The BBC Trust, on the basis of a complaint from one man and his dog, has declared that the BBC, or at least John Humphrys is a right wing government stooge:
The BBC Trust said that a programme called the Future of Welfare, written and presented by John Humphrys, breached its rules on impartiality and accuracy. It found that the programme had failed to back up with statistics claims that there was a “healthy supply of jobs”.
Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, defended Humphrys as a “robust broadcaster” and said the documentary was “thoughtful and intelligent”.
His intervention came on the day that High Court judges rejected claims that the social housing benefit cuts for people with spare bedrooms discriminated against disabled people. Ten families had brought a court case against the Government.
Mr Duncan Smith was infuriated by the BBC’s coverage of the ruling, which he felt gave too much airtime to campaigners.
He said: “I have just watched reporting on the BBC about the Government winning a High Court judgment on the Spare Room Subsidy that once again has left me absolutely staggered at the blatant Left-wing bias within the coverage. And yet the BBC Trust criticise John Humphrys’s programme, which was thoughtful, intelligent and born out of the real life experience of individuals.
This is the same BBC that has provided a ‘useful’ calculator that will tell you which parts of the country you can afford to rent a home in…..it tells us that the South East and London are practically out of bounds for anyone but a lottery winner…however one look at the homes on offer in estate agents proves that to be far from the truth. In other words the BBC is providing propaganda for the anti-welfare reform lobby who insist that the poorest are being priced out of London…which is patently not the case.
Just been listening to Derbyshire reporting on the court’s decison (from 41 mins) and the response from campaigners….she had to admit the case she was highlighting as an example was ‘extreme’….as is usually the case. There will always be such cases that need special consideration but they should not be used to condemn the whole policy as the BBC all too often uses them to do.
“Proof positive that the BBC is biased”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2381603/DAILY-MAIL-COMMENT-Proof-positive-BBC-biased.html
Sorry, this should be on open thread etc, but i dont have rersources to check, did the bbc report as much when labour introduced bedroom tax ? http://kebabtime.blogspot.com/2013/03/all-bedrooms-are-equal-but-some-are.html
(sorry for wrong thread )
After an investigation the BBC trust finds that one of it’s programmes was biased.
“Biased-BBC” says – rubbish, it wasn’t biased at all – and quotes; “The Daily Telegraph”, “The Daily Mail” and “Ian Duncan Smith” as evidence. You couldn’t make it up.
And your point is ?
Perhaps Ian Duncan Smith -a senior minister- could do with re-education to ensure he toes the liberal line.
The Mail and Telegraph, being supposedly right wing, are quite beyond the pale. Most BBC commedians use the Daily Mail as a swear word
The old old story. Liberals are right. Rightwingers are nasty malevolent brutes.
I see it as the BBC defending it’s indefensible bloated tax base. My enemy’s enemy is my friend.
Dez’s post (showing his customary absence of self-awareness) is exactly what Charles Moore writes about here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/10176199/Why-does-the-impartial-BBC-not-tell-the-story-of-the-great-majority.html
What a brilliant piece – thanks for the link. I’d say it’s pretty much required reading – a devastatingly accurate (imo) appraisal of all that’s wrong with the BBC.
Indeed thanks for that link RCE. A nice summary of the BBC and so-called Liberal Progressives.
The mind set can equally well be applied to any public sector institutions and many Multi Nationals.
What a surprise!
Dez suddenly finds the time to ‘comment’.
BBC supporter “makes inane comment”.
Dez, to put it in such simple terms that even a hardline BBC acolyte such as yourself can understand it. This documentary was the ONLY piece of non-left wing reporting regarding the social housing spare room subsidy adjustment to housing benefits that the BBC had ever shown. Compared to mountains of wilfully misleading “bedroom tax” stories. So this was the only example of the BBC trying to be impartial and even handed by actually covering this issue from another perspective from the left wing “dole scroungers are salt of the earth and deserve more tax-payers money” angle…
Yet in spite of this solitary example of the BBC trying to be even handed and impartial (for a change) the BBC trust came down on the BBC like a ton of Bricks…
Thus PROVING how biased towards the left the BBC are the rest of the time.
