Monthly Archives: August 2013

WTF

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Paul Mason, soon to have his steel toecapped suede booties under a Channel 4 desk, seems to have cast off the shackles of BBC groupthink and ventured out into the world of thinking for himself…..well, tentatively:

The economic recovery may be patchy, but the left is wrong to ignore it

It’s not the same across the country, but there are signs of growth. The challenge for Labour is how to make the most of the new reality

 

Still hedging his bets, and acting as unpaid, I hope, adviser to the Labour Party, but he ventures that austerity may have worked…so much so that it may be possible to reduce it to some extent.

 

Of course he rounds it all off with a brickbat…

The real problem may not be the weakness or fragility of recovery, but the fact that large parts of the population are locked out of it.

……but I guess old habits are hard to change.

The Wind Farm Wind Up

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You may have noticed on your travels that any wind turbines that you come across have a rather unusual operational approach.

 

On windy days they can be seen to be completely motionless, whilst on almost windless days they are ticking round quite nicely.

I often thought that some clever chap who works for one of the turbine producers has come up with a cunning plan…..when there’s no wind put the turbines in reverse, that is, draw power from the electricity grid to turn the turbine to encourage the public to think ‘Turbines are turning…great….it’s working…government must buy more!’…..a little promotional stunt for the wind turbine industry…keeps the blades turning and keep the money coming in (though you couldn’t come up with a better stunt than getting paid to actually turn off your turbine!).

 

All nonsense of course?….apart from being paid to turn off the turbines….that’s all too real.

However the Telegraph has looked into wind turbines and just how effective they are in a snapshot:

Data released by one of the largest green energy companies shows wind farms producing enough electricity only to boil two to three kettles at a time.

At one stage last week, three big wind farms even took electricity out of the National Grid – to run basic power supplies on site – rather than actually supplying electricity to households.

According to RWE’s own data, three wind farms on Thursday afternoon appeared to be taking electricity from the National Grid rather than supplying it.

The eight turbines at Knabs Ridge, which is close to Harrogate in Yorkshire, used up 86KW of electricity while Lambrigg wind farm’s five turbines in Cumbria took 10KW from the grid.

Llyn Alaw wind farm, which is in Anglesey, and consists of 34 turbines also produced a negative output, according to RWE’s own data, of minus 80KW.

 

 

Somewhat indirectly connected to BBC bias….but it helps inform the debate and provides some background with which to judge BBC coverage of climate change and measures taken to supposedly combat it.

 

 

More Money, That’s the Answer to Everything

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Andrew Marr hasn’t changed…he’s still Red Andy and pushing the Left’s agenda…this time a few thoughts from the IPPR, left leaning think tank:

Who runs Britain? An Army of unregarded, unpaid carers. Now it’s time we cared for them says Andrew Marr and his wife who nursed him after stroke

 As a report today from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) points out, thousands of women in their 50s are being hit by a ‘triple whammy’ of work, childcare and caring for elderly parents.

 

Good that the BBC allows him to have other interests outside of work….hard to tell the difference to be honest between his work and play.

Guess the answer to ‘Who Runs Britain?’ is that the BBC runs Britain…or tries its best to.

Poor Opportunities

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BBC officer class enrages people, chief admits 

Executive salaries at the BBC have created an “officer class” which is causing “resentment and anger” among lower-paid workers, Lord Hall, the director-general of the corporation, has admitted.

 

Liz MacKean, a former BBC Newsnight journalist, said: “The whole issue about severance payments gets to the heart of something that has gone badly wrong with the BBC over the last decade and more, which is the creation of an officer class that seems to fly in the face of the principles of public service broadcasting.”

Alan Yentob, who earns £183,000 as the BBC’s creative director, joined Lord Hall on stage and rejected a call for more transparency over salaries. He said: “The BBC is not a local authority, OK? We need to invest, we need to get people to come in. Who wants to come to an organisation where their privacy is [affected]?”

　

Talking of privacy maybe Yentob should listen to this:

Mariella Frostrup asks:

Is Privacy Over Rated?

　

　

And talking of officer elites Evan Davis asks:

What’s the Point of an Elite?

　

Both programmes very BBC…both jam packed with worthy, highly educated middle class ‘elites’….you can hear Davis has the decency to be embarrassed about the makeup of his panel.

But…Evan Davis admits that he wouldn’t have wanted to go to a school like Eton…because he would have a been a small fish in a big pond, whereas at a state school, where he was headboy, he was a big fish in a small pond….a small pond intellectually and academically he means.

