Further to David Preiser’s post about the BBC’s use of an apocryphal quote in a far from subtle article on media barons, here’s one of the co-authors of that piece on Twitter yesterday:
Last week the BBC ran another De Castella article in which he attacked the News of the World for daring to quote Orwell’s Decline of the English Murder in its final edition.
And they have the nerve to call others “agenda driven“.
Twittering really tells us all we need to know about the hive. The beesboids seem blissfully unaware of how it looks.
The moral certainty of the liberal mind is something to behold.
They really believe that to hold a contrary view is not just unjustifiable but verging on evil.
Who are these people? What are they?
Tyrants in the making is as good a descripton as I can think of.
“Who are these people?”
Sanctimonious hate driven totalitarians.
Forgive me at my incredulity of where we are now with the BBC’s reportage of the current state of NI and NOTW. I can’t believe both the BBC but also th Guardian and Jon Snow’s C4 News.
It’s 2am and in Surrealville we are noe getting from News 24 calls for ‘anyone connected with NI over the timetable of hacking now to go.
That’s absolutely fine by me, if the long list of guest political columnists over the period in question would all line up at Beachy Head and take one confident step forward… Let’s start with the ones who lined their pockets at the time, ‘wrote’ editorials and thebsame who are now distancing themselves from the NOTW – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Ed Balls, Ed and David Milliband, Alan Johnson, John Prescott… you name the usual suspects and they all got paid…
Now the BBC are looking at Cameron’s guest list at Chequers and the anger rages because Coulson went there… have a look at those who wrote for NI before this jumped up furore…
I understand that laws were broken by phone hacking – and think a number of stone throwers are living in glass houses – but don’t let us move too far away from a ‘house’ that collectively shat itself when the rules of their expenses engagement were revealed now taking collective decisions on regulating our media.
On a side note I’d still like to know about the MEP expenses and those of the House of Lords where the claim for the daily rate is still openly and collectively known as ‘SISO’ – ‘Sign In Sod Off’
Rant over
“The ‘BBC Left’ is using hacking to get revenge. Left-wing politicians and broadcasters do not want to debate ideas but they do want to remove their opponents. ”
(by Janet Daley)
[Extract]:
“…the power of the BBC – and its historical hatred for the ‘Murdoch empire’ – is just one aspect of a larger battle which has now leapt across the Atlantic, where the target is not newspapers which can be legitimately charged with having committed unconscionable acts, but Fox News.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8642161/Phone-hacking-The-BBC-Left-is-using-hacking-to-get-revenge.html
She’s close but the target is really anyone who does not follow the left’s line. That may start with Fox News and News Int/News Corp but it will also include the Mail and others here and any not entirely left-of-centre papers in the USA. After that be under no illusions that Guido Fawkes and blogs such as this and mine that oppose leftist totalitarianism and the EU will also be in the firing line…
Quite, the list would be endless, and they would continue to silence people to the point where, when they had silenced all the non-believers, they would be turning on each other.
I’ve been enjoying the discomfiture of the Murdoch empire immensely recently, but a delicious side dish to the whole affair has been the occasional visit to this blog.
To think some people, such as Mr Vance, have convinced themselves that the most compelling aspect of this epoch-making story is the bias with which the BBC is reporting it!
Of course, on this blog, that is the most compelling aspect of every story.
With this story, however, there is an added piquancy, since it is essentially about the corruption of public life and discourse by a media organisation’s profit motive -the same motive that is supposedly the panacea for all society’s ills.
Like I said – delicious.
It is plain to anyone that the BBC has the knives out for Murdoch and NI. Non-stop, round the clock obsession.
On the *am Sunday religion prog on Radio 4 they were wittering on about one of the Murdoch’s receiving an honorary award from the Pope – as if that had anything to do with anything except the BBC’s vendetta.
