Monthly Archives: October 2010

Serve a complaint robust enough to penetrate the barrier surrounding the BBC’s complaints department, if there really is a complaints department, only to get it batted back with “We think we got it about right”

A typical case in point concerns the Middle East coverage, about which Mark Thompson says “We get complaints from both sides so we must be doing something right.” I’m no statistician, but I think I’ve spotted a flaw in this logic.
Thompson by all accounts gets paid an enormous salary, so he really ought to be smart enough to realise that this theory only works if you start from the premise that there’s a perfectly balanced audience; not one that has been subjected to ongoing abuse in the shape of many years’ distorted reporting.

With a virtual monopoly over our access to information on the subject, our opinion on the rights and wrongs of the matter is in their hands.
Consequently the concerned righteous majority has become virulently hostile to Israel. Add significant Muslim input, and what do you get?
Answer: The BBC’s negative and biased reporting meets with the approval of the majority. They’ve become such haters of Israel that the mere sound of Mark Regev’s voice is enough to provoke a furious response. Indeed if a single, scare-quoted word from an Israeli spokesperson emerges, as it occasionally has to, people are up in arms. They are acclimatised to the notion that Israel is responsible for the whole world’s problems. That accounts for complaints that the BBC favours Israel. So, occasionally, when the BBC is forced to include a nominal “other side of the story,” some of the indignant anti-Israel majority will protest, despite having little justification, as in the Mavi Marmara Panorama.

The relentless bias against Israel constantly upsets the pro-Israel minority, whose justified complaints join the spurious unjustified ones forming a veneer of balance that bolsters the BBC’s illusion of getting it right.

If the pro and anti complaints received are roughly equal in number, that means the ratio (of objections to the BBC’s bias against Israel) from the relatively small number of pro-Israel complainants is, per capita, disproportionately high, which reinforces the veracity of the case for the existence of the BBC’s anti Israel bias. Have I explained that complicatedly enough? I hope so.

On the other hand, it could be that the number of complaints are not actually equal, but split, in the Helen Boaden sense of the word, meaning that there are a certain number ‘for’ and a certain number ‘against,’ whether the ratio is actually 1000 to 1, or 50/50.

Either way Mark Thompson and Helen Boaden are paid enormous salaries. A person on HIGNFY with a small head said Sir Philip Green was a fat greedy shit.
There is a type of consumer programme that’s designed to name and shame people who practice to deceive. One is called Rogue Traders, in which a dishonest rogue is lured into a BBC honey-trap involving, for our entertainment, secret filming of shoddy work and outrageous overcharging. Matt Alwright and a television film crew are filmed by another film crew ineffectually confronting the miscreant, getting their fingers slammed in car doors and being run over as the rogue speeds away in his van. The toothless anticlimax of an outcome, is that the rogue’s picture gets to be pinned up in the rogues gallery, though no-one knows where that is.
I wonder if we could get Mark Thompson and Helen Boaden’s picture in there, or perhaps name them on HIGNFY as fat greedy shits, and please don’t tell me the coverage of the Middle East is balanced.