Interesting insight from someone who worked for the BBC
During “Today” this morning, there were two instances of outrageous BBC grovelling to Labour. Just after 7.38am who pops up but John Reid to position himself as a champion of “individual freedom of conscience”. I thought this a bit rich coming from someone who has been at the centre of this ever more totalitarian government but he was given an easy ride. Then, just a few minutes later, we had Alan Johnson on to announce punitive legislation against Pub Licensees who dare to hold Happy Hours and the like. Again, Johnson was not pushed in any way and was allowed to waffle on as if Labour itself had not been involved in bringing about 24 hour booze culture.
Have you picked up on BBC coverage of the Jihad attacks carried out by the Taliban in Kabul today? I suggest to you that the tone of the coverage was almost one of….admiration. The BBC seems to take perverse delight that these dark ages barbarians can carry out such atrocities.
Have you read Mark Mardell’s item on the fierce battle taking place in the USA for the senate seat left vacant by the death of Ted Kennedy? Mark seems quietly confident that the Dem’s will win this which strikes me as a bit odd since most other commentators are suggesting that Scott Brown is ahead in the polls and that Obama has been forced to do all he can to keep this iconic seat in the control of the Dems. Should the GOP win, it will be a terrible low for the BBC, as Obama’s unpopularity will become all too visceral. His radical leftism may excite the BBC but evidently a significant section of the electorate thinks otherwise. How could this be – when the God-King is but within his first year? Mardell and the rest of the pro-Dem sycophants at the BBC better get used to this pattern of losing Dems – roll on the mid-terms.
Anyone catch posh Ed Stourton’s travelogue on that charming resort of Gaza this morning? (7.39am). I was touched hearing his all too evident admiration for the tunnelling skills of those fine Hamastan inhabitants although angered at the way in which the evil Jews have wrought all of this due to their “Operation Cast Lead” a year ago. Good old BBC – ALWAYS fair and balanced on this topic.
The Sunday Times reports today that the IPCC 2007 report perpetuated a massive untruth about global warming, that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It’s a truly astonishing story of how a supposedly scientific body that preaches unassailable ‘facts’ will take any alarmist titbit and magnify it to the nth degree. Guess who was foremost in reporting this nonsense? The BBC of course. To be fair, it has reported some doubt about the 2035 figure, but overwhelmingly, it has supported the ‘we are all doomed’ line. This, for example, is from June:
Glacier melting in the Himalayas is virtually certain to disrupt water supplies within the next 20 to 30 years. Floods and rock avalanches are virtually certain to increase. Heavily-populated coastal regions, including the deltas of rivers such as the Ganges and Mekong, are likely to be at risk of increased flooding.
Kevin Marsh is probably not a well-known name outside the rarified corridors of the BBC. But as head of the BBC’s College of Journalism and also a former editor of Radio 4’s Today, he’s one of the corporation’s top news wallahs, shortly due to retire on an obscenely fat pension. So how does he practise his trade? As a scion of public service broadcasting, with its binding principles of fairness and lack of bias? Er, no. Well not according to Antonia Hoyle, writing in today’s Mail on Sunday. Mr Marsh did not like former BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan’s (he who broke the story of the dodgy Iran intelligence dossier) rather positive entry on Wikipedia, so he doctored it, adding the telling phrase that his reputation for breaking news ‘was not always deserved’. Likewise, our Kev thought the Wiki entry for his predecessor as editor of Today, Rod Liddle, was a tad too nice. Originally the Liddle section said that he had used Today to ‘break’ new stories. Kev’s neatly edited version said that he had ‘tried with limited success to switch the programme to a more tabloid approach’. Maiow. That, in BBC speak is the highest form of insult.
Mr Gilligan claims that Mr Marsh is not happy with him because, as a result of the Hutton report – which considered the BBC’s handling of the Iraq dossier- his career as an editor ended and he became instead ‘deputy head of training’.
I should add that Mr Marsh strongly denies that he was acting inappropriately; he is quoted as saying he was merely ensuring accuracy. Of course. All I will say is that I made a number of complaints against Today items when dear Kev was editor, and attended meetings where he was there, so I saw his style first hand. His approach was always to bend the facts in every way he could.
I asked, last week, how long it would be before the intrepid Roger Harrabin came up with a defence of the Met office, after his Yorkshire-based colleague, Paul Hudson, dared to suggest that Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi (among others) was more accurate with his weather-forecasting than the Met and its £170m global warming lying machine (aka a supercomputer). Well, it’s taken him all week. And if you can understand his back-flipping, contortionist – nay, fantastical – reasoning, you deserve a prize. As I see it, our friend Mr Harrabin believes that when the Met Office is wrong, they are actually right, because they are nearly right; and that in any case, it doesn’t matter, because it’s getting much hotter, and their supercomputer can see that, whereas the day-to-day incidences of freezing etc, don’t really count because they are part of the ‘frying tonight’ overall trend – and on that, of course, the Met Office is always right. As for those who doubt any of this, well, according to Mr Harrabin, he doesn’t give a damn, because they don’t count, and of course, they can’t count (unlike the Met). Something like that. Me? I’ll stick with Mr Bastardi. His writing style might not be the most elegant, but his message is crystal clear and honest. The Met Office are warmist crooks.
Update: it’s reported in the Sunday Times that the BBC is fed up with the inaccuracies in Met Office forecasts, and might appoint instead the New Zealand outfit Metra. Pigs might fly, they are too enmeshed. It’s a BBC press office ruse to drive prices down because the Met’s contract is up for negotiation.
Via the comments – Iain Dale on One Show bias and the BBC’s response.
In September, when US-based left-wing Guardian columnist Gary Younge popped up as a bona fide voice of the BBC on From Our Own Correspondent, I pointed out that he had recently described followers of the Tea Party movement as “(a)nnoying, bizarre, incoherent, divisive, intolerant, small-minded, misinformed, ill informed and disinformed…” In other words, just the sort of prejudice against the American right which finds favour at the Beeb. I noted also the irony of a Guardian/BBC journalist accusing others of living “in a politically parallel world where everyone they know believes the same as they do.”
We’re in the middle of a mini Obamafest at the moment as the BBC celebrates the first anniversary of The One’s inauguration. To balance the many pro-Obama films and programmes made by adoring fans, the Beeb has commissioned a couple of documentaries about Americans opposed to Obama. Amazingly, this project was given to someone with a sympathetic view of the subject matter.
I’m kidding, of course:
In this two-part documentary, author and journalist Gary Younge tells the story of the other side of the Obama phenomenon; the story of those who say that the Obama presidency is nothing but bad news. Younge asks who these people are who feel they have been marginalised by the Obama revolution. He also asks what they don’t like about him and what Obama could do, if anything, to win them over.
Younge spends 10 days travelling through rural Arkansas and Kentucky, talking to anti-tax protesters, fundamentalist Christians and libertarians, country club members and local dignitaries to find out how they view the last year under Obama and what their hopes and fears are for the coming year.