Really, who can blame the BBC for reporting this story with glee? The Murdochs and their fellow travelers within the national press have orchestrated a relentless anti-BBC campaign for yonks, dressing up their commercial agendas with public interest. Most particularly -as seen last week -chilling any BBC contract negotiations with the certain knowledge they will be considered of public interest by the BBC’s rivals.
And remember, NI execs brought all this on themselves. The BBC haven’t carried this story, the outrage of the public has done that. Even the ultra-right wing Drudge Report in the States has lead with this story with each new development.
And remember, it wasn’t the BBC who hacked a missing schoolgirl’s phone -AND DELETED ALL THE MESSAGES.
It wasn’t the BBC who corrupted policemen and politicians with graft, promises of lucrative ‘consultancies’ etc etc.
Finally, it wasn’t the BBC to whom our governing politicians grovelled for influence and then dutifully attacked once in office.
That last sentence got a bit mangled -but you get the picture, I’m sure
It’s nice that you see this in terms of food menus, but as you yourself have noticed, on this blog the most compelling aspect of every story is the bias with which the BBC reports it. Well, what else would you expect from a blog entitled Biased BBC?
You wouldn’t order a pork pie in a kosher restaurant, would you – and by the same token the occasional visit to this blog should indicate what to expect when seated at the B-BBC table.
Although the profit motive plays a part, it is of course political influence which figures most significantly in ‘across the board’ fears of a Mordoch monopoly, and, as far as many people are concerned, a BBC monopoly.
The only ones who seem unaware of the latter fear are the BBC themselves, because they assume an unassailable God-given moral high ground.
As for ‘glee.’ The BBC shouldn’t really be reporting this or any other story with glee, their charter stipulates impartiality. As for your last admittedly mangled point, the general public seems remarkably underwhelmed by the whole thing. It’s the BBC and the Guardian who are gloating, and we all know that pride goes before a fall.
(Bon Appetit.)
There are plenty of politicians of all sides who grovel to the BBC – given its 70% command of the news airwaves. To deny that is to lie. I mentioned the 8am religious programme on Radio 4 this morning – it dragged in the Murdoch business, if that is not part of a vendetta by the BBC empire I do not know what is.
There are very solid grounds to criticise the BBC, its endemic bias, its bloated inefficiency and profligacy with our licence fees, its mostly-crap programming – it does not require some sort of evil Murdoch conspiracy. If there was a conspiracy masterminded by Murdoch and his executives – where is the endless sniping at the BBC from Times and the Sunday Times ? When does Sky News attack the BBC ? Yes, there is a record of people like Trevor Kavanagh at the Sun making occasional attacks on the BBC for its arrogant bias and for being totally out of step with public opinion – but even the harshest criticism by Kavanagh, a doyen of the UK political press, was blithely ignored by the BBC.
Why blithely ignored ? Because the BBC has a £4 billion a year monopoly on the licence fee, there is no “regulation” except by the supine BBC Trust, and the BBC’s huge influence on UK politics makes it largely flameproof.
So a blog who’s main (arguably only) aim is to expose BBC bias is guilty of, err, concentrating on the BBC bias angle. Wow, you lefties really are stupid aren’t you.
And i’m pleased to see that enjoying Murdochs discomfort, at least it will take your mind off Milly Dowler and her family, that poor girl you and your ilk cruelly used as the spark to set of this firestorm.
At least Simon Kisby has revealed what we long suspected: the actual concern in this attack on NI and Murdoch is really about political ideology and causing harm to political enemies and not actually giving a damn about human lives or the victims and their families. There’s more joy in causing damage to political enemies and delight in watching political enemies get upset than there is care for murder victims or their families.
Yes; the BBC-NUJ has many sycophants who smilingly support it against any criticism from small blogsites.
Of course, if any public critics of the BBC-NUJ annoy it politically, then they will not be welcome on its publicly financed, political air waves, non-profit making or not.
