I’ve been away all day and just back but have listened to the BBC at several times and the coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough football crowd disaster was omnipresent. I remember watching the story unfold – it was undeed a terrible event and I feel sorry for all those bereaved families BUT the relentless MOPERY emanating from Liverpool and the BBC’s slavish coverage of it was over the top. Over on A Tangled Web, one of my fellow writers, Mike Cunningham, also picked up on the scale of the BBC coverage. Wondered what you reckon?
96 TEARS.
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hi dave
i did wonder where the relentless BBC memorials were for the thousands of dead over hundreds of atrocities.
i suspect (though i have enmormous sympathy for the liverpuglians) that they give it so much prominence is that they are so very good at complaining and the beeb dont want to be in the same place as the Sun.
ngg
sorry i reposted this
hi dave
i did wonder where the relentless BBC memorials were for the thousands of dead over hundreds of atrocities in northern ireland.
i suspect (though i have enmormous sympathy for the liverpuglians) that they give it so much prominence is that they are so very good at complaining and the beeb dont want to be in the same place as the Sun.
ngg
ngg 9:26
Liverpudians complaining, surely not ?
No mention of lovely Burnham getting heckled either – odd.
hi dick
they covered it at 6 pm
but not for too long. channel four covered it at 7 very well
ngg
Apparently the police working at Hillsborough that day were all Scousers. When fans asked which Block they should stand in, all the police kept saying was “A A A A A.”
i’ll get my coat
Really don’t see the bias.
sick joke dude
Radio 4 News at Ten leads with Liverpool. Should it not be a subsidiary story, not the lead item ?
But at least they reported that Burnham was interuppted by calls for “justice for the 96”.
I just wonder if 96 Forest supporters had died if we would see the same stuff?
Boris Johnson had a good point about Liverpool.
I feel sorry for those that died, but we don’t see this sort of thing for the Herald of Free Enterprise or the Marchioness. Lockerbie, the 737 that crashed at East midlands airport etc etc.
Here is another anniversary far worse than the Liverpool one, which occurred on the 15th April 1945.
The Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen is liberated by units of the British 11th Armoured Division.
@Martin
I think if it had been Forest fans, the coverage would have been much the same. The fact that Liverpool were, and still are, a bigger club than Forest plays a part, though.
It got so much coverage because it’s the national game and was so public – plus a football ground is not a place you expect to run the risk of dying. (Unike flying, or driving a car. If it had been two busloads of fans crashing into each other on the motorway, it wouldn’t have got the same coverage, or have the same resonance.)
I don’t mean to trivialise the loss of those many families but I do wonder at the scale of BBC coverage. It’s not so much bias but is is unbalanced.
Does anyone voluntarily go to Liverpool ?
I went on a trip and never went back.
Eh? You are right of course – but who chooses which tragedy to commemorate? It was a dreadful event but there are others.
April 15 1912: The British luxury liner Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg; it was among the worst maritime disasters in history, with more than 1,500 dead.
Whilst I don’t wish to appear disrespectful to the families of those who lost their lives, it does seem to me that Liverpudlians as a group tend to go totally OTT with the self-pity thing. Any semblance of dignity or decorum seems to go straight out of the window.
I suppose we can think ourselves lucky that Jade Goody wasn’t a Scouser.
It is interesting that the BBC hardly mentions the dead and wounded soldiers coming back from Afghanistan. I guess they can’t blame the Tories for that.
Martin | 15.04.09 – 10:43 pm
Not yet, anyhow.
Do they always give this as much coverage? I certainly can’t remember this much before.
Maybe it is only because it is the 20th anniversary?
Grant, Liverpool has improved a lot recently, there is even a spark of self reliance developing in the populace. It is worth revisiting.
nrg 11:00
That is great if they are learning to stand on their own feet. But, frankly, I have more deserving people to help.
Funnily enough, I think it went the other way. For all that there’s been plenty of coverage, you’d be hard pressed to work out what it was that’s so controversial about Hillsborough. Apparently, this is the one time we don’t need to examine the ‘root causes’.
Well there was a minute’s silence at the weekend and a two minute one today not just in Liverpool but Nottingham and Sheffield as well.
Both the BBC and Sky have been all over this story. There just a little too much of this for my liking.
DJ 11:14
Yes, funny that the BBC haven’t spun the “root causes” as “Thatcherism” !
Belsen was a well-run concentration camp until it was overwhelmed by inmates transferred from other parts of the Reich as the Allies encroached in the final months of war.
More crap about the camp beeboid and his shite electric car.
“…Unlike traditional electric cars, Chevy Volt has a revolutionary propulsion system that takes you beyond the power of the battery. It will use a lithium-ion battery with a gasoline-powered, range-extending engine that drives a generator to provide electric power when you drive beyond the 40-mile battery range…”
So basically if you drive less than 40 miles a day (and that 4o miles is when the batteries are new probably not on a full car load nor running the air conditioning system etc) you are dragging around a petrol engine for no good reason.
As Top Gear showed thrash a Toyota Prius around and it does less to the gallon than a BMW.
Not only that but the beeboid failed to mention that electricity has to be produced which at the moment is by fossil fuel or nuclear.
sorry for the sick joke. i guess i was just getting sick and tired of all the Hillsborough stuff.
theres something about that tragedy that makes the mawkish self-righteousness about it repellent – like it or not, the deaths were caused by DRUNKEN football fans.
not by fans running away from a fire, or a riot. No. it was caused by greedy drunken Liverpool fans wanting to get into the ground without paying for a ticket.
sorry for the folks that died, but the lack of self-examination by Liverpool supporters is kind of sickening. all this bollocks about “justice” and blaming others, when THEY CAUSED IT THEMSELVES…
god, give me strength…
the biggest downside to all these electric cars is the price.
