The BBC has hit upon a convenient and deniable way of spreading propaganda, rumour and innuendo….they report twitter, Youtube and other social media offerings as ‘what’s trending’ at the moment…which is just a high tech way of mud slinging most of the time…..it could be any old rubbish, much of it highly political, based on the highly prejudiced and unprincipled mobilisation onTwitter etc of particular activist groups…especially those with an anti-Israeli stance.
And just how reliable is it?
Here is the final paragraph from one long ‘report’ based on Twitter:
It’s important not to believe everything you read on social media. “Everybody please calm down,” the journalist who originally claimed the men had been drinking beer has now tweeted. “My tweets were based on interviews of locals around the area. I do not claim it as gospel truth. Peace !!”
In other words it’s tripe…but the BBC report on it and legend becomes fact despite any disclaimers as to the truth of the report.
Here for instance is the blurb for the video above from the poster…..
‘an Israeli soldier attempting to shoot a 15 years old, after detaining him for two hours, the soldiers took the injured boy to unknown place, after beating him up near Qurtuba school in Shuhada Street.’
You can see emotive language and lies deployed to generate reaction against Israel….‘attempting to shoot’?
The BBC takes it up…and cleans up the language but retains the subtext intended to portray the Israeli soldier as unnecessarily violent towards a ‘teen’ or a ‘young Palestinian’.
The BBC’s intro on their magazine frontpage…a subtle jibe at Israelis in the title…how dare they praise someone for pointing a gun at someone else?:
Praised for pointing a gun
Thousands of Israelis have “liked” a Facebook page supporting a solider who cocked his gun at a young Palestinian.
The article headline:
#BBCtrending: Support for Israeli soldier who aimed gun at teen
It started on Sunday when a Palestinian activist group, Youth Against Settlements, posted a video to YouTube which shows two young Palestinians in a standoff with an IDF solider. After one of them fronts up to him in a challenging way, the soldier cocks his gun as if to shoot and points it at each of them in turn.
The problem with the BBC ‘report’ is that it underplays the danger and the reality of the situation in that video….if you were that soldier what would you feel and what would you do?
You might ask where all the people with cameras came from, the BBC doesn’t. You might ask why a Palestinian was hassling the Israeli soldier, the BBC doesn’t, you might ask why an Israeli soldier might feel justified in cocking his weapon in that situation, the BBC doesn’t.
The BBC doesn’t really provide much of an answer for anything, but instead seems happy to have ‘fallen’ for a piece of ‘Pallywood’ where a confrontation is deliberately engineered to force a soldier to react in an aggressive manner ‘to highlight the aggression of the Israeli military’ and allow activists to claim that all this is “a sign that Israeli society is getting more aggressive and extreme”.
The truth is that this was deliberately engineered anti-Israeli stunt designed to capture the attention of the useful idiots of the Press to demonise Israel, painting it as an oppressive aggressor beating up on defenceless Palestinians.
The truth is that a lone Israeli soldier is in a dangerous position and he is surrounded by people whose intentions he doesn’t know but are acting aggressively towards him and past history suggests it would be foolish not to be prepared.
This is a war zone, a low key war zone but one in which the Muslims have been trying to erase Israel off the map for 60 years now…..something the BBC doesn’t highlight….it’s not Notting Hill or Islington on a quiet Wednesday afternoon.
The BBC does not give you the soldier’s side of the story, for instance the Palestinian is quite clearly shoving the soldier, nor how dangerous the situation really is but the BBC are keen to put the other side…’there are other perspectives on the story.’
The BBC is happy to provide a world platform for ‘Pallywood’ and the anti-Israeli, anti-semitic brigade…..is there any wonder that anti-semitism is rising around the world?
The BBC is playing its part and you suspect the hidden Balen Report revealed that.
Again the BBC targets Israel with this report of the traumas inflicted on Israeli children by the Israeli education system teaching them about the Holocaust and reaction to it:
Too young for the Holocaust?
Who is too young to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust? A new law in Israel means kindergarten children will be taught about the Nazi genocide for the first time, triggering an acerbic response on social media.
Trouble is this was a controversial story they have already run back in January but it seems the BBC have found an excuse to disinter it and have another go at the Israelis…..we looked at this then…..
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
FOOC had a little report on the Holocaust and education in Israel…it started off as if it was just a human interest story bringing us the lives of Israelis and the meaning perhaps of the Holocaust and how it still touches their lives….much as the BBC brings us the heartwarming or heartstring plucking tales from Palestinians or asylum seekers.
You soon realised that was not to be here…as soon as the BBC stated that there was a ‘row’ over the Holocaust education you knew what had attracted the BBC’s attention to this story.
