Monday morning comes along, a fresh week, and a new Open Thread for you to share latest BBC bias…
OPEN THREAD…
Bookmark the permalink.
Search Biased BBC
Recent Comments
- Thoughtful April 26, 2024 at 12:11 pm on Midweek 24th April 2024I see some thick posh Tory is on the rack for not appearing to know that Rwanda and Congo are...
- Up2snuff April 26, 2024 at 11:58 am on Midweek 24th April 2024Eddy, in the good 'old days' (I'm talking late 1980s) when a surgeon cut a lump out of a person,...
- Up2snuff April 26, 2024 at 11:52 am on Midweek 24th April 2024LL, people tend to smile when a camera is pointed at them.
- tomo April 26, 2024 at 11:44 am on Midweek 24th April 2024applies in spades to the BBC. https://twitter.com/clim8resistance/status/1783801809355591978
- Rob in Cheshire April 26, 2024 at 11:37 am on Midweek 24th April 2024That's why I stopped buying the Manchester Evening News. It's a left wing rag these days. A shame, because it...
- Rob in Cheshire April 26, 2024 at 11:34 am on Midweek 24th April 2024The key word there is "equitable". It sounds like "equality", but it isn't. It is the code word for a...
- Rob in Cheshire April 26, 2024 at 11:31 am on Midweek 24th April 2024Keynes hated the gold standard because he wanted governments to be able to create money. But giving that power to...
- Non Snowflake April 26, 2024 at 11:25 am on Midweek 24th April 2024Can't be a real man coz he isn't looking at the needle as it goes into his skin. Baby.
- Lunchtime Loather April 26, 2024 at 11:09 am on Midweek 24th April 2024Smiler alert: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68896845 "Vince and Fiona Malone lost £26,000 worth of goods to shoplifters last year" it says, ...
- Loobyloo April 26, 2024 at 11:00 am on Midweek 24th April 2024Can the BBC explain why all the other boat people can’t be charged with attempting to arrive in the uk...
Categories
agw anti-American anti-conservative anti-Israel anti Israel. pro Palestinian Antisemitism BBC - sickeningly biased at all times. BBC agenda BBC bias bbc bias and balance. bbc bias by omission BBC censorship BBC Question Time BBC selectivity bias Biased BBC climate change dhimmis general thread immigration Islam israel Mark Mardell obama obama bias Obamalove open thread pro-labour pro-palestinian pro EU pro Hamas pro Islam pro Labour bias pro Obama PRO OBAMA AT ALL COSTS. pro Obama BBC agenda question time question time live Richard Black save gordon. USA politics US economy US News US politics US presidential elections
Today Programme 8.41 this morning, as Adam Shaw has several goes at the managing director of Cunard. Hope the link comes up soon, as it is astonishing to listen to and is of course very revealing about the Beeboid minset. To generics like Shaw, Cunard is elitist and hence regarded as at best suspect and at worst evil.
Anybody hear some academic called Angie Hobbs at about 7:15 on Toady banging on about the nature of “fairness”? Since she can’t write for toffee the whole piece was essentially dead airtime, but she went entirely unquestioned and unchallenged by the presenters, something of a first apart from TFTD. I assume that she was arguing from a Lefty viewpoint, but I wasn’t really listening. Anybody else pay attention? She sounded a bit Aussie-ish, but spoke in that monotone one associates with Lefties.
Oh, and the Beeb’s report about a “man” being held after a murder in Aylesbury was so uninformative that I just assumed Mohammedans were involved – as was confirmed by a glance at the front page of the “Daily Telegraph”. It’s getting into Pravda territory when the State Broadcaster wilfully refuses to tell us even the most basic details about what seems to be a major case.
Yes I heard her, she was wittering on about the philosophy of fairness, it was a thinly veiled attack piece against Tory-Cuts©
I’ve been away for a few days but I was in a fit of hysterics when I heard that Postman Twat had been appointed shadow chancellor.
The reason he left the Post Office to become a Labour MP was because he got given a round where the house numbers went above 25.
Even the BBC are going to have their work cut out to make this fool look competent.
Did anyone catch Simon Jack’s totally off topic comments about Sir Philip Green on Breakfast TV this morning?
Introducing an article about Green telling the government that they should use their clout to get lower prices when tendering contracts, Jack sneeringly prefaced the story with words along the lines of “Sir Philip Green – he spends a lot of his time travelling between here and Monaco… company’s owned by his wife…. pays very little tax.”
Now this was nothing to do with the story and was a simple character attack on one of Britain’s most successful businessmen. Would the same snide comments have been made had it been Bernie Ecclestone suggesting this supremely sensible idea?
This little outburst showed Jack’s true colours and made him look surprisingly bitter and spiteful. Can we really have a business reporter who is anti-business?
The BBC has no problem at all with non-dom tax-sheltering companies in Bermuda or the like, so long as they are owned and operated by James Caan, whom it devotes whole programmes to promoting on mainstream television, no less.
“Can we really have a business reporter who is anti-business?”
A (singular) business reporter?? At the BBC many are either lefties (Mason, Verity etc) or frustrated panto artistes (Adam Shaw)
Not just Mason the mong, you can add in slapper Flanders (she’ll sleep with any old Balls) and of course Mr Muppet Robert Peston. None of them know a thing about economics.
Yes, at at 7.45 Simon Jack was determined to steer the conversation away from the contents of Sir Philip Green’s report onto Sir Philip Green himself. “It was “hotly debated whether he was the right man for the job due to his tax position”, he said in his introduction. Then he asked Polly Toynbee of the Guardian whether Sir Philip was the right man for the job and followed that by asking Nick Seddon of what he (correctly) called “the right-leaning think-tank” Reform whether sir Philip was the right man for the job.
It took Nick Seddon to say, “The truth is that we don’t want to get too distracted by the person who’s making the recommendations. The question is whether the recommendations will be implemented.”
At 8.45 Jack was back on about it, talking about “the Monaco-based billionaire” (and he fairly spat out the b of billionaire) and how “it’s been argued” that Sir Philip “isn’t the best-placed person” to advise the government on the issue.
Sir Philip Green is not best placed for anything so far as the BBC is concerned, he is Jewish.
I would vote for him to be DG of the BBC, if we only had a vote.
You’ve hot on something there Grant. Maybe like Chief Constables/Police Commissioners we ought to elect the DG of the BBC.
Only,
Quite agree. After all this is a democracy……. er….
More anti-business snarkiness from our friends at the Biased BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/10/why_ask_a_billionaire_about_be.html#postcomment
This time their “business editor” admonishes the ultra-wealthy Sir Philip Green for having the gall to suggest government departments could be spending our money more efficiently. He is wealthy precisely because he runs a tight ship. A beeboid will simply refuse to get this point, ever.
In 1985 the government appointed a Shell executive to tackle the mountain of government waste. They had items in stationery stores in government that were enough to last for a thousand years. I can’t remember his name now but waste, like the poor, is always with us.
