A Biased BBC reader has sent me this very interesting analysis of BBC spin on BBC alarmism over possible football crowd problems in Poland.
“With just a week to go before the start of the 2012 European Championships, the BBC stands accused of spreading alarmism over concerns regarding crowd trouble and racism at this summers tournament. Patryk Malinski felt that there was plenty left to be desired in this particulate programme.
Last Monday evening the BBC broadcast their programme Panorama: the Stadiums of Hate in which they made a huge step towards biased and sensationalist journalism rather than objective, factual reporting. The BBC journalist, Chris Rogers, spent two months in Poland and Ukraine, the host nations of this year’s European Championships, and his main aim was to prove that football fans in both countries are mindless racists, and together with his guest, Sol Campbell, they tried to convince the viewers that going to those countries to watch the competition may somehow be unsafe and that potential fans from other countries may even risk their lives should they go to Poland and Ukraine. The programme, however, was so full of inaccuracies and generalisations and, as a Pole, I feel the need to respond.
A shocking and powerful documentary. Sol Campbell was alarmist. Rogers was excellent though, and he was on the news channel saying that Poland was taking steps against it.
A few years ago they blamed English football fans because one of them got stabbed to death in Turkey by one of the natives. Two points explain the corporation’s warped logic –
(1) The victim was a working class Englishman
(2) Turkey is an islamic country
Reporters see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, find what they need to find and ignore what interferes with a sexy story line.
I draw your attention to the B-BBC correspondent who, a few weeks ago, complained about the coverage of a “riot” in Spain that never happened. He was in Madrid, if I remember, fearful because his BBC World TV feed assured him he shouldn’t believe his eyes.
I have often returned with eyewitness accounts of incidents that were ignored by my betters: “The greenest village in Britain” was an example for R4. It was a scam but the editors wouldn’t take my word because they had read an article in the Sunday Times – the Times article was the hyped report. I was told to go back and “find the story”.
One senior manager once commented on a sensitive documentary about VAT inspectors, “If you can’t give me the story I want I will find someone who will” – ignoring my own findings.
Once I tried to tell a news editors about the fence that divided East and West Germany – a fence I had seen with my own eyes…only to be laughed at. I’ve always wondered why he did that? Perhaps the truth hurts the committed ideolog too much. Or perhaps he was simply one of the 26,000 people in the UK, members of the unions, the media and academia who were picking up a paycheck from the East German government.
You can bet Chris Rogers found what he was looking for – or what his editors told him to find. In the “good old days” Weekend World (LWT: producer John Birt) short-circuited the process by writing the script first and talking only to interviewees who supported the commentary line.
After 30 years in the trenches, I am an eyewitness to news practices – unlike the voluble Mr Whitman. However, I value his comments. It sharpen the sinews.
Hi, Having spent 11 years in the UK I very much appreciate your comments. The problem is there but it has been overblown like in Soviet propaganda. Could I contact you for a short interview?
yours,
Marek Rybarczyk
Very interesting information. I’m surprised the BBC got the translation of that chant wrong.
2 months? All spent in a 20 euro/day hostel I hope.
Presumably the reporter fabricated the footage of neo-nazi salutes, the testimony of Jewish groups and the images of swastikas too…? If the chant was mistranslated it was a serious failing, but the remaining evidence is overwhelming.
Agreed, the Nazi saluting crowd was not a one-off, so it sort of backs up the image presented of the Ukraine. The lying police chief surely wasn’t a BBC fake, someone they had paid to pose as something else. I hope (the BBC does have form. See here as well.). But Rogers said he saw it in every single game he attended, and the takeaway message was that nobody should go to either country. The BBC got a cuddly black man to say it, rather than a Beeboid, but that was obviously the entire point of the special. Rogers didn’t spend two months to make a report saying anything less. Is it the BBC’s job to make message reports like this?
From further into that article:
“Besides, John Terrys alleged racist abuse of Anton Ferdinand took place in October and his trial won’t start until after the European Championships – will BBC make a programme implying that because it’s taking so long, the British society is covertly racist?”
Actually, they probably will.
I thought they’d confirmed that long ago.
still, it mustn’t be nice getting shit off ppl just because of the colour of your skin,
although i suppose its better than getting your head cut off by members of the religion of peace just because youre a christian.
Id like to know why the militant leftist Nick Lowles of Hope not hate infamy was roped in by the BBC…It seems that it was an underhanded ply to further heighten the alarmist propaganda pertaining to neo Nazis Poland and the Ukraine. What the hell are the BBC employing creatures like Nick Lowles, who cites on his own blog, the website “Socialist Unity” as his idea of “Blogging for hope”?…….”Socialist Unity” are foaming at the mouth supporters of SWP/UAF/Respect. So are the likes of “Socialist Unity” and Nick Lowles now the the BBCs idea of mainstream?
‘So are the likes of socialist unity…..bbc mainstream’ ?
SOP at the bbc is to put up a socialist as as the default argument position, then find someone from the outer reaches of leftist insanity to provide the interview ‘balance’.
