Monthly Archives: September 2011

Hold on to your hats. Richard Black has now decided to move into overt political analysis, the logical extension, I suppose, of his eco-warrior brief. His worst nightmare is in prospect: that a red meat Republican climate denier might succeed the sainted Obama. Clearly, “red meat” has special abusive value in this context, because he points out with pride it was devised by his chum, the cannabis smuggler, Jonny Dymond. En route, he sings loud praises to the Environmental Protection Agency, the body that single-handedly is doing more damage to the US economy than a phalanx of Bin Ladens. And, using a quote from one of favourite organisations, the so-called Friends of the Earth, he produces his trump card to show how plain stupid the red meaters are, because he EPA, he tells us with glee, was actually set up by one of their own, none other than that (boo, hiss) ultimate nasty Republican, Richard Milhous Nixon.

Mr Black saves the best until last. He writes gloomily:

But the rest of the world has to recognise that whatever transpires, the US is unlikely to be pushing a radical green line any time soon. Then again, it has been this way since the hanging chads of Florida carried Mr Bush to the White House in 2001.

Quelle horreur! It’s all that lying, cheating, double-dealing Dubya’s fault. What an outro! Can’t you just hear the rest of the BBC newsroom cheering him on for being so smart…and getting so much anti-Republican venom in one story?

They simply can’t help themselves. I couldn’t stomach listening to the Stimulus Jr. speech to the bitter end, so bailed out and missed a major gaffe. What’s that, you ask? The Smartest Man In the Room made a gaffe? Never. Well, He did, and it’s a good one. This has been making the rounds of actual honest journalists who are not propagandists or die-hard Obamessiah fans, but I waited a full day because I knew the BBC wouldn’t have corrected it by now.

At 19:36 on the BBC’s liveblog of the speech, Beeboid Adam Blenford posted this at that point in the speech:

Switching back into a plea for unity, and invoking the memory of Abraham Lincoln: “A Republican president who mobilised government”.

He’s referring to this bit of the speech:

“We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party”.

Bzzzt! Wrong. Blenford, of course, had no idea. Sure, Lincoln was the first Republican to be elected President, but the Party itself was founded in 1854 by a Alvan Bovary, at an abolitionist meeting at a church in Wisconsin. Yes, that’s right: the Republican Party was basically founded to fight against slavery, in response to the looming Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would let new states decide if they were going to have slaves or not. Lincoln was a Whig at the time, and didn’t join until 1856, when he co-founded the Illinois branch. Sure, he did a great deal to help establish the Party, but did not found it.

This is the President of the US, folks. Now, it’s impossible to know if the Teleprompter of the United States had it wrong (which means the President is also ignorant and just read it out), or if the Community Organizer in Chief just winged it and told a lie so he could use Lincoln as a cudgel with which to beat intransigent Republicans in the House. But the President either got it wrong, or simply lied in front of Congress and the whole country, just to score a political point.

Blenford didn’t catch it, and Mark Mardell didn’t catch it, nor did Katty Kay. I don’t expect them to actually know anything about US history, as Mardell and the rest of the Beeboids covering the US display their ignorance time and time again. But the BBC then censored this mistake/lie in the transcript:

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a civil war he was also a leader who looked to the future – a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time the BBC has…um…touched up one of the President’s speeches in order to give the audience the desired impression. In fact, they did it with His very first speech as President. They edited the footage to make Him appear to have said stronger words about environmental issues.

The problem here is twofold. First of all, there’s the fact that the dozen or so BBC employees you’re supposed to trust about how to understand US issues are woefully ignorant of their patch. Worse, their colleagues in the editing suite and in the BBC News Online offices are dishonest, and edit and censor news to fit the impression they want you to have. This time they’re just censoring a transcript to protect the leader of a foreign country. How pathetic is that?

Even if the very young person being paid very low wages to put up the transcript can’t be expected to know the place he copied and pasted it from had it wrong, this has been all over the web for more than 24 hours, and surely somebody with integrity at the BBC would have caught it by now. If there was anyone with integrity at the BBC when it comes to the President.

BBC, you are liars and propagandists. There really needs to be a complete purge of personnel before this can be fixed.