The BBC economics department is totally infested with the left. A recent young Oxbridgge graduate who worked for me, left to join the BBC team and a week later joined left foot forward. Remarkable, and true. There is no attempt at impartiality. None. It is a scandal. Nothing of course will be done. God, I hate the BBC with a passion, and everything it stands for. How many is it sending to Chile? At MY expense. Leaching lefty scum. Sorry, mini rant there.
Those who follow Stephanie Flanders inability to mention the topic of inflation will not be surprised to see that todays disappointing inflation numbers do not get a mention on her blog.
However men getting a Nobel Prize is considered significant. To quote from her page “This is my blog for discussion of the UK economy.”
Yet economic figure after figure passes without mention. I notice that more and more people are questioning the state of play in the comments section.
7/7 Inquest today.
INBBC doesn’t mention ISLAMIC JIHADISTS in its reference!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/05/london_blasts/what_happened/html/default.stm
It’s the old word association trick. Attach a label to a name and reapeat until the label sticks to the person as an ad hominem. It is akin to the marketing practice of creating brand awareness in advertising. Some of the memorable ones become catch phrases.
The ‘brand tag’ here is used to create the negative. As you say, listen to what the man is saying.
Let’s play the game in reverse (politically).
Harriet Harman, whose husband was a powerful union boss…
Ed Milliband, who comes from a Marxist family,
Johnston, a former postman….
Gordon Brown, who once said ‘No more, boom and bust’, says…..
One could go on and on.
And the BBC does.
“Johnston, a former postman…. ”
And Marxist union official…
I had to laugh yesterday at MillipEd saying with a straight face that he had appointed the best person for the job.
Funny man. 😀
Harrabin on this morning’s R4 Toady programme was quizzed on the authority of the IPCC following recent events.
He said that following the ‘hideous glacier error’ it was accepted by governments that all the other thousands of facts provided by the IPCC were accurate and that Pachauri would not be sacked because it would upset India and provide sceptics with a ‘scalp’.
Harrabin would seem to be off the fence and back under the cosh !
Yeah, but who really gives a shit what Harrabin says any more? That bus left sometime last year and has been gathering speed ever since. All that remains is to listen to him insulting his own intelligence.
beeboids relishing the fact that the afghan hostage was not killed by taliban fire. any sane person will realise that any rescue mission there is fraught with danger and while it is sad that the hostage died due to american fire, let us not have misconceptions that her death was to do with the american rescue. she died because of the taliban and assorted terrorists who kidnapped her and have created a state of lawlessness and danger there. but the beeboid reporter was nearly gleeful stating that this is a big embarassment to william hague, the pm etc etc
‘..the beeboid reporter was nearly gleeful stating that this is a big embarassment to william hague, the pm etc etc’
If this is on record as indicated, then the ‘reporting’ team involved should be hung out to dry.
By what sick interpretation does one skirt though a kidnap and tragically failed rescue to gloat about its impact on a political party, now our government, being ’embarassed’.
That defies logic as much as it being in the worst taste.
As if by sick magic….
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11514210
‘BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall said the latest developments would raise questions over UK and US relations and the possibility there was an attempt to cover up the circumstances of Ms Norgrove’s death.‘
Would they? Questions mainly from and to serve the agenda sick media hounds to score pathetic points now with claims, before any actual facts are actually discovered.
The poor girl is barely cold, and her parents only just getting to grips with her death, and the BBC machine is already waaaaay past this to try and see how it can be used to punish those who they disagree with who took decisions with the best they had to hand.
I’d love to hear Ms’ Kendall’s views if she was enjoying Taliban hospitality herself, and the word came in that, actually, a committee of Newsnight panelists were being convened to discuss how best to secure her release now her captors were alerted. Them being experts ‘n all.
Just what are her qualifications to be a diplomatic correspondent? Did she have a date with Ed & Ed too, so maybe once bumped into brother Dave having a midnight whizz on a sleepover?
U-frikking-nique.
Always interested when the Graun grapples with irony…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/oct/11/itv-mailonsunday
Why is the ITV News political editor allowed to write a partisan column?
Haha! The Grauniad concerned about impartiality. Maybe they think impartiality should only be for TV.
Isn’t he the same Greenslade that is or used to be the media man on the Evening Standard? (We don’t get it any more since they made it free and stopped distributing it outside of central London.)
Wasn’t he editor of the Mirror under Maxwell?
I see that the BBC are in full swing reminding Britain of the horrors of ‘Fatcherism’ – why have they resurrected “the boys from the blackstuff” on BBC 4 – following ‘All our workib lives’ a surprisingly balances look at the collapse of British ship building. They did’t say it but clearly the rampant communism on the yards and the insane restrictive practes (the fault of the management for using casual labour according to the communists) caused the demise of ship building in Britain.
I suspect that theye is a degree of nostalgia for the hideous state of the nation in the 70’s – when the workers committees ruled.
The BBC cover Sir Philip Green reporting on the government waste that should be eliminated in order that more resources are available for service delivery, but the BBC feel the need to put in a sidebar quote from Peston on its preferred way of reducing the level of service cuts.
“If all businesses and wealthy individuals could somehow be persuaded to devote less time and effort to minimising their British tax payments, rather smaller cuts in public services would be required”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11512287
Did anyone catch this on the BBC website
Palestinian boys hit by settler’s car in Jerusalem
Two stone-throwing Palestinian boys were injured after being hit by a car driven by a Jewish settler leader in East Jerusalem, officials have said.
Imran Mansur, 11, broke his leg after being thrown into the air and bouncing off the car windscreen. Iyad Gheit, 10, had to have glass removed from his arm.
Talk about trying to spin a story to get some sympathy, if you notice on the site only one photograph is showed, the child being helped after the incident.
Here is the video of the actual incident, see what you think..
just happen to have the cameras there and photos too,fixed i’ll say
It’s “Palestinian boys hit settler’s car”.
‘Palestinian boys run straight at settler’s car that’s driving toward them’.
It’s a gift for the ‘What happened next’ round.
‘Two stone-throwing Palestinian boys offered a Pallywood photo opportunity for at least 6 photographers including a video cameraman who just happened to be standing around at the time. Unfortunately this set-up was ill conceived so isn’t going to be a main news item because there’s not much Jew bashing to be had from it, Press TV wasn’t deterred though’
BBC-NUJ’s Marr avoids discussion of specific critiques of BBC-NUJ’s blatant daily political bias for Labour, trade unions, E.U., mass immigration, Obama, Islam, etc.
“Andrew Marr criticises bloggers. Is it 2005 again? ”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100005810/andrew-marr-criticises-bloggers-is-it-2005-again/
Our friend Richard Bacon, the left wing tool that doesn’t stop giving. Today he admitted that he flew to Miami (yes the one in Florida) just for the weekend.
So how much CO2 did that produce I wonder and will he own up to it the next time he’s interviewing one of his left wing tool friends who will be lecturing us on ‘climate change’ and how we need to cut back flying.
