I see the BBC have covered Warsi’s comments on a “small minority” of Pakistani men seeing young white girls as “fair game”. Lots of parenthesis lest we got the wrong impression and how wonderful to read that extensive item without the words MUSLIM or ISLAM getting a mention. That said, Mosques do get a name check but happily the world class BBC journos hit the brakes at that point….
Tonight Question Time comes from Cardiff from the original Welsh “Cahhhhdeff”. The “You Are Leaving Cardiff” sign has been voted Most Welcome Sight for six years running. The dialling code for Cardiff is 029 which came second in the 2011 Wales Most Interesting Area Code competition, losing out to Newport’s 01633.*
On the panel: Minister for Disabled People Maria Miller (who? And why do they need a Minister?); the only ever UK Cabinet Minister to have stood trial for bank robbery Peter Hain (TheEye asked that in our pub quiz two weeks ago!); Leanne Wood, a republican socialist who is leader of something which looks like a bad hand at Scrabble called Plaid Cymru and the usually quite splendid Kelvin MacKenzie, Daily Mail columnist and former editor of the Sun.
Also appearing is someone billed on the BBC website as author and comedy scriptwriterJohn O’Farrell. Will Dimbleby also mention that he was a Labour candidate in the 2001 General Election? Or that he wrote the “jokes” in speeches given by Blair, Brown and other Labour politicians? Who’ll open the betting? Make me an offer.
Your Moderators line-up consists of David Vance, David Mosque, TheEye and John Ward.
Question Time is followed by This Week. Andrew Neil is cursed with the world pie-eating champion Diane Abbott, Michael Portillo – probably in a shirt resembling a 60’s deckchair – the unspeakably stupid Mehdi Hasan, Jilly Goolden, and a Greek stand-up commedienne called Katerina Vrana. No, I hadn’t heard of her either, before you ask, but she lists Eddie Izzard as her favourite comedian so on that basis alone she probably needs to be set on fire and the flames put out with a golf shoe.
Prediction: it’s going to be dreadful. And in other unexpected news, Fernando Alonso complains about the lack of charm in modern F1 and Brian Blessed calls for everyone to quiet down.
This is a guest post by B-BBC reader A Libertarian Rebel…do give it a read.
“There must be very few, if any, B-BBC readers unaware of the visceral hatred which our much beloved national broadcaster harbours towards all things Murdoch and News International.
It’s dressed up, of course, as a lofty, altruistic, public-service-broadcasting concern about quality standards and the monopolistic effects of excessive market share (conveniently ignoring, err, the Beeb’s own 70% share of broadcast news & current affairs coverage): but what it’s really about is a determination to neutralise NI’s position as a right-leaning print media alternative to the left-liberal BBC/ Guardian/Independent nexus, and head off the threat of what, for the Corporation, would be the ultimate nightmare – a wholly NI-controlled BSkyB or a UK version of Fox News, presenting the UK viewing public with a libertarian, small-state, free-markets, EU-sceptic option for their news and current affairs viewing.
We’ve seen this operating already in the highest gear with the BBC’s far from impartial and blatantly anti-Murdoch tenor of its coverage of the phone-hacking scandals and the Leveson Inquiry: but what flicked in into overdrive on Tuesday evening was the news that Rebekah Brooks had been charged with conspiracy to convert the course of justice. Despite Merkel/Hollande meeting on the EU Fiscal pact and the euro visibly collapsing about our ears with Heaven-knows-what implications for the UK economy, BBC News channels not merely led with it (not unreasonable – other channels did too) but gave it virtually saturation coverage for the remainder of the evening.
So it was interesting come across these 3 tweets posted late that same night by someone for whom the BBC evidently has a high regard:
Imagine finding Rebekah Brooks dead in her cell. The trauma! Why, I would wish to compensate the officer £10,000. I repeat, £10,000.
Brian Limond is of course the serially unfunny & offensiveness-dependent (no doubt classified in BBC commissioning parlance as “edgy”) Scottish “alternative” comedian who about 6 months or so ago distinguished himself by gleefully anticipating the death of Baroness Thatcher and adopting an avatar showing Lady Thatcher bloodied and with her throat (presumably “edgily”) slashed.
More to the point however, the Beeb loves Limond’s output so much that it’s commissioned not one but two series from him, one in 2010 and one in 2011, both undoubtedly generously paid for by the licence fees which we’re all so delighted to provide in the form of a compulsory regressive tax extracted on pain of fine or imprisonment. With material as erudite and subtle as Limond’s, you can see why the Beeb values him highly.
