The UK’s employment figures hit a 30 year high but the BBC play it down.

The headline here  gets in the 2.53 million unemployed figure ….but shouldn’t the headline be ‘Employment at Record High’? or would that just give the Tories too much credit?  No such reluctance when giving the figures for temperatures when they reach ‘record highs’.

It was interesting following the BBC’s coverage of the release of the unemployment figures……reporting the ‘good news’….but then came the ‘buts’.

The first line was that youth unempoyment was still terrible under the Coalition…however that line had to be rapidly dropped as they realised that the fall in unemployment was mostly down to youth employment rising.

The next line was that there was still far too many long term unemployed but that didn’t really have much resonance…shame as it was the basis for Labour’s counter-attack.

The next line was that well yes employment has gone up but you know what it’s all part time jobs or self employed people or temporary work….painters and decorators, gardeners, window cleaners…you know, the type of jobs desperate people take when the economy is  in such dire shape…as it is under this Tory government.

Guess the BBC is trying to keep the economy on an even keel and not allowing you to get your hopes up too much and start seeing green shoots where there are none….don’t want you to be disappointed when your expectations are dashed….because as we know the economy is only getting worse under George Osborne’s misguided rule.

Savile’s own epigraph:

“When I’m gone, they’ll say: ‘I always thought he was straight but he wasn’t – he was crooked.’ ”

I imagine that’s one that could equally apply to the BBC.

The BBC have been pushing the story that the Newsnight programme wasn’t really about Savile personally and that senior management didn’t know, did not want to know and shouldn’t know what was going on at Newsnight….due to the BBC’s renowned ‘Independence’.

However it looks like the programme was expected to kick up a bit of a fuss as you might imagine, and that preparations were in hand to cope with that…‘a line to take’…..is it really likely  senior manager was kept in the dark about a programme that was going to put a bomb under the BBC and that they were not told at least of the content of the programme….and asked if it should be aired?

‘The email from a press officer to BBC executives appears to contradict the corporation’s official statements about why the BBC Two programme was cancelled just before Christmas.

The BBC seems to have lost its marbles slightly over this as it prepares to air a Panorama programme about the Newsnight decision….the day before the BBC DG, George Entwistle, goes before a committee of MPs to investigate the affair.

Is that just bad judgement by the BBC, or an attempt to play a spoiler and spike the guns of any inquiry with an exoneration of the BBC, or is it a stab in the back for Entwistle who seems to have upset the News staff at the BBC if it implicates the BBC in some sort of wrongdoing?

Not really a sensible time to air it I would have thought….especially as any information from the committee looking into the Newsnight abandonment must surely be relevant to the Panorama programme itself, investigating as it is…the Newsnight abandonment.

Here is a new one of these for you to detail the bias! Over to you…

How the BBC loves Labour harpie Caroline Flint. She was given great prominence on Question Time last week and today her attack on the Coalition’s energy policy is the lead story in the UK.  What amazes me is the way in which the BBC co-operates fully with Labour revisionism of political history. It is if 1997-2010 never happened. (However the Thatcher years must never be forgotten.) The hyopocrisy from Flint and co is staggering but the BBC never actually challenges the meme. I suppose that is because they agree with it.

A Biased BBC reader writes…

“James Jones and the entire crew for THE MORMON CANDIDATE are masters of deceit and editing wizardry. I have Mormons living all around me. One has two daughters who left the faith and they are loved as much or more by their parents than their other four children. None is shunned or intimidated. Most Mormon families have some kids who bow out of the faith, and I’ve never seen any of them treat the non-believers as outcasts or personas non grata. Jones and Sweeney interview ex-Mormons like Romney’s cousin (seemingly paranoid) for “unbiased” views on the church. It’s clear that BBC’s raving lunatic Sweeney is manufacturing sensationalism, and he has a very clear agenda before he feigns doing journalism. Where’s the white paper on socialist president Obama and his “God Damn America” mentor, Reverend Wright? High school news junkies could be more objective than this team of idiots.”

Sorry about this but it’s more Savile….it does seem that the BBC are interfering with the due process of any inquiry into this affair……

The BBC have announced two inquiries into the Savile business looking at whether the BBC was in any way to blame and why the Newsnight investigation was pulled.

However judging by what I have seen and heard and what some of the comments here are saying it would seem that the BBC has already decided and is on a mission to ‘fix’ the public’s perceptions regardless of the inquiries’ outcome.

It is wheeling in the big guns in a damage limitation exercise that is set on muddying the waters and massaging the truth.

We’ve had John Humphrys  suggesting it was all so long ago and in a culture that is long gone, we’ve had Joan Bakewell  spinning the same line….

“We were all padded, pinched, stroked, the whole female sex was available in those days – not willingly so – in the 1960s. It was how you treated women.”