No doubt Bacon will be supporting those that oppose the expansion of Heathrow. I wonder what airport HE flew from.
we were honoured this morning with this. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-11513895
Actually the original wasn’t this. I failed to take a screen shot but just caught the one line that is missing. Did a bit of follow up and came up with below.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/nations_radio/nations_radio_tor.txt
Way way down you’ll find the words
“Editorial standards and impartiality. This area is considered out of scope. The Trust looks to its Editorial Standards Committee
to consider editorial standards issues at a strategic level as part of its ongoing work.”
so for those like me wgo give a fuck……………whats the point of the whole process?
Richard Bacon has just been slapped down on Radio 5 by Michael Parkinson. Tosspot Bacon was trying to convince Parky that Russell Brand is a comic genius and not an utter twat. Parky had none of it saying “I don’t see the point of Russell Brand”.
Poor old Bacon, last week he was sharing a far of warm man Vaseline with Brand in one of the most simpering interviews the camp male beeboid has ever done (even worse than the one he did with Pigstock).
Well done Parky.
Parky was fantastic wasn’t he? You could hear the desperation in Bacon’s voice, both over Parky pointing out that there is no point to Brand and that the BBC is an over-bloated organisation staffed by people filling pointless managerial jobs
I disagree with Michael Parkinson. I think there is a point to Russell Brand. And that point is to serve as a stark warning as to the dangers of transvestitism.
Have finally managed to get a message on the BBC Radio 4 Messageboards The Choice Is Yours re Sandi Toksvig’s “cutting edge” joke “Its the Tories who arte putting the N into cuts” from the News Quiz.
The moderators have pulled the heading but discussion continues.
Re Peston:
“…(Sir Philip) is keen to point out that the savings he is suggesting would not involve a single public-sector redundancy: all of the squeeze would be on private sector suppliers (who probably won’t thank him)”
Of course what knob end Peston fails ot understand is the private sector is used to trimming costs, in every contract the private sector negotiates it’s used to having to haggle over the price.
Clearly this is a concept Peston doesn’t get, the private sector will simply adapt if price is driven down.
It shows what an utter prick Peston is, he’s clearly got no idea of the real world has he? He should spend less time sniffing Gordon Brown’s backside.
I caught some of Peston’s interview with Green a little while ago. Peston was really trying to nail his statements about government waste as ideological (does that sound familiar?). In fact, as I type this, Peston’s video report about the whole issue is on right now.
But when Green got around to discussing the waste on phone contracts, Peston challenged him as having no actual specifics. Oops, Green did, in fact, have real facts, figures, and suggestions as to how to fix it.
Peston didn’t like it one bit. When Green said that the government was seriously overpaying for phone contracts, giving hard figures and a brief explanation, Peston kept trying to add editorial comments. Every statement from Green was tagged with a gratuitous editorial message: “In your view..”, “so you’re saying that…”, in very stern tones. No, Robert, the numbers say that the government overspends by $600 million plus.
Suddenly, Peston’s mannered speech when he’s in control vanished.
Peston is smart enough to realize that Green is right, but he hates the fact that it’s Green saying these things.
Good grief! Now the BBC is defending government expenses. “These are serious accusations,” says the female Beeboid. You “can’t compare like with like”, i.e. it’s not “fair” to compare government internal spending with private sector companies, she says, “because there are so many” departments.
Some woman from the FTI said that there can’t be any such waste as Green alleges, because the Treasury has to approve any government spending and they’re always checking to see if it gives value for money.
I’ll pause for a moment until everyone stops laughing.
The woman went on, encouraged by the BBC presenter, to say that the government is so decentralized that it’s not right to look at how they arrange their contracts in the same way as in a large corporation (thus contradicting her earlier statement that these things are always vetted for value for money). Allowed to continue unchallenged (as the BBC is approaching this issue from a single angle), she then claimed that the government has been trying “for years” to reduce spending and clean this up, reducing staff, etc.
Which government was that?
This sage (Vicky Pryce, estranged wife of Chris Huhne) was chief economist at the Department of Trade and Industry under Labour. I wonder how much of the advise she gave them got us where we are today.
Ah, no wonder she was saying that the Treasury always knows best on these things, and that the government has been working to fix this for years.
It sounds as if they forgot to mention that there are so many departments, all of which do their best to spend all the money in the budget for the current year because if they don’t, they will be allocated less money for the following year, And so it goes on.
Government overpaying for phones or anything else is nothing new. It has been going on for donkeys’ years. And it happens in local government as well as central. Just keep an eye on your council’s rubbish collection contracts with waste companies to see how inept officials are at getting value for money and building in mechanisms for keeping costs down and the companies on their toes. If yours is anything like my local council, heaven help us.
Over the last however many years there have been reviews and initiatives to improve government procurement and they set up something called the office of government commerce to deal with this and embed best practice across government. So how is that working, eh? Seems Philip Green has still found something to do, at any rate.
“7/7 bombs acts of ‘merciless savagery’, inquests told”
But lessons of Islamic jihad motivation not being learnt by INBBC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11511461
This does not represent the majority of Muslims. But two unconventional candidates who hold unapproved thoughts totally represent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who support the Tea Party movement.
“Marr said that most bloggers are “bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting”.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100005810/andrew-marr-criticises-bloggers-is-it-2005-again/
Maybe Marr just doesn’t like the fact that the BBC has less power to influence people’s minds?
Hmm, perhaps Marr should take a look in the mirror and his buddies. Talk about ugly.
They are not employed for their looks, they are employed for their left wing views
I’d thought I’d seen those two before, in their more youthful days.
The Dude has it right.
“The very worst Journalists are those who think we’re interested in their opinions rather than the people to whom they’re speaking or the facts they’re supposed to be reporting.”
That is the BBC “commentator” to a tee. They are not in any stretch of the imagination “reporters” or “journalists”.
Marr is bright enough to have glimpsed the future and he is afraid.
He and his fellow travellers hold over the news agenda is going to weaken. We will no longer be told what to think and how to behave as citizens.
It is unravelling fast and the Tea Party in the US is the harbinger of what is going to happen here.
The period between 1950 and 2011 will become a subject for future university courses on how a small incestuous “elite” with a shaky grasp of reality but strong on a discredited ideology attempted to hijack an ancient country for personal gain and to satisfy their feelings of inadequacy and guilt.
So Ahmadimjihadi is about to cause a scene in southern Lebanon, pimping for Hezbollah, putting the Iranian boot on the Lebanese neck even more firmly, and throwing rocks at Israel in solidarity with the Resistance.
All the BBC can do is a cute slide show, with captions which ever so slightly frown at what he’s up to. No mention, of course, that Iran views Lebanon as their border with Israel, and wants to make it a puppet state under Hezbollah control.
And no, this isn’t even for Newsround.
This could be the most dangerous of situations especially if Hizbollah attempts to take over Lebanon with Iranian support.
There are European troops in the Lebanon at risk and Israel cannot just stand by.
It all looks very dangerous.
Hezbollah already controls much of what goes on in Lebanon. They have re-armed and then some, all under the watchful eye of the UN.
What does Abbas and the Palestinian side really want out of a peace deal and what is their end game?
We are never put in the picture and we are never told exactly what the Palestinian side are demanding and why.
