Monthly Archives: October 2012

Stephanie Flanders, has notoriously has slept with both Ed Milliband and Ed Balls. She is “nauseated” by Conservatives. So she is ideal as the Economics Editor of the BBC then.

“In his speech Cameron talks about the NHS but can they tell us how many of the Cabinet have private health insurance?!”

So Stephanie … do you?

We know you send your two children to public schools so it’s not as though being a hypocrite is out of character….

EDIT: It appears that Flanders has stealth edited her post to shift the comment on to an unverifiable “viewer contribution” hence two screenshots of the same post showing different text. Nice. And can’t be checked of course.

At least on Biased-BBC we document our edits.

A new one of these for you!

BBC DJ Liz Kershaw was on Nicky Campbell’s show this morning giving a good account of herself regarding the BBC culture in the 1980’s….a time when PC and health and safety were rapidly becoming  a fixture in the workplace….so even if you were inclined to say ‘Well it was the times’, that’s just not true…it was not the 50’s when a woman knew her place nor the swinging 60’s era of free love and letting it all hang out.

Her story about being regularly groped and then her complaints ignored is now well known….but she revealed something else….that she had some concerns about something else, unspecified and unrelated to her other complaint, that she went to management to deal with…and was told that if she spoke openly about it she would ‘never work in the BBC again.‘

The BBC has a draconian non-disclosure agreement that prevents employees talking about the BBC and this was applied with vigour to Kershaw to shut her up.

So there are two questions here….one….what was the thing that Liz Kershaw felt so strongly about that she raised it with management….and two…..why did the BBC then close down all talk about it?

It does seem that far from being transparent and accountable the BBC works desperately hard to maintain its reputation by hiding its dirty secrets with legal injunctions, in the case of the Balen Report or threats, what Kershaw called ‘intimidation and fear’, to silence employees.

The more we see of the BBC the less we see of it.  What are the great ‘unknown unknowns’ that the BBC is hiding?

Bodo in the comments has highlighted this article in the guardian reporting that the BBC is to instigate a new investigation into its isupposed mpartiality.

The report will look into the BBC’s coverage of Europe, immigration and religion.

Now it may just me being cynical but this is just one in a long line of such reports which seem to be purely designed to cover up more than they reveal.

In 2006 the BBC commissioned Loughborough University to carry out a report into its coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict…its conclusion…the BBC was biased…against the Palestinians.

THE BBC’S coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict implicitly favours the Israeli side, a study for the BBC Governors has concluded.

Deaths of Israelis received greater coverage than Palestinian fatalities, while Israelis received more airtime on news and current affairs programmes. The references to “identifiable shortcomings” surprised BBC News executives, who are more used to accusations that their coverage is routinely anti-Israel.

The BBC Governors felt there was no bias at all:
The Governors received the panel’s report at their Board meeting last week and welcomed its finding of no deliberate or systematic bias.

Apparently the BBC does not have any bias towards Europe either……

We are pleased that the Panel found no evidence of deliberate bias in the BBC’s coverage of EU matters.

“That said, we note the Panel’s conclusion that “there is a widespread perception that the BBC suffers from certain forms of cultural and unintentional bias” and that “the BBC’s coverage of EU news needs to be improved and to be made more demonstrably impartial”.

The BBC’s 2007 report, From Seesaw To Wagonwheel  into impartiality failed to tackle the Israel/Palestine conflict….one of the major, if not the major, area of contention about BBC coverage and bias.

The BBC then employed Scientist Steve Jones to review its coverage of science….Jones was hardly independent, his career having been saved by the BBC which essentially has him on a short leash. It is no wonder that the pro-AGW Jones found no signs of bias in the BBC’s coverage and in fact argued for bias in favour of climate change and global warming.

The BBC employed another of its own to investigate its coverage of Israel/Palestine…Malcolm Balen….who declared even before the investigation began that he believed that the BBC was not biased but that it did make mistakes…..which seems to be the kneejerk get out clause for all bias….it’s not deliberate or systematic just cultural, unintentional and a result of group think.

The Balen Report has famously been hidden from all eyes…you can only conclude that it must reveal something so damaging to the BBC’s reputation that it can never see the light of day…..what could that be?  Something that shows the BBC’s coverage has consistently been anti-Israeli and may have led to the death of Jews and the legitimisation of attacks on Israel?

