Monthly Archives: November 2011

SHAW DROPPING

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Thanks to B-BBC contributor Graeme Thompson aka Hippiepooter for this item;

My jaw dropped listening to Danny Shaw on 5Live Breakfast this morning. He was reporting on a Guardian story concerning the IPPC investigation into the police shooting of the gangster Mark Duggan.

On the basis of partial evidence leaked from the IPPC investigation, The Guardian drew the firm and incendiary conclusion that Mark Duggan was unarmed when Police opened fire on him.

Basically, in my view, Danny Shaw mullahed the Guardian for this. He took the Police line against them.

I believe Danny Shaw’s name has cropped up a few times here in relation to accusations of bias, and justifiably so if I’m not getting confused with another ‘Shaw’ (apologies if I am), but when a BBC journalist puts himself ‘out there’ in the interests of responsible reporting, particularly when it’s the Guardian that’s ‘getting it’, he does the British public a tremendous service and there’s no better place than this to give him the applause he deserves.

Judge for yourself: 02:17:14

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Continental Drift

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As deegee has been pointing out, if Barack Obama got it wrong by saying that Hawaii is in Asia, then the BBC News website has gone one better than the president on the ‘gaffe’ front. It now seems to think that both Australia and New Zealand are in Asia:

The BBC’s World menu changed recently. The old Australasia/Pacific section has gone:
Do they need some geographers at the BBC? What’s going on here?

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SLAP ON THE WRIST

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There’s an important investigation here by the Mail on Sunday of a grant to BBC environment “analyst” and greenie poster boy Roger Harrabin of £15,000 from the University of East Anglia’s climate centre, the outfit at the centre of Climategate. The cash, it is stated, was used to fund a range of climate change seminars. Mr Harrabin denies, of course, that the money has influenced his reporting…and the BBC itself can see no issues of impartiality. Well that’s OK then.

But I wonder how many who disagree with Mr Harrabin’s brand of eco fervour attended his seminars? And, as I’ve extensively reported before, Mr Harrabin seems happy to tout his services to any greenie cause that will hire him.

The Mail investigation also mentions the Television Trust for the Environment (TVE), which as I reported earlier this week, has been censured by the BBC trustees over conflict of interest and a failure to tell viewers where the programme budget had originated. Reporter David Rose notes that Dr Joe Smith, Mr Harrabin’s partner – and joint recipient of the UEA cash – was chief scientific adviser to TVE programmes, including a couple the BBC trustees have censured. Mr Rose quotes Jenny Richards, the deputy chief executive of TVE, as saying that the company had “made hundreds of programmes” for the BBC and regarded the trustees report as a “slap on the wrist”.

That, to me, is the most telling remark in the whole story. It suggests that she knows that the trustees don’t really give a fig about this whole sorry mess – they are involved in a bit of cosmetic window dressing, and nothing will actually change.

Bishop Hill, who (wrongly) thinks that Robert Lamb is still the chief executive of TVE, says I have been “overheated” in my reporting of this affair. He is entitled to his views, and I respect them – that’s the strength of blogging. But in my book, those at the BBC who are involved in this rather fetid mess of obfuscation and conflict of interest are without doubt eco fascists, and thoroughly deserve that description. Mr Lamb and his ilk have traduced the BBC and reduced it to an organ of WWF propaganda. They want rule by international diktat, to cover the countryside with windfarms, to massively reduce the population, to make heating our homes so expensive that thousands will live in daily fear of how much energy they are consuming, to stop us from flying, to force us out of our cars, and much more. That all adds up to a brand of fascism.

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BBC Censorship: Billions Down The Green Toilet Edition

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Everyone here is by now well aware of the Solyndra scandal, where the deadly combination of campaign cash influence and the Warmist ideology of Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, led the White House to give over half a billion dollars to a solar energy company, owned by a top Democrat money man, which they knew was going to fail.  Several people (DB, John Anderson, and Cassandara King, to name a few off the top of my head) have posted comments about it over the last few months as the damning facts keep coming out, and I think it’s worthy of a full post.

The BBC has done exactly five reports on it (plus one brief mention during a Daily Politics segment on how government behavior might possibly drive up energy costs, and one even briefer mention in a story on Republican complaints about government spending).  Can’t say they’re censoring the Solyndra story, but it’s pretty poor reporting considering what they’ve left out. As far as I’m aware, the story has never made it to any of the flagship news-oriented programmes, and even these news briefs never seem to stay on the front US & Canada page very long, or get noticed in the Features & Analysis section.  In short, BBC News Online whips up a news brief every couple of weeks, and that’s about it.  Mark Mardell, the BBC US President editor, has never blogged about it, nor have any of the other correspondents dared bring it up.

But this problem is much more than just the one company.  The ideologically twisted Chu has thrown money at several failed or failing green energy companies, nearly all of which are connected to Democrats or Democrat campaign cash.  None of the battalion of Beeboids working on US stories has reported on any of them.  So now I’m going to tell you what the BBC doesn’t want you to know.

First, the money thrown down the Solyndra toilet was $535 million.  Even the BBC was forced to admit that the White House gave them the money even though they knew the firm wasn’t viable.  But notice that they censored the fact that the majority owner was the Kaiser Foundation, owned by one of the President’s top money men.  Since the subpoenas and Congressional investigation started, emails have come out showing that Kaiser was pressing the Administration for the money, even though they all knew the company was doomed from the start.  The best the BBC could do was admit that “a Democratic fundraiser warned that investors did not rate the chances of survival for the firm.”  They don’t want you to know – or, as difficult as this is to believe, felt that it was unimportant – that this particular Democratic fundraiser owned the company, and was the one pushing for the cash.