A very interesting item on BBC news about the Israeli offer to freeze settlement building IF Fatah recognizes the state of Israel as a Jewish state, the Palestinians said NO citing the demand of the right of return of millions of so called ‘refguees’ and their descendents not to a future state of Palestine but into a shrunken(by peace deal) state of Israel! Huuuh? Yep you read that right.
So the aim is to flood a post deal Israel with enough Palestinian settlers to liquidate the state of Israel with immediate effect by turning the Jewish majority into a minority instantly and we all know how Arabs treat minorities dont we?
Look one year into the kind of peace(suicide)deal and you see the new majority dismantling the Jewish state starting with the name, then the persecutions would start and the the flight from the persecutions.
All this time the MSM has been playing a game of denying us in the West the truth and reality by omission of the facts, what the Palestinians really want and really demand and its simply NOT peace is it? Its nothing more than the extermination of the state of Israel by population and religious solidarity.
There is to be no Israel and Palestine side by side living in peace and singing the coke song while holding hands singing cumbya and sharing cakes and tea, there is going to be no peace at all.
Until we are fully informed of the real intentions and desires of the Palestinian side we will not be able to gauge whether Israel is right or wrong and that is the whole point isnt it? Because if we all knew exactly what impossible demands they are making would mean the extermination of the state of Israel then all the fabricated and forged sympathy for the poor downtrodden Palestinians would evaporate like the morning mist on a summer day.
We are being told nothing of the stark reality and we are being kept in the dark about the real intent of the Palestinain side, its not about peace and its not about coexistence and even about this two state solution the BBC keeps harping on about.
The Arab stance is clear as a bell, no Jewish state will ever be tolerated on ‘Arab land’ and no Jew is welcome and not one inch of Jewish Israel will be allowed to exist.
Now tell me what other state would allow itself to be erased by population invasion? What other sovereign nation would allow millions of alien and hostile colonists to freely enter that nation and give comfort and succour to those bitter enemies as they establish superiority by numbers? Ooooh…er…uhm…yes there is one nation trying it without the consent of its people of course!
Just seen a repeat of the news item about the rejection by Abbas of the Israeli offer to freeze settlement building in return for the Palestinian sides recognition that Israel is a Jewish state.
Guess what?
The part about the Palestinian demand of ‘right of return’ for the so called refugees and their descendents into the state of Israel after any peace deal has been censored out.
Now what a coincidence eh? Was it a mistake that some editor missed until he/she had ‘the phonecall’ from propaganda control demanding they cut out the offending part of the report?
You can imagine some islamist censor at the BBC shouting down the phone, the public are not supposed to see and hear that part so take it out NOW! and some beeboid dhimmi crawling and creeping and wringing his/her hands bleating about being sorry sir and it wont happen again sir…blub blub.
Don’t know if anyone else heard it this morning, but two of the hag faced old dykes on Radio 5 were talking about one of the trapped miners gilrfriends who had just had a baby (he’s not seen). The BBC females seemed to find it rather amusing that the woman wasn’t sure how she’d react to having her boyfriend back. Female beeboids just seemed to find it very funny, yet appeared to have no humanity for the guy trapped who STILL doesn’t know if he will get out alive.
All not quite going to plan for the BBC’s finest ‘reporters’ as regards this awful kidnap hostage rescue attempt failure… at least on the message boards where folk can go beyond swallowing their broadcast only views like Linda Lovelace.
While some do concede the Americans have a poor record on occasion in such cases, almost all accept that no one knows squat as yet, so maybe best to belt up until we do.
So spinning this in every possible Beeboid way from the outset to stir up grief for their favourite whipping boys is at best, premature, and not a little bit tacky.
Nick Robinson’s blog is already closed after a few score. I’m guessing a few others will bunker mode soon.
Predictably… unique.
The Muslim Brotherhood has declared their allegiance with anti-US jihad, and all of Al Qaeda’s goals. The Muslim Brotherhood is the leading opposition in Egypt and Jordan, and has a huge influence on both CAIR in the US and the MCB in Britain. Will the BBC bother to report it?
Just like Bin Laden used to do, the leader of the MB says that many Muslim regimes are too beholden to the US and don’t help their own people. He also declares global Muslim war on the US and Israel.
“Resistance is the only solution. The stage of indirect negotiations [between the Palestinians and Israel] ended without the Palestinians gaining anything, and without the Palestinian negotiators taking a lesson from it. And now the PA, which has resumed its talks with the Zionists, is about to gasp out its last breaths at the table of direct negotiations. [At the same time], on the anniversary of the second intifada, the Palestinians are preparing the third intifada, and we see this people, in the West Bank and Gaza, seething [in anger] against the Zionists and their supporters, like a cauldron [of boiling water].
“The U.S. cannot impose an agreement upon the Palestinians, despite all the means and power at its disposal. [Today] it is withdrawing from Iraq, defeated and wounded, and it is also on the verge of withdrawing from Afghanistan. [All] its warplanes, missiles and modern military technology were defeated by the will of the peoples, as long as [these peoples] insisted on resistance – and the wars of Lebanon and Gaza, which were not so long ago, [are proof of this].
“Resistance is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny, and all we need is for the Arab and Muslim peoples to stand behind it and support it. The peoples know well who is [carrying out] resistance and who has sold out the [Palestinian] cause and bargained over it. We say to our brothers the mujahideen in Gaza: be patient, persist in [your jihad], and know that Allah is with you…”
Both CAIR and the Muslim Council of Britain have direct connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the BBC, these are mainstream Muslim organizations. Also according to the BBC, Islamic jihad does not represent the views of the vast majority of Muslims.
Which is it, BBC?
The Labour government is totally culpable for giving respectability and even a special place of privilege to the MCB – and the BBC for giving them a platform and every support.
The scumbags cannot even bring themselve to acknowledge the ‘Great’ part of Great Britain and these are the hostile terrorist loving vermin that our scumbag government deals with everyday and funds via taxes.
If there were any justice in the UK these scumbags would be taken to camp Bastion and then dumped outside the main gates en masse and told to f*ck off to their islamist friends for help and succour.
I see they are doing Ashcroft on Panorama, I hope to see the individual moneyed backers of Unite and Unison on the same slot next week.
Doubt it.
Biased BBC
Well, well, well.
The BBC cannot defend this. It was full of innuendo and rubbish. It was nothing but a blatant party political attack.
Notwithstanding he may have made some dodgy deals, Panorama left us in no doubt about his strong links to the Tories.
Personally, I think he is as dodgy as most political donors. The simple point is the state broadcaster cannot go after a party like that.
“the biggest single donor, corporate or private, to the Conservative Party donates just one per cent of annual funding. Any organisation can lose one per cent and sail on regardless.
The Labour Party receives a staggering 60 per cent of its money from the trade unions. With today’s reduced membership they represent only about a sixth of the electorate.”
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/ourcomments/view/204213
So will the BBC attack one of theri own? Greedy bankers and now greedy beeboids.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1319644/BBC-director-deputy-Mark-Byford-redundant.html
Anyone want ot bet Byford gets a free pass?
