E
By the way, did you read the BBC report detailing how the Church where the Obama family go to worship has been burned down in a suspected arson attempt? Alright then, it didn’t happen but if it did, I figure it would be splashed across the BBC. Fair bet? So, isn’t it interesting that when the Church where Sarah Palin worships is torched, not a word from the BBC. Maybe she never existed?
JohnA | 15.12.08 – 8:19 pm
How on earth can you say that Palin has lost credibility with the Repubs, that they blame her for the defeat?
On Sunday George Stephanopoulos invited John McCain to endorse a Palin 2012 run. He refused.
If McCain won’t back her, and let’s not forget he invented her politically, then I doubt many other heavyweight figures will.
Obama is going to be the President, is Sarah Palin going to be the President in January – NO. Grow up, do you spend your whole day looking for these pathetic stories?
Tom:
Why on earth should McCain endorse anyone for an election nearly four years away? Who knows now who will be standing then?
Powerline reports it as arson – http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2008/12/022313.php
McCains time has been and gone. He had his shot and missed out. Whether he backs Palin is neither here nor there since it wont be him making the decision to push her for the GOP presidential nomination in a few years time.
BTW, lots of morons harped on about Palin being unqualified to be VP (inspite of managing a $10bil USD budget, 20k staff, national guard etc) yet not a single peep about Caro Kennedy’s [probable] elevation to the senate, unelected.
I guess its true, the only standard applied to the Dems is the double standard!
Mailman
Mailman | 16.12.08 – 12:19 pm |
I’d widen that statement to leftists in general. The MSM don’t like conservatives – years of indoctrination have had the desired result and it shows in the media.
Jack,
The primacy of Sarah Palin amongst Republicans nationwide MAKES this a story. But she’s white, she’s conservative -and so it is a NON story in memory hole land. Never happened, right? It IS newsworthy yet the BBC ignored it. What is pathetic is that you no not get it. Maybe you work for the BBC?
Can I just share this superb quote from the wonderfully-named Pastor at the Church, Larry Kroon, one of the finest examples of curate’s egg I’ve ever heard:
“This fire won’t change what we do. A considerable amount of the building is in great shape.”
That’s the spirit!
Sarah Jane | 16.12.08 – 9:29 am |
I’m sorry, but this is no strawman. As disillusioned german has already shown, the BBC did report the ridiculous “Turkey Pardon” incident:
Palin pardon amid turkey butchery
Let’s face it: this wasn’t exactly just one piece in the annual, traditional roundup of Thanksgiving news items and turkey ‘n’ fixin’s recipes for British families. So the only reason I can think of for the BBC to waste their time and your brain cells on this is because it makes Sarah Palin look bad. (If one doesn’t understand the humor and irony in the whole “pardon” production, then of course one will think she’s oblivious and cruel. Which is exactly how the BBC presented it.) There is no justification to report this if we accept that the church arson is of no news value. I have yet to see any defenders of the indefensible even try to explain that one.
Not even Justin Webb felt is was worth a snide remark on his blog. A little sympathy after all she’s been through would be out of the question for ol’ Justin.
Now the BBC refuses to report something rather serious. That church was torched specifically because of Gov. Palin’s public stature (good or bad, doesn’t matter). Unfortunately, that makes not only Sarah Palin look like a victim for which one might have some sympathy, but it makes a whole bunch of white, US Evangelicalish Christians look like victims, too. But your colleagues in the News department choose their victims very carefully, don’t they?
David Preiser (USA) | Homepage | 16.12.08 – 3:31 pm
You know, David, reading that Pardon a Turkey story, I felt it made the BBC look stupid, not Governor Palin.
They clearly think there is something incongruous about other birds being slaughtered while one is pardoned.
But there isn’t.
It makes perfect sense. The pardoned one is spared the fate of the rest.
Only someone with a BBC reflex to see all this as some kind of ‘animal rights’ gesture, would think there was anything odd about it.
Tom | 16.12.08 – 4:12 pm |
Yes, but is this more newsworthy than a story about the woman’s church being torched? What’s the value of the one versus the other? The defenders of the indefensible won’t say.
Jack 12:05
The point is that, if Palin was black or a democrat, or both, the BBC would have reported it. Or , if it had been a mosque, not a church !
