125 Responses to OPEN THREAD

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  1. David Preiser (USA) says:
    October 19, 2010 at 4:37 pm

    BBC News performer Emily Maitlis just let some Scottish guy get away with a blatant lie about Tory defense budget cuts regarding Harrier jets and aircraft carriers.  The BBC is promoting the lie in both the news text crawl and now in the next segment.  
     
    The Scottish guy said that the nasty Tories are scrapping the Harriers and so now are making aircraft carriers “with nothing on them”.  Neither Maitlis nor her producers wanted to admit that this is complete BS.  Maitlis is lying right now.  
     
    Finally Liam Fox is on to tell her that the Joint-Strike fighters are based on the Harrier and are practically VTOL capable.  No catapults needed.  Yet Maitlis continues to attack him as if she and the entire BBC News Division have no idea about a simple techinical detail about the planes.  She clearly didn’t understand what Fox just said.  
     
    In any case, the Harriers aren’t “being mothballed” tomorrow, as Maitlis alleges.  They’re being phased out over 10 years while the JSF F35 is phased in.  She and the BBC producers have no idea about military issues and are simply attacking from an ignorant, purely partisan standpoint.

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    • David Preiser (USA) says:
      October 19, 2010 at 5:24 pm

      Oops, looks like I spoke too soon.  Cameron is saying that Harriers will be dumped sooner.  But who ordered the JSF F35s and aircraft carriers to be finished on drastically different schedules?

      I guess it doesn’t matter that these aircraft carriers will be able to accomodate Ospreys.

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    • Martin says:
      October 19, 2010 at 5:40 pm

      David, what the BBC don’t point out is that Liebour were in power for 13 years and never had a proper defence review, they took us into more wars than any Government in recent history and failed to correctly fund any of them.

      Yet the BBC just wipes this from memory.

      Regarding the aircraft carriers. Both are a waste of time. The Navy has no airborne early warning for these two carriers. The US navy flies it’s own AWACS aircraft off its carriers. During the Falklands war our navy lost several ships because of a lack of proper long range radar.

      WE would have been better off getting a couple of US carriers and some F-18’s along with the proper aircraft for a fraction of the cost of the carriers and JSF.

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    • Guest Who says:
      October 19, 2010 at 6:11 pm

      ‘Emily Maitlis just let some Scottish guy get away with a blatant lie…’

      Not perchance, a Mr. Jim Murphy, a Labour drone who has oddly become the ‘go-to guy’ to wax lyrical on matters defensive, confidently assure that no hint of what he is (probably was) in bed with was, and is up to their armpits in the ordure created over the last decade that we’re struggling to resolve as a nation?

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      • Only Winding says:
        October 19, 2010 at 6:28 pm

        I thought Murphy was a disgusting shambles in that interview, especially the tosh he spouted about Tories in Parliament jumping for joy when Labour made the original decision to build these completely unsuitable aircraft carriers.

        Pathetic and of course she let him away with it.

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        • Martin says:
          October 19, 2010 at 7:04 pm

          It appears that they are going to re-design the carriers as well to install catapults and arrester gear etc to accommodate conventional naval aircraft.

          The more I think about it the more I just wonder why they didn’t buy F-18’s to start with.

          We’re now going to end up with 20 JSF,s, take out losses due to crashes and long term maintenance, they will be lucky to have 10 available at any one time. Utter waste of time.

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          • David Preiser (USA) says:
            October 19, 2010 at 7:32 pm

            The more I think about it the more I just wonder why they didn’t buy F-18’s to start with.

            Another name for the JSF is “Eurofighter”.  Do the math.

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    • John Horne Tooke says:
      October 19, 2010 at 8:33 pm

      “.. Emily Maitlis just let some Scottish guy get away with a blatant lie..”  
       
      How do you know it was deliberate? Do we know if Maitlis actually researched the  Coalitions policies?. I have heard quite a few so called reporters on BBC Radio who seem ignorant of the subject they are questioning. These poeple are “always on”, do they have time to research the topic?  Most of them just come across to me like “green behind the ears” youth who have not experienced life outside of the students bar.

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  2. Martin says:
    October 19, 2010 at 5:36 pm

    Some good news, the TV tax is frozen for 6 years. Toenails was almost in tears.

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  3. David Preiser (USA) says:
    October 19, 2010 at 6:06 pm

    So the BBC is expected to freeze the license fee for five years, which supposedly means a 16% cut in real-means terms.  I guess that’s where the £500 million figure somebody mentioned earlier comes from.

    First of all, I like how they assume that costs will rise by that much over the next five years.  This means the BBC is playing the Labour game of saying that not spending more money is the same thing as cutting current levels. 

    But let’s play that game for the sake of argument, and assume that the BBC would have to spend £500 million more over the next five years to maintain the status quo (after another mandarin falls on his or her jewel-encrusted golden sword, of course).

    Need to save that much money?  Simple.

    1.  Combine BBC 3 and 4.  There’s no need for both (they’re only part-time anyway), and they can cut funding a few more of those self-indulgent celebrity pieces, such as Stephen Fry trying to convince himself it’s okay to love Wagner’s music.  But more of James May’s ‘Toy Stories’ are fine.

    2. Eliminate a few non-practical positions, such as those compliance monkeys who have to go over opera librettros for Radio 3 looking for naughty words, or the people who draw up Maoist apology language required of only certain employees when they make unfortunate remarks.

