How do you think the BBC is doing in its coverage of the Conservative Party conference? We’ve had a few days of their “unique analysis” so thought I would put a specific thread to capture your feedback. From my perspective, it’s the same as ever. Snide, seeking splits, trying to undermine and rewrite history.
CONSERVATIVE PARTY CONFERENCE
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The BBC’s coverage of the Conservative conference is pretty much as expected.
Sunday – find a Conservative (or Tooory) whom I have never heard of, decribe him as a ‘Senior Tory’ as the BBC did; he doesn’t agree 100 per cent with the Party line and describe it as a split.
Sunday – describe Pickles’ finding of £250 million to restore weekly bin collections as a waste of money. How many of us use the horrible little caddies in the kitchen to collect food waste? Over the last few days in the heat they would have stank.
Monday – apropos Greece try to find a Toory who isn’t in full agreement with what the rest of Europe are doing to try to resolve the Greek Debt crisis – then describe it as a split.
Monday – rubbish the announcement of raising the speed limit on motorways to 80 mph – a speed I do anyway (ssshhh). (Apparently Huhne leaked the story over the weekend so the BBC had plenty of time to decide how to attack it.
Tuesday – decide that the appeal of one American on a murder charge in Italy (her boyfriend came much lower down the billing) was more important that the Conservative conference. I am sure last week announcements from those not in power and not likely to be for some years was the top story on Today every morning except one.
Tuesday – rubbish any health announcements with those in ‘Public Health’ – would be interesting to see if any of their names link with the Labour Party.
Yep – pretty much as expected.
Huhne must have leaked it well before the weekend as there was a question about it on Thursday’s BBCQT or Any Questions apparently.
But yeah, apparently acknowleging reality and raising the speed limit to match what is currently happening will make us all suddenly become speed demons. What a load of lefty nonsense. The BBC had people on saying that increasing the limit will increase emissions. Hang on? Most people are already driving at that speed, if they keep driving at that speed, then emissions will stay the same, but far fewer people will be lawbreakers. What they omitted was the fact that this increase would come with a decrease in town and city centres to 20MPH, this reducing accidents and fatalities and emissions far offsetting the increase.
But then the green lobby will not be happy until cars are banned outright wiill they?
I know that if I am travelling a long distance I average around 80 MPH, so I will not be increasing my speed. It just means I shall be more relaxed at the wheel instead of distracted by looking out for police.
I shall welcome that common sense increase when it happens.
ROBERT BROWN; What do you mean ‘average 80mph’? Do you understand what an average is? To ‘average’ 80mph means you must at times be exceeding 100/120 mph or even more! Keep out of my way, you are dangerously ignorant.
Huhne certainly knows a thing or two about speeding.
Good God, he knows something? I never had him down as posessing a brain cell.
Derek,
I agree, I was overestimating his “intelligence” !
Strikes me that the attitude of the BBC – as exemplified by Today – is that the Conservative Conference is not particularly important. Certainly having Montague rather than the grown-ups Naughtie or Humphrys doing the spite-ridden heavy lifting is evidence of this. In a lifetime of being bored rigid by the politicos’ self-obsession as expressed in these slimefests, rarely have I seen the speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer (in the middle of a financial crisis we are given to understand) dealt with so peremptorily by a national news organisation: a couple of sound-bites from the speech, some not very insightful comments from the usual suspects at the BBC and that’s it! The impression last week was that Labour and its supporters were all over the BBC: this week the Tories? Not so much. Worse, it appears to me that the coverage of the LibDem get-together was more comprehensive than that of the Conservatives.
Perhaps Craig has done some of his excellent work on this.
I guess that they have the philosophy of, “If you cannot say something nasty about the tories, do not say anything at all”.
So if the BBC ignore the tories, they must be doing something….left wing.
Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 discussed something connected with Labour Conference on three days out of three last week. Nothing at all on Tory Conference at all this week. Perhaps he is pretending that it isn’t happening.
http://lunchtimeloather.blogspot.com/
I have not listened to or watched any of it.
Predictable BBC that goes without saying but Cameron is no Tory and his new party is no Tory party. Just another gathering of the liberal left in a different hue. A few dissenting voices perhaps but they will only be there to make up the numbers.
Which is why the BBC are relatively quiet about them this week. If we had real tories, making real cuts in the size of Government and in taxes and repatriating power from the EU, or better still actually giving us a binding EU or EFTA referendum and supporting the EFTA side, and scrapping the taxes and restrictions based on climate-change, then the BBC would be apoplectic and leading every news bulletin with condemnation of these vile baby eating tories.
It worries me that the BBC are NOT attacking the tories more. This probably means that the tories are straying much too far to the left.
We can assume that BBC-NUJ’s PARKINSON is politically opposed to Dr David STARKEY.
With no evidence provided, Parkinson writes this:
“The Lib Dems were dealt with in tones of contempt more commonly reserved for serial killers or tax collectors.”
“Tory conference: Starkey lets Cameron have it”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15158057
Didn’t the BBC NUJ threaten to boycott the conference as a protest. It seems they effectively did. I suspect the only reason they were up there is to cover the protest though truthfully, I’m relaxed about it because effectively it means there is less negative coverage and I’m getting used to getting my news from other sources now anyway. Its a shame I have to pay for this leftie crap.
I thought Starkey had been black-balled by the BBC after the Newsnight explosion. Oh wait…he’s having a dig at the Blues…welcome back then.
Is there a Conservative Conference going on? All I’ve seen in an hour and a half on the News Channel is a brief humorous discussion with Charles Clarke about immigration and human rights, followed by Sopel making puns about a cat which is allegedly responsible for getting someone deported.