But perhaps not how you treated 11,12,13, 14 year old girls…and boys.

Tory MP Rob Wilson delving deeper stated on the same programme that:  ‘There was a culture in the BBC of Senior BBC management targeting younger female employees’……and he rightly says that other organisations also have many questions to answer but that doesn’t mean the BBC should escape from also providing answers.

And we’ve had Victoria Derbyshire doing a double act  (45 mins) with ex-Today editor Kevin Marsh.

Derbyshire herself pre-empts the inquiry possible findings by stating that Newsnight dumped the programme because of ‘editorial reasons’……she reads out a few texts or emails that are against the BBC but the only callers that get through are pro-BBC…however she does read out this classic…..

‘Apart from harbouring tax dodgers and paedophiles the BBC does a cracking job’.

She then brings in Kevin Marsh to spread his own form of oil upon troubled waters….he has difficulty with recognising, or admitting the truth…..Derbyshire fed Marsh the questions and got the required answers…nothing to see here, move along.  It is quite apparent that programmes such as this are meant to make people’s minds up about the BBC’s role long before any inquiry comes up with its own answers.

The BBC is acting as judge and jury in its own defence….and strangely enough finding all the evidence points to an acquittal.

KM:  There will always be people who will be suspicious of big organisations and believe in conspiracy….having been inside the BBC for 30 years I know that is not true about the BBC’….he then comes up with his own conspiracy theory….’It is a commercial (Murdoch?) or political (Conservatives?) conspiracy against the BBC…no matter what the BBC says, it will be at fault’……he said it was ‘very easy to get angry about something for the sake of a newspaper column.’

So it’s all just a big conspiracy….firstly by anyone who just doesn’t trust ‘Big Organisations’ and secondly by Dark Forces opposed to the BBC seeking to attack it….and its all really about false anger drummed up to fill a few column inches.

KM:  I believe George Entwistle when he said he didn’t interfere with Newsnight because it is part of the BBC’s makeup to be rigorously independent and to avoid allegations of interference…it’s not the way the BBC works for bosses to interfere…..There’s no question that Newsnight wasn’t pressured to drop the investigation…there were sound editorial reasons for it not to go ahead…..The investigation wasn’t even complete really, not a film ready to go….if we’d gone ahead and been wrong it would have been catastrophic.

That’s OK then….he believes Entwistle, the BBC is rigorously independent, and it was an internal Newsnight editorial policy to abandon the investigation.

No need for any inquiry at all then…it’s just an exercise in ‘seeing justice being done’…all a waste of time and money….as ‘Auntie’ is so trusted and respected it of course could never really be found to have done anything wrong.

Marsh has his version…but other BBC sources say otherwise:…let’s have Derbyshire & Co interviewing them…..

‘Questions remain about just why Newsnight editor Peter Rippon took the decision to stop the report, and how close it was to completion when he did so. On Sunday Kevin Marsh, a former editor of Today who has now left the BBC, wrote a blog that was sympathetic to Rippon. “When the Newsnight editor paused the investigation, it was still at the evidence-gathering stage… evidence he was beginning to have doubts about,” wrote Marsh. “In other words, there was nothing to ‘pull’ – there was an investigation in progress and it had hit a brick wall. There was no script, even, in spite of what’s been reported in the press.”

Meirion Jones, the then Newsnight producer who was putting together the Savile report (and who is now working on a new Savile investigation for Panorama), declined to comment when contacted by The Daily Telegraph. But Pollard will want to ask Jones whether Marsh’s version of events is correct, or whether Jones’s Newsnight report was – as some BBC sources continue to insist – actually at a more advanced stage (and therefore less easy to shelve for genuine “editorial reasons”).’

The world is a very different place now thanks to Labour’s new laws that will protect children from sex abuse, says John Humphrys. 

Let’s see what laws Labour’s Harriet Harman wanted to introduce….. 

Harriet Harman under attack over bid to water down child pornography law

Harriet Harman’s political judgement has been called into question after it emerged that she once advocated the watering down of child pornography laws.

 and updated.

The BBC, especially their prime news programme, must have known that and as soon as Harman spoke up they must have decided not to embarrass her.

Listen to Humphrys as he tries hard to downplay Savile’s actions.

It’s so touching. Even in the midst of the Savile sexual abuse maelstrom, the BBC lovingly reports Milibands plea for “an independent inquiry” into what actually went on.  Presumably judicial led, Ed, like ever other inquiry you call for on a virtually hourly basis? I heard Harman in the Commons also expressing her alarm at Savile’s crimes and how it had stained the much loved reputation enjoyed by trusted Auntie. Again the BBC is PRAISED even when we can see the decades of cover up. Amazing really.