But wait a minute – sending a message of an indecent, obscene or menacing character is an offence under S127 of the Communications Act 2003, isn’t it? And despite the necessities of safeguarding free speech, it’s surely difficult to argue that an invitation or recommendation for hanging or bridge-pushing isn’t menacing; nor that it doesn’t constitute an incitement to violence which, if uttered in a public place, would be an offence under S5 of the Public Order Act 1986 as well. Either of those offences, or preaching racist hate, will get you fired from the BBC (unless directed at BBC-approved targets like white male Christian libertarians, of course).
The Corporation would no doubt say that Limond’s not employed by it: but the fact is, it’s already commissioned two series from him. So the questions arise: does the BBC think it’s an appropriate use of licence-payers’ funds to commission material from someone who openly breaks the law to incite violence? Will it repudiate and disassociate itself from his comments? Will it undertake not to commission him again?
An ethical and responsible taxpayer-funded public service broadcaster should do all three: but ah, he’s virulently anti-Murdoch, isn’t he? Don’t hold your breath.
“Cutting on the bias” in wood or textiles means cutting diagonally against the grain so that it accentuates the lines. That’s what’s going on at the BBC’s special section on the US 2012 election. It hasn’t been updated in a couple of days, and here’s how it appears now:
White House propaganda, White House propaganda, and more of it, with a couple of fluff pieces thrown in. The top story at the moment is the BBC’s explanation of the President’s first ad attacking Romney for his association with Bain Capital. It’s become more balanced than it initially was, as people here pointed out earlier this week, and presumably after somebody at the BBC realized it. It’s still not entirely balanced as they’ve got the President’s ad embedded right at the top of the piece, while including only a link to Romney’s rebuttal. The link below that is to a second attack ad on Romney on the same topic. No links to anything from Romney.
The “Latest news” section is slightly out of date, but the bias is still obvious. Besides the news brief about Ron Paul ending his “active campaign”, the other featured reports are about Hollywood feting the President for His recent endorsement of homosexual marriage, a piece about Romney reacting contritely to that Washington Post hit piece – now proven to be less than accurate, although the BBC has never bothered to inform you of that – about him allegedly bullying a homosexual a few decades ago (another score for the White House campaign machine), and a piece lamenting Sen. Richard Lugar’s defeat in the Republican primary for Senate in Indiana. We’re told by “correspondents” that this will make the Senate more partisan than ever. Translation: the Democrat majority won’t get their way so easily. This is a biased position, of course, shown to be all the more ludicrous since the Senate just rejected the President’s own budget proposal 99-0. You can’t get more bi-partisan than that, which is why the BBC has so far censored that news.
The video features also reveal the biased grain in the BBC’s perspective on the US elections. The section on Battleground States isn’t all that bad in general, and I won’t try to read too much into a perceived emphasis on Democrat optimism. But there is a blatant lie in the section on Wisconsin. You have to click on the State in the Battleground feature to read the following:
Barack Obama will be hoping to hold on to the sizeable majority he won in 2008, and will be helped by the state’s strong union movement. The unions have been leading the opposition to new Republican Governor Scott Walker’s controversial bid to restrict workers’ collective bargaining rights. The proposals led to mass protests and a successful attempt to trigger a recall election for Mr Walker’s job.
The bit I’ve bolded is, quite simply, a lie. What Walker did was restrict the right of public sector unions’ rights on collective bargaining. The BBC admitted that part when they first began reporting on this story, yet here they deliberately mislead you to think it’s an attack on all workers, full stop. I simply don’t accept the excuse that this was simplified due to space constraints or because it’s an unimportant distinction. And of course, by “controversial”, the BBC means that the unions didn’t like it. Another issue of bias here is that the BBC gives you only the Democrat unions issue, and not the budget disaster Gov. Walker faced upon taking office, which just as much a concern for voters. The budget concern is why Walker sought to restrict public sector union power and their burden on the State. It’s not all union workers everywhere, only the public sector ones, which is why I maintain that it’s an important distinction. As most people here will know, their coverage of the Wisconsin situation has been extremely biased and at times dishonest. Plenty of background can be found here, here, here, here, and here. I don’t expect the BBC to update this section with the news that the union-backed candidate lost the Democrat primary for the recall, which kind of puts a damper on the whole issue, making the BBC’s take even less useful.