There does seem to be a pattern here……evidence of bias but a declaration that no bias exists….or as with the Seesaw to Wagonwheels and the Balen Report, a complete refusal to acknowledge concerns about the BBC’s Middle East coverage.

The new report can only be more of the same…regardless of the content of the report you can only conclude that it will be kicked into the long grass and quietly forgotten should its findings turn out to be uncomfortable.

David Liddiment, the lead BBC trustee for the review, said the BBC’s reputation and commitment to impartiality was in its DNA.

A report into Europe, immigration and religion…what’s missing yet again?  Israel.

Presumably ‘DNA’ stands for ‘Do Not Answer’ any questions about our coverage of Israel.

This programme is one that should see the new DG in the dock at OFFCOM if any BBC programme would.

Evan Davis has ensured that the BBC has taken sides in one of the biggest political and economic arguments of the times. The BBC has become openly political and partisan.

A programme that was dreamt up as a clever ‘Trojan horse’ to ‘nudge’ us into accepting a certain economic viewpoint was allowed to go too far and become what amounts to a blatantly obvious piece of propaganda for the Labour Party’s spending, or is that ‘investing’, plans.

It should, I would assume, have been a subtle bit of agitprop that told a story, made its point but not say that point aloud, it should have ‘led’ the viewer to reach the desired conclusion himself…but the BBC being the BBC it doesn’t trust the British public to make the right decision so it spells it out for them…spend money now!

Evan Davis is investigating the condition of Britain’s Infrastructure…he finds it is in a dire state, of course….and in need of great deal of money to be invested in it.

This will not only help provide jobs and economic growth now…but future proof us when the population reaches 70 million….he tells us.

No mention of the immigration that Labour imposed upon us that makes 70 million a likely figure….and upon which we can heap much of the blame for the hugely expensive upgrades in infrastructure needed now….the estimate in the programme is, purely for energy, telecoms, water and transport improvements, that it will cost £500 billion by 2020….and that excludes other projects needed such as schools, housing and hospitals to cope with the flood of new people.

So not only has Evan’s Labour Party spent ruinously when in government and landed us with a huge bill hanging over us now but it has left us a legacy that is going to bankrupt us or turn us into a third world economic basketcase as the economy cannot pay for all the necessary infrastructure to cope with the influx of immigrants.

But don’t worry says Evan….the cost is a mere nothing in the scale of things…and even if you object to new construction, don’t worry…because once it’s built you’ll love it, you’ll be content!

Here is a taste of Evan’s thinking and the conclusions he proposes….it is essentially a Labour Party political broadcast giving unqualified backing to Labour’s own policies.

As I said, if he’d been clever he’d have left it at telling us of the crumbling infrastructure and the future problems that will arise from that and then allowed us to start thinking ‘maybe something should be done’…but he kept going and decided to lecture us in what is as he says an area in which there is a great argument.

He has ensured that the BBC has taken sides in one of the biggest political and economic arguments of the times. The BBC has become openly political and partisan.　

Evan Davis speaks:

‘Britain faces an almighty challenge…key parts of our infrastructure are wearing out and all over Britain it is the same story. Much of our civil engineering that’s holding our country together is not up to the job.

Britain needs some serious work.

It won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap.

But if we’re ambitious for our future there’s no better time to get on with the job of building it than right now!

Should we be doing a lot more of this work (building infrastructure)…I know I’m biased…because I like it….but isn’t there a case for investing far more in infrastructure to get Britain ready for the future?

Forth Road Bridge….although it cost 1.5 billion it is a useful fillip to the local economy at a difficult time.

Infrastructure is one of the most effective ways of creating jobs.

Many believe there’s a lesson for Britain today and we should be digging our way out of a slump.

There’s a big argument over that.

But it makes an awful lot of sense when the economy is in the doldrums.

How much would it cost?

To keep the water, energy, telecoms and transport systems alone up to scratch and keeping pace with the growing population will cost £500 billion by 2020.

Don’t we have to spend more to give our economy space to respond to change?’

Davis occassionally tries to keep to the script…ie this is a programme that is trying to suggest we build infrastructure for ‘the Future’…but keeps letting his true reasons slip out….it is all about spending for ‘growth’….or alleged growth…and no idea where the money comes from to  start with.

A more partisan programme, openly supporting a Labour policy, would be hard to find.

If the Tories don’t start acting on programmes like this and stop the BBC from airing them they deserve everything they get…which is probably a big fat zero vote in 2015.