Charmed I’m sure to know how the BBC’s finest look down upon their fellow state school inmates…..intellectually wanting but that’s good as it makes Evan look better.

Listening to both programmes, and well, any such programme from the BBC, and you keep hearing ‘The Poor’ being mentioned, concern for the ‘lower orders’, but where are their voices?

How is it that concern for the ’Poor’ and ‘Disadvantaged’ is the sole preserve it seems of middle class intellectuals? Do ‘The Poor’ not have any thoughtful comments about ‘elites’ or ‘privacy’?

We’re told that ‘The Poor’ are shut out more than ever from the higher reaches of society and that privacy is the domain of the rich….so how come they have no voice on these BBC programmes, a seat at the table rather than picking up the crumbs thrown to them by their ‘betters’?

 

　

　

　

　

Berry’s Not So Smart Circus…..Flogging A Lie

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The BBC’s latest review of its lack of impartiality from earlier in the year has resurfaced as one of its authors, Mike Berry,  pushes the lie, lovingly created and honed by him and those ex BBC employees now ensconced at Cardiff University who manufactured this ‘report’,  that the BBC is actually biased towards the Right.

The BBC say it went to Cardiff University but you might conclude that it took a wrong turn and ended up in Cardiff on the day the Circus was in town.

Even the BBC has admitted it is biased towards the Left so either Berry is a fool or a liar.

DB has mentioned this in the Open Thread and Is the BBC biased has picked up on that and delved into Mike Berry’s left wing, anti-Israeli background.

The usual stuff.

 

We have already had a look at this report and its authors and I think it is obvious that you can dismiss it as yet another BBC smoke screen.

Just what is the point of the BBC commissioning such reports into its impartiality when the people it gets to conduct the reports either have very close ties to the BBC or have very obvious, strong, political leanings that indicate they will not be impartial?

 

 

This is Berry’s final conclusion:

So the evidence from the research is clear. The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world, not a left-wing, anti-business agenda.

　

A more dishonest and misleading statement about the BBC would be hard to find.

Pro-Conservative, anti-Europe, pro-Business?  Did he not have the room to add on pro-EDL, pro-Christian, pro-Israeli?

 

Amazing how Berry can get those big clown feet into his mouth ….but he has such an appreciative audience who clearly like their news spoon fed to them because thinking for themselves is so hard to do as the Twitter mob of the usual left wing trolls that come out from under their stones to celebrate his nonsense admirably demonstrate:

Seumas Milne ‏@SeumasMilne 19h  Contrary to media mythology, #BBC coverage is dominated by Conservative, corporate & City voices, research shows http://bit.ly/15klDyq 

 

 You have to laugh at this from Berry (If I was  a student at Cardiff I’d be asking for my money back if taught by Berry):

The fact that the City financiers who had caused the crisis were given almost monopoly status to frame debate again demonstrates the prominence of pro-business perspectives.

 

I’m sorry, I have to choke back the tears of laughter….I thought that tripping on LSD was so 60’s…does it still go on?….apart from the fact that the Banks have been massively reined in weren’t we told that it was ‘Occupy’ who had framed the debate…even by Mervyn King and Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England:

Haldane said:

 ‘Occupy has been successful in its efforts to popularise the problems of the global financial system for one very simple reason: they are right,’

‘If I am right and a new leaf is being turned, then Occupy will have played a key role in this fledgling financial reformation,’ he continued. ‘You have put the arguments. You have helped win the debate. And policymakers, like me, will need your continuing support in delivering that radical change.’

 

Occupy certainly framed the BBC’s narrative.

The BBC is pro-Occupy, it encouraged the ‘youth’ to riot and protest, it damns bankers and big business at every opportunity, it fanatically supported Labour’s Plan B, it has done everything in its power to knock the confidence of business, investors and consumers and to push the belief that Osborne’s policies are bringing us to the brink of ruin…even now as the ‘green shoots’ emerge they find ways to tell us we’re all doomed rather than look on the bright side.

 

You just have to listen to one of their recent efforts to see the BBC’s approach:

How You Pay For The City

 

The title alone gives away the drift of the programme.

Why not ‘How You Pay For Tescos’?  Because of course you do….…or ‘How You Pay For Your Own Wages’…by buying products from other businesses…whose workers go out and buy products from your company…which pays your wages …and so on….Capitalism is so awfully complicated.

or even  ‘How You Pay For The BBC’?.

The BBC isn’t free you know.