Next up is the piece by Justin Webb – Mark Mardell’s predecessor as North America editor, whose gushing reports about The Obamessiah during the 2008 election won him the coveted seat on Today – explaining why the Republicans aren’t ready to lead. My fisking of ol’ Justin’s piece is here.
Then you get Jonny Dymond’s biased piece telling you how the Republican Party is just for white men, freezing out Hispanics. It’s just one in a series of race-baiting pieces from Dymond, whose remit seems to be proving that Republicans and any opponents of the President are racist. See here, for example.
If you still aren’t convinced that Republicans/conservatives are awful, then you can move on to former Obamessiah activist Matt Danzico’s “bespoke” magazine piece about yet another one of those studies showing conservatives are inspired by negatives while liberals are inspired by positives. The study’s goal was to prove a biological and cognitive difference between liberals and conservatives. I won’t bother to address how this leads us down a path to eugenics, but suffice to say that it’s always liberals these days who want to use “science” to prove that they’re superior. Danzico, of course, slightly misrepresents the findings. Another way of describing the findings can be found in the University of Nebraska’s own school paper: conservatives tend to be more realistic while liberals tend to be more idealistic. I find it amusing that a student journalist spins the study less than an adult professional journalist.
And finally, there’s Adam Blenford’s piece worrying that too many people in the US aren’t registered to vote. Setting up the article by using a Republican as an example of a dedicated voter betrays the bias, if one understands that voter “disenfranchisement” is the primary motivation behind ACORN and Left-wing activists who encourage absentee ballots (Blenford uses the youth vote, another Left-wing target demographic, as his example there), same-day registration, and who attack laws requiring ID to vote, all methods behind voter fraud. Some people here may remember Newsnight hiring Left-wing activist and “investigative journalist” to do a special report telling you that only white Republicans engage in voter fraud, and specifically to disenfranchise black people. He also defended ACORN against charges of voter fraud by saying that, even though they do it, it doesn’t affect elections. If that’s not enough to convince you, just do an internet search with the term “voter disenfranchisement 2012” and see who’s worrying about it and what issues are the focus. It’s obvious.
While not every single report is riddled with bias, much of it is, and nearly every single piece on the BBC’s US Election 2012 page is written from a Left-wing perspective one way or another. There’s no memo handed down to make this happen, no directive from on high. It’s due to the BBC hiring what seem to be exclusively Left-wing staff. If they all think that way, there’s no need for an organized institutional bias: it will happen naturally.
Only the BBC would dream of digging up a graveyard full of corpses who were punks in 1977 when we were celebrating the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.
“I was against the Silver Jubilee, against the symbolism and the money being spent on the festivities. My friends and I thought the royals could afford to pay for the party themselves.”
Thus one Louise Bolotin, a 50 year old “writer”, reminiscing about those glory days. A real rebel was Louise..to show her rage against the machine she wore her “Stuff The Jubilee” badge ALL DAY…tell that to the Solidarity members who were being imprisoned in Communist Poland or the Cuban dissidents being tortured by Castro’s secret police. Louise showed true defiance and, what’s more, she feels the same today.
The Beeb revived other corpses to find the same sentiment and then proceeded to inform us of the historical/sociological significance of punk
Her attitude typifies those following the punk movement at that time. Although the nation had been encouraged to have a party in honour of the Queen, not everyone wanted to come.
The rising popularity of the punks provided a snarling, spitting, sometimes swearing outlet for some of the angry youths disillusioned with 1970s Britain – a time of strikes, economic hard times and high unemployment
What a load of pretentious colour supplement drivel. It wasn’t a movement, you moron, just a fashion trend like the Teds, hippies, mods, skinheads, Goths and thousands of others. There was no political dimension, just, like me in my Teddy Boy drainpipes in the 50s, a wish to irritate my elders by wearing something that made me stand out from the crowd and to make me seem intimidating (think hoodies)…the badge of youth in every generation.
However a tiny group of student/arty types muscled in on the trend and created a style industry and bigged it up to get some PR traction and, of course, with sound capitalist motives, to make some money selling music and fashion. These, like latter day Jacobites, are sad dinosaurs still dining out on the “movement” . Most of the punks, however, like the Teds and Goths and Mods grew up and became adults with families and proper jobs.
As for the BBC’s political point, as a teacher in South London during the 70’s, I remember that the punks tended to be the spotty, insecure loners on the fringe of school social life who found out of school solace in belonging to their outlandish tribe. In full punk gear they looked violent and terrifying but they were plaster board warriors who were essentially the embodiment of Urban Wimpdom.
