I was intrigued by this BBC headine this morning. “Iain Duncan Smith calls benefit rises unfair..”. Cute. IDS did not say that benefit rises were “unfair” but he pointed out that the RATE of increase under Labour was unfair. Big difference and to be fair to the BBC they do go on to point this out in the article below albeit whilst giving Labour lots of space to insist benefits had not risen enough BUT many people grab their new from headlines and in this instance it is at best sloppily constructed or at worst maliciously contrived.
FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR MILIBAND…
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“Iain Duncan Smith calls benefit rises unfair” headline = instant ‘nasty Tory’ reaction = job done.
The first sentence of the article reads:
“It is unfair for benefits to rise at a faster rate than wages, the work and pensions secretary has said ahead of a key Commons vote on capping benefits.”
But the headline, that which sticks in the mind of people not reading too closely gives a totally misleading impression. Clearly deliberate and clearly bias.
‘The first sentence of the article reads:’
Better perhaps than the usual Beware of the Leopard default, but you appear to have… missed the point.
The BBC does not miss the point, ever.
They just choose to skew it if they can get away with it, as long as they can.
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/trust-upholds-complaint-against-bbc-news-over-inaccurate-tweet
‘the corporation said the issue was whether the headline on Twitter matched the story “and, in its view, it did’
‘The director of the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit later said that “he did not accept that those who only read the headline would have been left with a materially misleading impression”
The BBC’s view was that “the short headline was an accurate summary of the report to which it had linked”.
Several months, and vast amounts of time and effort later…
‘“…agreed with the complainant that this meant the headline did not reflect with due accuracy the story to which it was linked.”
Jim… try simply suggesting to BBC Complaints that the headline does not accurately summarise the actual story.
See what happens.
“BBC refuses to reveal emails that could show whether it gave staff chance to avoid tax”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2256004/BBC-refuses-hand-tax-avoidance-emails-MPs.html
Supplementary.
“BBC Trust facing calls to publish ‘tax avoidance’ emails.
The BBC Trust was today facing calls to publish emails that could show the corporation gave its star presenters an avenue to avoid tax.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/9775318/BBC-Trust-facing-calls-to-publish-tax-avoidance-emails.html
The hypocrisy of the BBC and its band of liberal/left presenters is breathtaking. They go on and on about the ‘virtues’ of more and more public spending and yet they seek to avoid paying tax and NI. On top of that they happily pile into anyone else who has less than perfect tax affairs whilst using loopholes themselves.
The stench of hypocrisy in Broadcasting House must be nauseating. Surely stories like these can be used more aggressively by the likes of the Mail and Telegraph to further undermine the remaining trust that the public has in the BBC and eventually encourage the timid Tories to get rid of it.
You do realise that all we, the ordinary chap and chapess in the street, are nothing more than a crop to these people.
We provide them with a slice of our earnings and they give us low quality services back.
In the mean time they are living off us getting the best of both worlds.
Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all.
‘Anthony Fry, the BBC Trust’s finance committee chairman, has also refused to read the emails ..’
That awesome level of senior market rate uncuriosity still at record levels, then, heading into bovine arrogance. And getting away with it still.
The Trust is the entity that looks after the licence fee payer’s interests as I recall.
Imagine anyone in the public or private domain who tried that by way of a brush off to the BBC’s on-air attack dogs?
They really do inhabit a parallel world.
The headline on the radio news was clear this was about the rate of rise. And the article is crystal clear.
Blimey Jim, dodging like that and you could be a CECUTT Director before Lords Patten or Hall Hall can say ‘we get it about right’ or ‘send out for more FoI exclusion lawyers!’.
The headline quoted is online.
It matches the twitter page.
BBC Politics @BBCPolitics
Benefit rises unfair, says minister http://bbc.in/1338neO
That… is nothing to do with whatever may be ‘clarified’ on the radio (or an episode of Ceebeebies next year)… or later on in the piece.
