Monthly Archives: May 2012

COLONISING GIBRALTAR

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This little piece of BBC bias was picked up over on Twitter by @IvorGrumble.  I bring it your attention thanks to her eagle eyes…

Tensions over fishing rights around the British territory of Gibraltar have been raised, following an incident involving Gibraltarian police boats and British Royal Navy, and Spanish police. It comes after several days of dispute in which Spanish police escorted Spanish fishing boats near the area.  The Gibraltar government says fishing with large nets there is illegal because of an environmental law. Spain claims sovereignty over Gibraltar, a British colony since 1713.

Huh? Gibraltar is NOT a “colony” — it is a British territory. The BBC just cannot help themselves, can they. Be it the Falklands or Gibraltar, you KNOW which side they are on.

TRANSPARENT AND FAIR?

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A Biased BBC reader asks the sensible question….

“Yesterday it emerged that many BBC announcers, news readers and regular stars of major BBC programmes are being paid through companies, thereby paying lower rates of tax. Why are BBC journalists, as employees of a public broadcasting corporation, not investigating and reporting this news, together with background information and names, with the same passionate fervour at every opportunity on radio and TV, as usually experienced when members of the government, civil service, business executives and other branches of the media or entertainment community outside the BBC are alleged to be managing their tax affairs to reduce their tax bill? They seem quite capable of reporting even the flimsiest allegations, together with inuendo, comment from pressure groups etc when it is some other organisation or individual but seem reluctant or even not prepared at all to do it when it s “one of their own”. How transparent and fair is that?

MISSING MEHDI?

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Ah, my old twitter sparring pal, Mehdi Hasan, has been moved on to greater things! Biased BBC’s Alan asks;

” Wonder when the BBC will see the light as another of their favourite ‘moderate’ Muslim commentators is felled?

Mehdi Hasan has been ousted from the New Satesman and gone further to the fringe at the Huffington Post UK.

http://freebeacon.com/huffpos-house-jihadi/?tw_p=twt

‘Raheem Kassam, editor of the conservative The Commentator, told the Free Beacon that Hasan might have parted ways with the New Statesman due to his toxic political views.

“There is the ongoing speculation around Westminster as to whether he was dropped due to the sheer scale of negative attention he brought to the New Statesman magazine,” said Kassam, who has thoroughly documented Hassan’s favorable coverage of Iran.
“Everyone knew that the status quo couldn’t continue with Hasan,” he added. “It was only a matter of time until he was rightly held to account for what became increasingly nonsensical journalism and a repeated refusal to comment on his extreme views as highlighted by the videos.” ‘

Hasan was widely recognised as an Islamist with disturbing views….as well as ostensibly a loony ‘Lefty’ to boot.

You might think the BBC would think carefully before using him as a commentator on important issues but of course their desire to have  a ‘Muslim’ on the Telly or radio overran their common sense…..it was in any case hardly a ringing endorsement for Islam to be represented by Hasan….as he was one who believed in actually living the religion, carrying out its true requirements…..or as the BBC might put it ‘perverting the religion’.

Because of course such a way of life is hardly compatible with the Liberal, Enlightened West.

The BBC loves a friendly Muslim though…..it attempts to slip in as may as possible into the mix in its programmes to ensure we aren’t ‘frightened’ by the ‘mysterious and strange’ community in our midst.

Like Professor Jim Al Kalili…..scientist with a Muslim name…however….’Al-Khalili has stated that, “as the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shia Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body.’

Regardless of that the BBC know we will immediately class him as Muslim because of his name….the BBC intent is to say….’Look, here’s a ‘Muslim’. He’s friendly, a nice chap, and what’s more a highly intelligent, successful scientist…..you must not think all Muslims are potential terrorists!’

It is also part of their campaign to have the the ‘golden age’ of Islamic science  brought to the fore and given its ‘due place’ in our history….because of course, the BBC, and the Guardian, tells us, the West was built on the Islamic science….without Islam we’d be living in mud huts eating raw cows….and ultimately to have us ‘see’ Muslims and Islam as a benefit to society rather than a backward, Medieval, oppressive, homophobic, mysogynistic, divisive and intent on religious apartheid religion that brings violence and conflict to our society.

Good luck on that.

ROUNDHEAD OR CAVALIER?

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A BBC Four programme that asks ‘Roundhead or Cavalier….Which one are you?’.  B-BBC alan wonders…

“I didn’t know what to make of it at first but a metaphor soon sprung to mind that suitably encapsulates everything that this programme is about….imagine driving down the road and you look up to see a small boy mooning you from the back of a bus….amusing huh?….only on a closer look do you see that the works of Karl Marx are printed on his backside….not only is he mocking you but the mocking comes with a message attached!

