Monthly Archives: February 2010

BIAS? WHO’S BIASED…

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They deny it until they are blue in the face, but readers of this site know that behind the closed doors of the rats’ warren corridors of the the BBC, the boys and girls who work there are immersed in finding new and exciting ways of spreading lefty groupthink. Finally, 25 years on, we have a glimpse of that murky world, courtesy of today’s Sunday Times. The late John Nathan-Turner, then producer of Doctor Who (watched in those days by audiences of 16m), hired a cabal of lefty script-writers to find ways of discrediting Margaret Thatcher. One of them, Andrew Cartmel, was reportedly asked by Turner at his script-writing interview what he wanted to achieve by working for the programme. He got the job when he said, without missing a beat, “I’d like to overthrow the government”.

Mr Cartmel told the Sunday Times: “I was a young firebrand and I wanted to answer honestly. I was very angry about the social injustice in Britain under Thatcher and I’m delighted that came into the show.” So that’s how you get a BBC job! He and his fellow scriptwritersr plotted away between them to introduce anti-Thatcher themes, and weren’t too fussy about subtlety, introducing a villanous character called Rehctaht (Thatcher backwards).

The BBC’s reaction? Well of course, it’s not true. They were as unbiased then as they are now. As this shows.

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I Used to be Indecisive… but Now I’m Not so Sure….

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Nick Clegg has finally done the right thing. He’s sacked Jenny Tonge!

The BBC reports this as though it was a quick decisive move by the Lib Dem leader. But this was done after considerable equivocation and hesitation, and protestations that she is not anti-Semitic, and is still worth listening to. Something must have got to him. Maybe Jenny Tonge was right all along about the Jewish Lobby getting its evil grip on ‘our party.”

Unfortunately, it can’t be much of a grip because Nick Clegg wants to halt Britain’s arms sales to Israel and persuade our EU counterparts to do the same, and suspend the proposed new cooperation agreement with Israel till ‘things change in Gaza.’ etc etc etc.

From what I’ve read about Nick Clegg’s policies on the Middle East, some lobby or other might have had a hand in forming his ideas, but it certainly wasn’t the ‘Israel’ one.

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Unmentionable Matters

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A BBC world service programme, Politics UK discussed Neathergate with Sir Andrew Green and Denis MacShane.

Presenter Dennis Sewell’s admirable introduction promised a frank and open discussion, but it quickly reverted to type as the participants carefully avoided mentioning the detrimental effect Muslim immigration in particular has had on western society, and the obvious vote-conscious stranglehold it has on politicians with Muslim-heavy constituencies.

The next item tackled Ali Dezaei’s exploitation of the PC-driven taboo that prevented criticism of Black’nAsian police. The whole saga seems like a microcosm of the UK.

When the institutional racism in the police force was recognized after the Stephen Lawrence affair, the pendulum swung so far in the other direction that political correctness rendered objectivity nigh on impossible.

The considerable effort expended by politicians and the BBC in persuading the population to accept and embrace all cultures, even ones that abhor the very tolerance that facilitates their good fortune in being unconditionally and paradoxically welcomed here, echoes the collective blind eyes that refused to see a “black’ policeman as a crook.

Desperate bluster by politicians in order not to appear racist, and the media’s frantic attempts to normalise Islam parallel police anti racist measures like promoting ethnic minority individuals above their ability or setting up a Black Police Association.

If the police scenario does parallel that of the UK as a whole, the eventual conviction of a corrupt ethnic-minority policeman offers hope that this country might one day come to its senses.

Before that can happen the BBC must somehow become unbiased, and allow a wider spectrum of opinion to share the platform enjoyed by the cosy consensus that currently dominates the airwaves.

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MORE HORROR…

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Apologies for returning to him so soon, but Roger Harrabin has become in some senses the story; his endless spinning, dissembling and contorting are at the heart of why BBC so-called journalism is rotten to the core. His latest posting gives – in reverential tones that Wackford Squeers himself would have been proud – Professor Phil Jones’s account of why he is right about climate change and the rest of the world is wrong. To be sure, Mr Harrabin has clothed the good professor’s utterances with weasel words that acknowledge that sceptics exist and that he might have handled the odd bit of data, the odd fact, ineptly. But Harrabin’s overall message is that professor Jones is right, the facts and the datasets prove global warming, and it is a tragedy that Copenhagen did not achieve the world governance that he so desperately craves. Bishop Hill has a very different take on the professor’s words.

Every time there is an opportunity to put the warmist case like this, Mr Harrabin takes it, savours it, and embellishes it; and he never troubles to give another side of the story, even though Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, Anotny Montford (Bishop Hill)and others have shown time and time again that the very data that Professor Jones so exults is as full of holes as a colander. One final point. Surely, even Mr Harrabin does not believe this (at the end of the latest story)?

He said many people had been made sceptical about climate change by the snow in the northern hemisphere – but they didn’t realise that the satellite record from the University of Alabama in Huntsville showed that January had been the warmest month since records began in 1979.

But because Professor Jones said it, perhaps he does. In the world of alarmists, the words from on high must be true.

