BBC News editor Rachel Kennedy has removed the tweet, highlighted here, in which she expressed hope that recent events would “do for” Sarah Palin (h/t John Horne Tooke). In case you missed it here’s the screengrab:
Kennedy will now be attending a “masterclass” by BBC Twitter tutor Sue Llewellyn (who was herself quite keen to associate Palin with the Tuscon shootings):
No doubt the licence payer will be picking up the tab.
While the BBC look for the Palin connection, at left American magazine Mother Jones, reporter Nick Baumann interviews an old friend of Jared Loughner, Bryce Tierney :
On Sunday, federal prosecutors charged 22-year-old Loughner with one count of attempting to assassinate a member of Congress, two counts of unlawfully killing a federal employee, and two counts of attempting to kill a federal employee. Giffords was the target of Loughner’s rampage, prosecutors say, and the sworn affidavit accompanying the charges mentions that Loughner attended a Giffords “Congress in Your Corner” event in 2007. The affidavit also mentions that police searching a safe in Loughner’s home found a letter from Giffords’ office thanking the alleged shooter for attending an August 25, 2007 event.
Tierney, who’s also 22, recalls Loughner complaining about a Giffords event he attended during that period. He’s unsure whether it was the same one mentioned in the charges—Loughner “might have gone to some other rallies,” he says—but Tierney notes it was a significant moment for Loughner: “He told me that she opened up the floor for questions and he asked a question. The question was, ‘What is government if words have no meaning?'”
“He said, ‘Can you believe it, they wouldn’t answer my question.’ Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her.”Giffords’ answer, whatever it was, didn’t satisfy Loughner. “He said, ‘Can you believe it, they wouldn’t answer my question,’ and I told him, ‘Dude, no one’s going to answer that,'” Tierney recalls. “Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her.”
One gets a distinctly Mark Chapman vibe from that. From his Youtube videos we can deduce that Loughner, to put it charitably, is running on a different mental track from most of us. His ramblings about grammar seem like a bastardized version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
– that language and grammar can determine, or at least influence, thought. It was unfortunate for Ms Gifford – and even more so for the six people murdered, including a nine year old girl – that he chose to ask her his unanswerable question – and resented her inability to answer.
This chilling link was sent to me by a reader.
“On YouTube Gabrielle Gifford has a channel called “Gifford2″ . If you scroll down to the two people, of the channels that Gifford herself “subscribes” to, you’ll see that they number only two. One is a fellow congressman, and the other is named “Classitup10′s Channel” and is owned by non other than “Jared Lee Loughner”, the bloke who allegedly shot her.
The Palin/Arizona saga is easily the most important issue today; but meanwhile, Roger Harrabin here assembles a veritable usual-suspect army of green campaigners to shout at maximum volume that the government must appoint a GREEN MINISTER to make sure the “green agenda” continues to be adopted. The horror is that the Cleggerons probably will; but of course, our Roger utters not a peep about those who think that such a move will be a massive waste of our money. I’m all for sensible spending of taxes by cutting out waste and making efficiency savings – but this is not the way.
I’m adding monstrously to my carbon footprint to enjoy some glorious global warming in the tropics, so this will be my last posting for a while. The main task was avoiding dreaded “eco hotels” that ram AGW messages down your throat with every meal, but I have managed. And NO BBC! Whoopee!
Name the problem and the BBC response is Palin is to blame (unless Thatcher got there first, of course). I’m on the BBC’s Nolan Show in the morning to discuss the Arizona murders. Any comments you would like me to make? I am appalled by the media hunt against Palin even as the dead still lay where they were so brutally murdered. ITV have been grim, and the BBC no better.
The Telegraph’s Toby Harnden has a good blogpost about the “unseemly rush to blame Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and Republicans for murder in Arizona”.
I noticed this eagerness to blame the Right, and Palin in particular, when reading some BBC twitterers last night.
BBC News strand editor Rachel Kennedy, whose opinionated tweets (highlighted here on Biased BBC) led Director of News Helen Boaden to issue a warning email to all BBC staff, continues to be unconcerned about impartiality. In Kennedy’s view the cross-hair imagery in a map of pro-Obamacare Democrats produced by Sarah Palin was of such significance to yesterday’s shootings that she hoped it would bring about Palin’s downfall:
As Toby Harnden points out “martial imagery is standard political fare” and has been used by the Democrats when targeting Republicans. Such details are of no concern to a Palin-hating BBC news editor, though. Is it any wonder that BBC news output is so aggressively negative towards Palin when its editors openly express a desire to see her done for? It would be nice to think that such views would “do for” Rachel Kennedy, but as she works at the BBC she will no doubt be lauded instead.
The cross-hair map attracted BBC reporter Nicola Pearson’s attention too. She was concerned that it wasn’t receiving enough attention, and evidently was also impressed with the thoughtful balanced opinions of Kevin Maguire:
BBC US correspondent Katie Connolly was another who was keen to get in a mention of the Tea Party:
For BBC Radio Shropshire’s painfully right-on Jim Hawkins the map was the thing, as it was for BBC Twitter instructor Sue Llewellyn:
(Incidentally, “fieldproducer” is Sky News’ Neal Mann who last week was warning other journalists not to jump to conclusions about the arrest of the landlord in the Joanna Yeates murder case. No such worries about wild speculation for British broadcast journalists when there’s Palin-bashin’ to be done.)
