Here’s One Show reporter Ellie Harrison sporting a CND T-shirt for a segment about new veterinary procedures on last night’s programme:
Hat tip to Dumb Jon, who wasn’t impressed with the show. I dare say he won’t be pleased to hear that Adrian Chiles will be presenting a late night spin-off called The Ten Show.
Broadcasting executives addicted to cocaine are routinely praised by bosses for their “creative genius”, a former BBC producer told MPs.
Sarah Graham, who worked on children’s programmes for the corporation and took cocaine for nine years, said use of the drug remained widespread among senior media executives and taking it helped to boost their careers.
The Times also provides a brief history of coke sniffing BBC celebs. Same story covered by the Telegraph, and the Mail.
It’s really not news — it’s pushing a point of view.
When I read that I thought that yet another important political figure had grasped the truth about the BBC. That it was said by Obama’s chief adviser David Axelrod was even better. I know Axelrod is essentially a Daley machine hack from Chicago but he was the mastermind behind Obama’s meteoric rise from obscure non achieving, inexperienced, state senate placeman to Saviour of the World in five years so he must have his finger on the pulse.
But then the penny dropped. He wasn’t talking about the BBC – he was fingering Fox News (or the right wing Fox News as the Guardian likes to call it.)
Apparently the White House feels that Fox, unlike ABC, CBS, NBC and the other cable channels CNN and MSNBC is not being particularly helpful to the President. In fact Axelrod accused Fox of having a “perspective” and I doubt he meant it was leftward.
Now for an administration to come out so openly against a major media outlet is unprecedented – imagine the furore if George W Bush had made a similar remark about MSNBC. Yet the rest of the US media have been strangely muted about the whole affair as has the BBC….I wonder why?
The one honourable exception has been ABC’s Jake Tapper who tackled White House spokesman Robert Gibb. Gibb bumbled away in his usual Oliver Hardy manner – and the rest of the media sat on their hands.
Fact is, of course, that from fairly early in the Democrat primaries the networks and CNN and MSNBC were in the tank for Obama and gave him a very easy ride and continue to do so – for the moment. They invested so much capital in pimping the product that to take him off the shelf so early would destroy the little credibility they might still think they have. Axelrod is irritated by not having a full house hand. Fox is the one channel that has refused to worship at the Obama altar and the administration doesn’t like it.
So – is it just sour grapes? Of course not – Axelrod is an old Chicago hand. You don’t worry about not being liked in the Daley universe – but you do worry about the numbers..and Fox has the numbers, surging far ahead of the other cable channels. Fox has power and therefore needs containment in case the others are tempted to leave the temple and follow a similar path.
Actually there has already been a mild attempt to show a degree of buyer’s remorse on a recent edition of NBC’s Saturday Night Live – yes that SNL where Tina Fey was encouraged to poke fun at Sarah Palin week after week during the 2008 campaign and not only revived her flagging career but won several awards for service to the cause. SNL did a very feeble skit on Obama with a mock report card which appeared to suggest that the man had spoken brilliantly but actually achieved very little.
Axelrod was not best pleased so within hours someone had a quiet word with CNN because they actually presented an item which fact checked the skit and “proved” that SNL were not being fair!
No danger of anything like that over here, thank goodness. As Dan Hannan remarked to Fox’s Glenn Beck (the tearful Glenn Beck as the beautifully balanced Matt Frei calls him) the idea that any right winger would be allowed a permanent slot on the BBC would be laughed out of court…..
Victoria Derbyshire’s recent Nick Clarke Award for best broadcast interview has been rewarded with the loss of an hour to Obama-lovin’ glamour puss Gabby Logan, who will now be on from 12 ’til 2 weekdays. She’ll be followed by Richard Bacon which means that R5L’s afternoon output will now be determined by the daily obsessions of a tiny number of like-minded celebrity luvvie twitterers.
At least my preference for the afternoon slot has been given his own show: former Sunday Sport editor Tony Livesey takes over from Bacon for the late night stint. Livesey’s occasional stand-in sessions on Weekend Breakfast have made the alternative to the Sunday morning religious broadcasting on Radio 4 bearable for a change. Bonus – his appointment has not gone down well with one Five Live permanent fixture, leftie luvvie Boyd Hilton. I hope Livesey bears that in my mind when he’s booking his guests.
For those unfamiliar with Livesey’s work, this is from the Press Gazette report following his resignation from Sport newspapers:
Livesey told Press Gazette his lasting legacy would be the Cutting Edge Channel 4 documentary about the Sport that showed him coming up with the headline “Shoots You, Sir” about the murder of Gianni Versace. The headline referred to popular comedy sketch show The Fast Show that included a sketch where two tailors said the catchphrase “Suits you, Sir”.
Livesey said: “One of my other proudest moments was when I didn’t quite believe the story ‘Aliens turned our son into a fish finger’ so I told the reporter to go to Asda buy a packet of fish fingers, mix the child in with them and see if the mother could pick it out.”
A bigger role for Livesey has got to be a good thing, yeah?
Update. Forgot the hat-tip to Martin in the comments.
Update 2. Imagine the outrage from all the luvvies if Twitter had existed when Livesey responded to the death of a gay fashion icon with the headline “Shoots You Sir”.