David Preiser (USA) | Homepage | 16.12.08 – 4:43 pm
Clearly the church torching is worth reporting. It is bizarre that although it’s been reported pretty much everywhere else, the BBC insists on pretending it never happened.
Not just bizarre, it’s downright suspicious.
If I were a Wassilla cop, I’d be looking for some beeboid fingerprints on the accelerant.
PS I didn’t think so yesterday – I’ve beeen converted to being interested in this story by all the other coverage!
David – your post isn’t a strawman. But DV’s is. There is no Obama church burning story. There is a turkey pardon story, and of all the officials from the President down why did they choose her?
As usual the best of the comments are more valid and high quality than the lead articles.
“Absolutely! That 63% rating among Republicans proves conclusively that the fire was arson and was connected with Palin’s attendance at the church.”
No you prat,it means things Palin are news,since in all probability she will run for president in 2012.
viz: henryflower | 15.12.08 – 9:19 am |
Hi hf, hope I’m not repeating points already made.
The BBC found it worthy to adversely cover Sarah Palin giving a Turkey a Christmas reprieve, but not this significant story.
When there is a serious race attack the BBC habitually trundles out propagandists to blame some Conservative for saying we have a bogus asylum problem in the UK.
There is far more basis for speculating that the sort of hatred of Sarah Palin for being a Christian and Conservative incites these sort of acts. According to David Vance though, the BBC haven’t even covered the story.
Trash, ignoring your bad manners:
“No you prat,it means things Palin are news,since in all probability she will run for president in 2012.”
Please list me all the John Edwards stories the BBC inundated us with between his failed 2004 VP candidacy and his run for office in 2007/08 – because I can’t recall any. He was a failure who might potentially try again one day, but that didn’t make him news until campaigning began.
And again, because it seems repetition might aid your reading skills: I have already stated several times that the minute this fire is proved to be arson, and that arson is proved to be linked to Sarah Palin, then I’ll agree that her 62% approval ratings among Republicans makes this a news story. If you have such evidence, please share it with us. If you don’t, perhaps you should mind your manners a little more, and explain why I am a prat for being prepared to wait until the evidence is in before accusing the BBC of racial and ideological whitewashing in this instance? As I said above, more than once, if that evidence does come in, (and it may well do), and the BBC ignore the story once the link to Palin has been established, then we can say for sure that this is bias.
Until then, or if the evidence proves something more prosaic to have been behind the blaze, I don’t call it a news story any more than the BBC do. If failing to pre-judge the evidence, and then using that pre-judgement as the pretext to attack others makes me a prat, I’m happy to be one.
No you prat,it means things Palin are news,since in all probability she will run for president in 2012.
Garden Trash | 16.12.08 – 6:16 pm
Actually it was quite funny. A photo opportunity gone wrong and a comeuppance. These sort of videos go viral and the more visible the celebrity the more likely to be covered by the media (or indeed to be caught on camera).
The turkey pardon is a Presidential ‘tradition’ that only begun with President George H.W. Bush, in 1989. Gov. Palin was hitching a ride.
It does show a couple of things about the lady.
1) She lacks the instincts to check what is going on behind her before accepting an interview. She will probably learn from experience.
2) She has no one in her staff with the knowledge/instincts to protect her from these gaffs. Undoubtedly one will be hired/trained.
3) The lady is really quite nice. Why do the turkey pardon? “You need a little bit of levity in this job especially with so much that has gone on in the last couple of months that has been so ‘political’ obviously. It’s nice to get out and do something to promote a local business and just participate in something that is not so heavy-handed politics that invites criticism. It’ll invite criticism for even doing this but at least it was fun”.
I would speculate that the news team were pissing themselves during the filming. If SP is as tough as I think she is that particular reporter/cameraman combination will never be allowed to film her again. Lessons all round.
BTW David Vance is quite lax about abuse. Someone who goes by the name of Garden Trash should be more careful with insults or like Sarah Palin, in this case, people will concentrate on the unintended turkeys rather than the message.
deegee, I think ‘Garden Trash’ is quite a nice, evocative pseudonym. Unless that person’s real name is ‘Gordon Trash’, in which case the disguise could be better – he could go sci-fi retro – ‘Trash Gordon’ – which is at least pertinent to the aims of the site…
Hi h-poot. I would agree with every word you say.
