Andrew Marr once said: “The BBC is not impartial or neutral……It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”
Hardly true…the bit about ‘not so much a party political bias’ [Ta to Pah] I mean of course….we know huge swathes of the BBC casts its vote in favour of Labour…most of the senior journalists reporting on politics and economics are Labourites…and some have close ties to the Labour Party.
So it’s more than an ‘innate’ sense of their own ‘rightness’…..there is a deliberate, conscious effort to present a certain Labour friendly world view.
If that is so you might ask just how far would they go? If we turned over some stones, looked in a few dark corners, would we find some emails or texts between the Labour spin doctors and the BBC?
Would a call from Labour HQ ‘set the agenda’ for the day’s news?
If Tom Baldwin, Labour’s spinner in chief, contacted, quietly, oh so quietly, an editor at the BBC and suggested that ‘We, Labour, are going to oppose the government’s decision on plain packaging for cigarettes and will use this to attack Lynton Crosby to deflect attention from our Union woes….will you be on board?’…do you think the BBC would play ball?
Hell yeah!
Er…I mean…We’ll never know….but it looks like Labour needn’t bother on the price of a phone call…the BBC did a splendid job stitching up Crosby yesterday on the flimsiest of evidence…well, no evidence except the mutterings of Labour spinners.
Despite denials that Crosby had any input into forming ‘policy’ the BBC has turned legend into fact. Only this morning on 5Live I heard a presenter almost telling Vince Cable he should be demanding the resignation of Crosby…..based on what? Rumour and innuendo and the fact that ‘this just won’t go away’?
Why won’t it go away? Because the BBC et al will keep flying that kite for Labour as long as it takes to embarrass Cameron…as they did with Coulson.
Coulson..now there’s a thing…..he worked for Murdoch so is clearly an evil person….but not a mention of Labour’s own spinner…Tom Baldwin…also a Murdoch man…one who was the Labour Party’s bagman at the Times where he would place stories that Labour wanted planted during their time in government.
hmmmm….wasn’t that where we came in….stories planted in the media for political advantage?
So the BBC ignore Baldwin….they also ignored the proven conflict of interest that the chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, Tim Yeo, having many fingers in many green industry and renewables pies. Guido Fawkes for months listed those conflicts of interest…..but the BBC took no notice.
But look…..it took less than half a day to be on the trail of the Tory’s electoral and political advisor, Lynton Crosby.
Yesterday we were treated to a never ending barrage of news and comment about the government’s decison to postpone introducing plain packaging for cigarettes…..and gradually we were introduced to rumour and suggestion that this was all down to Lynton Crosby because his lobbying firm worked with tobacco companies…..no evidence that he lobbied for those companies on this subject or that he influenced the policy decison in any way…just Labour Party innuendo taken up with gusto by the BBC.
Is anybody interested in the packaging of cigarettes to any large extent? No. So why did the BBC give it such a big news profile? This is a story that was always a ‘trojan horse’, packaged and shaped to allow Labour to attack Crosby. As Grant Shapp’s said: ‘This is looking like a smear campaign’.
There is no proof as yet of any undue influence by Crosby whilst there was very definite proof of a serious potential conflict of interest with Tim Yeo….who has now suspended himself from his role….which suggests that seriousness….not enough for the BBC to take early notice of though.
Yeo has got well known interests in green industry and he made decisions that had enormous effects on that industry as Chair of the energy committee….so a proven cause and effect here….Yeo defintiely worked on Green policy…..what should have been investigated was if his decisions also benefitted him financially in his other capacity as a green industry baron.
The BBC is of course devoted to the Green cause and it looks like it compromised its journalism to help promote that and hide any possibly embarrassing problems like Yeo….no such qualms about a man who is the Tory’s electoral guru….the Devil incarnate for the BBC….straight onto his trail hunting him down…after having set the scene with wall to wall negative reports about the decision.
But this is of course nothing new…the BBC conveniently failed to investigate Unite’s election rigging allegations…..even as the story broke the BBC played it down trying to limit the allegations to Falkirk whilst there was laready evidence that up to 41 other constituencies had been targeted by Unite and to suggest that Miliband knew nothing of this…and that heroically he is determined to clean out the stables.
