Monthly Archives: March 2010

So it Goes Again

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“The BBC is currently much more interested in the untimely granting of planning permission for a few houses for Jews. Joe Biden’s visit was just in time for that, but, dammit, just too late for the ceremonial dedication of a public square to Dalal Mughrabi.”

Forgive me for re-posting a snippet of my own copy. I’ve been away from a computer, and now I see that Robin Shepherd has written another cracking article about the BBC’s treatment of these events and the BBC’s attitude to Israel in general.


“What in fact is the BBC line against Israel, as evidenced by the thrust of its writing and reporting?”

He cites five examples of certain stories the BBC has chosen to ignore or downplay. Had the BBC given them the prominence they actually merit, a different light would have been cast on the situation. One that would render the BBC’s entire narrative on Israel incoherent.

“That is why the Dalal Mughrabi story was ignored. That is why the BBC continues to censor all reference to Hamas’s anti-Semitism from their profile of the group on their website. That is why terrorists are referred to as “militants”. And what applies to the BBC applies in Europe more broadly.

By leaving the general population in a state of near total unawareness about the realities that Israel confronts in its dealings with the Palestinians, even neutral and unbiased observers are bound to come away with the impression that Israel is the guilty party in this conflict.

This is real censorship. And it works.”

Writers that understand the case for Israel and have a grasp of the I/P conflict invariably mention the BBC’ s slanted coverage. The biased reporting that has gone on for the last forty years has a helluva lot to answer for.
Robin Shepherd is one of the more eloquent supporters of Israel, and he is by no means alone in regarding the BBC’s deficiencies over this matter with deep despair.

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MORE SNAKE OIL…

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Here’s another BBC warming fanatic. He’s James Painter, who for the past decade has been filing warming alarmist stories from his beat in his various roles as BBC World Service Spanish American editor and Miami bureau chief. He came to my my attention because he’s led the field in reporting alleged climate change related drought problems in the Amazon, one of the areas where the IPCC report has been found to be discredited; Richard North reveals today why it’s bunk.

He’s now moved on to become a lecturer and research fellow at the Reuters Institute in Oxford, but this is partly funded by the BBC and he is still a BBC Latin American analyst, filing stories on the impact of drought and the shrinking of glaciers. So Mr Painter remains a BBC man through and through. He is clearly of that BBC breed that believes climate change is a crusade. He recently gave the annual keynote lecture to the Society of Latin American Studies. It’s well worth a careful read because his speech is a case study of the extent to which bias has infected every aspect of BBC journalism in this area. He says:

To summarise then, climate change is happening, it’s happening faster than expected, and it will have a huge impact on Latin America. Of course there are all sorts of scientific uncertainties, but uncertainty should not be an excuse for lack of coverage in the media. In the same way that climate adaptation policies have to be incorporated into governments’ development strategies, global warming as an issue has to be mainstreamed into the media.

Basically, this fanatic believes that 90% of scientists accept global warming, and therefore the views of sceptics should not be reported; that the Arctic is melting, that the Amazon will be badly affected by drought , and vast parts of South America will become desert. He thinks also that the 2007 IPCC report did not go far enough:

…there is plenty of evidence to suggest that by some key performance indicators – the rate of warming, the rate of melt in some parts of the world and the rise in GHG accumulation – real-world changes are at the upper bound or beyond the worst-case scenario presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) last year.

The main thrust of his argument is that media organisations must stop reporting other news, and focus their main efforts on climate change. I’ve noted before that if you scratch the surface of the nature of BBC journalism, you find that it’s actually a propaganda machine, and that almost every reporter that is examined is actually a political activist. Mr Painter fits that profile; the tragedy is that he clearly believes – from the tone of his lecture – that’s he’s an objective reporter. He’s not, he’s a peddler of snake oil.

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Bob’s Yer Uncle

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Here we are, frantically battling against the bias at the BBC. Year in, year out, we stab away at our keyboards, foam-flecked spittle flying, blood pressure on the point of spontaneous combustion.
Auntie, meanwhile, gaily carries on, undeterred, oblivious and undaunted.

Then, along comes Bob. Hell hath no fury like a live-aid organiser scorned. The BBC sits up and openth one eye.
So. Should we recruit a celeb?.