So why did the Beeb even bother to visit this particular cemetery? The clue is in the description of 1970s Britain.. “a time of strikes, economic hard times and high unemployment”…it’s the BBC narrative about Cameron’s Britain and they are constantly searching for signs of disaffected youth. They thought they found it in the 2011 rioters but had to pull back when the public supported belated tough police action and harsh sentences. So, at the moment, they need to go back in time…except they forget to mention that punk erupted under a Labour government and the black fog of despair that generated the punks was dispelled in 1979 with the arrival of the BBC’s nemesis..
I suppose when you are a state enforced monopoly this sort of thing brought to my attention by a B-BBC causes little concern;
“There was a freedom of information request 2009/2010 that showed that 94% of BBC staff advertising spending was with the Guardian. in defiance of their market share among quality dailies. I raised this on a BBC “have your say” page in response to some idiot/or perhaps a plant, accusing the BBC of right wing bias, my contribution disappeared just like the unwanted version of history Winston Smith consigned to oblivion. No surprise.”
So, there I am with Kerry Katona on one side and Jon Gaunt on the other! Here’s the link to my appearance on BBC1 Nolan TV show last night for those prepared to be brave enough to watch. Have to say that I feel I was treated fairly. I’m on first….
The other day, DB posted about the BBC’s dutiful promotion of White House propaganda about Mitt Romney’s earnings from investment in Bain Capital. They put up the President’s campaign video, and helpfully explained how awful Romney was for earning money off of a failed company and sending poor innocent workers to the unemployment line. The campaign meant to attack Romney’s business record, attempting to tarnish his track record of successfully turning businesses around, and hoping to undermine the growing mood of trusting him more than the President on fixing the economy. In short, it was an attack ad. And, as DB pointed out, it was misleading. The BBC still reported on it without question, and only belatedly (after someone called them on it, presumably) added a mere link to a Romney video hosted elsewhere.
This isn’t the first negative campaign piece from the President, who was supposed to be above it all. There was the attempt to hurt Romney with that silly dog story, which of course backfired. There was the charge against Romney and the Republicans for supposedly waging a “War on Women”. The President tried to frighten everyone by telling them that the Republican budget would be “radical”, and harm the middle class, the elderly, and ruin everything while helping only the wealthy. And of course there’s all the class war rhetoric, culminating in the ill-fated “Buffet Rule”. Most recently, we had the relentless coverage of what turned out to be a less than truthful account of Romney as a homophobic bully.
Now that the President is trailing Romney in voter trust on five different issues, the BBC, perhaps inspired by a piece in the New York Times last week, worrying about attack ads from Romney while at the same time encouraging the President to “push Romney’s face down in the dirt”, is rushing to His defense.
Pity the poor President, they tell you, because He’s the financial underdog in this race. Sure, He’s raised more money than last month, but the awful Republicans are making these nasty attack ads. Worse, the poor President doesn’t have the same wealthy Super PAC to help Him.
Making the announcement, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said large sums were being spent by special interest groups against the president.
So you’re already prepared not to raise an eyebrow when reading this:
At the end of March, the Democratic Party reported about $124m of cash reserves, while Republicans had about $43m in the bank.
Correspondents say the Obama campaign could see a further burst of donations after his recent endorsement of same-sex marriage.
I bet “correspondents” aren’t even remotely cynical in that analysis, or suspicious of any motives for that endorsement other than sheer honesty and integrity, either.
Although Mr Romney’s direct campaign funding has lagged behind the Obama campaign, Republican super political action committees (super PACs) are spending millions of dollars backing his candidacy.
In a sign of the gathering super PAC offensive, one group, Crossroads GPS, backed by Karl Rove, former adviser to President George W Bush, said it would spend $25m on anti-Obama ads.
He’s the underdog, a victim, I tell you!
About $57m has been spent on negative advertising against the president since October, Mr Messina said in the Obama campaign video.
Are you pitying Him yet? Ire raised enough against the vicious Republican machine? No? Maybe the closing line will help.
Meanwhile, a super PAC supporting the president, Priorities USA, has struggled to match that level of funding, raising just $10m by the end of March.
And that’s it. Not a single mention of the attack ads His own PAC has been making. Like the one they released Tuesday, showing the poor former workers of that plant Bain closed, the same one with which the campaign and the BBC have tried to tar Romney by indirect association the other day. The workers likened it to being attacked by “a vampire”. Oh, and apparently Romney’s opponents used this exact same tactic against him in his failed 1994 campaign for Senate. The BBC won’t bother to tell you that, unless they can find a way to praise Him for the brilliant strategy.