But that ignores the fact that highly regarded Labour supporting websites had been complaining about the Labour Party ignoring the allegations and indeed threatening disciplinary action against some who complained about Unite….in Falkirk the local Party officlas who noted the large number of Unite members joining suddenly were told to keep quiet and sign them up anyway by Party HQ.
Miliband almost certainly knew of and supported Unite’s policy and actively tried to block those who wanted to raise the issue.
The BBC ignore that previous stance by Miliband as it would completely destroy Miliband’s credibility and tear Labour apart for the forseeable future.
They also ignore Miliband’s ridiculous claim that Labour is the Party of the Working Class…the very people that for 13 years the Labour Party ignored and sidelined…when they weren’t calling them racists for their attitude towards Labour’s immigration policy…..Labour going so far as to import a whole new working class that they hoped would vote Labour in their gratitude whilst undercutting the wages of the existing British workers and forcing them out of housing, schools and hospitals.
The BBC ignores the real stories if they don’t fit with its agenda, they ignore the thoughts, desires and needs of a vast majority of the populace, and of course they ignore your complaints. The BBC is out of touch.
Charles Moore in the Telegraph has some thoughts along those lines for the BBC:
Why does the impartial BBC not tell the story of the great majority?
Our self-righteous national broadcaster is woefully detached from voters’ real lives
The one entity, in short, in which the BBC feels permanently uninterested is the individual citizen.
It is not surprising that the BBC takes him for granted, because it can. It takes his money by law, and without his consent, in the form of the licence fee. Until this ends, the BBC will, with the finest impartiality, refuse to tell his story.
All pretty ironic when you think the BBC constantly backs attacks on Cameron and Co as millionaires ‘out of touch’ with the real people.
Alan, many of the BBC reporters went to Oxbridge where they learnt the power of the English Language. It’s an important point to remember as it means they are amongst the finest proponents of the get-out-clause imaginable.
Marr did not say ‘no party political bias’ but ‘not so much a party political bias’. That means they could be as party politically biased as they like as long as they are less so than ‘liberal’ whatever ‘liberal’ is taken to mean.
So Marr wasn’t lying, he was stating, in careful language the case. The BBC has ‘liberal’ bias that does not exclude party political bias as long as the party in question falls with his definition of ‘liberal.’
Given his close links to the Labour party and the fact that his wife was closely linked to Gordon Brown what else would one expect from him?
Pah
True, carefully phrased nuance is all.
yep, hence that apt so apt Kipling quote you posted the other day:
…”The truthful, well-weighed answer That tells the blacker lie”…
Does anyone know if Charles Moore is reachable via an email like first.last@telegraph.co.uk? I’d like to send him a link to the “In Their Own Tweets” page, as it’s full of evidence to support his groupthink theory. The section of his article about how only liberal progressives are allowed to work there is mostly one big straw man, and he could use some evidence that the groupthink and self-righteousness is very real.
I was told that five out of six Oxford students where too thick for Mensa, and that the thick left-wing ones who did Arts and Humanities rather than Science and Maths where actually of below average intelligence. That is why you get the contradiction within the BBC of middle-class Labour supporters, voting the same way as people in the inner cities. These people also tend not to leave Oxford if at all possible, that’s why they also pervade the politics in the Universities with head banging intolerance of views that they do not agree with. It is something that the Chinese Universities are exploiting in the pursuit of overtaking the West in the studies of Atmospheric Physics, Genetics and Human Intelligence.
Paddy O’Connell was at his biased best this morning on Broadcasting House. Labours union troubles were ignored, but the question of Tory party funding was examined at length. Where on earth did this topic suddenly come from? I can only think Labour HQ.
When labours troubles in Falkirk were mentioned O’Connell cut the speaker off with an abrupt “that’s an exception”.
Earlier in the program there was the most disgracefully biased trailer… ‘In The World this weekend at 1 o’clock, we’ll be asking, does the rumoured Tory U-turn on minimum alcohol pricing show their health strategy is in tatters?”. Talk about a loaded question.