The BBC Trust have just completely disproven everything that you have tried to defend the BBC over, like ever!
DO you understand it now?
The BBC has one article pro-removal of the spare room subsidy and the BBC trust dumps on them like a ton of bricks. Hundreds of innacurate and misleasing reports sympathising with a left wing agenda in favour of scrapping a non-existant tax (misleadingly named “bedroom tax”) and the BBC Trust does not bat an eyelid.
DO YOU GET IT YET DEZ?
Its a mistake to think impartiality is about making some right wing documentaries and some left wing ones and hoping it works out about even.
I haven’t seen any convincing evidence of ‘mountains of wilfully misleading “bedroom tax” stories’. And this was a finding by the BBC Trust, so I presume they haven’t considered mountains of complaints like that?
Don’t quote when you’re not actually quoting what the BBC said or you may be asked to point to where the BBC said it.
‘the BBC trust came down on the BBC like a ton of Bricks…’
You didnt read it did you? It described the programme as ‘fair and open-minded when
examining the evidence and weighing material facts and that it gave due weight to the many and diverse areas of the argument ‘
If you do read beyond the headline, while you may disagree with some of the analysis, one thing you might notice, both from the programme makers and the Trust who considered the complaint, is that impartiality is taken seriously and the consideration given to it.
Here you go:
Click to access may_jun.pdf
I won’t ask, do you get it now?
I would also offer the site the suggestion if it wants any credibility it should focus more on the monthly complaints findings here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/complaints_and_appeals/
And maybe less of the ill-informed, hateful posts.
Guessing deploying ‘hateful’ is in anticipation of the new censorship regime now passing through establishment corridors?
Speaking of which….
“so I presume they haven’t considered mountains of complaints like that?”
Presumption in a sea of such certainty is always a risky play.
I can tell you that what the Trust gets to consider, or not, on matters of complaint, is essentially a complete mystery, because what gets to them (or not*) is filtered internally and in secret.
*Something the market rate talents along the whispering corridors of power may like to ponder is what they do get told by those below… or what they do not. As Pollard, Rose, etc, revealed, they often seem rather caught out by this. Thus explaining if not excusing the BBC’s current level of internal information, and external credibility. Along with that of those who would seek to defend them.
But if you find your inability to find convincing evidence as persuasive, a directorship in ECU beckons for sure.
The BBC reports…
Trustees also said that the programme was “fair” and “open-minded” in its examination of the evidence, that there was a “wide range of significant views” and that it “gave due weight” to the different sides of the argument.
However, they found that viewers may have believed that the benefits being targeted by the government “were largely responsible for the view held by some that ‘the welfare state is in crisis’.”.
It also concluded that due to “the absence of sufficient complementary statistical information to underpin contributors’ accounts, viewers were left unable to reach an informed opinion and the accuracy guidelines had been breached”.
The Child Poverty Action Group, which brought the complaint along with an unnamed individual, welcomed the Trust’s findings.
“We welcome the BBC Trust’s recognition in its ruling that the programme broke rules on accuracy and impartiality in ways that fundamentally misled viewers,” said Alison Garnham, chief executive of the charity.
“This programme, like too many media stories, failed the public by swallowing wholesale the evidence-free myth of a ‘dependency culture’ in which unemployment and rising benefit spending is the fault of the unemployed.
So the program was fair and open minded – but because it suggested that there was a dependancy culture in the country and they got a complaint from a “charitable” pressure group they would have to disown the otherwise on-message Humphrys – I mean the rising benefits cost can’t be anything to do with the unemployed can it?
I look forward to a documentary on the dependency culture of charities like the Child Poverty Action Group, whose beneficiaries consist of well-heeled executives from posh backgrounds with extensive media contacts, also from posh backgrounds.
Mark II,
“I mean the rising benefits cost can’t be anything to do with the unemployed can it?”
Roughly 47% of total Uk Benefits spending is on Pensions.
3% on Job Seekers Allowance.
(for comparison) 1.7% on Winter Fuel Payments.
From 2011 to 2012 – Pensions increased by £4.44bn.
Job Seekers Allowance increased by £0.41bn.