Panorama used to be a grown up serious programme. In the olden days. Now it’s more of a pantomime. They set out to prove something to the halfwits they assume are watching. Last night they decided to prove that Asians suffer racial abuse. They set about recruiting two Asians to hang out with hidden cameras, as a kind of undercover honey-trap. Well, they weren’t undercover, they were actual Asians, with religious headdress. That confused some of the target racists into shouting “Paki” or, once, “Jew!” Some of the taunts were undeniably racist. But that’s not what real racism is.
The disgraceful hostility emanating from the lazy goodfornothing lumps of pointlessness we were shown was less an example of Islamophobia than of societal meltdown. I suspect that anyone loitering there would cop it, doubly so if they were wearing identifying apparatus of any kind, be it religious – or any other random sign of weakness, infirmity, or purse carrying. It was a kind of no-go area. So what was Panorama trying to prove?
That they were incompetent documentary makers who had little regard for the intelligence of the audience? They tried to manipulate one of this country’s worst social abominations into a matter of Islamophobic /Asian victimhood, but what they succeeded in showing was their own agenda.
Chairman Mao and a red star. Aww, how sweet.
A BBC regular proudly displaying a Hitler badge and a swastika would soon see the programme invitations dry up, and rightly so. Lefties are held to different standards and are allowed to celebrate their communist mass-murdering heroes by claiming “retro irony” or some similar bullshit.
(The other badge relates to a show by the comedy trio the Penny Dreadfuls)
Update October 22. Jupitus responds. Hello to all you leftie tossers.
This morning’s BBC news is making much play with a letter in the Times denouncing those who appropriate icons of British military history for political purposes. It was one of the lead items on R4 news.
Two former heads of the Army are among those to put their names to a letter accusing “those who seek to hijack the good name of Britain’s military”.
It does not name the BNP but has been issued as part of a new campaign.
They write: “We call on all those who seek to hijack the good name of Britain’s military for their own advantage to cease and desist.
“The values of these extremists – many of whom are essentially racist – are fundamentally at odds with the values of the modern British military, such as tolerance and fairness.”
Well, I’m sure you can’t expect the (former) Army top brass to keep copies of everyone’s election leaflets – but surely the BBC’s army of newshounds and political correspondents must have noticed that the 2009 Euro elections featured an awful lot of what you could loosely call ‘nationalist’ iconography which didn’t come from the party not named by the generals. Try this, spotted by Iain Dale.
OK, why haven’t the BBC spotted this leaflet, handed out in the West Midlands Euro constituency in 2009 – by an ‘essentially racist’ party ? I noted it at the time as the Battle of the Spitfires.
Surely, as the generals have not named any political party, but purely those “who seek to hijack the good name of Britain’s military for their own advantage” , the BBC piece should include the Labour Party in its list of suspects ? Where’s that balance I keep hearing about ?
A new open thread …over to YOU!
Writing over in the FT, Philip Stephens has an interesting article on the BBC and he makes five suggestions as to how he thinks the BBC could be saved. I think each of his ideas has individual merit but perhaps where he and I differ is in whether the BBC requires saving in the first place! I am sure that if the BBC implemented the suggestions Philip makes it would be a much improved broadcaster but we would still be paying through the teeth for it. The missing step is the sixth one – axe the license tax and let the BBC fly free….
I have read very carefully Richard Black’s defence of the BBC’s reporting of the so-called problem of “climate change” (mentioned by David Vance in a previous post). It’s an important statement that shockingly reveals the depth of the malais and dishonesty in BBC journalism. He’s in that strange cloud cuckoo land that BBC reporters inhabit, and he’s deployed all the standard BBC responses to claims of bias, especially the one that if both sides of a particular argument complain about a BBC feature, the corporation must be in the middle somewhere and therefore right.
What he doesn’t take into account, of course, is the fanatacism of the warmists who yell “rape” loudly the minute anyone questions their cherished religious beliefs; and what he studiously avoids (the elephant in the room) is the fact that in the years I have been following the BBC’s “climate change” coverage, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of stories where the views of warmists – no matter how ridiculous or untrue (as in Gordon Brown’s maniacal codswallop this morning) – are reported unchallenged, while those containing the views of so-called “sceptics” can be counted on a few hands.
What he also doesn’t say is that the BBC Director general recently told a meeting of the Parliamentary media group that in his view, there is a “consensus” of scientific opinion that supports global warming, and therefore the BBC’s responsibility in reporting such “science” is to give prominence and precedence to the warmists. Thus there is deliberate, systematic under-reporting of “scepticism” sanctioned at the highest level of the corporation.
A test of Richard Black’s assertion that the BBC is getting it right could not be simpler. Take for example, the stunt a couple of days ago when the (Muslim, western-hating) cabinet of the Maldives met underwater to protest about “climate change”. Their views were given wall-to-wall Beeb coverage, not only on the website, but in BBC1 bulletins. What was conspicuously absent from the BBC’s reports were the views of the many scientists who have surveyed the Maldives and found that sea levels there are actually falling. The Watts Up With That website has shown persuasively that the government of the Maldives not only know that this is the case, but that also, they have actively censored the evidence.
When Richard Black and the rest of his BBC chums start publishing such information, I will be open to the idea that they might be changing. Until then, they remain climate change fanatics, bent on spreading scientific hocus-pocus of a type not seen this seen of the Enlightenment.