The BBC has spent more time so far on the Welsh Finance Minister’s speech about how she wants to spend every penny they have in order to promote job growth against nasty Tory budget cuts in the Welsh public sector. And of course Amanda Knox and how Greek debt is now hurting European banks, just like everyone told the BBC it would do, but Flanders said would be okay.
Fortunately, the Knox story is comfortably taking up plenty of BBC air time so they don’t have to soil their hands over the conference. We got a bit of Lansley’s speech a while ago, plus a repeat of Sopel’s jokey segment with Clarke about the cat. Otherwise, that’s it for the last two and a half hours.
I know events are driving this, but surely the BBC could have done another new segment from the conference rather than repeating the pointless exchange between Sopel and Clarke.
Compared to Labour conference last week, the Tories have been buried by the BBC….. Even Lib Dems had more coverage.
Tories just need Boris Johnson to say he’d slash the BBC budget by 85% if he was PM and it’d set the Beebs world alight……. go on do it you Boris – you know you want to……..
Billy,
Not related to the legendary Henry Blofeld, the cricket commentator ?
The only thing which seems to get BBC-NUJ Radio 5 lightweight Peter ALLEN annoyed is the existence of Tory MPs.
Less than an hour or so ago he set off on an anti-Tory rant before Damian GREEN MP had even spoken.
BBC-NUJ Allen’s interrupting rant was based on his naive political presumption that:
Human Rights Act = human rights = true policy to be impelmented!
BBC-NUJ-Labour questioning of Tories on ‘TODAY:
-have you stopped beating your wife?
E.g.
1.)
7:22
“Is David Cameron a right-wing Tory of the old school or a compassionate Conservative? ”
2.)
8:50
“Home Affairs correspondent Danny Shaw investigates
whether the Conservative Party hates the police. “
BBC-NUJ can extend this line of questioning to Labour Party.
e.g
1.) ‘Is Ed Miliband a left-wing Socialist of the old school or a compassionate Labourite?’
2.) ‘Home Affairs correspondent investigates
whether the Labour Party hates non-immigrants.’
The only thing I had found out from the Radio 4 on Monday was that they considered other things could be made to appear far more important, including a long interview with Tony Blair over the withdrawal of Palestinian Aid by the US, with only brief references to the Conservative Conference.
The report on the day’s events between 10pm and 10.45pm gave me the perfect example of the way the BBC intends to portray the Conference. The final minutes of the programme covered a brief piece of information that the Tories had discussed binge drinking. This was followed by going immediately to their reporter in Manchester who had sought out a handful of young people from the conference who had drunk a little too much, which happens at all conferences, and made a massive fuss about it and carefully included one of them extolling the virtues of champagne.
Other than that, I would hardly have realised there was a conference being held.
Jimmy, a very accurate description of that closing piece.
It began with Ritula Shah saying “Conservatives are no strangers to revelry”, then all those drunken Tories, and the champagne-drinking guy being asked how much he’d paid for the champagne, replying “I’ve no idea. I drink champagne because I like champagne.” (Bingo! for the beeboid!).
Then there was this from the reporter (Paul Moss):
“But there’s a serious point here. Your party has a prime minister and a chancellor of the exchequer who are both members of the Bullingdon Club notorious for its alcohol-fueled destruction. If people see that the political leaders they have and the delegates at your conference are getting drunk, they’re not really going to take a message seriously from government when they tell people you shouldn’t be drinking so much, are they?”
Drunken, hypocritical, champagne drinking Tories in an age of austerity!
That was a party political broadcast on behalf of the Labour Party.
The 10 pm news last night led with the possible failure of a French/Belgium bank which was going to initiate total meltdown of Europe – meant that the conference had to fall in the running order – today on Today no mention as there were lots of other things that were more important.
Around 8.40 this morning Today went live to the Conservative Conference where Sarah Montague proceeded to preview Cameron’s upcoming speech. She was joined by three hacks – one from the Telegraph, one from the Mirror (?) and one from the Independent (?!). Best of all though, around a quarter of the airtime given to the piece was actually used to big-up Millipede’s efforts at the Labour Conference the week before. Classic…
So far I have to say the BBC hasn’t been as openly biased as I expected. So far, they haven’t wheeled out Labour figures for rebuttal after every speech. They do try to undermine everything in a way that they didn’t with Labour, but the only obvious thing is the fuss they’ve made about a leadership challenge for the Conservatives when they certainly didn’t do that for Labour, who really do have a challenge in the offing.
Now, though, Cameron has said a couple things in his speech that will really piss off the Beeboids, particularly the optimism and direct attack at Red Ed’s speech and Labour’s “apology tour”. The Beeboids won’t like that at all, so let’s see how they react.
Typical BBC dig at Cameron’s background on the Live Text coverage of his speech:
@15:38 Ben Wright Political correspondent, BBC News
Big hurray as the Old Etonian PM says the “aparthied” between state and private schools must end. I don’t think making life harder for private schools is what he’s got in mind.
Naturally the Beeboid is stuck in the class war mindset and has this the wrong way around. It simply wouldn’t occur to him to help some people rise up instead of tearing others down.
Uh, oh, Shaun Bailey just said that Cameron was right to state that it’s not the Unions versus the Government, but the Unions versus the country. Beeboids will hate that. Poor Bailey will never make the BBC speed dial now.
“Theresa May was meowing up the right tree on human rights”
(by Ed West)
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100109132/theresa-may-was-meowing-up-the-right-tree-on-human-rights/