Monthly Archives: March 2010

Forecast Wrong Again

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Via Tim Blair, a reminder of stark warnings from BBC Radio 4’s Costing the Earth in 2007:

The Australian of the year 2007, environmentalist Tim Flannery, once predicted that Perth in Western Australia could become the world’s first ghost metropolis, its population forced to abandon the city due to lack of water.

While some critics scoffed at this idea, there is no doubt that it has forced the city to wake up to the fact its water is running out and that it can no longer rely on its natural supply.

Perth this week:

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Budget2010: The LiveChat!

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Welcome to the Budget 2010 live-chat, which is simultaneously starting just before 12:30 here on Biased-BBC, and on All Seeing Eye, Barking Spider, Corrugated Soundbite, Dick Puddlecote, Governmentitus, GrumpyOldTwat, Man Widdicombe, and Subrosa

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BBC asks "Why so sensitive on immigration?"

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From this morning’s Today programme:

As the election approaches, immigration has become a primary concern for many voters but the sensitivity around it is preventing election candidates from making immigration a central issue.

Could that sensitivity and reluctance perhaps have anything to do with the way the BBC has dealt with the issue in the past? When immigration – or more specifically Tory immigration policy – became a major topic during the 2005 election campaign, the Today programme responded by doing an outside broadcast (on St George’s Day) from Leicester. The leader of the Conservatives on Leicester City Council was invited on to defend his party’s policies; he faced a hostile audience and a clearly biased Carolyn Quinn who sided with the crowd and lobbed easy leading questions to a pro-immigration community representative.

It’s a bit rich of the BBC to suddenly start asking why politicians from the mainstream parties are reluctant to talk about immigration when the BBC itself has shown such antagonism towards those who have raised the issue in the past.

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PIE IN THE SKY…

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You’ve got to hand it to the BBC. They won’t give up one some things – and especially their relentless advocacy of AGW. No matter what the facts, they will twist them. Take this item, on wind power on Orkney. It’s one long commercial for the joys of “renewables”, an ode to the importance of us all buckling down and accepting these bird-chopping, landscape-defacing monstrosities. Notice that the one thing missing from the article is the “s” word, the elephant in the room: subsidy. The author recounts how the community will benefit by £200,000 a year from their new toy, but he fails to spell out that without the government’s huge subsidies for wind power, wind turbines would be prohibitively expensive. Notice, too, that there is no mention of another vital issue – that the wind is so unreliable as a source of power that no matter how much propaganda is spread about the benefits,it will never, ever, be able to provide anything but a small fraction of our overall power needs. But eh,ho, it’s a nice patronising story about country folk doing nice greenie things. And that’s all that matters to the BBC.

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Budget2010: The LiveChat!

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On Wednesday afternoon at 12:30pm here on Biased-BBC we will be live blogging the last Budget before the General Election. The Budget will be carried on all major television channels except for BBC1 which will be showing Bargain Hunt (no, really!).

Importantly for us here on Biased-BBC, we will be looking carefully at the different ways that channels report and editorialise the announcements. We’ll be able to compare, for the first time here, one event reported several ways in a live environment. Good for bias checkers as well as important for everyone who pays tax in the UK.

The Chancellor’s speech will certainly be a political affair rather than a fiscal exercise, so we can expect plenty of unaffordable goodies deferred until after the Election with a challenge issued to the Conservatives to oppose them.

This chat will be a collaboration between A Tangled Web, All Seeing Eye, Barking Spider, Biased-BBC, Corrugated Soundbite, Dick Puddlecote, Governmentitus, GrumpyOldTwat(thanks for the pic!), Man Widdecombe, and Subrosa – all excellent and highly recommended blogs. If you haven’t been to some of them before then please take this chance to try them out.

From Biased-BBC, All Seeing Eye and David Mosque will be in the moderators chair so it’ll feel just like our regular Question Time evenings. To catch the live blogging, come back here on Wednesday, March 24th just after noon.

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SPHERES OF INFLUENCE…

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Oxfam, one of the BBC’s favourite political organisations – spreading dissension and hate in the name of climate change – has spent megabucks of donor cash (no doubt given in the mistaken belief that it would help the poor)in a project to try and understand how the blogsphere supports sceptical thought about the causes of warming. In so doing, it’s drawn up this diagram (with the heading “how to combat sceptics”) showing the “pro” and “anti” sides. Guess which organisation is at the centre of the “pro” side? There’s dear old auntie, right next to the Guardian, the New York Times and the World Bank. I suppose this only confirms what we already know – but now it’s official. The greenie fanatics know exactly what they are doing and they know that the BBC is a an ultra-safe pair of hands and friend, ready to do their bidding and puff any alarmist press release that’s spewed their way.

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Hopin’ For Change

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On BBC Radio world service yesterday Jon Donnison reported Ban Ki-moon’s depressing reaction to his Gaza visit. Somewhere along the line someone has used the word ‘medieval’ in connection with Gaza, language modelled on Michael Buerk’s iconic ‘Scene of Biblical Proportions’ speech.
This emotive word must have appealed to the BBC; it appeared again and again in various news bulletins.

Jon Donnison’s report contained the parts of Mr. Ban’s statement that were critical of Israel with particular emphasis on Israel’s denial of permission to import concrete and the continuing state of disrepair of Palestinian houses.

A news bulletin that was broadcast immediately afterwards included the bit in Mr. Ban’s speech about recognising Israel’s need for security.

The juxtaposition of these two reports delivered a perfect example of bias by omission. The exclusion from Jon Donnison’s report of the only bit in Mr. Ban’s statement that was vaguely supportive of Israel was highlighted by its inclusion in the news bulletin that came next.

By ignoring the matter of security for Israel, Jon Donnison’s report exaggerated Mr. Ban’s already biased condemnation of Israel and provided a fairly typical example of the way the BBC’s reporting meddles with public opinion.
Another small but subliminally emotive trick was the ambiguous sentence “Israel only allows in limited humanitarian aid.”

That could either mean Israel cruelly deprives Palestinians of sustenance by only letting in some of the vital humanitarian aid, or, with the addition of a comma or two, it could mean that it lets in vital humanitarian aid but nothing more; nearer to the truth I think.
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Robin Shepherd invites readers to suggest a way forward.
Most contributors realise that unless Israel is confident of going it entirely alone, without outside support of any description, they need urgently to address ‘getting the message across.’
That would necessitate a massive change of direction from the BBC.
Firstly to allow the public access to full and fair information.
Secondly, to put a stop to interviewers behaving like adversarial inquisitors when they’re trying to bring forth vital and illuminating information from someone like the mayor of Jerusalem. Justin Webb was positively discourteous this morning. Who does he think he is? Jeremy Paxman?

I would have no objection to Justin Webb putting the other side of the argument to Nir Barkat, but first he must fully comprehend the background, get the facts straight and allow the discussion the breathing space it needed.

Robin Shepherd’s newest post links to Charles Krauthammer’s JPost article. If Justin Webb were to read that article before jumping in with his inquisitorial attacks, he might be equipped to conduct an interview with an Israeli spokesperson.

The power of telly is such that Delia Smith only needed to make a passing reference to some ingredient or other to start a stampede at the supermarket. If the BBC were to give more air time to people like Douglas Murray, and commission Robin Shepherd to make a documentary or two it might go some way to undo what has been done.
But people are being kept ignorant, and the puzzle is whether it’s through malevolence or stupidity.

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