The BBC seem to be still downplaying the Jimmy Savile affair.

George Entwistle this morning on ‘Today’ said that Newsnight was right to not broadcast the allegations about Savile and that he wasn’t in the business of  using the benefit of hindsight to try to blame people for their ‘mistakes’.

Could have fooled me…isn’t the British Empire and all that regularly run through the mill for its perceived sins by the BBC?

Mark Easton is still blaming Thatcher for everything….

The BBC told us that depression has risen 40% since 2006….but Mark Easton on ‘Today’ believed he had the reason why….Thatcher’s ‘savage’ attack on industry in the 80’s….a period of industrial decline that people have not got over…and now with savage Tory cuts on the mental health budget it can only get worse.

And speaking of Mark Easton, he seems to have taken his new boss’s message on board…….

Here is Mark Easton who, apart from revealing that a PE teacher at his school took great pleasure in making ‘small boys do naked press ups’,  almost puts the blame for the abuses onto the girls…or ‘groupies’ as he calls them….whilst taking the Entwistle line….the past was a different time with different mores……

‘The Jimmy Savile story takes the sexual politics of the present day and applies them to another age. The teenage groupies in the 60s and 70s who hung around the pop scene, hoping a bit of the glamour and excitement would rub off onto their own lives, were entering very dangerous territory – a world where sexual liberation was colliding with traditional power structures.’

It’s a rather curious tale he tells…because on the one hand he says no one would blink an eye about such goings on….but conversely his own ‘outrage’ had been raised by a visit to the local magistrate court where such an abuser was actually being tried…..so someone did care…..

‘When I was a cub reporter on my local newspaper in the late 1970s, I returned from the magistrates court with what I thought was a front page story. A councillor had appeared on charges of sexual assault on young girls, an alleged abuse of power that had left me shocked……

……But all too rarely were these kinds of concerns taken to the authorities.  In fact, one suspects that the police would have regarded accusations of such improper behaviour as domestic or trivial. Rather like my news editor, the desk sergeant would probably have shrugged and suggested the complainant worried about proper crime.’

So is he suggesting we don’t look back in anger at what may have gone on then…it was just the ‘times’? 

Or is that just a convenient get out for the BBC?

Start the week with a new one of these on-time!!! What has been bothering YOU with the BBC this morning? The floor is yours…

Monday morning on the biased BBC and Osborne meets Naughtie. The BIG point that the BBC want to hear Conservatives repeating is that they will force “the rich” to pay even more in taxes than they already do. I suppose Osborne is triangulating a bit when he says that he WILL make them pay more insofar as this can be achieved by reducing the top rate of tax a bit and thus encouraging people to reduce their efforts to avoid hanging over the fruits of their endeavours to Government but from a BBC perspective, it is clear they salivate over the very concept of soaking the rich. Maybe they should send some of their world class reporters across the channel to France to see how Hollande is getting on with his plan to achieve a similar result? Or, to save us money, just ask Estate Agents in London?

Here’s an interesting little video which shows just why climate sceptics have an uphill battle against the BBC.

Richard Black is ‘informing’ fellow journalists of the ‘facts’ surrounding various controversies….’myths’ as he calls them.

Note how he does not raise the very considerable questions that pour doubt upon the credibility and impartiality of the various inquiries into the CRU email hacking saga.

Black raises the ‘research’ done by B.E.S.T into surface temperatures….stating it is proof of AGW….no mention of the rather obvious problem….that one of the scientists completely refuses to be associated with the ‘research’ as she believes it draws the wrong conclusions and that the chief scientist is a proven pro-AGW advocate.

Black pours scorn on the notion that warming has stopped since 1998 (despite Phil Jones CRU admitting it had)…it is just a plateau for Black (it could well be).

However, he is quite prepared to use upper atmosphere temperature drop over a similar period to try and prove that the sun does not affect global warming….no plateau there then!

And all this is on the back of Prof Steve Jones report into BBC impartiality in science reporting….the same Jones whose career was ‘saved’ by the BBC as he couldn’t get any funding for his research….and then along came the telly with bag loads of cash.

When BBC reporters are fed this line of tosh is there any wonder that we do not get a proper debate on the subject….it is no less than brain washing by Black with a flood of misleading information.

I would be more impressed if the BBC College of Journalism also had some credible ‘sceptics’ on board giving their take on events….otherwise Black was merely pushing propaganda.