The House investigation is ongoing, and the most recent BBC report on it framed it as a strictly partisan affair, reporting that voting to subpoena the White House records on the loans was “along party lines”.  Pathetic.  So the BBC has massively played down any possibility of cronyism or political reasons for the loans, and tried to paint the investigation into this fraud as partisan behavior by Republicans.  The BBC’s coverage is mostly from the White House perspective.  The BBC has also censored news that the White House told Solyndra to postpone layoffs until after the November mid-term elections.

But as I said, this is just the tip of the Green Iceberg.

SolarReserve got $737 million.  That company part-owned by a firm run by Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law. Oh, and partners with another Kaiser Foundation company.  Cronier and cronier.  The company hasn’t gone bankrupt yet, but surely it’s only a matter of time.

SunPower, also in California, got $1.2 billion, thanks to lobbying from the son of a Democrat Congressman.  The company is now $820 million in debt, and rapidly heading down the green toilet.

Abound Solar, mostly owned by Democrat donor billionaire Pat Stryker, got $400 million.  So far, it seems the company hasn’t done much more than count the money.

Granite Reliable Wind Generation got $169 million.  That company is owned by CCMP Capital (NB: pdf file, pg. 29).  A former Managing Director of CCMP is none other than White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Nancy-Ann DeParle.  She was also head of the ObamaCare communications department back when the President was pushing for it.

The National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado got $200 million from Steven Chu. A top Democrat Congressman from Colorado works with them (whatever that actually means).  It’s now failing.


Beacon Power in Massachusetts, who were supposed to be building storage devices to make the highly inefficient wind turbines more viable, has gone bust.  They got $43 million of taxpayer cash, now down the green toilet.  Beacon was first brought to the government’s attention by Democrats: Sen. John Kerry and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.  Beacon is a spinoff of Satcon Technologies, who are cozy enough with the Democrats that they provided a fuel cell power plant for the 2004 Democrat National Convention.  That’s the one where John Kerry was the nominee.  Say no more.

Evergreen Solar got $5.3 million and SpecraWatt got $500,000 of that Stimulus money the BBC was so enthusiastic about.  That cash wasn’t directly from the Dept. of Energy, although it was from local authorities handing out Stimulus money allocated to them.  Both firms are now bankrupt.

Last, but certainly not least, is BrightSource, which got a whopping $1.4 billion in bailout funds from the Dept. of Energy. The principal investor is co-owned by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., co-conspiritor of Newsnight-trusted investigative advocate, Greg Palast. BrightSource was in deep financial trouble at the time, and the Dept. of Energy bailed them out.  The project for which it got the money is being led by NRG,

UPDATE:  I forgot to add that, while the NRG Political Action Committee sends campaign cash to both political parties, the majority of their cash goes to the Democrats.  Worse, the two top NRG bosses themselves seem to donate exclusively to Democrats.

To sum up:

Apparently something like 80% of the taxpayer cash doled out by The Obamessiah Adminstration to allegedly promote Green Energy and “green jobs” went to firms heavily involved with Democrats or Obamessiah campaign donors.  This adds up to nearly $4.7 billion thrown down the Green toilet, all for ideological and partisan reasons.  It’s a combination of irresponsible ideology and old-fashioned corruption.  Some may call it Venture Socialism, but I call it Crony Corporatism.  This is all hidden from you because it makes the President look bad. 

As the Solyndra investigation goes on, we’ll start hearing a lot more about this stuff, and the BBC will continue to hide it from you. I think the end result will be calls for Chu to step down. As the 2012 election looms and we approach next November, the President just might throw him under the bus. It’s not like this has been ignored by the press, either. The BBC figures this isn’t as important as Natalie Wood’s death or sexual abuse scandals in college football, or celebrity gossip.  But they won an award for their online coverage of the US, so what do I know?  Your license fee hard at work, I guess.  Still, one can only imagine what the BBC editorial decisions would be had this stuff happened while Bush was in charge.

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NORTH OF THE BORDER

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Some interesting thoughts from a Biased BBC reader North of the border;

“You may be interested to note that BBC Scotland has virtually shut down on all comment facilities on their ‘news’ threads. 

Blether with Brian has pulled its comment section because the punters were not buying the pro-Labour spin being generated by the Tangerine Jelly as he is known to us Scots. 

BBC Scotland in conjunction with Ian Gray (aka Elmer Fudd) ran a number of stories about how the Scottish Government was going to close down Abertay University in fact both the Tangerine Jell and Elmer had bits of paper to prove this was the case – one month later it is clear that was never the case – in fact the very opposite. 

Then there was Joanne Lamont’s (Labour MSP aka Stairheid Rammy) tale of terrible doing by the Scottish Justice Minister over a rape case she had ‘just become aware of’ according to the BBC. Turns out the rape, the case and its outcome all happened prior to 2007 when Labour’s Cathy Jamieson was Justice Secretary. The Glasgow Evening Times also ran the story and were forced by the girl’s family’s lawyer to print a retraction as yet nothing from the BBC or the Labour Party. 

You may also take a look at the BBC Scotland’s tampering of an interview with Ally McCoist, the Ranger’s manager, to make McCoist appear sectarian. Another is a clip purporting to show John Swinney shaking his head at a statement put forward by Alex Salmond when the actual Holyrood TV section shows that Swinney was shaking his head at a load of tosh being spouted by Ian Gray of Labour.”

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