Great. That savings of his enormous salary ought to just about make up the expense for sending a whole bunch of correspondents to do a multitude of individual reports about the exact same story in New York for the 9/11 memorial and now for the Chilean miners.
Yeah, Thompson gets it alright.
Getting rid of Byforde so that the Machiavellian Thompson can grab even more for himself and remaining fat cats. Does that man ever do anything other than protect the special position of himself and the Beeboid Corp?
They really are stupid. So stupid . The payoff and the pension pot are beyond all reason. I can imagine the congratulations all round at pulling off such a stroke at the expense of the taxpayer. Thompson must be looking forward to the best paid retirement in Britain when he is forced to quit.
The rest of us can eat cake as far as he is concerned. Truly an ancien regime out of control.
They are digging their own graves but are too stupid to realise it.
If anyone has complained to the BBC but hasn’t received a reply, that is only because they didn’t realise it was a complaint. How could they be expected to know without seeing this guide, which has been specially prepared to solve the problem.
Ah, I get it now. I rarely receive replies when I complain about their anti-white racism, their Soviet style of reporting, their suppression of freedom of speech, their inability to address the many problems of mass-immigration etc. etc.
In the minds of these fools they’re probably considered as compliments.
They can tell from mine due to the wording, words like f**k**g l**tie t**ts are a giveaway.
But that’s a compliment! 😀
Just watched Frei boy on BBC World America reporting from Chile. What an utter moronic prat. The worst report I think Frei boy has ever done and that says something.
Why is he even there? Apart from self-aggrandisement, as DB suggested on the other thread, I mean. Sure, BBC America is technically an independent entity, under the umbrella of BBC Worldwide. So it’s the commercial arm which will pay for him and his crew to spend the week in a nice hotel and rent a couple of Range Rovers. But they share content with the World Service and the News Channel all the time, and vice versa, so he doesn’t really need to be there for BBC World News America broadcasts.
There is no valid journalistic reason for him to be there, or for anyone else besides Tim Willcox, for that matter. Yet the BBC has sent more than two dozen people down there in the last few days to cover the reveal of the miners. Why does each channel have to have its own crew and individual reports?
Not only that, but for every Beeboid “talent” standing on that hill near the drilling site, your license fee is needed to pay extra time to other Beeboids to fill in for them at their regular slot.
It’s funny wasteful this all is. Yet Mark Thomspon and the other senior BBC mandarins think all they need to do is make a couple of class war gestures to appease the masses. In their minds – and this seems pretty clear from Byford’s statement and others – everyone is really angry only about high salaries. If they get rid of that superficial element, and put a couple of royal heads on poles, everyone will be happy and they can go back to business as usual.
The fact that in the face of this they’re sending more Beeboids to cover a human interest story without any real significance or impact on anyone’s lives outside Chile shows that they really just don’t get it. After all, even if they save a few million by sending a handful of mandarins out to a gold-plated pasture, the license fee hasn’t been reduced yet, and so they can go on wasting loads of money elsewhere.
Funny that the BBC can send down an army of hacks now when a little while ago during the worst and coldest winter in South America for years where many died and countless of animals perished of freezing cold and where record snow covered many parts of the continent the BBC could not be arsed to send even one hack out to cover the devastation!
Funny that eh?
It’s another day, it’s any o’clock, and it’s cuts-a-Jack on the BBC!
Breakfast roving boy in some seniors dance class, where the old biddies, at his behest, ‘express their worst fears’, neatly edited together.
Afterwards, it is mutteringly conceded that most of what the vox pops claimed were NOT going to happen, but no matter…they THOUGHT they might.
So, let’s drag up a coalition coumcillor and put him on the spot.
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves until we actually know what the CSR is going to reveal’, he says. Not that this in anyway stopped the piece rumbling on. And on.
Quite.
Aunty… try for once to report what has happened, as opposed to punting out pre-propaganda pieces daily on what ‘might’ happen as scare stories to suit your sorry narrative.
Yes. yes, yes! Just tell us what has happened. Be reporters, that’s all that’s needed.
Sadly, they are recognising the threat that this observation suggests, and are staging a fight back, especially using house elfs on blogs.
Now, calling into question the reporting value of an opinion, usually based on unsubstantiated and/or inaccurate facts/claims, is met with shrieks of ‘You obviously want North Korean state propaganda… of course reporting includes their views!!!!!!’
Er, no. But the irony being lost, or shouted down, is always funny.
If I may stray a smidge OT, I was wondering if any more experienced had any advice on ‘trolls’/trolling’.
On any blog it is a fine line, and I recognise that, in the spirit of free speech it’s a hard one for any mod to navigate.
But I am noticing an odd phenomenon on some of Aunty’s blogs, currently being discussed on Harmless Sky regarding Graun’s CiF, of passive (at best) collusion between degree of separation posters on threads and the thread owner/mod… as it suits the narrative (especially when things are going pear shaped).
Many BBC blogs seem to have at least one tame troll, often very indulged by the management when others can easily fall foul for the ‘catch-all’ ‘off topic’.
While it is possible they do make a point of value, and worth debating, more often than not they flll the thread up with snide one-liners, or vast attempted fisking screeds, straw men, cherry picks, or simply nonsense.
If you do respond, it is of course a short route to a bad place. And even others can dip in and advise you ‘not to feed the troll’.
Which does make some sense. But….
…. that can end up with the trolling ‘owning’ the thread eventually, and killing it soon after.
Which, when one thinks about it, can very much serve the bunker mentality of the thread owner who may be regretting starting it, or where it is going. Yet dare not go to ‘watertight oversight’ or ‘closed for comments’, especially if the topic is free speech or reporting standards as, well, that would look ‘awkward’.
Any thoughts on how best to respond? At least to leave the troll and their masters a little less than satisfied with the scorched earth they have colluded to inherit, and are now feeling a bit lonely at being the sole inhabitants.
I was pondering ‘Reopenedformoresensiblecomments.com’, the link for which could be placed on a BBC, Graun, etc thread that is teetering or subject to excessive modding, so even when folk are denied a voice it can be archived and continue elsewhere out of the control of those who initiated it. As I have advocated here, I would allow all comments bar sue-territory material, but have a ‘sin-bin’ side bar where either site owner or popular vote can re-assign those who wish to play games, and those who enjoy jousting with them
Sorry if a bit daft, but the level of censorship and manipulation on some blogs is too… unique… not to mention vexing. And I prefer to seek solutions along with critiiques if possible.
“I would allow all comments bar sue-territory material, “
Sue territory? I thought for one moment you were alluding to this, where all the offending contributions were deleted, leaving the responses stranded.
There is a need for discouraging persistent trolls, especially serial ones who have managed to build up considerable notoriety on the blogosphere. Especially when they derail a thread, as you say.
But dissenting voices are an asset to a blog IMHO.
Excuse the poor word use.
I am aware (as a blog owner) that there are areas where one might end up on the wrong end of litigation merely for providing the vehicle for discussion.
Agree on the dissenting voices totally.
But the ‘Spawn of Rupert! Yawn!’ or ‘I’m a little teapot and you are the anti-christ’ variety can prove awfully distracting.