That way their man looks fairly normal by comparrison. Do it with every interview for 30 plus years whilst pleading impartiality at every opportunity and you have a result !
Hate Not Hope are a disgusting bunch of convicted criminals and Communist thugs. Amazingly, our tax money funds this fake ‘charity’ as well. Truly sickening!
Charities are charities, and should be funded by voluntary donations NOT BY TAXPAYERS MONEY!!!
I feel very strongly about this – if government needs to do something then they should do it, they should not fund charities to do things that they should be doing.
Damn right. They’re just another government department otherwise!
Poland has not yet been flooded with the dross of the third world – visit Camden, now twinned with Mogadishu. Nor have they been bullied into accepting “multiculturalism” as “normal”. Football culture is a rough old game at best, and sending in the Commission for Racial Equality to referee was always going to get short shrift.
So a bit of recreational antisemitism’s OK, is it, if it means we don’t have to put up with black people using our street markets?
Who mentioned “black people”? East African Muslims are of a different stripe from Black British. Or is the cultural distinction too subtle for you?
Oh I do apologise. In that case, a bit of recreational anti-semitism’s OK if it means no East African Muslims using our street markets, is it?
Force your wife or girlfiend to dress up like nun before she goes off to the street market do you? While we are at it, remind us of the country of origin of the failed London tube bombers? Starts with an “S”. No, not Switzerland. Need more time?
I’m just not getting this “diversity” bit, troll-boy. Over to you.
Interesting. So just because I point out that your comment is nonsensical, I’m a tyrannical Muslim husband? Your life must be unbearable, with evil Muslims rearing their heads at every corner…
Yawn
Fine by me. You’re the one who made a bizarre link between Polish antisemitism and the fact that they have a small population of third world “dross”. I’m not the one looking like an unreconstructed savage.
“Force your wife or girlfiend to dress up like nun before she goes off to the street market do you?”
What about people who dress up like nuns because they’re nuns?
Maybe the BBC should investigate why there are not enough ethnic adopters. Seems to be so many children in care because enough “same culture” people cant be found.
Same goes for blood and organ donations !
Note too how every outrageous outrage from certain demographics is explained away as the legacy of slavery/colonialism/the crusades und so weiter.
Anything in Polish or Ukrainian history which might explain their descent into extreme nationalism? Anything at all?
Apparently, there’s nuance and then there ‘nuance’ in Beebland.
Meanwhile, we still await the BBC’s report on life as a white farmer in South Africa.
Did Louis Theroux not do the latter? They were, on the whole, racists, as I recall.
Yitschak Shamir said they get their anti-semitism through their mothers milk. He lost all his family in the camps which incidentaly were all in Poland and Ukraine.
Since Poland is the highest contributor to the Righteous Among the Nations in Yad Vashem, Mr. Shamir creates nothing but further hate through his bigoted statement. He earns no respect.
The Catholic Church and the Russian influence during the 19th Century informed a lot of the anti-Semitism in Poland. The Ukraine had their own Pogroms, so it’s not like this a new phenomenon.
But how many white nationalists are there really in the Ukraine? How many are members of some group ready to kill for race war? We weren’t told.
Reckon the BBC think that these former satellites of the USSR were rather nicer to minorities, when the Soviet Union was still intact.
As yet-no exposes on either Russia or China…two other places where to be black or the wrong kind of asian can get you into serious trouble.
The fact that the BBC have discovered that nazi/anti Semitic thugs only a week before the football starts does make me wonder-after all, it was clearly raised continuously as an issue when the tournament was awarded.
Let me tell them now-it might not be a good idea to be the wrong colour…or gay for that matter….for the next slew of places too…Qutar, Brazil…but that`s where the sponsors want I guess!
Rogers won`t be going near West Ham/Millwall/Tottenham/Leeds type hotspots anytime soon I suppose will he? Too provincial and close to home I`m sure.
Can’t remember the BBC running a documentary about how dangerous coming to London is for the Olympics, when that Polish woman jumped out of a burning window, after her house was set on fire by Afro-Carribeans in Croydon the other year.
But wait, the BBC were too scared to send anyone to cover the Great Looting.
+james, you can’t remember the BBC running a documentary about the Croydon riots?
“BBC One – Panorama, The August Riots”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b013xy9t
Don’t suppose you can remember a pipe-bomb attack on a Polish family by White-Britons in Northern Ireland either?
“Pipe bomb left at Polish couple’s home in Steeple, Antrim”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-15271940
Of course, for *some reason* the bbc FAIL to mention the skin colour, nationality or religion of the perpetrators.
[?]
And of course this will cause b-bbc regulars to rise up in unison to condemn such “bias by omission” by the bbc!
Or… well… erm… perhaps not.
Our Polish friend above noted that the map of Europe was both wrong and out of date.
A sign that the lazy BBC couldn`t be arsed to respect the European geography-unless the EU cited it as a map of xenophobia, in which case we`d only ever see THAT one.