The headlines referred to are… inaccurate.
Therefore, crystal clear maybe, but wrong.
It’s what people see first and may not see beyond.
Saying the same thing over and over in hope that it will inspire a different result is not going to work for you any more than it will the BBC in future.
And it does not take an Einstein to figure out what banging on anyway in face of that suggests.
But Labour/BBC have the last word again ….
“This Tory-led government is comprehensively out of touch with the reality of Britain’s working families.”
Are they still running that one?
I thought they had twigged the notion of Mr. Miliband and ‘in touch’ was a leap even the most committed Labourdefaulter might baulk at.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/17/liam-byrne-note-successor
‘Shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne also said that whatever desperate quote the BBC will run for him, few will forget the fact that he and his party knew the left power and the country with… no money left’
Working families may not be aware of that much longer if the BBC can help it.
Beyond the rigged Editors’ Picks, this is also hilarious..
18. nutgone
We have seven children, if only the working people knew how hard it is to cope on benefits. We already know that having them capped at 26K is coming and now I hear that they won’t even be pegged with inflation my blood boils. My only pleasure in life is a few cigarettes and a drink at the weekends. This government wants to punish people just for being poor. I will never vote Tory again!
Not least for all the daytime dislikers free to express their lack of appreciation. I wonder how many actually voted it up?
LOL. Surely another pleasure is bonking his Mrs. and bringing up his children. I wonder if it is tongue-in-cheek, probably not or he would have exaggerated the booze and fags a bit more.
“Only pleasure in life”? Presumably, then, she delivered that missive to Broadcasting House personally, walking across the bleak moors wrapped in her woollen cloak, no shoes to save her feet, just the layers upon layers of weeping bunions, slashed open time and time again by the ragged stones she must drag her old and ailing body over, just to deliver her vital message: “Tory scum”.
Or maybe she uses her laptop and the same internet connection she has to check facebook and look at pictures of cats.
Ah lolcats. Purrfect. 😉
Nah she’ll do that on her i-pad, or latest i-phone, they have special apps for benefit claimants, and a sat nav app to the nearest foodbank!
In keeping with meet the new year, same as the old, especially in terms of idiot ‘news’ and worse interviewees, my lunchtime SKY did not disappoint.
First up the Prince’s Trust has out a report which, wait for it, ‘suggests’ that young people who are not in work get depressed. Frankly not enough money is going to £100k heads of research at charities vs. those in actual need if such things are not well known enough as yet.
There was an amiable young chap on to be patronised by the big fat white guy and fragile not-blonde airhead who supports him.
Seems he wants to be a beats producer. Lot of call for that. But quite how the investment in getting him to be currently working at M&S (kindly allowing him the break so long as he wore the uniform?) is paying off I was less clear.
Still, as he articulated (and only he could, really), it is better than doing all that robbin’ & muggin’ his peer group opt for when not being assisted with their CV drafting.
Then on to Shakleton, who I do hold in high regard for his exploits and for being one of my school’s old boys who also got expelled for putting a po on the clock tower spire.
Slightly less impressed with the gush being accorded the latest ‘in the footsteps-of’ type, with an eye to sponsorship and TV deals, who is reproducing his epic hike to seek help, only with rescue services but a sat-nav call away. So really an exercise in frostbite tolerance before putting the professional rescue services in danger.
However Mr. Boulton did slightly redeem himself in his interview with the new TUC leader, who seemed like an amalgamation of Harriet Harman and Baroness Ashton, only without the looks or brains, if close the the salary.
In what is one of her first outings, she seemed to channel the great interview Ed M. dug with the BBC a while ago, simply ignoring any of the valid points being put to her and repeating tired soundbites over and over.
The BBC top brass would have loved it. And a few of the ‘it is ‘cos I say it is’ cherry parrots here. (I have expanded the Flokk scope for 2013).
Not listening to any BBC news stuff, but don`t really need to.
