Monthly Archives: January 2010

Panorama (Non Culinary Version)

By | |
27 Comments

I’ve been thinking about the influence the BBC still has over the general public. I hope it’s diminishing, what with other sources becoming part of everyone’s normal news-gathering. But for now it still seems hugely significant; even if it were to cease tomorrow, the residual effect would take time to wear off.

Monday’s Panorama was so one sided that I didn’t even attempt a point-by-point analysis, but chose instead to express my despair in the form of cookery.

Robin Shepherd took the bull by the horns in a more masterful fashion, setting out the programme’s flaws with his customary thoroughness and accessibility. For example he revealed that the individual who was supposed to represent the voice of impartiality and reason was in fact “Danny Seidemann, a well known (but not to British viewers) left-wing lawyer-activist.”
He also added the bits (in bold ) that Jane Corbin neglected to mention, vital bits that changed the entire focus:
“When the State of Israel was born in 1948 — following Arab and Palestinian rejection of a peace agreement accepted by Israel which would have seen the internationalisation of the city — Jerusalem was divided.
The West of the city became part of Israel and the East was controlled by Jordan — which expelled Jewish residents and forbade Jews from praying at all of the city’s holy sites.
In 1967, Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing the West Bank following war with its Arab neighbours. That war was caused by Arab governments and the Palestinians who had the aim of eliminating the state of Israel in its entirety and expelling its Jewish residents.”
When I saw the trail, before seeing the programme, I referred to the same bias by omission on the open thread, and asked:
“Does she think Israel started an unprovoked expansionist war in 1967? It looks like it. She must surely know that that is almost the exact opposite of the truth.”

Honest Reporting delves deeper, setting the record straight and unravelling the misconceptions that Jane Corbin was so eager to perpetuate. In summary, the distortion and denial of the Jewish historical link with East Jerusalem, the allegations of racism and ethnic cleansing in the housing policy, the facts behind the notorious Hanoun family eviction, the shooting incident, and various other notable omissions and half truths.

All of this is not so unusual for the BBC. Does it matter? There are after all, some saving graces. The Newsnight report from Sderot ( scroll to 27:25 ) that was more balanced, though someone mentioned that it took a member of the British Army to do that, and not a BBC employee. (I note that Paxo revised the obligatory Pali war dead figure down from the usual 1400 to 1300, presumably for one day only.)

But the general consensus that Israel’s legitimacy itself is questionable persists.
I wonder why the UK tries so hard to misrepresent a country that it ought to admire, why the BBC has orchestrated a delegitimising campaign that ignores Israel’s wonderful achievements and altruistic deeds, and distorts and twists everything it possibly can to depict it in a bad light, concentrates on its flaws and shortcomings, magnifying them out of all proportion while glossing over that of its – and our own – enemy.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Hewitt on Obama

By | | ,
15 Comments

A celebratory tip of the Red Sox cap to David Preiser for pointing out this rather fine commenter’s fisk of Gavin Hewitt’s latest blog.

It’s a bit rich of Hewitt to now pass comment on the Europeans who “had fallen for Obama” when his own presidential campaign diary read like a romantic novel. Even I was inspired at the time, offering this as a suggestion for a book cover:

Unfortunately it didn’t get past the BBC moderators.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Sunday Mornings on Five Live

By | | ,
21 Comments

A couple of weeks ago Heat magazine editor Sam Delaney appeared on Kate Silverton’s radio show as her sidekick for the day, and he left listeners in no doubt about his political leanings with a rant about Cameron and the Tories. I assumed at the time that Silverton would have a different “studio friend” each week, reflecting a broad spectrum of political opinion. That was pretty stupid of me, this being the BBC (and Radio Five Live in particular). As part of the station’s new year shake-up Delaney’s role on the show is actually permanent. No surprises, then, to read this in Monday’s Guardian:

Sam Delaney… was once a researcher for Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown…
In the 1990s, as a self-confessed “19-year-old stonehead”, he was passionately into Labour politics and one of his jobs as Harman’s researcher was to deliver her tuna sandwiches when she was in shadow cabinet meetings. His boss at Millbank was Ed Miliband. “Most of the people who were part of the research group, and would have a pint with each other or lunch in the canteen, are now cabinet ministers, whereas I am editor of Heat.”