Hence my notion of allowing them to be viewed, just, elsewhere.
And having comments stranded is the pits. Especially if the modding is not clear on who and when. You go from champion to bozo very quickly.
GW, the only thing I can think of is to flag the offending comments as violating the house rules, and give a calm, measured, detailed explanation of why it does.
It worked for me on one of those extremist trolls. I think it was simon21, but I can’t remember now. In response to one of Katie Connolly’s “What is the Tea Party movement” pieces, he posted a typical ad hominem rant: they’re all religious fundamentalists, dangerous, violent, anti-science, homophobic, blah, blah, everything short of grinding up black babies for their pudding.
I sent in a complaint saying the comment was pure slander, with no substance. I explained – in calm tones, and without insulting the commenter himself – that the comment wasn’t about debate, and made no attempt to explain anything or provide evidence for any of the accusations. I also said that the commenter implied that all Tea Party supporters were lying about their true interests. It was pure, baseless slander of hundreds of thousands of people.
It was removed within 48 hours. I think the word “slander” and pointing out that there was no attempt to debate the issues at hand might have been what convinced the mods.
There are obviously a few dedicated self-appointed defenders of the indefensible who spend time searching the comments for something they don’t agree with so they can flag it and have it removed. The only thing for it here is to fight fire with fire.
It was removed within 48 hours.
Been there, done that. Ta for feedback, anyhoo.
Maybe there’s mileage in a ‘I’ve been mostly modded by Aunty’ T-shirt?
Grubby stuff like slander and blatant mis-information they will solemnly ponder and then ‘decide’ it’s OK. Anything they, or one of their troll chums doesn’t fancy, you’ll be OT and in the sin bin before you can say “House Rools”. My latest reply (I only write in to build up a file of facile responses from them if Capita decide to get silly) is as funny a circular/’Beware of the Leopard’ round as I have seen in a while (latest first):
Dear BBC Visitor
Thank you for your email.
The moderators do not routinely remove posts for being off topic.
Posts that are considered off topic are only reviewed if alerted by another user. These alerts are then passed to the site owner to make a decision as to whether the comment breaks House Rules.
Central Communities Team.
—
Re: Blogs Feedback – Moderation
Dear Sirs,
They did not appear to be off topic… they were off topic.
And the fact that this excuse is used so irrationally across the entire BBC Blog infirmament I know will not trouble you.
However, as belied by your cookie cutter response, I was not arguing on that basis.
I pointed out how while mine were excised for being ‘off topic’, those equally so remained, apparently by being more amenable.
I cited one, which at time of writing remains.
That… is favoritism and selective censorship.
Not what our objective national broadcaster should be indulging in.
—-
Thank you for your email.We have reviewed your posts and both appear to be off topic and so have correctly been removed, in accordance with the House Rules that you agreed to abide by. As such, we are unable to uphold your appeal and reinstate your content.
No idea what happened there. System claimed a 5k character max each time.
GW, there’s probably a lot of extra formatting code in the italicized and bolded text you copied in. It’s especially bad when copying from the BBC website. For some reason, this comments tool keeps it all, and includes it in the character count. Same for urls. The only way around it I’ve found is to first copy from a website into a plain text editor such as Notepad, then c & p from there into the comments window here, then format as needed.
It’s a pain, I know.
That’s why I think only diligent flagging will make a difference. If enough comments are flagged as slander, they might learn.
I assume that you are referring specifically to the troll that has taken over the Boden thread in the Editors blog? There are a couple of others who infest the FiveLite blogs but the Beeb seems to have just abandoned any interest that they may once have shown.
Perhaps INBBC will get around to adding the following to its own 7/7 accounts…
“The 6/7 bombers: Revealed, how terror attacks were delayed a day as ringleader took pregnant wife to hospital”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1319717/7-7-INQUESTS-Bombings-delayed-Mohammed-Sidique-Khan-pregrant-wife-hospital.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#ixzz128gkKTQ1
Google “Rupert Murdoch” site:BBC.co.uk for the last 24 hours. At last check there were already seven articles.
I came across British media join forces against Murdoch takeover of BSkyB
Letter to Vince Cable signed by many of UK’s leading news providers warns £8bn deal would damage democratic debate.
The signatories argue against a combined Murdoch multimedia empire that would have a turnover of £7.5bn compared with the BBC’s £4.8bn.
I’m no supporter of Rupert Murdock but there seems to me more than a whiff of hypocrisy in this move.
The signatories argue against a combined Murdoch multimedia empire that would have a turnover of £7.5bn compared with the BBC’s £4.8bn.
Yeah and you don’t get a branded a criminal or thrown in jail for not bying the Sun or Sky Sports.
So, if up to this point in time, the BBC is actually the 900-pound gorilla in the room, and larger than any other media organization, why has there been no complaint about the BBC stifling democratic debate from these media darlings?
Media Brief by Torin Douglas
The BBC is publishing new editorial guidelines this morning, after the BBC Trust asked licence-fee payers for their views. The BBC reports that they include new restrictions on the use of “humiliating and derogatory remarks” for entertainment purposes. Controversies in religion and science must be covered with “due impartiality”, as applies in cases of political and industrial controversy.
We will see.
Indeed.
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=46118&c=1
If Mark Byford has been in charge of the BBC’s editorial policy, he’s been a waste of space the entire time.
As for restrictions on the use of “humiliating and derogatory remarks”, does this mean they’ll finally remove the “tea-bagger” slur from Kevin Connolly’s piece from April 2009? Or is that considered “edgy”? And this will surely severely restrict Matt Frei’s output as well, as he does little more than make derogatory remarks.
I did find the ‘Conscience of the BBC’ funny,if only for being so po-faced (surely from a PR), in a Boadenesque, ‘if it’s said, it must be true’ navel-gazing fashion.
I kept looking for the word ‘guilty’, for some reason.
Yes, Byford was in charge of all journalism. The state of it tells us how useless he was.
They don’t ask license fee payers – they ask a small panel of licence payers who are suposed to be a cross section of the British public. In other words 60% ethnic minority and 40% Labour voters.
I have had a licence for over 40 years and I have never been asked my view once.
I know…it’s funny that. How come I never get asked my opinion? Oh, I lie. I have seen some surveys online. They do pop up from time to time. Does one apply for these panels or wait to be asked?
Meanwhile it’s the Basement for us, I’m afraid. 😀
John Simpson says BBC news was never left wing:
“Thirty years ago I was the BBC political editor and there was absolutely nothing either left wing or right wing about our coverage. We were as straight as a dye then and I think it is absolutely as straight as a dye now.”
“I don’t know why Mark said that. Maybe he had some particular people in mind on some of the programmes but in terms of the BBC’s core coverage that was not the case and I don’t know why he chose to say that.”
…
“The act of cutting the licence fee is a political act which increases political control over the lifeblood of the BBC.”