We all KNOW how the Beeb would slant anything a Tory might say about welfare and the need to reform it…and cut costs, so that our great grandkids aren`t being saddled with Qatadas disability scooters MOT. Fat chance, but still!
If its Wed, it`ll be welfare then…usual slew of junkies and apologists wanting their grants for April…Will Hutton and Polly planning for Tuscan villas..what else but welfare and the “unfairness” of it all.
Think it`ll be abortion on demand next Tuesday, and have pencilled in Dignitas wicca coffin manufacturing industries next Thursday…Friday will be the usual beardies fresh from the Mosque denouncing some racial profiling or other.
Alistair Campbells grid did its job.
Even with Millbank gone, Excalibur and Campbell are still in the buildings at the BBC…and the BBC are so house-trained to bark for Labour that they think they`re “impartial”.
Deluded.cushioned pampered lamebrains all!
But “all so Savilised”….
You can say what you like about that arsehole campbell, nut dopey dave couls sure use that grid, ANY flaming grid!
Oops
But not nut
Could not couls
Sorry
sorry for the change in topic but this has to be read to be believed – imagine the bbc running this
Hong-Kong-protests-Thousands-protesters-streets-demanding-greater-democracy-waving-British-colonial-flags
“Hong Kong leader leung faces divide after mass rally”
http://www.manilatimes.net/index.php/opinion/columnist1/38553-hong-kong-leader-leung-faces-divide-after-mass-rally?
Following on from the “welfare claimants union”, it`s a joy-not unexpected-to see the teaching unions behind the welfare whingers there at the BBC Grievance Unit.
Guess what-the NUT asked a couple of teachers whether they liked their jobs, just after the hangover has gone and before the poor little lambs have to go back to work for a few weeks before half-term>
The BBC report that…no, the teachers are not happy-too far, too fast and all that…too much change apparently.
Oh, for those years of excellence, standards and stability as set out by Brown, Blunkett, Balls, Clarke, Byers, Morris, Johnson, Radice etc…Philip Lawrence, Jamie Bulger, Baby P and the like…a veritable golden age of “ejukayshun innit”.
See what I did there?…I lobbed in a few of Majors turds in with Labours watch…well the BBC do it all the time…so it`s my turn!
Funnily enough I`m finding that I don`t need the BBC to tell me about “welfare cuts hitting the poorest”, about “teaching unions feeling under attack from the nasty Tories”, about “the Church in crisis and why the NSS want churches removed from the Lords”…or about the “poor suffering folk of Gaza” or the “joys of the Arab Spring”.
For this series of stories came in that order tonight on Russia Today…and I don`t even need to pay for Putins propaganda, as long as he churns it out with his Stalin-lite chums in Moscow.
R.T…BBC…same stories, same priorities, same agenda..same ultimate destination for the white flabby West eh lads?
Today’s non-news from the bBBC is Public ‘aware’ of child benefit cuts. The bBBC trying to invent a ‘story’ that people realise we no longer have a Labour government giving handouts to everyone that they hope might vote for them.
Of course if this were in the USA, the bBBC would report a tax rise for rich people as a triumph for the President. But here it is ‘controversial’ and would be a ‘nasty surprise’ if people later have to pay back benefit to which they’re not entitled.
Surely Miliband could have given the bBBC a better story than that.
Some Unisurvey tells us that there are “fewer young people”
, applying to be students for next year.
The BBC tells me in its 6pm bulletin that this “raises fears” that not enough are applying, and that`ll be down to the tuition fees going up.
In who does this “raise fears?”….Tessa Blackstone.,Estelle Morris?…the Guardian and those tender little plants in BBC news?
Or does it benefit the clever kids who might now be able to get a bit of seminar space, or find a seat at the lecture theatre…does it benefit the rest of us that there aren`t more degrees in nail engineering or Astroturf Sciences?..you know, get clever kids to learn something worth the bother?
Course not-elitist maan!