Try answering your own question.
Well this story from the Guardian shows a +7.6% rise in spending on JSA and +3.7% on pensions so that would tend to indicate a bigger rise in welfare to the unemployed.
JSA is only one benefit that is paid to the unemployed of course and the claimant needs to be actively looking for work to claim it so I’m guessing income support is perhaps more popular. Housing benefit gets paid out regardless.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/08/uk-benefit-welfare-spending#
“Well this story from the Guardian shows a +7.6% rise in spending on JSA and +3.7% on pensions so that would tend to indicate a bigger rise in welfare to the unemployed.”
You do understand that a larger percentage increase in a much smaller number doesn’t suddenly make it more than a much bigger number?
And given the economic troubles its not a complete surprise the government is paying out more in unemployment benefit.
It’s pensions that is the big drain on the system not the unemployed. And all pensioners do is sit around on the internet all day moaning about muslims.
I’m sure the unemployed do their fair share of sitting around on the internet complaining about Muslims.
“And all pensioners do is sit around on the internet all day moaning about muslims.”
Having worked all their life to get the pension.
-But that’s part of the bourgeois liberal creed – to demonise the hard working the honest and the contentious.
The lazy the dishonest the greedy and the corrupt, can all be redeemed as long as they recite the liberal inquisition’s catechism
P.S. off to make myself free again, will be thinking of you all the while
I think you meant “… the honest and the conscientious.”
Yes your right -well done you
‘A Mathematician’ claims:
“It’s pensions that is the big drain on the system not the unemployed.”
By gad, sir, I’d like to meet you face-to-face and discuss a few facts of life.
Yes, I am now a pensioner and did I not pay right through the nose for the pittance I now receive as a “State Pension”?
Pension? It is an insult when certain factors are taken into account:
I worked in a highly paid industry, offshore oil, and I worked during the periods when Denis Healey (your chum, no doubt?) said he would “make the pips squeak” and he did that alright.
I have all my financial records from those days right up until I retired, and until Thatcher came along some of the sums paid to HM Government were truly eye-watering. Even after she came to power I still paid very high sums that the likes of you probably think “serves you right” for having a good job.
Don’t you dare squeal to me about me being a “big drain on the system not the unemployed”!
No unemployed person in this day and age will *ever* match my contributions to the nation’s coffers, even if they managed to start work tomorrow in the highest paid job available and worked until they dropped dead.
You blatantly biased left wing scum only ever have one outlook on life. Without many other workers just like me paying exorbitant “deductions” the system would have collapsed long ago.
p.s. And I’m still paying through the nose now on my private pension which I saved for by doing without certain luxuries in life which lefties like you probably regards as “rights”.
Now, HM Govt, and it does not matter which colour rosette they wear, are having a great big second bite at the nest-egg I risked life and limb for.
Mathematician, I am so angry at your totally biased and totally not thought through comments that I feel like telling you to go **** yourself, preferably using a toilet brush or similar.
You forget the £47 billion of tax credits given out like sweets by the maximum idiot Brown to all and sundry, including families in Poland. The beneficiaries’ sense of entitlement extends right up to those couples earning £150k because of Brown’s gerrymandering.
Quite so – businesses also play the dependency game – being subsidised with working tax credits, minimum wage legislation and massive immigration – all these basically undermine the labour market and keep employment costs low for employers (many of whom pay little tax).
My ex was working at the DWP when tax credits were introduced. Before this happened, workers in large city DWP’s were asked their opinion on tax credits, and whether they would work. The answer was NO. One reason – the fact that HMRC would be administering them, and their remit is to take money from us, not give it to us (this because Brown dressed it up as a “tax credit” to pretend it is not a benefit).
The other reason was that it was far too complicated. Their response was ignored and the rest is history. It was a re-run of the CSA, pumped up exponentially.
You answered it for me – Job Seekers Allowance increased by £0.41bn.
This was whilst unemployment was falling.
Still you think that anyone who is critical of this must be a Daily Mail reader – that is something I take strong objection to!
It shows that this “vile poor hating benefit cutting” government are actually increasing benefits for people who actually need them.