Having listened to the mockney tones of the former Labour researcher, one can stay tuned for 7 Day Sunday, presented by Tory-hating Chris Addison. The Independent’s radio reviewer wasn’t impressed with the first programme:

Chris Addison, the comedian who plays the weedy Ollie Reeder in The Thick of It, has been given his own topical news show 7 Day Sunday.
As usual, there is a certain amount of “category error” in this choice. As Ollie in The Thick of It, Addison is hilariously funny, but this is because his lines are written by the comic genius Armando Iannucci. On 7 Day Sunday, however, Addison is writing his own lines, assisted by a studio gang who would laugh at a pig’s bladder on a stick. On The Thick of It there is snappy dialogue at a thousand miles an hour, but if you talk like that on radio without enough jokes or substance then the listener’s mind skitters all over the place trying to concentrate, before giving up. The show’s brief was to “pull apart the week’s big news stories”, but in the event the only news covered was snow. Weirdly for someone who made his name in a political satire there wasn’t any. Why not? The Gordon Brown coup should have provided acres of material, but it took ages to get round to, and then got a paltry two minutes.

This reluctance to make fun of the Labour government contrasts sharply with Addison’s attitude to the Tories. This week he joked about dancing on Margaret Thatcher’s grave. Classy.

Radio Five Live. Gearing up for the general election.

Update. In the comments Ryan reproduces an email from R5L controller Adrian Van Klaveren re Delaney.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

AND THE LIGHTS ALL WENT ON IN MASSACHUSETTS!

By | |
49 Comments

Poor BBC. I listened with bated breath to their coverage of the stunning defeat for Obama’s Democrats in the heartland seat of Massachusetts. I mean, how would they spin this one? Well, strategy seems to be so far today to not talk about it too much, to then suggest it is Obama’s first real defeat since he ascended to power (So whitwashing the stunning defeats he suffered back in the Gubernatorial races last November) and finally to Blame Bush – after all, poor old Obama is getting the kickback from voters because he hasn’t solved the economic crisis, yet. A wonderful day to hear the BBC in denial of the obvious fact that it is Obama’s radicalism – the thing they drool over – that is handing victory after victory to the GOP.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Won’t You Listen To The Children?

By | |
16 Comments

The dust has long settled over Hoaxenhagen and we are all still alive. 50 Days To Save The World turned out to be merely alive in a combination of Gordoom’s head and the hand-wringing siren call of the Warmists. Despite ClimateGate and a growing body of evidence to the contrary, rather like a George Romero zombie, the hysteria of AGW just won’t die.

Consider this BBC “look back” over the conference – when schools around the world shared their views through Climate Change Interactive, a BBC World Class project with the British Council (which means you funded it both ways! Bonus!).

These are selected excerpts from the BBC site which make for scary reading in their drone-like rote. Of course these children are all being drip-fed with this nonsense by their respective education authorities, but as all 29 contributions are slavishly pro-AGW one has to ask: Were no non-conformist views submitted for this list? If none, were the BBC asking a balanced question or was a question framed to deliver these responses? Were the responses filtered to remove any sceptical input? And why does the BBC not inform children that there is a contrary school of thought…as a neutral news source should?

We believe that we’re affected by climate change because it seems like winter starts earlier.
Sleepy Hollow High School, New York State, USA
Many dust storms blow in the area where I live. There is dust everywhere. Mostly it is very hot, sometimes exceeding 50 degrees Celsius. The duration of summer is increasing.
Government Boys Middle School, Kamboh Nagar, Khanewal, Pakistan
I’ve noticed the water getting further up the side of the pier and the banks.
Sanday Community School, The Orkneys, Scotland
Bournemouth’s main industry is tourism and the wet, drab, grey summers we have been having recently, as well as our beaches are getting washed away with the storms are seriously affecting our income as a town.
Avonbourne School, Bournemouth, England
We are affected by climate change, because in winter it gets colder than before and hotter too in summer.
Al Baihani High Model School, Aden, Yemen

There are a couple of gems though. You’ve got to admire this entry:
There are no ‘seasons’ in our country; it’s just hot, hot, and hot!
Dhahran Ahliyya Schools, Dhahran, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia

Erm, yep. “Saudi Arabia” was my clue. Steering into dangerous BBC waters we also have:

The only one who controls it is God.
Njad School, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

How did that one sneak past the BBC anti-Christian censors?
This continuous AGW propaganda is nonsense with a hat on.