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MARRED AND QUESTIONED

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Anyone else have the misfortune to watch the Andrew Marr show this morning? It was the usual left-liberal fest. First up we had the new Green Peace President Kumi Naidoo on to tell us about the horrors of global warming. He took the opportunity to also express his support for law-breaking. Andrew just smiled at him. Then we had author Ian McEwan on to warn us about the horrors of…global warming. Get the message? After that, on sauntered Lord Adonis to warn us of the evils of Conservatism and the need to abolish the House of Lords. To finish, Ken Clarke was interviewed and he insisted that Conservatives needed to go after the liberal vote in order to win the election. Balanced and fair from start to finish as Andrew shines his light.

Next up, the execrable Nicky Campbell “Big Question.” The first question on this Mothering Sunday was “whether we need fathers”. The general consensus was that we didn’t and that two lesbians provided the almost perfect model for bringing up children.  There was also talk of “it takes a village” to bring up a child. Fathers were seen as an irrelevance to having a happy child. The feminised audience were a disgrace but par for the course. Next up, “Is it time for a maximum wage”? Hard left trade union Unite had a representative on to explain that it is an outrage that there is no ceiling on how people can be paid. He lied about the minimum wage being a great success (It hasn’t) and now he demands a maximum wage. Pure Communist thinking and endorsed by Nicky Campbell.

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Setting The Tone

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Here are the opening paragraphs of two articles from the BBC today, both from stories about anti-government protest movements. One discusses the “egalitarian” Purple People movement in Italy while the other is about the “conservative” Tea Party movement in America.

“Think of a world of politics without spin doctors, teleprompters, stage-managed conferences, party headquarters, manifestos, cynicism or even leaders.”

“When the bearded activist in wraparound sunglasses put his hand on my shoulder, I felt his anger.”

No prizes for guessing which is which. (Compare the pictures, too. One group is happily “festooned” in symbolism, the other has “declared war” “bitterly”.)

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Cringe Spotted

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From Autonomous Mind:

John Inverdale, the BBC presenter fronting the Scotland v England Six Nations Rugby today, said a few moments ago on BBC1 that Christine Bleakley successfully managed to water-ski ‘across the whole of the British Channel’ yesterday.

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Simon Says… What He Was Signed Up To Say

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The first offering from Simon Schama’s much-trailed ten-week stint on Radio 4’s A Point of View is pretty much as expected – Labour spin from a Labour supporter. According to Schama the narrowing polls prove that “we” the electorate really want bad tempered tough guy Gordon Brown as our leader, in defiance of those nasty anti-Brown newspapers and their politically-motivated narrative about the PM as a bully. (Remind me – where was Andrew Rawnsley’s book serialised? Oh yes, those renowned Tory rags The Observer and The Guardian.) In his attempt to convince us that Gordon’s the man we desire Schama gives much of his essay over to an embarrassingly unfunny imagined phone call between Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell (whose name he misspells). Schama’s services don’t come cheap; if this dire effort is a foretaste of what’s to come I think a BBC Trust inquiry could be in order. There’s not much that BBC bosses enjoy more than throwing bundles of cash at their favourite historian in return for his reliably left-of-centre take on events, but even some of them must be concerned at the quality of this opening piece.

And what’s with Schama referring to himself in the third person? He did in it one of the two oft-repeated trails for the programme (the other had him enthusing about Labour closing the gap in the polls), and he does it again in an interview for the Radio 4 blog. It’s an affectation that’s ridiculous in ego-inflated punch-drunk boxers, never mind fucking historians.

Update. Forgot to add, Schama does get one thing correct – suck up to your opponents and likely they’ll spit in your eye. Last week, in one of those depressingly common celeb-obsessed announcements that all political parties love, the Tories promised to involve big-name historians in their proposed overhaul of the national curriculum. One of those historians? Simon Schama.

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USING YOUR MONEY WISELY?

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The BBC needs every penny of that £3.5bn it steals from us each year. I mean, it does such invaluable work.

The BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds on teaching staff how to use Facebook. The corporation is holding classes for large numbers of its 23,000 workforce, despite the fact that using the social networking site is second nature to millions. Hundreds of BBC workers have already signed up for the sessions, in which they learn how to set up accounts on Facebook, as well as Twitter and Bebo.

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