Most of those who are moaning and protesting are either having their benefits reduced fairly, because they do not actually need as much as they were lavished with previously, or they are self-selecting victims who get a hard-on for being professionally offended on behalf of someone else.
Dez, pensions are NOT benefits. You may use the word, the government may use the word, but my pension is because for 41 years I paid taxes for my retirement. The same as I paid into my private company pension….so please do not peddle such rubbish. The fact succesive govenments have squandered my payments to them is their fault and not mine. Personally I would have preferred to not pay to the government but increase payments to my private pension.
I still question Humpty’s alleged ‘fairness’. It appears to have come upon him very late in life. I certainly didn’t see the same depth of questioning of all of New Labour’s ‘ministers’, including all of the Blair girlies who were given air time virtually every day to tell us by how much they had increased spending since 1997, as we see today of the Tories. That enormous increased spending was the root cause of our current deficit problems, and it wouldn’t have taken too much effort for one of the Beeb’s legions of overpaid researchers to have done the necessary to give the lie to New Labour’s lie from 2005 onwards that they ‘had repaid debt’. It had increased, even without PFI, from about 2002 and even Blair knew it.
The necessity for the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ is a direct result of the left’s immigration free-for-all, predominantly instituted during the reign of New Labour (1997-2010).
If large immigrant families weren’t waiting for the properties with a greater number of bedrooms, there wouldn’t be the need to relocate or charge residents for those same unused rooms.
But you’d never know that from reading or listening to the BBC or the mainstream media, would you?
I found this site by mistake. Me thinks you should get out more. Who edits it IDS? The man who lies about his education, employment history, Governement stats and Betsy Gate to name a few. Calm down dears – there be no dragons over yon hill.
‘I found this site by mistake.’
—
And accidentally registered & posted no doubt?
Not by chance a traditional conservative blue rinse voter now unable to resist commenting further?
Always welcome, though.
Thanks for sharing that with us.
Do call again.
Oh look another one flys by and like the bag lady outside the spar shouts incomprehensibly at the locals!
Pleassseee! There’s no need to be rude about Angela Eagle
Oh sorry she is just so easy ! a target I mean !!!!
Oh yes there is. Every time I hear on the radio I feel like cutting my wrists.
It’s even worse when you see her on TV.
Sorry. my comment was silly and juvenile just intended to get a cheap laugh from a like mind audience…..
Erm, a bit like most of the anti “Tory” so called comics on Radio 4.
Why do these trolls always start with ‘I found this site by mistake’? What sort of BBC bias were they thinking of? Why don’t they tell us instead of just being insulting?
Do stay around Sally as I’d love to understand the pathology of someone who finds a site ‘by mistake’, decides to rant on it, and then tells everyone to calm down.
“Me thinks you should get out more”
From an income gated community ?
The dragons came over the top of “yon hill” many years ago and only fools like you fail to see the dangers facing the country if this overspending, *ALL* of it borrowed, continues for much longer.
If you class IDS as a liar, what does that make Messrs Blair & Brown? (And Balls and Miliband come to that!)
did anyone catch VD 😀 … Drearybyshire on 5live, doing a segment on escalating sexual harassment suffered on public transport? … as she put it on trains, buses …. and ………………. taxi cabs
hmmm care to give us the percentages VD?
or expand on this
“BBC radio host Sam Mason, a single mother, was fired after she called a taxi company and requested a “non-Asian” driver to take her 14-year-old daughter to her grandparents’ home; preferably a female driver”
Gatestone institute
uk taxi rapes … no women is safe in a cab?
Interesting. Did Vicky say where they, 5live, got the story from? It sounds eerily similar to a bizarre piece in the Guardian which was properly mocked by David Thompson here:
http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2013/07/responding-to-semen-belatedly.html
“The article in question, by Ellie Cosgrave, is titled I Danced Against Sexual Assault on the Tube to Reclaim it for Women“.
Perhaps the BBC really does set its agenda by what they find in the pages of the Guardian?
The BBC and the Guardian? They wake up in bed together each and every morning. Both taxpayer funded as well (the Guardian just about survives thanks to the public sector ads it carries – despite Pickles saying he was going to stop that.