Of course the young schoolboy is not to blame…it is his mate giggling alongside him who incited him to carry on in such a bawdy, rude manner….the schoolboy who grew up to be a BBC editor no doubt.

And that in essence is how this programme engineers its hidden message into our lives…..it employs one of the BBC’s favourite tricks of using ‘useful idiots’, and some knowing knaves, to say things that the BBC couldn’t say themselves…and then have them edited into a narrative that suits the BBC’s message…in this case what might that be?

Bet you can’t guess.

Cavaliers and Roundheads, the English Civil War where the fight for equality and democracy was won by the forces of Godliness and discipline against those of decadence and thoughtless self interest.

That’s right – it’s Tories against the Caped Crusaders of the Left.

It’s still playing out today and throughout the last 400 years…Whigs against the Tories, Liberals against the Tories,  Socialists against the Tories.

Everyone hates the Tories you see.

The Tories, sorry Cavaliers….they don’t care about anything too much, they don’t care about details, not interested in the nitty gritty of organising life and politics, they have no overall plan, they have style but no substance.

But it’s OK….the Socialists, sorry, Roundheads, will save the day….being careful, organised, Godly(?), dutiful, professional, thoughtful, sincere, principled, purposeful and rebellious.

Who might be good examples of such virtues? George Osborn, Ken Livingstone, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Arthur Scargill and Boris Johnson, The Sun newspaper and the Guardian.

You do the maths on which is which.

The BBC don’t actually have much faith in your ability to spot their subtle anti Tory black propaganda so they slip in some pretty jarring shots and comments just to ram home the message….Tory bad and decadent, Socialist good and caring.

Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson blurted out that he laughed at Tories who dismiss the European Court of Human Rights…..so undemocratic of them…do they not realise that the English Civil War was fought for these European laws? Wasn’t it?

A Times columnist, Ben Macintyre, claimed that Cameron was a Cavalier by instinct, weaned in the Bullingdon Club with a belief that he is born to rule….a very dangerous aspect of his character he proposes.

However…Miliband is a natural Roundhead with clear and crisp ideas of where he wants to go….can’t understand why everyone hates him.

The finale was a comment overlaid with a film of Cameron…..the interviewee stating that ‘Britain is now a society that is a pyramid of snobbery and wealth.’ and then the last dig….the narrator saying ‘It now seems there’s a little bit of Roundhead and Cavalier in all of us.’…..juxtaposed against a lingering shot of Gordon Brown, Roundhead, and then George Osborn, reckless, irresponsible Cavalier.

Hang on, rewind,  wasn’t it a certain ‘Gordon Brown’ who was so cavalier with our cash, destroyed our economy, and broke the Banks of England, Scotland too?

As the narrator said at the beginning of the programme….‘To understand the origins of this great divide (between Cavaliers and Roundheads) is to understand what it means to be British today.’

That’ll be right, Anne Widdicombe, David Davies, Norman Tebbit, John Redwood and Margaret Thatcher all natural Cavaliers!

The programme was a bright idea thought up by a BBC Labour lovey as a device to paint the Tories in the worst possible light by implication and association……pure propaganda from the impartial BBC.   Propaganda that is supposed to seep gradually into our subconscious only fully maturing and coming into effect on polling day like the parasitic being that is the BBC leeching off our license fee money and using it to offend and attack everything most people outsie of the ‘metropolitan elite’ value.

Finally let’s have a look at what the Roundhead Puritan’s really brought us….and why they were shoved off to America to be those Bible Belt fundamentalists that otherwise the BBC hates……

‘Puritans were dissatisfied and bent on the destroying of the dregs of Popery. They were a group of literate and often highly articulate people acting like a fifth column to undermine and radically change Britain through sympathisers in and activists. Some aimed to reform by peaceful means others wanted to turn England to their religion completely and join their co-religionists in Europe. up and down the country they took over parishes and imposed a new belief…that they were the chosen ones and everyone else was excluded and was damned. Where the Godly would get a foothold in a parish they would often tear it apart. They disrupted peaceful communities with their preaching and efforts to discipline those they regarded as godless resulting in bitter divisions and denouncements of sinners.’

BIAS BY OMISSION?

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B-BBC Contributor Alan notes “Perhaps I have missed the BBC report into this matter?”:

‘It emerged last week that the ASA is investigating an advertisement from the Coalition For Marriage (C4M), which campaigns against changing the law, following claims it is “offensive” to homosexual people.

Archbishop Cranmer, a popular political and religious blog, was asked to justify carrying the advertisements, which also appeared in a host of other media after 11 complaints to the ASA.If the complaints are upheld the advertisement could be banned. 