What seems to have annoyed certain people is that at the time DV wrote his post, when not one report of the incident told us it had been officially proven to be arson, I found it premature to be:
a] presuming that it was definitely arson
b] assuming that because it was arson, it must be linked to Palin
c] deducing that because it was arson linked to Palin, who has 63% approval ratings among Republicans, the reason for the BBC’s failure to cover it so far must therefore be due to religious / political / racial / cultural bias.
At the time the post was written, none of the above had been established. Even now, only the first point has been.
You say “There is far more basis for speculating that the sort of hatred of Sarah Palin for being a Christian and Conservative incites these sort of acts” – and I agree with you 100%, except that at the time I was writing earlier, it wasn’t even established that any “acts” had been committed.
Now it is established, officially. It was arson, with an attempt made to set fire to church exits while people were inside. Extremely serious. Now it’s entirely fair to see what the BBC does with the story. Now I feel completely comfortable in judging them for any refusal to cover the story, and would tend to agree that if they try to bury it, they do so for ideological reasons.
The story is keeping very quiet here in the states too – as opposed to all those Black Churches burning a decade or so ago – NOT!
The lack of follow up suggests that there was indeed a political dimension that our MSM would much rather not comment on.
henryflower | 17.12.08 – 12:02 pm |
No way. It’s entirely reasonable to suspect both arson and a connection to Sarah Palin from the start. Any time a church or public building goes up in flames, it’s normal to wonder about foul play. It’s standard procedure.
Further, of course the first thing anybody is going to think about is Palin. You can’t expect us all to suddenly forget about the very real problem of Palin Derangement Syndrome. It’s quite reasonable to suspect that somebody doesn’t like her, and since the press pinned her church-going to her sleeve, it’s publicly connected to her candidacy and persona. Given the fact that due to her religious beliefs (not to mention gross misrepresentations of it), Palin was a prime target for ridicule and outright condemnation in the press and on the streets. There’s no denying that fact. It may even have been done by a local, who just didn’t like the attention she brought to town, or by a local rival, or something like that.
With all this in mind, it seems pretty obvious to be suspicious of arson, and a connection to Sarah Palin. In fact, arson seems to have been the first thing on the minds of the authorities in her town. And it probably wasn’t because the arsonist didn’t like the choir. So there’s no problem with David Vance’s suspicions.
As for the BBC’s refusal to report it (and that’s what this is), DV’s mistake seems to have been to use The Obamessiah’s church in his hypothetical. His critics have taken the position that a VP candidate is not as important as a Pres. candidate, so it’s an unfair comparison, Sarah Palin is no longer news as a failed second banana, etc.
Now that I think about it, though, I’m not sure how much that works. The spotlight was on Palin just as much as The Obamessiah during the last couple months, and a thousand times more harshly. If one were to use the level of public profile as the benchmark for reportability (for lack of a better term), then Palin should be nearly equal. Granted, she’s not in the BBC spotlight now, but it’s not like she fell off the face of the earth the day after the election.
In any case, that’s moot because as has already been demonstrated, the BBC had no problem with reporting on fluff, just because they thought it made her look bad, but will not now report on something very personal and very serious. There’s no denying BBC bias on this one.
DP – “It’s entirely reasonable to suspect both arson and a connection to Sarah Palin from the start.”
Indeed it is, and I did, every bit as much as DV did. Privately.
Where we differed was DV’s public assertion that a failure to speculate – before the evidence was in! – constituted evidence of an ideological BBC bias so extreme that it would whitewash acts of violence against Conservatives.
However reasonable the speculation, there was officially no crime to report at that stage. That meant that there was a possibility – however small – that a fire caused by faulty wiring would have caused David Vance to accuse real people of deliberately whitewashing an incident that could’ve killed people, based on their political and social biases. That’s a serious accusation.
I believe that an accusation as serious as that requires even greater and clearer evidence than the common or garden accusation that they favour Gordon Brown. It’s life and death stuff, violence and intolerance.
Do I think the BBC capable of such a callous level of bias? Absolutely: every time they report Islamist violence or Israel-Palestine we see it at its ugliest, at its most naked.