I liked the bit about Pickles “was going to stop it”. That would be similar to Pickles stopping Councills raising the councill, extortion tax by more than 2%. My limp-dim Councill upped it by 2.8% and not a word was said.
Why aren’t all public sector jobs just advertised on a government/local authority website. After all those seeking work, who do not have a home pc/tablet/smart phone, could utilise the online systems available at Job Centres.
We already pay for these websites through our taxes so why not save money on press adverts?
They never state that the vast majority of the attacks and rapes on women in Taxis were committed by Islamic taxi drivers.
The BBC doesn’t do reality.
Bring back the workhouse, that would sort out the dole scum.
The BBC need to look at all their output and look for bias. What we’ve just seen is the corporation cherry-picking like some climate scientists.
There are five BBC ‘Trustees’ on the editorial standards committee – Alison Hastings (Chairman), David Liddiment,
Richard Ayre, Sonita Alleyn, andBill Matthews.
On checking their CVs, I see three of the five are former BBC employees (and pensioners). Each ticks a well known minority box. None represents a mainstream element.
No former BBC staffer should ever be allowed on the BBC Trust.
It is incomprehensibly incestuous that any are members; but not surprising.
It explains why they diverted a billion pounds of licence fee money into the BBC staff pension scheme last year, quietly.
Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC technology maven, is married to a member of the Trust.
Mrs Cellan-Jones is not just a member; she is Vice-Chairman.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/who_we_are/trustees/
The Trust is like most other NGOs full of the very same people who can be relied upon to champion the views of the hive.
In fact the hive runs Britain now. The problem it has is that it is ,by it’s very nature, unable to cope with reality and the demands of the 21st century. It thinks it can but it can’t.
Perhaps things have been just too easy for the generations post 1945. The middle class ones that is.
But all good things come to an end and the hordes of comfortable middle class mostly non jobs are going to have to go., No money left.
No wonder the BBC is on edge. It is sustained by an absurd business model as far removed from reality as you can get.
Humphries is just a little bit older than the average Beeboid. It looks as if he is going to have to go soon. Only the indoctrinated young can be relied upon to stay on message.
What a state this country has got itself into.
It amazes me that the BBC seems so hostile to the Coalition. I would have thought they are soulmates in a fantasy island they really believe is possible.
I read Humphreys’ article today. Inocuous is the word. Certainly no evidence of bias either way.
He is very much of the old school.
The modern vibrant multikulti right on BBC is a different animal. There is a definite agenda. A liberal agenda based on an unreal attitiude to life. That is why this blog exists.
It is easier for a conservative ( a real one) to pass rthrough the eye of a needle than to be given a fair hearing by the liberal media.
Which is why many of us have given up on the BBC and can see no futther point in it’s existence.
Let it be as right on and biased as it likes but not at the expense of the taxpayer.
Thye BBC are clearly suffering from the prickly heat are they not?
I too read Humphrys piece-utterly anodyne and bland, saying nothing that the human population outside the BBCs orbit don`t know-or would be in the slightest bit contentious.
Still-it puts a windsock up for the likes of Prescott that the BBC hold a candle for the next Labour spongers and psychos…come the glorious day.
Humphrys-if he`s the voice of the loonies as far as the BBC are concerned-no wonder we`re so off the map to them.
Still-the REAL Glorious day is coming when the quisling traitors in our midst at the BBC get to report on why Hamas and Hizbollah don`t get along….and they`ll not be able to do so from Israel either.
John McCarthy, Alan Johnson…let`s hope another few dozen BBC stiffies join the rollcall of easy appeasers that find themselves in too deep!
You have the gall to include Mccarthy in your roll of shame? Let me know the next time you’re held hostage while reporting, maybe I’ll actually give a stuff what you have to say about anything. Lowlife.
The next time I read a blog, I hope that it doesn’t disappoint me just as much as this one. After all, I know it was my choice to read, but I actually thought you’d have something interesting to say. All I hear is a bunch of moaning about something that you could fix if you weren’t too busy looking for attention.
Comes to something when the spam bots actually come across more human than the usual rotating Borg drive-by squad.
To be fair, the spambot makes a valid point.