I posted this over on my other blog, A Tangled Web, but thought I would put it here also. To be honest, I was sick to the stomach after the Liveblog last night and wanted to share my thoughts;

“UK readers will be only too aware of the BBC’s flagship weekly political debate programme – Question Time. US readers may not be so familiar but essentially it consists of an invited panel being asked questions by a selected audience. It has, shall we say, a certain reputation for being left-wing, and that is why I set up a Question Time LIVEBLOG over @ Biased BBC a few years ago – allowing readers a chance to have their say on it as it is broadcast live. Usually, this is good fun and whilst the programme is predictably dreary, massively pro-Labour and reliably leftist in all other zones, I get quite a kick out of the Biased BBC commentariat and their caustic wit! 

However there is a serious side to this. 10 years, after 9/11, the edition of Question Time that was broadcast that week became infamous. The Towers lay burning, thousands were dead (reduced to ash) and I think most people were in a state of shock. On the panel of Question Time that week was the then American ambassador Philip Lader. He was reduced to tears by the unbelievable hostility of the “selected” BBC audience which baited him, blamed America and essentially suggested that the US got what it deserved. The BBC seemed surprised by the reaction from people across the UK and apologised for the atrocious programme. 

Last night, the BBC ran a 9/11 special edition of Question Time, ten years on. As usual, we hosted the live discussion. After 20 minutes, I was thinking of leaving the debate, after 40mins, I did. Quite simply, this was ANOTHER opportunity for the “invited” BBC audience to vent their spleen against the Great and Little Satan. America was berated, Israel was berated, Islam was exonerated and Muslims were defined as the real victims since, as Tariq Ali stated, “their lands are occupied”. In short, the programme made me sick. 

There is plenty to be said about 9/11, but I would have thought most decent human beings would sympathise with all those innocents who had their precious lives taken, so horrendously, so unimaginably. America was the VICTIM of a vicious terror attack by militant Islamists who shouted how great Allah was as those planes detonated into those offices. Since 9/11, there have been 17,000+ additional acts of Jihad. America made mistakes before 9/11 and it has made mistakes after 9/11. Perhaps we can all agree on that but in the final analysis, it was America that was attacked and it is America that has every right to defend itself. 

Bonnie Greer, Tariq Ali and all those others US haters in the Question Time audience last night made me feel ashamed to be British. When it comes to the BBC’s Question Time – my response is NOT IN MY NAME.”

Tony Newbery, of Harmless Sky, who is quietly doing brilliant work about BBC bias, tipped me off last night about an item on Today’s business news yesterday morning. It is a gem. First, the Guardian had already led on the story (one BBC box firmly ticked!); second, it involved a dodgy capitalist (who as a bonus was daring to exploit fossil fuel); and third it allowed the use of an “expert” who actually is a militant greenie anti-capitalist.

The story was that Tony Hayward, former chief executive of BP, has formed a company called Valleras and has secured £1.3bn of backing from a range of sources including the Rothschilds. It has very enterprisingly launched a reverse take-over of a Turkish company called Genel which has the rights to extract oil in Kurdistan, estimated to be the world’s sixth largest (and hitherto unexploited) oil field.

My instinct is to say…fantastic! Thank goodness someone in Britain has not thrown in the towel under the deluge of EU regulation and is showing a flash of the spirit that built an empire. But not, of course, the BBC. You could hear the disdain in presenter Adam Shaw’s voice that the new company might soon join the FTSE 100, especially as it was run by an executive who – as was rammed home with relish – had been associated with the gulf oil spill.

But the most questionable part of the whole exercise was that the woman chosen by the programme to react to the news – and introduced on air as only a “San Francisco based oil industry analyst” was Antonia Juhasz, who in fact is a hellcat hell-bent on destroying the oil industry. That’s not difficult to prove, because Exhibit A is her book called The Tyranny of Oil: the World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do To Stop It. With such neutral credentials, Mr Shaw asked the said Ms Juhasz several times what she thought of Mr Hayward’s return to frontline oil exploration. It doesn’t take much imgination to work out what was expected of her, and she duly delivered; essentially it boiled down to that Mr Hayward was a nasty, vicious crook who should not be allowed near an oil well and must be held to account for the “catastrophe” and “disaster” of the gulf oil spill. Mr Shaw uttered not one peep of disagreement.

Of course, the BBC and Mr Shaw got exactly what they wanted. But a very serious point of journalistic conduct is raised here, in that without a shadow of a doubt, the deliberate omission of Ms Juhasz’s highly partisan standpoint was blatantly dishonest, even by the BBC’s gutter standards.