 

The programme was half an hour of anti-city, anti-business, anti-government policies, that condemned the banks for making profits and claimed Quantitive Easing was a terrible idea that stole money from the poor and put it in the pockets of the rich bankers…never mind that it was pension funds and insurance companies that held government bonds that received the money….designed deliberately not to put money into banker’s coffers.

 You heard nothing good about QE on this programme, that it stabilised and kept confidence in the economy, it was merely a highly politicised anti-banker rant with only one dissenting voice…on for a moment….no points for every time ‘casino banking’ was mentioned.

 

In one half hour programme it covered QE, oil speculation, Banks diversifying, commodities,  interest rates, inflation…..even if it was possible to, the BBC had no intention of looking at these subjects in any real depth, it merely cherry picked data and quotes to back up its narrative.

  It told us that banks were manipulating oil prices….a man came on briefly and said there was no evidence for that…the BBC ignored him and carried on anyway.

Never mind that oil prices are always manipulated…notoriously by the likes of OPEC and Saudi Arabia and of course now Russia with gas prices….funny, no mention of that though.

 

So yes, the BBC is pro-Business, pro-Conservative.

 

I see now, I was blinded by my own prejudices before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biased Editorial Double Standards: US Ideological Violence Edition

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Two people from Nevada appeared in court yesterday on charges of plotting to abduct and murder policemen. They are members of the fringe group Sovereign Citizens, a movement of people who have an extreme, quasi-anarchic (in the old school sense), anti-government view. Apparently they were busted after an undercover operation exposed their plans. Nothing new or unusual, really, except that it’s a case of two extremist white people getting arrested for plotting anti-government violence in a week where the public has been overwhelmed with the news of young black men murdering white people (stories which have been used to hype up racial animosity and as a counterweight to the media’s Trayvon Martin Narrative) topped off with two different criminal convictions of military men who espoused political views shared by the Left-wing media. So this minor story must have come as a great relief to the newsroom and editors who are responsible for deciding what gets published every day, a welcome break in what must seem to them as a stream of unfortunate news giving credence to Right-wing views about racial violence, terrorism, and the dangers of the anti-war movement and heroic whistleblowing.

Naturally, the BBC feels it’s worth reporting. It was just a plot thwarted, noting actually happened, nobody even close to being harmed. But it’s newsworthy because of what they represent.

No bias on that score, of course, since the Washington Post, the HuffingtonPost, and CBS all felt it was newsworthy. That’s the lemming-journalism defense we often get: it’s okay for the BBC to report/not report it, because other media outlets are/aren’t. The bias lies in the report itself, as well as the blatant double standard in how they cover incidents of “domestic terrorism”.

First, the quality of reporting. The BBC cites the Southern Poverty Law Center as an authority on the Sovereign Citizens movement. They describe the SPLC as “a non-profit civil rights group”, full stop. Many people here will have seen some of us refer to a “Rule #1” being in effect, and this is a classic example.

In this case, Rule #1 isn’t from the Philosophy Department of the University of Woolamaloo (although I think a BBC version could easily be made with one or two substitutions), but concerns how and when the BBC labels vox pops, guests, and think tanks or organizations they use in appeals to authority. The idea is that the BBC so rarely labels Left-wing, on-message groups or guests that, if they don’t label them, or call them “independent”, one knows which side they’re on. In contrast, those with opposing viewpoints are introduced with the health warning that they’re conservative, or take one side of an issue.

This isn’t just a Biased-BBC fever dream, either. The Center for Policy Studies recently published a report proving it, at least where think tanks and policy organizations are concerned. And here again is another example. The SPLC is independent only in that it isn’t officially owned or run by a political party. It’s hardly non-ideological, though, and the BBC’s use of “independent” is dishonestly meant to lead you to that conclusion. In fact, the SPLC has a long history as a Left-wing activist organization. It’s always been a civil rights and human rights advocacy organization (the “Southern Poverty” part should be a tip-off), more recently going on the attack against numerous non-Left organizations. For example, they labeled the Family Research Council a “hate group”, and featured it on a “hate map” (although they’re clever enough not to use Palin-esque crosshairs), which may have inspired an attempted murder. It’s a joke to present the SPLC as anything other than what it is. In other words, Rule #1 is in effect here, as usual. It doesn’t matter if they do the work of angels, or if you or I agree or disagree with their ideology. It’s a highly ideological organization with very clear political views and activities, and it’s simply wrong to hide that and mislead the reader.