That’s easy scrap the licence fee, go subscription only, then politicians cannot “scare” the BBC with cuts to the licence fee. Beeboids always harp on about their “lifeblood”, what they mean is their right to coerce people with a television to pay up or else.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8059005/John-Simpson-says-BBC-news-was-never-left-wing.html
So it wasn’t, and it isn’t. Next they’ll be trying to say it never could be.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2010/09/impartiality_is_in_our_genes.html
Oh.
Kind of novel that all the senior talent and market rate bosses can’t even seem to agree on what they were… are… should… will be.
Money well squandered.
Robert Peston: `The bid battle for Liverpool FC has become slightly more complicated than three dimensional chess’
Not really – only for people with a poor grasp of these kind of issues Robert
just as an aside
is it just me or has anyone else noted a few new faces posting on here?
nice to see the tribe growing-and I bet if all the lurkers joined in the number of comments would rise dramatically
As predicted, the BBC is ramping up the propaganda about the Tea Party movement, and desperately trying to reassure the faithful that their beloved Obamessiah will prevail in the end.
Here’s US pollster John Zogby to tell you that losing the House would be a great thing for the President, and compares Him to Clinton and Reagan. All I can say is that it’s blindlingly obvious to anyone except a true believer that both Reagan and Clinton were far more competent as leaders and persuaders than the current White House occupant. Clinton especially so, but his success was partly due to the fact that he stood for very little other than being President, and compromised considerably after Newt Gingrich threw a temper tantrum, triangulating all the while. The Obamessiah simply isn’t capable of that, and His extremely negative attacks and frankly pathetic analogies in His speeches (we’re in the ditch, it’s hot, there are bugs, don’t give them the keys to the car) make that pretty clear.
But Zogby – good pollster, but lousy predicter of the future – says that losing badly in November will be the best thing for Him. As we’ve seen recently, the BBC does go out with a predetermined agenda and deliberately hires someone to contribute a piece that fits. Examples are the two pieces they commissioned from people about how opposition to the You-Know-What Near You-Know-Where was misguided as the area is full of stippers and seedy merchants, is due to racism, and that laws should be enacted to arrest people who object to it.
So the BBC reached out to Zogby and asked him to contribute a piece with a specific message. Agenda? What agenda?
Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
I Corinthians 15:1-2
Mark Mardell continues his quest to understand these freakish Tea Partiers. His confusion is well known to everyone here, but it’s a bit lame for the BBC North America editor to admit that he still can’t figure it out, because he formed his opinion last year and had stuck to it.
Mid-terms in Nevada: A Tea Party tipping point?
Actually, Mark (or the BBC sub-editor who came up with that headline), Nevada is a prime indicator, not a tipping point.
Mardell is in Nevada to learn about the shaky ground upon which the leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, is standing. This is the same Senator who helped create ObamaCare, and did all manner of backroom deals to force it through, in the face of massive opposition from the public. Mardell, however, doesn’t portray him that way.
The battle in Nevada is the clash at the heart of this election. The Silver State is tarnished. It has the worst economy and the highest unemployment and home-repossession numbers of America’s 50 states – so perhaps it is not surprising that the man who has been senator here for 24 years, Democratic leader of the Senate Harry Reid, isn’t boasting.
What about ObamaCare, Mark? What about all of Reid’s gaffes? As for the high unemployment, part of that is due to the President Himself, because He said companies shouldn’t spend money on conventions in Vegas. Reid is intimately associated with the President, so of course he’s going to suffer for that. He also had his minions attack a Tea Party bus a few months back.
Nevadans have plenty of reasons to be fed up with Reid. Mardell, of course, can’t quite admit the truth.
Instead, he’s running on his opponent’s supposed “extremism”. It is something the Tea Party relishes. Reid is a hate figure for those on the conservative right: he is someone who they say has dragged President Obama to the “extreme” left. That word again.
Yes, Mark, there’s that word again. You seem to use it quite a bit.
Notice how Mardell says that only Reid’s opponents think that he has dragged the President to the extreme left. Which is entirely backwards. The President came into office from the extreme Left, and lived His entire life wrapped up in it. Reid was following Him, not the other way around. Fortunately, it seems that the voters of Nevada are more perceptive than Mardell.
Contrast this to the way Mardell then lists several detailed attacks on Reid’s Tea Party-supported opponent, Sharon Angle. Even though he qualifies it with “she is accused by opponents of”, it’s full of details, whereas criticisms of Reid are vague and not specific to policies. So the reader doesn’t really know the full objections to Reid, other than a couple of notions Mardell presents as susepct.
What’s funny is that the statements he gets from the two Tea Party activists he talks to actually show that Mardell has been lying for at least a year about the make-up of the movement. 30% Democrats, they’re trying to fix problems with the Republican Party. That’s not the same thing as the racists and Obamessiah haters and far-right conservatives about which Mardell has been reporting for months and months. I doubt this new information will change his opinion, though, and he’ll go back to seeing racists everywhere.
Even with all this, Mardell just can’t keep himself from summing up with a negative.
The gulf in American politics is growing wider all the time, and 2 November will be an important day – not just for Democrats, but for the future direction of the Republican Party.
Wrong again. That “gulf” was clear to everyone right before the last election, and it has been there for ages. This is nothing new. Of course, Mardell only sees that many people are miles away from his own far-Left political ideals, and so labels everything from that persepctive. Perhaps if he had gotten his head out of the Washington Post and HuffingtonPost for a minute in February 2009, he might have had some inkling of what was going on. He’s only just now waking up to reality, and he sure doesn’t like it.
I enjoyed all those Beeboids frightening teenagers about being “in debt for life” if they went to university now that the nasty Tories killed the tuition cap. One of the kids even said her friend was going to Scotland instead.
Anybody think it’s a good idea to emulate the Scottish model?
In Scotland, skill shortage vacancies account for 17% of all vacancies in Scotland with 3% of establishments reporting them. A large proportion of skill shortage vacancies are within skilled trades (78%). 11% of establishments report internal skills gaps. Elementary (21%), plus process, plant and machine operatives (18%) occupations report the largest share of skills gaps. Only 4% of establishments reported skills gaps for professional and 4% of associate professional occupations. Across all occupations skills gaps are predominantly for technical and practical skills.
That’s just in agricutlure. Too many people getting useless degrees, and not enough in vocational training or apprenticeships.
And here in Bonnie Scotland the anomaly is that EU students get a free ride whilst English students have to pay.
And quite right too. Didn’t the English rule one third of the world during the Norman Conquest? And wasn’t it the English who put all the Red Indians into the Black Hole of Calcutta. After that they should pay more than anyone for their History degrees. I was lucky I got mine under Labour!!
I see that Nick Robinson is no longer doing any political gossip reporting and is stuck into the Government’s Spending Review and budget cuts.
I know he’s supposedly been working on a whole big series of presentations for when the Spending Review actually comes out, and I can only assume that all these other pieces he’s been doing about the budget and spending cuts are related to that.
But why? He’s not qualified for any kind of economic analysis or anything of the sort. Why isn’t anyone from the BBC economics or business team doing this? Is this just part of clearing the way for Laura Kuenssberg to take over for him?