Yesterday Cranmer voiced disbelief after Lord Smith recorded a message for the “Out4Marriage” website, expressing his support for same-sex marriage.
“We have gained so much over the last 10 or 15 years and civil partnerships have been a major step forward but it still isn’t full equality and that is why I think this is a very important campaign,” he said.  “There is a personal reason too – as a gay man I would like to be able to marry.” ‘

Here is a man, Lord  Smith Chairman of the ASA, of undoubted high influence, in a position to use his powers to silence critics of gay marriage…and it looks as if this has been attempted. And yet the BBC look the other way and decide to ignore this abuse of power.

However not on all occasions….top billing in ‘gay marriage’ search on the BBC….
X-Men superhero set for same sex wedding
Marvel comic X-Men is to feature its first same sex wedding after gay character Northstar’s marriage proposal to his boyfriend.

No mention of Chris Smith.  The Left have for a long while now been ardently campaigning to silence ‘Rightwing’ bloggers and even journalists…..guess this is just another aspect of that and the BBC no doubt agrees in many respects.

What did Andrew Marr say?

“The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias”.

Is that what we are seeing here…liberal bias by omission?

Question Time LiveBlog 24th May 2012

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Tonight Question Time comes from King’s Lynn (Coat of Arms Motto: “I can’t read or write, but I can drive a tractor”). The arrival of the BBC moving-picture machine demoncraft has been reported widely in the local newspaper – which is published fortnightly to warn the locals of upcoming full moons, new roads and immigrants, as well as providing the timetables for witch burning.

On the panel: Universities Minister David “Two Brains” Willetts and the world’s most unsuccessful bulimic John Prescott. To be fair it’s been at least 2 or 3 weeks since the leader of the Green Party Caroline Lucas has added her lentil knitting stupidity to Question Time so the BBC have decided that she’s due another shot tonight. The painfully unamusing”comedian” Griff Rhys Jones (whose appearance screams out for an urgent phone order to Slick Mario’s Quick Lime, Tin Bath and Shovel Emporium) rounds off the panel alongside Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin.

B-BBC is delighted to offer a free Martin Clunes posable action figure for anyone brave enough to stay up for This Week*

There’s a short video by advertising executive Sir Martin Sorrell complaining about red tape strangling growth who will then debate it with Michael Portillo and Alan Johnson.

The Guardian’s Nick Watt will join a This Week torch relay as an embarrassing dressing up exercise for the political stories of the week review slot and then …well… Kerry Katona to talk about how she used to get whacked out of her head on cocaine but is better now. Maybe they’ll show some of her old “glamour” photos too? Hopefully not.

Join us for the LiveChat. If you dare.

* Posable action figure made in China, may contain lead-based paint and lethal levels of depleted uranium. Not suitable for small children, adults. Offer closes 19th October 1968

BBC Censorship: Cory Booker Edition

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Some people here may be aware of Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey. He’s a rising young Democrat star, well-liked in his city, and has gotten quite a bit of press and praise for his use of social media to get people together and personal touch when actually helping voters. Even the BBC knows about Booker. They’ve reported, for example, about how he personally helped to save a neighbor from a burning house (including an end note about his shoveling snow for residents during an earlier winter storm). Booker also got a special mention in the op-ed piece they commissioned (or licensed for reprint, it doesn’t say so I can’t be sure) to praise the President’s “historic” endorsement of homosexual marriage rights. That wasn’t written by a Beeboid, but there’s no way the BBC can claim never to have heard of him before as a progressive rising star. You can read some background on Booker here.

The reason I bring this up is that Mayor Booker has been all over the US news media in the last couple of days for criticizing the President’s attack on Romney’s professional history as a venture capitalist. There have been further developments, making it an even bigger deal than it was originally, but the BBC has so far decided to censor the story entirely. Why? Because it makes the President look bad, and makes Him look less like the same alleged superhero who supposedly ran the perfect Presidential campaign in 2008.

Last week, DB posted about the BBC’s one-sided reporting on the President’s attack ad on Romney. The ad was an attempt to mislead the public into thinking Romney earned money from personally destroying a business and putting hundreds of people out of work. The President’s campaign – or rather, a Super-PAC which supports Him – put out a second ad taking the same line of attack to another level. The US mainstream media, still being in the tank for Him, added fuel to the fire of attacking Romney for his business success. The ads backfired somewhat, because the US is not Europe or Britain, and class war and wealth hatred doesn’t sell quite so well with the voters.

The President continued that attack theme in other speeches, and Cory Booker, mayor of what some see as a suburb of New York City, criticized Him for it on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press”. He called the attacks on venture capitalism “nauseating”.

