Over at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism Warner Todd Huston has created a mouth watering list of the “Ten Most Left-Biased American Journalists”. To anyone familiar with the US political scene the names are predictable – Paul Krugman, Chuck Todd, Rick Sanchez and sundry other clones of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf – and the list makes more sense if read in conjunction with Breitbart’s own takedown of the US media elite.
However regular readers of Biased BBC will be aware that the UK media contains a whole regiment of left wing hacks. Some of them, to be fair, inhabit the pages of newspapers and magazines that openly exhibit a left wing bias – but at least we are free to buy or not to buy such publications (and we’ re not buying them – hence the blood seeping out of The Guardian, Independent and Mirror)
But the BBC is, supposedly, a politically neutral organisation financed by a compulsory levy of all those who own a television. It should therefore be above reproach. I fancy, though, that my rephrasing of Breitbart would ring many bells on this side of the pond…(my tweeks italicised)
The BBC loves whistleblowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them.
The BBC loves transparency. As long as they’re not the ones being exposed.
No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the BBC today. The ends justify the means for the BBC. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down
So I invite all B-BBC readers (regulars and newbies) to look again at the Beeb Barons of Bias and suggest possible entrants to a BBC Hall of Shame. Just reach under the stone and bring Jeremy Bowen and his sort into the spotlight accompanied, hopefully, by a succinct justification for each choice.
Let’s see which shifty rodents are plucked out of their BBC holes and into the sunlight….
Great post!
My suggestions are:
That islamist sympathiser and active supporter whose name I cannot bear to mention and who used to report on Israel but was caught red handed by the Israeli secret services collaborating with hamas and got kicked out of the region and now languishes in the BBC equivolent of Siberia ie Pakistan. Who would guess that secret contacts involving a BBC hack getting into position to film a freshly snatched IDF soldier with hamas opperatives crossed the line of acceptable behaviour, happily the propaganda opp went belly up and all the BBC terrorist collaborator got was a lashed up story about a cuople of ‘innocent farmers’ getting whacked by the IDF. BTW innocent farmers who were heavily armed with a bunch of women waiting to crowd around the captured IDF man and the terrorists so the IDF could not attack.
It was in fact a classic hamas sneak attack using the cowardly methods of the hamas terrorist handbook that went wrong, unfortunately for the BBC terrorist collaborator the IDF got wind of the trap.
The above was relayed to me by an Israeli friend who has contacts with the IDF, I have no reason to suppose they are not true.
ooops!
My other suggestions are:
Every BBC reporter both passive pay cheque collaborators and activeideological collaborators and fanatical activists which makes up 99% of the BBC payroll.
I think it’s much easier to name those unbiased who probably can be counted on fingers of one hand
I cannot think of anyone at the BBC who is biased to the right. this woulf be a much shorter.
Did you you see how Ms Wark gave Mr Salmon all the time in the world to answer without interuption on last nights QT. She should apply the same given time to others.
Andrew Neil is perhaps the only approximation to lack of bias = he will go hard at all he interviews. Now if all beeboids acted like him the BBC might be worth watching again!
Can I nominate all of Radio 5?
Speaking of apologists, does anyone know where Alan Johnston has gone?
He seems to have disappeared since he was released years ago. Did he ever return to work, write a book, leave the BBC?
Johnston presents From Our Own Correspondent.
I turn off as soon as I hear his whiny, monotone voice.
I wondered that Prof Pizzle. I have heard him on “From Our Own Correspondent” but that can’t take that much time each week. I would give my right arm to know what happened when Johnson returned. Did the Beeb find out what really happened and decide to hide the problem or did Johnsons views on Hamas change ? Either way he certainly isn’t on the Beebs A team any more.
I wish to nominate the entire output of the BBC’s television arm.
For the last eleven years I haven’t watched any of it.
Yet I have visited this site during the last few years just to see how “someone” I once knew was getting on.
The diagnosis seems to be that Aunty is terminal.
What I would like to tell you though is that the disease is so widespread that after 44 years of listening to the Archers I no longer turn radio 4 on at 7.00 pm.
No, I turn it on at 7.02 pm to absolve myself from their left-wing bias even in the news headlines, hence allowing me to enjoy the episode unimpeded.
I haven’t listened to the Archers since the 60s but I rather gathered from comments made here that it was preachy and PC. Not so?
No, it’s OK David.
They have their moments such as Anthony Gormley, but I can live with that.
Even the most drug induced BBC left-leaning twit isn’t allowed anywhere the cash “ratings” cow.
Thanks Bio and 1327. I always thought his post-release quietness very suspicious. As you say, maybe his Masters weren’t keen on what he told them.
Merits further investigation I think.
Indeed you see when he was freed I expected the Beeb would give him a long holiday to relax and write his book. Then the usual spot presenting with Today or PM on Radio 4 while pushing his book and the Palestinian cause.
Instead we have near total silence and the entire event appears to have been put in the memory hole. Very odd.
Apologies David, I know this is slightly off your topic and it is two days running that I have posted a link to a Daniel Greenfield article but Daniel has today posted a superb article on lefty-bias in the US media and the moribund state of the media out there. When reading it one cannot but help think about our beloved BBC – the similarities are strong but I believe the situation is made worse in the UK by the stranglehold monopoly the BBC has on the UK. At least in the US people have a choice or not to fund the lefty garbage and it is thankfully dying on its feet, whereas in the UK the BBC liberal/lefty propaganda beast is fed by compulsory funding. It is easy to forget that the BBC is supposed to be Public Service Broadcating and therefore rigourosly unbiased and just think of the BBC in the same way as with other leftard media outlets all over the world. When one remembers what the BBC should be and sees what it has really is in all its horror it is both shocking and depressing.
Anyway, here is a selection from the Daniel Greenfield article but I would encourage everyone to read it all at the link following it.
By embracing advocacy journalism, the media wrote its own obituary. It stopped being biased as an aspect of its reporting, instead bias became its identity. There ceased to be a media apart from the biased narratives, the attacks aimed at everyone who disagreed with their politics and the shameless slobbering over their favorite politicians. The media made political indoctrination in support of government control over every aspect of people’s lives into its goal, and discovered why there is no free press in totalitarian countries. Because the people won’t buy them and the government doesn’t need them.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2010/07/dying-media-writes-its-own-obituary.html
I’d like to know if there was a Beeboid on JournoList, and how close the Beeboids in the US are to the Washington, DC contingent of US media on that list.
I would like to nominate Harrabin and his understudies in the “Environmental” Department of the BBC. Between them they have managed to take us from an “Age of Enlightenment” to the “Dark Ages” within living memory of a 14 year old. Now that has to be an acheivement.
RIP the scientific method 1592-1998.
James Naughtie, just contrast his aggressive interviews with Conservatives with the consenual love-ins he has with Labour representatives. He is the also the man who let the bias story out of the bag with his 2005 pre-election interview (with Ed Balls I believe) that included the memorable “If we win the election” remark. How he kept his job after that I have no idea; actually it’s obvious how and why. Can you iamgine the furore if a BBC journalist allied himself so closely with the Conservative party?
I nominate whichever BBC editor or senior producer for BBC News who sent Franz Strasser to the US on that propaganda mission to stifle debate and censor news about the issue of illegal immigration.