Ads from the President’s Super-PAC are also going to be aired in several states over the next few days. Vice President Biden is out there now doing the class war thing as well, telling the people in swing-state Ohio that Romney is bad because he was a venture capitalist. But He’s the underdog, and only it’s all the Republican’s fault for going negative, right?
The thing is, campaign cash is only half the story. The other half – and perhaps the more important one – is the media being in the tank for Him. Again. Think it’s sour grapes from one of His enemies who imagines bias in every report, and finds conspiracies under every media hack’s bed? Think again:
Then there’s that Newsweek cover. Plus, Hollywood is in the tank for Him again as well. Tom Hanks has narrated a 17-minute propaganda campaign film, all of Hollywood is re-energized for Him on the heels of His half-assed endorsement of homosexual marriage, and there will be a film about His heroic killing of Osama Bin Laden coming out in October. Even the BBC thought you should know about that one.
Despite the White House campaign’s attempt to portray Him as the underdog, and no matter how many times the BBC worries about all those negative Republican ads, no amount of money from any Super-PAC or the evil Koch brothers or Fox News can compete with the full power of the entire mainstream media, from the New York Times and the Washington Post to CNN and MSNBC and ABC and NBC and the LA Times and Time and so many local papers, plus all of Hollywood and much of daytime television.
Yet the BBC dutifully pushes that Narrative anyway, like a foreign branch of the White House press office.
On BBC News 24 yesterday, Jon Donnison reported the demonstrations in the Gaza strip and the West Bank by Palestinians celebrating Nakba day. I use the word ‘celebrate’ deliberately because Nakba day has become a celebration of victimhood rather than a commemoration of a Nakba (catastrophe) or cataclysmic disaster. Using this name brings it into line, in the world’s eye view, with a real catastrophe when half the world’s Jews were exterminated.
Naming the anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel after the Arabic word for catastrophe puts the largely self-inflicted expulsion of approximately 700,000 Arab inhabitants of the region on a par with the murder of six million Jews.
Jon Donnison’s report was more than a mere account of the demonstrations attended by ‘Thousands of Palestinians’. It was also a history lesson – consisting solely of a dumbed-down version of the ‘Palestinian narrative’, which itself is a very particular version of the creation of Israel. “The beginning of our continued hardship” he quotes Abbas saying, sorrowfully.
The role that Arab leaders played in this fright and flight exercise in 1948 by propagandising and scaremongering is ignored, as is the fact that the exeat was intended as a temporary inconvenience while the Jews were neatly disposed of by invading Arab armies. Forgotten altogether is the little known “other Nakba”, the expulsion of approximately 800,000 Jews from the Middle East, who were absorbed into Israel.
“How Palestinian Arabs became refugees and how they have suffered at the hands of the Jews,” is a version of history that many have chosen to adopt as *the* authentic account of the creation of Israel. The term Jews has been prudently ‘euphemised’ into ‘Israelis’ as if to dissociate it from the malevolence that dare not speak its name.
Of course many suspect there is another side to this story, but, with the help of the BBC, they have chosen to adopt this one, and this one alone. Glorifying, or ‘rooting for’ the underdog bestows a quick-fix self-righteousness and a comforting sense of belonging. For the activist, the more radical, the more rewarding; the more assiduous, the more smug; the more strident, the more dangerous.
It can’t just be a simple case of unavoidable brainwashing from an overdose of incessant, biased reporting, because it’s easy to discover both sides of a story through the internet. Even if you know you’re not going to like it, the knowledge that the information is there for the asking suggests there’s an element of choice in the Israel-bashing zeitgeist surrounding the intelligentsia and the unintelligentsia, and the fact that so many choose to ignore or reject the so-called “Jewish narrative” out of hand, yet adopt the Arab one unquestioningly indicates that antisemitism resides within the default Israel-bashing epidemic.
Surely the BBC’s own biased reporting can’t be due to brainwashing either, unless they’re hopelessly incompetent, and incestuously regurgitating each other’s biased reporting. Their unique access to funds and resources means they are capable of ferreting out the whole story, so their failure to do so must be because of somebody, somewhere’s conscious decision, and their failure to fulfill their obligation to report fully and impartially must also be a matter of choice.
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Brian Limond