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HORROR HARRABIN

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Yesterday Richard North, of the blog EU Referendum, appeared on the Gaby Logan show on Radio 5 to discuss the setting up of the UEA panel to investigate Climategate. That’s pretty amazing in its own right, although one swallow does not make a summer. Richard, as would be expected, was pretty formidable, but what was fascinating about the exchanges was the contribution of Roger Harrabin. I’m including the relevant section in full because it has to be seen to be believed. Note especially his pathetic attempts at obfuscation and his rapid descent into claims of insults. What insults?

Mr Harrabin opened his contribution by stating that the CRU emails had been “stolen”. Richard rightly took exception to this, and pointed out that the latest evidence suggested an internal leak:

. . . we’ve had wonderful theories about intelligence agencies and hackers and this and that and the other – this is prejudicing the inquiry, against the reality is that it is probably an internal job and to talk about stolen emails and hackers and all the rest is, I think, distorting the debate and not helping the listener and the general public understand what has been going on.

Gaby Logan: Roger, do you take that.

Roger Harrabin: I would like to know what the better term would be? They’ve been referred to consistently as stolen emails, I know there are other theories about, that there was an inside job. The fact is that they were private emails not for publication, and the people who had them published on the internet considered them to have been stolen, they’d been referred to as being stolen. I’m not sure what else we would call them . . . This is another one of these things where you probably need a sentence rather than a word . . .

RN: Roger, sorry . . .

RH: I think this is not a helpful . . . honestly, this is not a helpful debate at the moment to talk about whether they’ve been stolen or not. A review has been set up . . . .

RN: (interjects) Well, then don’t refer to it as being stolen.

RH: Can we . . . I think we should be thinking today, and this is how this gets bogged down in arguments, please, please, it would be a change as well if we could get into a debate without having insults as well, that would be a nice change.

RN: Well, all the . . .

GL: Sorry, sorry, could we just let Roger . . .

RN: Well all the point I’m making, Roger, is stop prejudicing the debate. You are making an assumption in your terminology.

I simply love that Roger seems to think that because the emails have been called “stolen”(by him, mainly!)that this is the best way to describe them. And the point of balanced journalism is, Mr Harrabin?

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EU BETTER BELIEVE IT..

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Had to laugh at the BBC reporting the news that the German economy has racked up an impressive….0% growth in quarter four 2009. Whoops. This seems to surprise the BBC experts. Just yesterday, the BBC was reporting that Merkel and co were lecturing the Greeks on financial probity and now today one has to enquire as to whether the Germans need to look closer to their own economy before lecturing others. Still, the BBC finds solace in the fact that the French managed 0.6% growth! Way to go. The Eurozone is in serious trouble with the money markets making more informed decisions on it than any simpering pro EU BBC journalist!

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BINYAN MOHAMMED TO GET HIS OWN BBC TV SHOW?

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Not impossible given the love-in between the State Broadcaster and the Ethiopian Jihad poster-boy Binyam Mohammed. I am heartily sick of the way in which the BBC pushes Mr Mohammed, and before him Moazzam Begg, as some sort of doe eyed innocent victims of our bad and evil security services. It seems to me that the BBC avoids asking hard questions of Mohammed and Begg and instead simply uses their grievance as grist to its own mill, always aiming to undermine the moral of our military and our intelligence services. It is maddening the way in which OUR cash is taken and then used by the BBC to promote the notion that all these Jihadists are innocent. Perhaps Binyam will get his own talent show “Simply Come Jihad” in which celebrities travel to distant countries to “find themselves”, then get captured by the evil spawn of the Great Satan, and compete to see who can illicit the most sympathy from a panel of judges.

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HOW BBC BIAS WORKS…

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Last evening’s Question Time, liveblogged in this parish, is a great example of the toxic working of the State Broadcaster. You see it had a clear propaganda job to do last night on behalf of the Government, a task it facilitated with practised ease. You see Question Time came from Belfast last night and just last week the major political event here was the Democratic Unionist Party rolling over on their pledges and conceding IRA/Sinn Fein – the organisation that murdered police officers and judges – the right to now have a veto over every decision affecting police officers and judges. The Government warmly approves of this naked appeasement, of course, and so QT trundled into Belfast. And the audience – that alleged random selection of the public – was all set up to ensure that each time the IRA convict, Old Bailey bomber and Sinn Fein delegate Gerry Kelly spoke, there was rapturous applause for him. Each time the DUP delegate on the panel spoke, there was applause. And when the ONLY person on the panel who opposes this shameful surrender – my political colleage Jim Allister even tried to speak – David Dimbleby interrupted him and the audience met his comments in frosty silence. The media message was simple – EVERYONE supports what has been done here last week. Nothing could be further than the truth but then again the BBC is very far from the truth. The bias lies in the structure of the audience and the willingness of the BBC to act as whores to perpetuate government policy. Just saying….

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Question Time 11th February

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Welcome to the Question Time live-chat, which this week is watching events unfold in Northern Ireland.

On the panel is leader of Traditional Unionist Voice Jim Allister QC, Old Bailey bomber and IRA terrorist Gerry Kelly, Conservative Lord Trimble, Sammy Wilson of the DUP and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Shaun “Where’s my Butler” Woodward.

The chat will be going live at 10:30pm UK time (give or take a few minutes for last chance refilling of wine glasses). Enjoy!

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