And my point?-seems to me that this is significant-as Twitter pours scorn on the coverage of the Jubilee coverage yesterday, it all adds to a sense of squalid depression at a childrens tea party as the adults get stoned outside.
That`s the BBC at the moment-don`t check maps, don`t check facts, don`t know one end of a survey from a Bella poll, have no scientific antennae for when they`re being told a pile of poo.
They don`t know, don`t care and aren`t bovvered…they`ve got a license fee for a few more years and as long as there`s hooded gents with drugs and bottoms(trackie or otherwise) they`ll be safe for now.
But our Polish friend told us something-and the balls ups, celebrity vacuities and inanities, reflex phoning in of tripe…we here like to think we`ve noted it for a long time.
An idea whose time has come…go back to your constituencies and prepare for Rupert-or hospital radio licenses maybe!
Hell-if Wossy and Dimblebum Minor have decided to run with the oiks, then it MUST have been bad!
..this just in…
post on Guido’s, no idea ref the veracity thereoff, but doesn’t surprise !
“Off subject but its a killer. According to the BBC presenter,the firm that made the Duchess Of Cambridge hat was also responsible for making the headgear for Nelson at the battle of Waterloo…You have just got to Larff”
Reply
Watching the Thames flotilla yesterday, the moron presenter kept on parrotting that HMS Belfast was 91,000 tons. You don’t need to know much, or indeed anything about ships to realise that this is nonsense, out by a factor of ten. Where do they find these no-marks?
Ha, ha, I suppose it has 60 inch guns and is 6000 foot long too. Sloppy journalism is the hallmark of the modern day beeb.
Too true, I am only surprised they did not hire Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to comment on the event.
The Panorama episode “Stadiums of Hate” really hit a nerve here. Most of all people were surprised. The BBC used to have a good reputation.
Here’s what a local blooger has to say:
<a href="http://john-moloney.blogspot.com/"
Your link didn’t work for me but this one did:
http://john-moloney.blogspot.co.uk/
As someone interested in historical maps I can assure our Polish friend that documentary makers nearly always get maps of Eastern Europe wrong. In particular they get maps of Germany, Poland and the Ukraine wrong and they tend to show Germany on the Oder-Neisse line when Germany extended to East Prussia on the Lithuanian frontier until 1945. I know that Eastern Europe has changed radically in the last 100 years but there are no excuses for cocking this up and it just shows how crappy modern day journalism is. One particular gripe I have is that Stalag III (of Great Escape fame) is nearly always showed as part of Poland when it was part of Silesia then in German hands. It doesn’t surprise me that Panorama used pre-1990 maps of Europe, maybe deep down the Beeboids still wish there was a Communist Eastern Europe.
An interesting blog has been published at the Economist website from Jonathan Ornstein who is the executive director of the Jewish Community Centre in Krakow and was interviewed in the programme.
I particulary like the following quote which really does show that the BBC has utterly lost it’s way as a credible news source as this is the sort of thing you would expect from the gutter press.
“I suggested to the reporting team that they interview the two Israeli footballers who played for Wisla Krakow this season and were active members of the Jewish community so that they could hear firsthand about their positive experiences. The reporters responded that this line of inquiry “didn’t fit their story”, a response which perplexed me at the time.”
Full blog here: The Economist
I was told by a history of science lecturer at UCL that the makers of Horizon had a habit of ringing around he scientists who specialised in the subject they were dealing with: if your views did not happen to fit the narrative thrust they had decided on, you did not get called back. This was in the 1980’s. They’ve been at it for a long time.
I’m shocked, shocked to discover spin and misleading reporting at the BBC.
Although I have to say that the silence from the Ukraine about their own racist violence is pretty damning.
This is getting worse for the BBC. Even ‘The Guardian’ is reporting the attack on ‘Panorama’:
“Panorama attacked over ‘sensationalist’ Euro 2012 racism claims
• Source for BBC programme condemns ‘manipulation’
• Broadcaster rejects charges of selective reporting”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/jun/06/panorama-attacked-sensationalist-euro-2012-racism-claims?newsfeed=true
There’s further criticism of the programme in the ‘Irish Independent’:
“‘Panorama’ documentary purporting to uncover football hooliganism in Poland was dishonest, writes Louis Jacob”
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/tv-radio/euro-expose-earns-beeb-a-red-card-3126469.html
It begins:
“Last Monday night, BBC’s Panorama aired a documentary entitled Euro 2012: Stadiums of Hate, which was packed with the narrow agenda-driven sensationalism that has become so prevalent in documentary making.”
Another reasoned hatchet-job on ‘Panorama’ can be read here:
http://www.thenews.pl/1/214/Artykul/101074,Euro-2012-Blog-%E2%80%93-stadiums-of-hate-or-sensationalist-journalism
The BBC documentary is an egzample of a media manipulation. A very narrow minded, sensational and unjust editing. Ethics should be an integral part of journalism. Instead they just created even more prejudice and managed to offend all those tolerant and peaceful natives. Shame on BBC.