty. This demonizes Israel as the sole villain, which is false.
JR used two lines of defense (if I knew how to search through the comments, I’d post links). The first, and most objectionable, was that Egypt gets loads of aid money from the US every year. Israel can make that stop in heartbeat (if, like most BBC employees, one believes in the omnipotence of the Israel Lobby), so Egypt plays along and keeps the border closed. When I pressed him on that, Reith dug up some obscure mention of Israel technically controlling the passage of the UN personnel who are supposed to oversee the border with Egypt. If nasty Israel doesn’t want the border open, all they have to do is prevent the UN guys from doing their jobs. Of course, that also demonizes Israel, giving the country the appearance of a Stalinist state.
That’s the tactic used in the linked article above.
Of course, Egypt can do whatever it wants, and has. They use the UN as a convenient excuse because they don’t want the Hamas Dealth Cult-Educated Gazans soiling their own country. So they happily keep the border closed. Nobody is stopping the “European officials” to which the BBC refers from coming through from Egypt. Israel doesn’t control access of anything through sovereign Egyptian territory. If this wasn’t a scam, that’s how it would work.
The BBC, of course, will ultimately blame Israel. Even when they are forced to admit that Egypt can open the border, it’s only according to the whim of those nasty Israelis, according to the BBC.
“Lyse Doucet: Pro-Taliban spokeswoman”
http://newportcity.blogspot.com/2008/08/lyse-doucet-pro-taliban-spokeswoman.html
How will BBC’s LYSE DOUCET, who doesn’t forget the ‘humanity’ of Taliban Islamic jihadists, report this story?:
“Pakistan city of Persharwar could fall to Taliban as fear and attacks grow” (includes video clip).
[Extract, from ‘Telegraph’]:
“Should they let their daughters go back to lessons in the rubble of their school, blown up by the Taliban in the middle of the night, or should they keep them safe at home?
“Hashim, the caretaker who was held at gunpoint by masked gunmen, was warned that they would be back if the school is rebuilt. He fears that next time they could blow it up with pupils inside.
“Yet this is not Kandahar, the Taliban capital of southern Afghanistan, but Peshawar – a city of 1.4 million people in neighbouring Pakistan, once celebrated as a cultural haven for artists, musicians and intellectuals.
“A year ago schools were considered safe in the city, the capital of North-West Frontier Province. But the Taliban insurgency that has been growing in the wild mountains that rise in the distance is spreading into urban Pakistan.” (Nick Meo).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/2650734/Pakistani-city-of-Peshawar-could-fall-to-Taliban-as-fear-and-attacks-grow.html
Robin | 30.08.08 – 5:39 pm |
“..the second lowest since records began,” – that sentence is used all the time – but if it said “the second lowest since 1979”, it doesn’t have the same impact does it?
The problem with these alarmists and the BBC in particular is that they chose a starting date that “backs up” their comparisons.
It is the oldest con trick of all time. If the Arctic was gaining ice and the Antarctic was losing it they would report the Antarctic.
Now they have gone from “global warming” to “climate change” – they stay clear of mentioning CO2 if the temperatures drop, but it reappears when they rise.
“The hypothesis that the CO2 rise during the interglacials caused the temperature to rise requires an increase of about 6 °C per 30% rise in CO2 as seen in the ice core record. If this hypothesis were correct, Earth temperatures would have risen about 6 °C between 1900 and 2006, rather than the rise of between 0.1 °C and 0.5 °C, which actually occurred.”
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm
The ‘climate change’ deluge continues…to the extent that to me, the BBC has now become, without question, the CCC. Today’s scarefest is on News 24, a report from Spain about how global warming is causing grape growers to fear that they might go out of production. Cue for shots of solar panels, VPs of worried growers, and loads of totally unsubstantiated hot air that Spain was getting hotter.
The report shared all the hallmarks of the genre; no alternative view; no context, and asolutely no attempt at journalistic balance.
It was buttressed again by the intensifying hype about hurricane Gustav. The reporters don’t actually say it’s caused by the dreaded CC – but that’s the subtext.
Climate Change Bollocks – that’s what we do.
On BBC’s responsibility, re-reporting of Islam. ‘Undercover Mosque’ revisted, Channel 4, tommorrow.
A year ago:
“C4 calls BBC ‘lazy’ in Mosque row”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/aug/16/tvnews.television
And in April, this year:
“BBC’s Mark Thompson says UK broadcaster are ‘over-cautious’ on Islam”
http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2008/04/bbcs-mark-thompson-says-uk-broadcasters.html
Is there any evidence that the BBC, for instance has, since Thompson’s words in April, become any less ‘cautious’, devious, cowardly, appeasing or biased or dhimmi-like in its reporting of Islam? What is the BBC’s strategy for reversing this policy of acquiescence towards Islam?
And today’s ‘Telegraph’:
“Preachers of separatism at work inside Britain’s mosques”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2653266/Preachers-of-separatism-at-work-inside-Britains-mosques.html
Rod Liddle: the Met., the BBC, PC, etc.
“Sir Ian of the Yard gets mugged by PC brigade” (Sunday Times):
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rod_liddle/article4641038.ece
It’s deeply depressing that Boris Johnson has swallowed the climate change hype to the extent that he can reportedly generate a ‘climate change’ plan and utter that:
measures are needed to combat the danger of increased flooding, droughts and heatwaves.
There’s not a shred of evidence that London faces any such threats (except under the same long-term sea level rising trend that led to the building of the Thames Barrier, at a time when all the greenies were warning us to prepare for an ice age).
Of course, however, when the Climate Change Corporation comes to reporting Boris’s vacuous, highly expensive and un-needed ‘plan’, the only angle they look at is whether it is enough. And of course, the greenie fascists say it isn’t. They want an end to all energy consumption. Except their own wind.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7587465.stm