Hat-tip to G.O.T. for the graphic, and this post crossed with John Horne Tooke mentioning it on the previous thread.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

RAIN DANCE

By | |
5 Comments

One of the great greenie apocalyptic lies is that flooding is on the increase because of ‘climate change’. Every time a river breaks its banks, Richard Black and his cronies mutter with smug satisfaction that it proves yet again that the science is ‘settled’. Their main partner in crime in this alarmism is the so-called Environment Agency, who have been proudly trumpeting – with full BBC assistance – a new report purporting to show that unless we cough up an extra £1bn a year in flood defences, we are all going to drown. As usual, in such BBC reporting, there’s not a flicker of a mention of factors such as building on flood plains or – shock horror – that it has always rained in the UK, sometimes quite a lot.

A few minutes browsing on this rather neat little archive shows that not only has Britain frequently experienced floods, but also that they were happening long before BBC greenie panic merchants fingered CO2 as the cause. I was particularly chilled by this, from 1770:

The accounts that have been received during the course of the present month…of the floods in several parts of the Kingdom, exceed any thing of the kind that has happened in the memory of man. The cities and towns situated on the banks of the Severn have suffered very great distress; those on the Trent have suffered still more; the great Bedford Level is now under water; horfes, mills, bridges, in almost every brook, have been borne down; but the most affecting scene of all happened at Coventry, where the waters in the middle of the night came rolling into the lowermost street of the town, and almost instantaneously rose to an alarming height. The poor there, fill the houses from top to bottom; those who occupied the lower apartments perished immediately…

And this, from a couple of years earlier:

The heaviest rain fell at London and the country round it that has been known in the memory of man. It began in the evening, and in a few hours the waters poured down Highgate Hill with incredible violence; the common shores in several parts of the town not being able to carry off the torrent, the adjacent houses were filled almost to the first floors; immense damage was done, and as it happened in the night, many were awakened from sleep in the greatest consternation. The Serpentine river in Hyde-park rose so high, that it forced down a part of the wall and poured with such violence upon Knightsbridge, that the inhabitants expected the whole town to be overflowed…

I noted especially the rather sonorous apocalyptic tenor of the newspaper reports; would that BBC journalists could command such lyricism to leaven their contemporary leaden reports of doom.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Exclamation Mark!

By | |
16 Comments

Here’s the blurb to a Mark Mardell report about Obama’s first year:

In a BBC/Harris Poll 20% of Americans would give President Obama an ‘A’ for the job he’s done in year one.
But an equal number of people give him a ‘C’, and the same percentage gives him an F! Mark Mardell reports.

An F! About Obama! Beloved Obama! It’s inconceivable! It’s outrageous!

Update. I see the BBC has flown heavyweight political analyst Richard Bacon over to the States to celebrate the first anniversary of O’s inauguration (written into his latest R5L contract, no doubt). Let’s hope the voters of Massachusetts give him something to really talk about.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Cooking with Corbin

By | |
10 Comments

Cookery programmes are still popular, and last night’s Panorama offered another traditional and much loved recipe for making Israel look really evil.

Ingredients.
Two or three bright-eyed fanatics.
One grey-haired self-hating lawyer with American accent.
One or two Chosen People, with multiple progeny.

Spicy Topping:
Assorted Palestinians. (select: sad, angry, wounded, bereaved, evicted from home, tearful child.
Before use, carefully remove all traces of religiously based anti-Semitism and murderous intent.

Garnish.
Available off the shelf: Ready-made clip of small group walking towards camera in religious fancy dress. Must include one large furry hat made from enormous car tyre.

Method.
Pre heat audience by drip-feeding propaganda for 40 years till boiling. Scrupulously remove and discard all historical context. Mix together, dish up and present, preferably by woman who has stolen Clare Short’s face.

If this is facetious, there is a serious side. Panorama used to be an important programme, a flagship BBC product. Now it’s superficial, sensational and slapdash. A microcosm of the BBC.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.