Fiona Graham, a BBC “technology of business reporter” was very taken with the views of acute Palin Derangement Syndrome sufferer Roger Ebert:
Unfortunately for all the BBC employees desperate to pin the blame on Palin and the evil American Right, Caitie Parker, a former school friend of the shooter, had been offering some insight into his past politics and strange beliefs:
Doesn’t sound like he’d be a natural Palin-loving Tea Party supporter, does it?
It’s also worth noting that none of the BBC twitterers quoted above chose to mention that Giffords had enemies on the left, as this now-deleted blogpost at leftie website Daily Kos shows [click to enlarge]:
UPDATE 13.20. Gavin Esler has blessed us with his tuppence-worth this morning:
The BBC College of Journalism’s Marc Settle (h/t John Horne Tooke):
UPDATE 13.50. Remember how the BBC’s America editor rushed to inform us, incorrectly, that the Fort Hood shooter wasn’t motivated by religion? How very different from the BBC stampede to link yesterday’s sad events to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
UPDATE 14.20. Which US politician said the following in 2008? “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”. See here.
UPDATE 14.45. A further thought. What does Rachel Kennedy’s Sarah Palin tweet say about Helen Boaden’s authority? The BBC’s Director of News pontificates about impartiality but her underlings continue to ignore her.
UPDATE 16.00. Another tweet from last night, this one from senior BBC journalist Toby Brown:
I think it’s safe to say that BBC hatred of Sarah Palin runs wide and deep. Murderous dictators in Africa don’t elicit this type of reaction. Truly weird.
Sad to report the killings by a deranged shooter in Tucson, Arizona. From my perspective, he was neither right nor left, but rather mad. The net has seen the political left take advantage of this to try and blame Sarah Palin, or Barbara Bachman, or Jan Brewer. How do YOU think the BBC is dealing with it – wonder how it will develop?
Some may winder if the pouting Victoria Derbyshire over on BBC 5 Live in danger of being perceived of inciting disorder and riots against government policy? A Biased BBC reader says of her programme the other day…
She spent the day with student protesters on the last two protests and now is asking ‘What is the best way to make your voice heard?‘ against government policy…this assumes of course that that policy is wrong or bad. She helpfully named the time and place of the next protest. The guests are all left wing radicals…one of whom has just suggested smashing things up…VD’s only question…’Isn’t that ineffective?’….no shock that violence is suggested….though she has told the guest off for saying ‘bollocks’.
Derbyshire’s name and attitude towards the Coalition government comes up time and time again in correspondence to me. Have you a view on her to share?
The BBC suffers from PDS- Palin Derangement Sydrome. Watch this piece of BBC3 garbage from 5.33m onwards. The BBC even invite Kevin Maguire to join in the hatefest. No such “irreverent satire” when it comes to Barack and Michelle, of course.
Jack Straw was being fashionably outspoken, and the admirable Douglas Murray and Mohammed Shafiq all shouted at once in a Newsnight chaired by Stephanie “toss-tosterone” Flanders.
The best way they could deal with the question of Muslim racism against non-Muslims in a suitably non-racist way was to identify the practice of ‘men of Pakistani origin’ abusing vulnerable white girls, as a criminal rather that a culturally-motivated issue.
Someone proposed that the police unfairly target Asian men, and if they took the trouble to look they would find this crime equally rampant in any other community. Here is yet another manifestation of the contortions we go through so as not to be thought racist. We must insist that there are good Muslims and bad, or there are criminal Muslims and law-abiding Muslims, but never that there is a culturally based racism in Muslim communities that paints non muslims as inferior and unworthy of respect.
If criminal or bad Muslims are indeed a tiny minority, what is stopping the good majority doing their bit, wholeheartedly co-operating with the police, or condemning such behaviour loud and clear, or in their own ethnically cultural way, issuing a fatwa against it.
It’s only about fifty years since liberation from Victorian type stifling of human sexuality occurred in the West. Before the 1960s premarital and extramarital sex was considered shameful, and single mothers were put under enormous pressure to give up their babies, oh yes, and homosexuality was illegal.
When the revolution took place people were encouraged to throw off the shackles of shame, prudery and repression and love themselves and each other. Then, as is the way of things, the pendulum swung too far, and along came overt promiscuity and sexualisation of everything under the sun including children.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that chauvinistic male-centerd Muslim culture is entrenched in the distant past, and their fear and loathing of our debauchery, combined with their, dare I say it, racist insularity is what lies at the heart of what they call ‘Asian men’ grooming and abusing vulnerable, unloved white girls.
For heaven’s sake don’t let’s think we can or should reintroduce pre 1960s attitudes to sex, but we need to examine our own exploitative culture too.
If they really want to stop being marginalised, Muslim communities who live geographically in the west but emotionally in the east must revolutionise their attitude to sexual and male-female relationships, and liberate their young men from the sexual stifling and repression that causes this so-called “fizzing and popping with testosterone,” and make sure that the “outlet for that” doesn’t amount to abusing the non-Muslims they think of as ‘easy meat’.
Jack Straw was one of the bunch that orchestrated the Asian invasion. Now he’s surprised at the consequences.
The BBC is slowly but surely exposing this problem, albeit more tentitively than it should, but it’s hampered by an over-sensitive wariness of a backlash that might threaten ‘community cohesion’ if it’s discussed openly. They pretend this is a fear of a purely right wing BNP style reaction, but of course openness is also taboo in the Muslim world, and Mohammed Shafiq, the Muslim spokesman on Newsnight admitted that he has received threats from his own community “for speaking out”.
Here endeth the sermon. Come on BBC, let’s stop walking on eggshells and get down to the nitty gritty.