In fact, this isn’t even the first time the BBC has used the SPLC as an authority to support an agenda. Jonny Dymond cited them in his dishonest story about how white supremacist groups have been on the rise since we elected a black President. Dymond presented the SPLC as an organization which tracks “hate groups and other groups on the far right”. In other words, not an impartial organization at all, but one dedicated to an agenda of attacking the Right. Much like some BBC journalists.

It would have been easy enough for the BBC to simply refer to the FBI, or even the Department of Homeland Security (surely not too partisan for the BBC), who have the same concerns about the Sovereign Citizens. Although maybe that would be a case of “they would say that, wouldn’t they?” about an anti-government group. Instead, the BBC went for an ideological fellow traveler, presenting it as an impartial judge.

This leads me to the biased double standard. A little over a year ago, the BBC published a news brief about the arrests of five young men in Ohio who were caught plotting to blow up a bridge. They, too, had known ties to a well-known organization, but for some reason, instead of reporting the connection and going into detail about it, the BBC decided to censor that key detail. I suspected at the time that the reason was that the organization in question was the Occupy movement. Laughably, the BBC managed to think of one possible motivation for the crime, which the FBI dismissed out of hand: the anniversary of Bin Laden’s death. The FBI dismissed that as a motivation because they knew what the BBC refused to tell you: they were Occupiers, and their motivation was to engage in some anti-government (or anti-establishment) ultra-violence. I say the BBC refused to tell you this because it’s impossible to claim that the BBC didn’t know, seeing as how the wire services from which the BBC gleaned this in the first place mentioned the Occupy connection. Outrageously, the BBC even quoted the FBI about ideology being motivation:

“The individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views,” said Special Agent Stephen Anthony, of the FBI’s Cleveland division, in a statement.

Which ideological views? Occupy views. It was deliberate censorship, because the BBC was (and still would be if it came back) highly and rather openly supportive of the Occupy movement, and was loathe to draw such an unsavory connection. When it’s a Right-wing group like the Sovereign Citizens movement, though, the BBC has no problem mentioning the defendants’ connection to it and citing its ideology as the motivation behind their plot to commit violence.

A clear double standard, and one unquestionably caused by personal, ideological bias. I wonder if either Daniel Nasaw, the man in charge of deciding what stories get published in the US section of the BBC website, or any lurking professional journalists, will be able to give us any other explanation besides, “Please shut up, you don’t know how things work in a newsroom.” (I paraphrase slightly.)

FRIDAY OPEN THREAD…

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Because these fill up with hundreds of comments every day! I tuned in to the BBC Radio 4 at 6.30am this morning. They DO seem so sympathetic to “the opposition” in Syria and Morsi’s supporters in Egypt, don’t they? Muslim Brotherhood propaganda is breathlessly repeated and how often are we informed that Morsi was “democratically elected”? The situation in Syria is certainly complex but the BBC seems to have aligned with “the rebels without probing too deeply as to who they are and what they want. Anyway, I’m off for the day so detail the bias YOU see here…

Babes In Arms

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LOLOL

Leftwing BBC type in melt down.

Tessa Dunlop on Today programme this morning (08:50)

Talking about a book published by Civitas which puts the case for families having more than one child…as it can be beneficial for siblings, they claim.

Dunlop, who has only one child herself, has other ideas saying:

 ‘The world’s population is exploding….People are always coming up to me and saying when will you have another child..and there’s two things here…Civitas is a right wing think tank, I just wonder if they would be saying ‘when are you going to have another’ to a Somali woman  standing next  to me in the supermarket….it’s like the Middle Classes must keep breeding, keep up our genetic army…’

 

 

Well, I don’t think Civitas are responsible for her friends and others, including her doctor, for asking when she will have another… that’s pretty much a standard line in the baby talk world…I don’t think they are recruiting for the Fourth Reich.

A ‘Somali’ woman in the supermarket queue,  really, is she on holiday?…we all know that they are ‘British’ as soon as they step off the plane….Dunlop clearly hasn’t read the memo from BBC ‘Diversity and Cohesion’.

Presumably she doesn’t mean Somali women like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was driven out of Europe to the safety of America by the same sort of Left wing prejudice, bigotry and stupidity on display here.

I wonder where she picked up her views…kind of reminiscent of this piece of BBC religious ‘racism’:

A Womb is a Weapon

For some, encouraging larger Christian families is part of a project to outbreed other religions, particularly Islam, winning back the world for Christ one baby at a time.