    3. Drastically reduce the body count for Newsgathering operations.  There’s no need for every channel to have its own talent making the same report about the same event. Viz:  Chile and the US.

    4. How many Radio channels does the BBC actually need?  Combine Radios 2 and 5, send the edgy excess to podcast only, if at all.

    4.  Get serious about fixing BBC America and merchandising in the US so you can milk it for far more cash than it’s yielding now.  The place is run by orangutans at this point, and the BBC isn’t getting anywhere near the result it could.

    5.  Cut the number of newsreaders and weather muppets on the News Channel by half.  Make them work more than two hours at a time.  Please, God, not Emily Maitlis, though.

    6. Examine how much money is or isn’t being saved by having so many damn shows produced by third-party productions companies owned by the star presenters.  Examine if the BBC rule about how much content must come from third-party producers is even a good idea.

    7.  Leave the website alone already and stop going over budget every damn time.

    Done.  Money saved, product not devalued.

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    • David Preiser (USA) says:
      October 19, 2010 at 6:28 pm

      #s 1 and 5 will save enough money to cover the costs of absorbing the World Service and Welsh language service.

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    • Asuka Langley Soryu says:
      October 19, 2010 at 6:29 pm

      Or…keep the £500M and shoot Richard Bacon into space.

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  4. Span Ows says:
    October 19, 2010 at 6:19 pm

    Not sure if this has been posted already…

    “One by one, the major media of the world are changing their tune on reporting about economic conditions in Gaza and the West Bank. (Although we’re still waiting for the world’s biggest broadcaster, the publicly-funded BBC – which is under a legal obligation to be balanced – to do so.)”

    http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001144.html

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  5. David Preiser (USA) says:
    October 19, 2010 at 7:55 pm

    So what happened to the ever-increasing horrible hurricanes caused by AGW/ACC? 

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  6. Only Winding says:
    October 19, 2010 at 8:20 pm

    Industrial relations Chinese style as 11 Zambian miners are shot by their Chinese masters for asking for better working conditions:

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/zambia/8073443/Zambian-miners-shot-by-Chinese-managers.html

    Whilst the BBC are reporting it on their online African news page, anyone care to imagine a Panorama on China’s unhealthy influence in Zambia any time soon?

    After all they hurriedly put one together on Chile in a matter of days.

    Mmmm!

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    • David Preiser (USA) says:
      October 19, 2010 at 8:51 pm

      No problem, Matt Frei will be along soon to tell you how China is going to be a great world leader, and pine for a bit of totalitarian autocracy.

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  7. David Preiser (USA) says:
    October 19, 2010 at 8:49 pm

    Not mentioned in Claire Bolderson’s report for BBC World News America on Democrat: Russ Feingold’s losing battle to keep his Senate seat.


    Russ Feingold courts Tea Party votes

    Bolderson does admit that Feingold presents himself as a “maverick” who votes against the Democrat bloc sometimes (which is true), but she points out that he did vote for ObamaCare and the Stimulus Bill.  Bolderson even acknowledges that this is coming back to haunt him.  But she does not admit that Feingold said this at a recent debate:

    “Even though he made some comments originally about how the Patriot Act maybe had some problems, he fell in line to the Republican view, says he’s for the Patriot Act,” Feingold said, pointing out that he was the only senator to vote against the post-Sept. 11 legislation. “And the tea party people agree with me.”

    “Tea party people know that I stood against the Wall Street scam from Day One, that I voted against TARP, that I voted against repealing Glass-Steagall Act that kept these guys under some control,” he said, referring to the 1930s law that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

    Is Sen. Feingold a racist?

    Bolderson keeps to the same story Mark Mardell and others keep pushing:  that people are reflexively against incumbents when the economy sags.  Might there be a connection between ObamaCare and the Stimulus Bill and the fact that national debt is far, far worse than it would be otherwise, and the economy is affected accordingly?  Could it be possible that the voters realize that the people currently running the show are going in the wrong direction and that they’re not all just blind, scared sheep?

    The BBC isn’t interested.  Instead, their message is that it’s not the fault of the President or His policies.

    Notice also how Bolderson attends a rally for Feingold and gets a couple of devoted vox pops on his behalf, but covers his opponent, Ron Johnson, in a more cursory fashion.  Instead, she skips right to the county fair to find a couple of people disappointed in Feingold.

    Then note how that when Bolderson says that both parties need to get out the vote this time, only Democrat students are shown.

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  8. Richard says:
    October 19, 2010 at 11:26 pm

    Anyone see Emily Maitlis’s appalling treatment of Liam Fox on BBC News channel this evening?  She shouted him down, spoke over him at length, interrupted, and her tone was one of outrage and incredulity.  As a piece of professional journalism, it stank.  She’s off my Xmas card list, for sure.

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  9. Light Foot says:
    October 20, 2010 at 12:27 am

    I saw that.  I have no idea why the Tories don’t just dissolve the BBC and leave it to sink in the free market.

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  10. George R says:
    October 21, 2010 at 8:30 am

    Slapdash Beeboid ‘journalism’: e.g., M Easton.

    He presents us with a whole article (not worth reading) based on a less than half overheard phone conversation on a train; and hey presto, he’s knocked out a piece generalising on the changing role of women!

    “Will the cuts change the role of women?”

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/10/will_the_cuts_change_the_role.html

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