Monthly Archives: January 2012

TWITTER YE NOT…

By | |
10 Comments

I’m not sure why BBC correspondents are on Twitter. When I was trained to be one, the emphasis was in ensuring balanced reports that gave all sides of a story. Twitter is deliberately designed to push one-sided opinion. Richard Black, however, has been increasing his carbon footprint over the weekend by visiting Washington and he’s keen to tell us all about his excitement via Twitter.

So far, there’ve been two posts…the first is in support of a blog by Bob Park, a retired US academic, who, over many years has been warning – in greenie militant fashion – of the dangers of the population explosion. In the post liked by Mr Black, he admires the way the Chinese have brought down the birth rate (now how was that achieved, Mr Black?) and then takes a hefty kick at the two front-runner Republican presidential candidates for daring to have five and seven children children respectively. They are compared by Mr Park to the peasants in Afghanistan – unlike the great Obama, who has only two. Mr Black is clearly in ecstasy over the subtlety of the venom.

His second herogram is reserved for the Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who has told a meeting of energy executives that there can be absolutely no doubt about climate change. Personally, as a trained BBC correspondent, I reach to check my wallet every time a politician tells me there’s a dead certainty about anything. And the redoubtable Donna Laframbois has a brilliant posting here about the economic gullibility of politicians. But Mr Black clearly doesn’t operate with such complexity. He – rather than going to the trouble of filing a balanced report which might have to deal with inconveniences like verifiable evidence – prefers to nakedly and unashamedly puff the words of the deluded Scandinavian by Twitter.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

EXECUTIVE PAY

By | |
37 Comments

It’s a recurrent BBC meme – “executives” are getting paid far too much and something must be done about it. (Cue Red Flag playing gently in background, comrades) True to form is this report which leads BBC news today…

David Cameron has promised shareholders a binding vote on executive pay, in an effort to deal with excessive salaries. The prime minister told the BBC there had been a “market failure”, with some bosses getting huge rises despite firms not improving their performances. He also pledged to tackle large payouts for executives dismissed because of poor performance.

The BBC then goes on to use the IPPR and the High Pay Commission as authoritative sources for demanding that “something” be done. Both these bodies are virulently left wing, as you can see here and here.    
I’ll be on the BBC tomorrow (Nolan Show) to discuss this issue but my summary position is as follows;
1. I object to the State interfering in private business. It is none of the business of Government to instruct companies how much they should pay.
2. I also object to crony Capitalism, the enemy of the free market. But the sins of a few FTSE Top 100 financial companies are being manipulated by some to curtail private enterprise.
3. With State Sector workers earning more than those in the Private sector that funds them, I’m surprised the Prime Minister is not looking to curtail the excesses of that sector. For example, is a BBC presenter worth a salary package worth hundreds of time more than the man or woman who makes the tea in the BBC canteen?
4. Not all FTSE companies reward failure. Indeed if they did they would not remain top 100. I wanted to see large Banks that made poor decisions FAIL, but it was a left wing Labour Government which bailed them out. Now this is used as a form of moral blackmail over every other business in the UK and that too is wrong.
5. Is David Cameron going to pick up the bill for re-writing every employment contract in the UK so that severance terms are to his satisfaction? 
Any other thoughts you want to share on this topic?

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

BLACK IS BLACK

By | |
15 Comments

The BBC obsesses about race whilst most of us just happily get on with our lives treating individuals as we find them, disinterested in such group collectivism. Biased BBC Contributor Alan notes;

Black is a Country’

‘….exploring the extraordinary underground music generated by the Black Power movement of the late Sixties and early Seventies: radical, beautiful and rare.
Black music as a whole became far more vocal in its opposition to white mainstream society. Meanwhile Africa became as a powerful symbol for a younger generation of black American artists, a source of political identification, spiritual sustenance and often exotic, musical inspiration.’

A coincidence surely and not conspiracy by a left over Marxist revolutionary at the BBC romanticising the Black Power movement and hoping for a similar Black revolutionary movement to spring up here….but you have to question the BBC’s timing on broadcasting this programme right after the convictions of Stephen Lawrence’s killers.

It is a good programme without doubt but it is unquestionably crafted not merely to inform but also to excite and incite….any disaffected black youth listening to the sensual tones of the narrator overlaid with the almost poetic rants of the radicals and all uplifted by rousing rebellious music would certainly be drawn into the romantic image and then the ideology underlying that ‘image’…..are they intending to turn ‘Black is a Country’ into a rallying call?

Nonsense….just me going off the deep end. Or is it? When a Black MP plays the race card and is clearly intent on separating out Black people from society as a whole…..although who is ‘Black’ is clearly contentious…..the tweets reveal some are not ‘black’ enough….