But does that mean we fling this serious accusation about as though it were a spectator sport, before having evidence? I don’t think so. You can’t accuse people of covering up violent crimes for racial/political reasons before evidence even confirms that a crime has been committed. Biased turkey reports and 63% approval ratings have no bearing on that whatsoever.
Now arson is confirmed. Now we can certainly judge the BBC by its choices. Here is the current Americas page:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/default.stm
“Obama named Person of the Year”
“Obama urged to end Cuba embargo”
“Obama is stimulating”
“Tiring of the Blagojevich saga”
“Women get help for sex addiction”
“US man uses pizza in self defence”
“Foes warned off ‘testing’ Obama”
Nothing on the deliberate attempt to burn down Palin’s church with 5 people inside.
Anyone from the BBC care to defend that? As you can see above, I gave you the benefit of the doubt until the facts became clear. Now they are, and you aren’t interested. Any defence for that?
henryflower,
Okay, fair point about withholding public accusation, but this is the BBC we’re talking about, and this was a pretty easy call to make.
DP – agreed. And a pleasure to debate courteously with you, as ever.
As things stand, we can state for a fact that pizza fights and sex addicts are considered by the BBC to be more important American news items than the potential murder of people attending Sarah Palin’s church.
BBC apologists – can you explain that fact please?
HenryF,
The BBC has never waited for anything to be proved before running with a story. Case in point, the fictitious story of US guards at Gitmo p1ssing on a koran.
Al Beeb ran with the story, is as responsible as any of the other MSM outlets for the anger, violence and ultimately deaths caused by the story and then when proven to be a lie, Al beeb dropped the story quicker than a fat chick being dropped after a saturday night fling (and all without the merest retraction).
Mailman
What about the burnings, bombings and attacks round the world on churches and christians in just the last month or so?
Where actual deaths have been alas all too common.
No sign from the BBC.
Indonesia
http://www.bosnewslife.com/4542-indonesia-muslims-burn-churches-homes-over-blasphemy
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023881.php
India
http://www.bosnewslife.com/4500-india-christians-fear-christmas-violence-in-orissa-celebrations-cancelled-bosnewslife-in-depth
http://www.bosnewslife.com/4455-india-militants-attack-christians-in-karnataka-church-bombers-sentenced
Nigeria
http://www.bosnewslife.com/4423-nigeria-authorities-detain-500-after-violence-kills-pastors
http://www.bosnewslife.com/4078-breaking-news-nigeria-muslim-militants-blamed-for-deadly-violence-against-christians
Somalia
http://www.bosnewslife.com/4397-news-alert-somalia-christians-fear-more-attacks-as-ethiopian-troops-advance
http://www.bosnewslife.com/3900-3900-news-alert-somalia-gunmen-kidnap-nuns-governm
Comoros
http://www.bosnewslife.com/4331-christians-detained-beaten-in-indian-ocean-nations
Eritrea
http://www.bosnewslife.com/3908-news-alert-eritrea-launches-new-crackdown-on-christians-110-arrests-reported
Iraq
http://www.bosnewslife.com/3907-3907-news-alert-iraq-militants-kill-two-christian
Iran
http://www.bosnewslife.com/3902-3902-iran-releases-son-of-executed-pastor-on-bail
Pakistan
http://www.bosnewslife.com/3901-3901-pakistan-authorities-threaten-to-bulldoze-doz
Kyrgyzstan
http://www.bosnewslife.com/3891-3891-breaking-news-kyrgyztan-adopts-controversial
I could have published far more for the last few weeks alone and reports from different agencies, but the pattern seems pretty clear, so that is enough.
You all know if any one of these had been against a mosque rather than a church though I suspect the BBC would likely have covered it in force.
And maybe they should consider the real meaning of martyrdom.
BaggieJonathan | 18.12.08 – 12:26 pm |
No Presidential candidates at any of those churches either, so not newsworthy.
But alas all too much death and destruction.
More than to any presidential candidate successful or not.
Only Christians though, so clearly they don’t count.
But if it was a totally false report of someone urinating on a book (distateful though this would have been even if it had of been true, it would not have been fatal), or a cartoon that kills no one, or a book written years ago by a booker prize winner that kills no one, then its huge BBC news…