I think it cost $40K for that heap of crap shown tonight.
If Obama thinks the poorer working class American is going to pay more green taxes on their only just affordable second hand petrol car, whilst their middle class neighbour whistles around in a low tax electric car, he might have a shock coming.
America will politely tolerate idiots like Ethical Man for a while, but he will soon hit some real opposition
Martin | 15.04.09 – 11:21 pm |
indeed. Eco Fascism is truely the realm of the madman.
logic doesnt apply. if you have an electric vehicle you are “green” – in spite of charging it up from electricity from fossil fuel power plants.
the Japanese have the right idea for this nonsense:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_FCX_Clarity
Hydrogen fuel cell.
“Top Gear showed thrash a Toyota Prius around and it does less to the gallon than a BMW.”
Sorry but that’s mostly Jeremy Clarkson bias – ever heard of a slip stream? Any idea which car was in the front and which was benefiting from far the slip stream?
The Prius really isn’t that bad a car, but would be stupid to buy one until they have a plug-in version. At least the Volt gets that part right, but it is by GM so will almost certainly be crap.
Liverpool is not known as the world capital of self pity for nothing.
I spent two miserable whole long years on Merseyside. Never again.
Can anyone tell me if the BBC have edited and rearranged this bit.
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8000635.stm
As I understand it as soon as Burnham mentioned Brown’s name the crowd started booing. In the BBC clip they start applauding. Is that right?
archduke they did not cause it themselves – the drukenness and trying to get in without tickets was only a secondary factor that contributed the the problem.
Most deaths were dues to the stadium design and the policing – Liverpool fans just made things worse and perhaps increased the number of deaths.
You’d still be looking at 50+ deaths I would think even if it was a decent set of fans.
Douglas Quaid | 15.04.09 – 11:46 pm |
fair enough. i take your point.
caging people behind fences has got to be one of the worst decisions ever made. disaster waiting to happen.
which reminds me – theres a similar disaster waiting to happen at Waterloo with their shiny new ticket turnstiles on the platforms.
god help us if a bomb goes off or a fire breaks out. theres a Hillsborough panic crush waiting to happen there…
If I remember for some reason Forest got the other end of the stadium which held more fans.
There was a big screw up no one can deny that. The argument is that Liverpool has a habit of going all Princess Diana every time something happens. In fairness I nearly threw up the other week when Jade Goody was buried.
This Country needs a bit of backbone.
charlie brooker pointed out on his newswipe show this evening that Jade Goody’s boyfriend’s speech was carried by all the major news channels.
and yet not a single speech at the G20 protests was aired. not a single one..
backbone? i think the country needs a whole friggin skeleton..
I’m going to stand against the grain on this one. I’m from Sheffield, I have family at Hillsborough who saw. And sod the police and the hype, it was the Liverpudlian scum that caused it. Not the decent ones who died, the ones who actually had tickets and who were in the right place, but the drunken scum who pushed. And vandalised. And urinated in the streets.
That the policing wasn’t perfect is undisputed. But I’ll bet not a single policeman woke up that day and though “ok – good day to kill some Liverpudlians”. Whereas hundreds if not thousands of Liverpudlians woke up that day and though “ok – good day to get pissed and then push my way in. Ticket? What ticket?”.
Honestly – sod ’em. Sod the bloody lot. My complete and sincere condolences to the honest ones who died. My total contempt the scum hiding behind enquiries and it-was-everyone’s-fault-but-mine.
I don’t remember any tributes to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Heysel ‘disaster.
In fact, the silence was deafening.
Today’s OTT coverage smacked of one of those ‘good day to bury bad news’ days.
Christ Red Lepond you are an odious troll. Belsen was merely overcrowded huh?
How many Michelin stars did Belsen have until it was “overwhelmed”?
Bit of a denyer by any chance?
Denier
I’m surprised, and saddened that DV has opened up a thread in which the ignorant, Martin, archduke etc, can spew forth their ill-informed SHITE.
Read this, and then repost, I challenge you.
http://www.southyorks.police.uk/sites/default/files/foi/significantpublicinterest/interim%20report%20hillsborough.zip
To this day not a single person has been held accountable for the failures which occured that day.
JUSTICE – is it too much to ask?
glj | 16.04.09 – 12:44 am
ask the fans without tickets who created the crush. blaming the cops gets those people off the hook.
pitpasschris | Homepage | 16.04.09 – 12:30 am
bradford city f.c. fire 1985.
seems to be forgotten. and yet thats an even more clear case of utter neglect and wilful manslaughter.
glj: “I’m surprised, and saddened that DV has opened up a thread in which the ignorant, Martin, archduke etc, can spew forth their ill-informed SHITE.”
Surprised why? It’s what DV does. But he justifies it on the basis that umpteen page views shows that he’s popular. It had nothing do with truth, or good journalism, or any sort of justice – only the rampant ego of a sad individual.
and yet yer all on here talking about it.
job done for DV.
archduke | 16.04.09 – 1:12 am | #
But you clearly haven’t read the Taylor report, have you?
So your opinions are based on what exactly? Personal experience?
I’ve stood in the Lepping’s Lane end with West Ham a few months before the Hillsborough Disaster.
We only had a couple of thousand people in there and there was plenty of room left. I still don’t know what exactly happened on that fateful day but I do know it was a trap.
All I can say is R.I.P.
glj | 16.04.09 – 1:21 am
my opinions are based on what happened and how Liverpool hasn’t faced up to the fact that their own fans caused the disaster.
i guess thats why it really hurts for them. they KNOW that they caused it themselves. hence you get all the blame culture and wanting “justice”.
has anyone taken any of the ticketless fans who caused the disaster to task? of course not. easier to blame the cops.
Socialists F****d at US Tea Parties