HackneyAbbott Diane Abbott MP @bimadew White people love playing “divide & rule” We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism

HackneyAbbott Diane Abbott MP @bimadew Ethnic communities that show more public solidarity & unity than black people do much better #dontwashdirtylineninpublic

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

POUNCED!

By | |
6 Comments

This from Pounce two days ago in the OT. It received 29 ‘likes’. You’ll see why.

“At the end I link to pieces from the Telegraph, Independent, the Jerusalem Post and Wiki. You decide if there are grounds for BBC Online being investigated by the anti-terrorist squad for promoting terrorist propaganda. To me, there is a clear and intentional ‘import’ to the way BBC Online decided to cover the story:-

Pounce OT 2 days ago, 21:15:42 (amended version)

How the BBC rewrites the facts in which to justify Islamic terrorism.
Jet bomb plotter Nezar Hindawi loses parole bid

A terrorist jailed for 45 years for plotting to blow up an Israeli airliner has lost a legal battle to secure his release, the BBC understands The Parole Board rejected Jordanian Nezar Hindawi’s bid for early release, despite previously recommending it. Hindawi, 57, planted a bomb in his unwitting pregnant fiancee’s hand luggage on a flight from London Heathrow to Tel Aviv in 1986. The device could have killed 375 people had security staff not found it….. Hindawi was jailed for hiding Semtex explosive in the luggage of his pregnant fiancée, Irishwoman Anne-Marie Murphy, then 32, without her knowledge. He was from a wealthy Palestinian family whose village was burned in the Israeli-Arab war of 1967, when he was 12. After his family became refugees in Jordan, he joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), became a writer and travelled to London. (Where else? DV) 

So the BBC reports on how a Palestinian was jailed for hiding semtex inside his fiancee’s hand luggage and did so because his village had been burnt down during Israeli-Arab war in 1967. Really?

Here is what the BBC doesn’t tell you in their the Jews can only be evil article:

Nizar Nawwaf al-Mansur al-Hindawi (his first name is also spelled Nezar) is a Jordanian of Palestinian origins. Born in 1954 in Baqura, a village near the east side of the Jordan River, he worked as a journalist in Amman. Although he is from a prominent establishment family (two uncles had held cabinet posts), Nizar’s extreme anti-Hashemite views and his founding membership in a shadowy organization, the Jordanian Revolutionary Movement for National Salvation, got him in trouble at home.

Hang on, the BBC tell me he is a Palestinian whose village got burnt down in 1967. Yet and a big yet, they fail to point out he was born in Jordan in a Jordan village (Now part of the city of Irbid) and that he left Jordan after he took up Islamic terrorism as a hobby. He fled his home country and set up shop in..London where he was recruited by Syrian Intelligence, which is why after he planned the bomb he went and hid in their embassy and which is why the Brits closed down the Syrian embassy and broke diplomatic relations with Syria after the very sophisticated bomb was found to have been constructed inside the Syrian embassy. (It had passed 2 X-rays and was only found during a hand search when El Al security became suspicious of the weight of the calculator. (3Ibs of plastic explosive inside a pocket calculator)

Yet the BBC cannot allow the public to know the full story, instead they weave a sob story about how this poor man’s village was burnt down during the Six Day War and this was his attempt at revenge. Nothing about how his victim when she found out she was pregnant was told to abort, then when his Syrian handlers found out , they got him to use her as a patsy in which to carry a bomb aboard an Israeli aircraft which according to the BBC could have killed 375 people. No, you Islamist shills, it would have murdered 375 innocent people. But hey what’s the truth to the propaganda arm of Islamic terrorism.

Independent
Telegraph
Jerusalem Post 
Wikipedia

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

BBC claims ‘economic downturn’ will cause more attacks on teachers by pupils

By | | , ,
23 Comments

On Saturday a number of national and regional media outlets reported the story of 10-year-old boy attacking two female teachers at his school ‘in Avalon Road, Orpington’. It resulted in both teachers being taken to hospital – one with a broken leg and dislocated kneecap and the other bearing facial injuries.

None of the outlets went into any more detail, not even the name of the school or its background. Instead the Autonomous Mind blog was left with an exclusive about the school, Burwood School, an establishment for boys with special educational needs that has a number of troubled and previously excluded youngsters on its small roll. No other media sought out and reported these details.

Some hours later the details carried on Autonomous Mind, including the elements of the 2011 Ofsted report cited in the blog post, were picked up by BBC London who despatched Paul Curran to the previously un-named school to deliver the details in a BBC London news report.