NI is a symptom, not a cause of the corruption in the British Media landscape. To see Murdoch cast as the Voldemort who has cast a long corrupting shadow into the green garden of the British establishment is perverse. The BBC has a dog in this fight. It has its agenda. Overall the agenda fits with the corruption of public life and discourse in Britain and hence the obsession with its enemy. Murdoch is the convict who returned. A Magwitch holding up a mirror to its face.
This is the establishment tearing at itself. It courted Murdoch shamlessly. He was useful. Very useful.
Let’s hope that Murdoch drags down, Samson-like, the whole self-satisfied edifice with him.
What is ‘delicious’ is the prospect of a gaping gash in the side of a corrupt political, media and financial elite.
The British establishment has permitted, in its arrogance,the most colossal malinvestment in British socal and economic life.
The BBC is part of this corruption.
Just Waiting for ths BBC to be draggrd in. Then It will dissapear off the Airwaves.
I realise the Daily Mail is labelled ‘beyond the pale’, but this article does name half the BBC as guests at a special all night Murdoch-Freud Chipping Norton bash.
That article about Orwell’s The Decline of the English Murder blatantly tried to make something out of nothing. It was a dismal attempt to find fault with The News of the World’s farewell editorial for saying of Orwell’s words:”They were written in 1946 but they have been the sentiments of most of the nation for well over a century and a half as this astonishing paper became part of the fabric of Britain, as central to Sunday as a roast dinner.”
And in order to do it, they found someone to sneer: ‘ The blogger and communications expert Max Atkinson says they have linked the great writer to some dubious claims. “Are they part of the fabric of Britain? No! As central to Sunday as roast dinner? No! This is self aggrandising, megalomaniac, boastful and untrue stuff.” ‘
That’s just silly. What Orwell wrote, only the first part of which was quoted by the Beeboid, thereby omitting the mention of roast beef lunch, was:
“It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? ”
Orwell did put the roast dinner and the News of the World together in his vivid image of domestic working class life. Objecting to The News of the World reflecting George Orwell’s depiction of the custom of life on a Sunday as including both the News of the World and the roast dinner is as daft as objecting to his writing that the man sat on a sofa. Just because someone might have an aversion to sofas, wouldn’t make it a rational objection to the centrality of sofas in the fabric of the nation. And why call it boastful, as if that is something bad, to be held against the paper? Why wouldn’t the News of the World congratulate themselves on its longevity and history and boast about it in their final flourish? It would be odd if they didn’t. It’s outlandish and desperate to talk about megalomania in this context or try to make out it is something that the paper made up.
The article limped on, trying to make out that Orwell was having a go at the newspapers:
“But while the essay depicts the quintessential lazy Sunday, it also satirises the prurience that newspapers – the News of the World is the only one mentioned by name – encourage.” …
and
…Orwell goes on to relate how these murders are “re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers”.
/continued
/ Continued
Orwell’s concern in this essay wasn’t having a go at the papers, though. They were incidental to his point which was about the enduring popular fascination with certain murders but not others: his actual reference was wider than newspapers. But the Beeboid gave us only the above selective mini-quote.
A fuller quote demonstrates the point and Orwell’s actual theme:
“If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them. Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: …
…Of the above-mentioned nine cases, at least four have had successful novels based on them, one has been made into a popular melodrama, and the amount of literature surrounding them, in the form of newspaper write-ups, criminological treatises and reminiscences by lawyers and police officers, would make a considerable library. It is difficult to believe that any recent English crime will be remembered so long and so intimately, and not only because the violence of external events has made murder seem unimportant, but because the prevalent type of crime seems to be changing.”
The Beeboid’s chosen communications expert (!) added for good measure: “They’re misrepresenting Orwell to suggest he’s a fan of the paper.”
Who exactly has been doing the misrepresenting? And whose idea was it to publish such a shabby and flimsy piece of transparent agenda in the guise of journalism?
Agenda? What agenda? They don’t even realize they’re doing it.