The BBC gleefully tells us that Holocaust education in Israel is traumatising children.
Those Jews eh!
Then there is this from India…the BBC targeting its old enemy the BJP……..
Beaten in India for ‘drinking beer’
In the latest macabre twist of India’s election season, campaigners have been beaten up next to the country’s holiest river – but did they drink beer and pee there, and was this “moral policing” by thugs allegedly linked to the BJP?
After making us read about the bad old BJP thugs beating up people out for a nice drink they finish with this revelation:
It’s important not to believe everything you read on social media. “Everybody please calm down,” the journalist who originally claimed the men had been drinking beer has now tweeted. “My tweets were based on interviews of locals around the area. I do not claim it as gospel truth. Peace !!”
Then there was this one a while back:
Is London safe?
London and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are closely connected. Thousands of tourists from the UAE visit the capital each year and the city’s biggest football arena is Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium. But a violent attack in the city has led thousands of Emiratis to tweet that #london_is_not_safe – threatening to unwind that relationship.
The #london_is_not_safe hashtag was started by Emirati Twitter accounts 20 hours ago and has around 3,500 tweets. “Emiratis living in London are concerned,” one of those tweeting, Bader al Kaabi, told BBC Trending. “I feel unsafe because two families have been attacked. And London police do nothing.”
So this hashtag was started a mere 20 hours before the BBC rushed in to report on it…and send in its reporters for the story….quality stuff.
You have to question the BBC using social media to provide them with news stories…..it leaves them open to the people who mostly populate Twitter and Facebook…the activists who know how to manipulate the press and generate headlines.
The real trouble here is that the BBC not only ‘fall’ for the stunts but go out actively looking for ‘trends’ that reflect their world view in the full knowledge that they are just ‘gossip’ and often deliberately malicious gossip at that…they use this new way of working to target their pet hates or to burnish their pet likes…and all of it ‘deniable’ as they can fall back on the excuse that they are merely reporting the vagaries, the curious interests, prejudices and extremes of people online.
It does seem a particulary dangerous route to go down for the BBC, and one that would seem to be a waste of time and money….and all rather self-reverential in a way…if the BBC were to look at the motives of those running the Twitter campaigns and place it all in context then it might be a useful service….when activists are targeting businesses or countries or politicians it would be a useful to provide proper analysis of those campaigns rather than just reporting the effects as businesses etc retreat under a barrage of Twitter comments which may in fact only represent a very tiny number of people but who have enormous apparent clout magnified by Media, such as the BBC, giving them legitimacy and power by reporting their activities as if they were representative of the whole country or at least an influential majority.
At the moment ‘#BBCtrending‘ just seems to be nothing more than a self-serving project dreamt up by BBC techies and reporters obsessed with the gossip and ‘more interesting than truth’ myths and legends that social media generates.
It could be a powerful myth busting tool and fact checker but seems more on the side of the propagandists than the truth at the moment.
“A Window on the Media”
By Conrad Black.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/53814
The BBC is meant to report the news, based on facts. How often do we hear the BBC bolster its own agenda with phrases such as ‘Some have said’, ‘It has been claimed’, ‘It might seem’ etc. without ever substantiating who supports the view.
A long time favourite technique of the R4 Today programme is to make a bald statement e.g. “Britain is the most unequal society in Europe”, pause while that sinks in, then go on to say “claims a report ….”. A proper news organisation would say up front “A report claims that Britain is the most unequal …”
That’s just a hypothetical example, but I’ve heard the tactic many times. It allows the BBC to parade its prejudices as if they were facts.
If you look across the social media, Twitter and Facebook campaigns are mainly a tool of the young, and therefore leftist in origin.
In the previous parliament however, the Right had a better time of web campaigning and discussion because it centered around website creation, a more formal tool and much more difficult to push into the public without some understanding of strategy. This was before the days of widespread Facebook and Twitter campaigns.
Hardly surprising then that the BBC now looks to Twitter and Facebook for news, as it purports a general world view that mirrors its own.
IN the internet age, the lie gets around the world before the truth gets its boots on.
Incidentally watching the above video clip, is there ANY other country in the world where a lone armed soldier would show such restraint and calmness when surrounded by a hostile crowd and given the history and reality of ruthless attacks on Israelis.
I’d like to see a similar confrontation handled so well in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc.
All that work!
And nobody reads it.
Poor Alan. Your wasting your life.
Aren`t you the name of some kind of car from the 70s?
Thought you were scrapped…welcome anyway.
Looking forward to hearing from you come the day when you have something to say.
Until then-scrapyard ,shep!
Something very fishy certainly.