But being the BBC, the report just had to include a different slant that furthered a favoured and seemingly unrelated pet narrative. This saw Curran lead in to a televised quote by a teaching union official from an un-named union, who himself was also un-named, by saying:

One teaching union expects the situation to get worse because of the economic downturn.

But can you spot any mention of the economic downturn in the official’s broadcast assessment of attacks on teachers by their pupils, quoted in its entirety below?

In today’s society, where lives are difficult, stressful, often chaotic, it’s no wonder that very occasionally children go completely off the rails.

There could be any number of causes for lives being difficult, stressful or chaotic. But the BBC has decided the cause of an increase in attacks on teachers will be as a result of the economic downturn.

This isn’t factual news reporting, it is opportunist speculation mixed with personal opinion, pushed on viewers without any supporting evidence whatsoever. And it deliberately ignores the particular circumstances of the incident at Burwood School given the challenging nature of the school’s troubled pupils.

It has no place on a publicly funded service broadcaster, but it happens over and over again.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

RICHARD BLACK ’97: 1 METRE SEA LEVEL RISE IN 30 YEARS

By | |
32 Comments

Richard Black 1997:

The best models we have predict a range of effects on climate as the Earth warms up. The biggest global effect will be a rise in sea level – warmer water simply takes up more room, and some of the world’s ice will melt.
The seas could rise by up to a metre in 30 or 40 years’ time. That might not sound much but it could lead to whole nations disappearing beneath the waves.

It’s 2012 and we’re half way there. I guess those “best models” must have indicated that the next 15 years are the really bad ones.

UPDATE 5.15PM. He’s still banging on about it. This tweet appeared yesterday: That link takes you here:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a sea-level rise of up to 59 centimetres over the next century, a level that would inundate most of the Maldives’ inhabited atolls. Low-lying Pacific island nations, such as Kirabati and Tuvalu, would also face being flooded.

Yeah, whatever. “Wolf!”

As Tim Blair points out, the Maldives has more pressing concerns. And boy does it know how to play gullible fools such as Richard Black – when the president isn’t blubbing about climate refugees he’s breaking ground for new airport terminals.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

NICE AND COSY

By | | , ,
49 Comments

Evan Davis really gave Chuka Umunna a tough going-over on this morning’s Today programme, if by tough going-over one imagines being soothed with the soft gentle strokes of giant cotton wool balls for ten minutes. Davis’s line was basically, “You get on with it and I’ll chip in every now and again to concur with everything you’re saying and help clarify the message.” When they’d finished agreeing about executive pay, Davis then asked Umunna (adviser: Diane Coyle, vice chair BBC Trust, wife of BBC tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones) why poor Ed Miliband is getting such a tough time when it seems clear that he’s actually pretty awesome:

Just before we finish I do want to ask you about the leadership. It’s sort of been in the news this week, this feeling that it’s been a difficult week for Ed Miliband – he’s given an interview in The Guardian this morning. Why do you think it is, because he’s given a fairly clear analysis of the country very much along the lines of the one you’ve talked about – about irresponsible capitalism that needs dealing with – why do you think it is that question marks have been raised about him given the clarity of his message?

Amazing as it seems, poor Chuka somehow managed to survive that blistering line of attack.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

ABBOTT BACK, BUT WHERE IS THE BBC?

By | |
70 Comments

For a “world-class” broadcaster that costs us BILLIONS, the BBC seem ever so slow when it comes to picking up stories concerning Diane Abbott;

Ms Abbott has also provoked outrage from cabbies with another tweet. “Dubious of black people claiming they’ve never experienced racism,” she wrote from her iPhone on Tuesday. “Ever tried hailing a taxi I always wonder?” Steve McNamara, a spokesman for the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, said: “This is a typically silly comment by Diane Abbott and deeply unfair. The modern generation of taxi drivers is as diverse as London itself and most of the knowledge schools now have prayer rooms.


Diane Abbott MP
 Dubious of black people claiming they’ve never experienced racism. Ever tried hailing a taxi I always wonder?

19th century taxis? I am sure the BBC will vigorously pursue this. Yes?

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

HAWKING HAWKINGS

By | |
30 Comments

The BBC likes Professor Stephen Hawkings and he was on Today this morning. His profound atheism is a quality that they admire and his physics background provides a convenient distraction when he comes out with statements such as there is no God and that man made global warming warming may well bring about the end of mankind. I suppose it is one of those ironies that because of his condition, Hawkings gets to make statements without interruption but I have to say that I find his views pretty offensive and for a supposedly clever man, he makes some very stupid comments It’s not exactly bias but I believe that he is used by the BBC because his alleged genius advances their narrative of god-hating and global warming advocacy.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.