I am sure Stephanie “Floundering” Flanders is reving herself up for the spending review too David. After all she can barely bring herself to write about an IMF conference she attended or economics events but always has plenty of time for political stories that knock the Tories…
Paul Mason, Newsnight’s Socialist Economics editor, has done a special film on the trials and tribulations of Gary, Indiana. It’s an industrial town, based almost entirely on the steel industry, and has seen severely hard times.
Mason hired a local photographer to create an emotionally manipulative film of the urban decay, and states his purpose:
I went back determined to find out how the stimulus dollars had been spent; to get beyond the ideology and recriminations and see why President Barack Obama’s stimulus has failed to turn the country around.
Of course, the entire piece is based on Mason’s own ideology, but I’ll get to that in a moment. First, Mason engages in a little irrelevant race-bating by bringing up an incident from 60 years ago. This Sinatra story has nothing whatsoever to do with the economic situation of that time or this one, but Mason uses it to set up his little “white flight” gag. He also says Gary is 84% black, so I’m not entirely sure what the point is, other than playing the race card, which of course further bolsters the city’s victim status.
Mason gets into some detail about the situation, and asks the following questions:
So what’s the story with Gary and the stimulus?
He immediately gives the answer: the state is controlled by nasty Republicans. This tells you all you need to know about Mason’s ideology, as the Democrat Federal Government didn’t exactly cough up all the money the city asked for, as even Mason admits. But never mind that: Republican ideology screwed it up, according to Mason.
His second question, asked of the Republican (boo!) Governor of Indiana:
But, how can you enforce fiscal austerity on a place like Gary, at the same time as the official policy of the federal government is to reflate the economy? Surely, I ask Mr Daniels, something has to give?
Yes, Paul, something does have to give. So instead of Mason’s ideological questions, I’ll ask one of my own:
Why does anyone have the right to stay where they are and demand that the rest of the world revolves around them?
I grew up in a state that originally prospered from the mining industry (mostly copper). When those mines went bust back in the 1930s, many towns died along with them. The result was that people moved elsewhere to where the jobs were. Nobody stayed in a defunct mining town and expected the government to magically swoop in and create something out of nothing. Yet Mason fully expects that this is what should happen, even expressing his astonishment that it hasn’t.
Funny how the BBC is always telling you that those “migrants” from other countries pour into Britain because that’s where the jobs are. Same for the Mexicans and others from the Latin countries who have illegally swarmed into the US. The Beeboids expect you to think that it’s perfectly natural for people to leave an area with no work and go where the jobs are. This is, in fact, how the world works.
Yet here, Mason seems to deny all of that and wonder why more money hasn’t been thrown down a toilet. Why doesn’t he think that the people of Gary ought to go somewhere else, some place where the government can use stimulus funds (if we’re even going to play that game) more efficiently?
Answer: Mason’s ideology. Tonight on Newsnight.
BBC-NUJ: a help or a hindrance to Chile mine rescue?
Even the BBC-NUJ’s chum,’The Guardian’, can’t avoid this sort of comment:-
“The rescue of the 33 trapped miners in this corner of Chile has drawn an astonishing 2,000 journalists to the improvised camp at San José mine. It has come to dominate world headlines, suck attention from Afghanistan, the Middle East and US elections and prompt the question: when does a story become a circus?”
And ‘The Guardian’s Rory Carroll, who is one of the 2,000, has these remarks on the BBC’s presence:
“The BBC, defensive over accusations of flabby overkill at having sent 26 people, issued an unofficial fatwa against print reporters blamed for breaking the story. A female journalist from a guilty newspaper was rebuffed when asking for help with a battery.
Chile’s media, meanwhile, enjoyed the show.
“The local tabloid, La Cuarta, ran pictures of seven ‘bella’ female correspondents and the headline: What luck: these beauties are fighting for the 33 heroes.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/12/chilean-miners-media-chile-tv
For film buffs, ‘The Guardian’s Mr. Donaldson (amongst others) did make a telling reference (in August) to the role of the media in Billy Wilder’s brilliant fictional film about a mining rescue, ‘Ace in the Hole’ (1951).
Perhaps the BBC-NUJ can put this film in its TV schedule so that its Chilean 26 can view it on their return (among with the rest of us).
“The trapped Chilean miners are a little close to Billy Wilder for comfort”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/aug/25/trapped-chilean-miners-billy-wilder
That prat Frei has just been helpful in telling us that Chile has a Right-Wing President (relevant?) and that he will be looking for a poll boost from the rescue.
Sneering BBC…its in their genes.
He says the same thing on his blog. Worse, he accuses the President of moving the rescue a few hours earlier so that it’s in Chilean TV Prime Time.
If it can be moved forward, why wouldn’t they do it? Why not get the men out as soon as possible? Especially since we learned earlier today that there have been some rockfalls and shifting around the rescue shaft opening.
Frei also sneers that the authorities have been lying the entire time about the progress of the rescue effort, just to make it seem like a miracle for the President.
What about those emotional US drillers Willcox was talking to the other day? Were they lying as well?
Frei Boy doesn’t even need to be there. There are loads of other Beeboids to do plenty of coverage, and they can easily show it on his little BBC World News America puppet show.
Get rid of him.
Frei talking out of his arse as usual.
I heard that as well, Frei really is a twat.
Anyone else watching News 24? Matt Frei making a complete and utter tosser of himself. Other beeboid just read out statement from Barry Obama and Frei nearly had a trouser accident.
Other rather camp male beeboid with Frei has started to do a Steve McLaren and speak in a foreign accent.
Also, the camp male is now a mining expert apparently, being as the tosser has never been near a mine until now, I’m impressed. NOT!
Two overpaid twats talking total bollocks. The BBC at its very best.
I am and it is vile. Sneers at independently wealthy right-wing politicians who he is inferring are exploiting the potential tragedy for political gain and then having the audacity to say that the 2 hour delay is “slightly annoying”.
I am sticking with it, because this whole coverage is giving us ammunition about BBC bias and excess.
If you missed BBC-NUJ’s Mr Mason doing his analysis of social class in America, on ‘Newsnight’ tonight, there’s a reprise at political stablemate, ‘The Guardian’:
“America’s new poor: the end of the middle-class dream”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/12/end-of-the-middle-class-american-dream
El Presidente born with a silver spoon in his mouth and went to Harvard.
Thanks Mr. Frei.
The following also went to Harvard:
Stephanie Flanders
Ed Balls
Ed Miliband
“Two Eds are better than one, Stephanie?”
http://www.express.co.uk/ourcomments/view/204824/Vanessa-Feltz#
Barack Obama.
Jesus I really hope people are watching the drivel being spouted by Frei and the camp male beeboid.
Laughingly we had camp boy and Frei ‘talking technical’ which made me laugh.
I was trying to work out what the great interest is with tihs story for the BBC. Then it came to me. A long slender shaped object being inserted into a tight fitting hole several times.
Yes now I know.
A Beeboid is at his (or her) worst when promoting themselves in a deluded fashion. Take this tweet from a two-bit regional news magazine political hack (plenty of Labour friends note):
http://twitter.com/#!/susana_mendonca/status/27186467015