Needless to say, Booker was immediately vilified by most of the media, and the President’s own man, David Axelrod, publicly called him out on it. The President’s supporters at MSNBC also went on the attack, as did the usual suspects (next time someone complains to you about how biased Fox News is, show them that link). Booker apparently also got a lot of pressure from both the White House and the Democratic Party national bosses, and quickly had to re-emphasize his ultimate support for the President and His Party. This was all over Twitter, the HuffingtonPost, the Washington Post, and Politico. The New York Times called Booker a “surrogate” for the President. So we know the BBC staff in the US is well aware of the situation.

Things got so bad for Booker, in fact, that he made a special video statement to “clarify” his point. Politico’s headline on this could almost qualify for a typical BBC job: “Booker walks back ‘nauseating’ comments”. But the story doesn’t end there.

First, the President came under fire Himself because people started pointing out that He raised huge amounts of cash from venture capitalists. The most of any other candidate in 2008, in fact. Worse still, one of His current top bundlers not only worked for Bain, but actually did take over and shut down a company, sending workers to the unemployment line, and made a nice fat profit doing exactly what the President’s campaign tried to accuse Romney of doing by dubious association. If this had been done by a Republican, Mark Mardell or some other well-paid Beeboid in Washington would be lashing such hypocrisy with the usual sarcasm and sneering.

As for Booker’s own video, the White House tried to use this as a campaign tool. But, being the inept group of amateurs who added silly boasts about the current President to the official biographies on the White House website of a number of past Presidents (in the 20th Century, from Coolidge onward), the recent attack on Romney and that dog story, which backfired spectacularly, and all those failed hashtags, the campaign geniuses couldn’t leave well enough alone. So they heavily doctored Booker’s video to slant his words differently (something the BBC is also wont to do), and started promoting it.

First, here’s the full video:

Now here’s the White House version:

Ridicule ensued, and even someone at the Washington Post not named Jennifer Rubin admitted something was wrong. Leading Democrats have suggested the White House abandon this strategy and move on. Basically, this has been a big story, a possible early turning point in the election year, the kind of thing the BBC’s US President editor usually rushes to explain to you. But it’s really just another disaster that makes Him look bad, and the BBC censored it, as usual.

Crying Shame

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If anyone still doubts that the BBC reports negatively and one-sidedly about Israel, do look at the comments (296 and counting) below the line at Nick Robinson’s article here.

The dubious standard of literacy and the appalling ignorance indicates that the commenters aren’t in the habit of seeking out details or background beyond their own armchair. In other words they’ve been relying on the BBC.
All they seem to know is that Israel has ‘nukes’ and Iran hasn’t, (so unfair) and anyway Israel is at the root of all the problems in the Middle East; and oh, Israel’s wars are none of our business.

It’s enough to make one weep.

Update. Quite a few pro-Israel commenters are fighting back! (356 and counting!)

History, Mystory, the BBC story

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The BBC were wrong footed on Today when they asked Lord Woolf to comment on the running of ‘Inquiries’.

His first comment was about the  ‘Hutton Inquiry’ and the treatment of Lord Hutton…..he said that during the Inquiry Lord Hutton had been praised by all for his running of the Inquiry…however when his judgement was released suddenly that view changed and he was treated totally unfairly….and of course the BBC was at the forefront of that criticism.

Evan Davis had a little panic and changed the subject saying that perhaps the final judgement wasn’t important…. the release of evidence into the public domain was the important thing.

That would be convenient for the BBC….ignore the final conclusions of Hutton and carry on regardless.

In fact that has been what they have pretty well done since that Inquiry….the BBC have rewritten history ever since and now blatantly say that Hutton was ‘of course’ wrong and the BBC was right.

No, the BBC was wrong, ‘Today’s’ misleading report altered the public mood and perception of the Iraq War and you could reasonably make the claim that the BBC’s lies about the 45 minute claim cost British soldier’s lives…the government was put on the backfoot and was thereafter hesitant about committing the necessary resources in manpower, weapons and money to win the war outright and quickly.

Could the Today programme really change the public’s perceptions and views so effectively?

Look at what Baroness Deech, an ex BBC governor, has to say about its ‘power’:

‘One may wonder what all the fuss was about an interview on one radio programme early in the morning, but when I tell you that that programme is listened to by 7m adults each weekday morning, (more than 10% of the population and probably 25% of all adults) and prides itself on shaping the agenda for political discussion that day, you may comprehend it.’

As to the BBC rewriting history….that quote came from Baroness Deech’s speech at  Gresham College last year….in which she tried to vindicate the BBC and rubbish Hutton……the BBC has a very long reach and a long memory…and it has the ability, the continuous platform. to air its own side of the story whilst ‘opponents’ of course do not.

Funnily enough Evan Davis was pretty keen to talk about Leveson often praising it as an example of a pretty outstanding Inquiry beneficial to all mankind.

Wonder why?