Well, it’s pretty clear that the BBC want to see another President Clinton in the White House but the spotlight was on her GOP opponents last evening and in particular Donald Trump in the Fox News debate last night. I thought this was a telling quote from the BBC analysis of the debate…
“Donald Trump was generally seen as an amusing sideshow.”
Not a hint of bias there. FYI – Trump leads the field of GOP contenders by a massive margin at this point.
And so to the wonders of the weekend! Here is a new OPEN THREAD for you to detail the bias.
The dynamic duo are back, the climate change tag team of Richard Black and Roger Harrabin return for, hopefully, one performance only.
Black is harrumphing loudly, in the Guardian, about Quentin Lett’s asking ‘What is the Point of the Met. Office?’
This is heresy and a damnable breach of BBC protocol. Damnit!
Harrabin joins in and expresses his displeasure with a sneering tweet…
#Climate sceptics have demanded “their” programme. They just got it. Radio 4. 09.00. @QuentinLetts_ on @metoffice. @ECIU_UK @CarbonBrief
Harrabin must have a short memory having himself asked a similar question….
The trouble is that we simply don’t know how much to trust the Met Office.
How often does it get the weather right and wrong. And we don’t know how it compares with other, independent forecasters.
Can we rely on them if we are planning a garden party at the weekend? Or want to know if we should take a brolly with us tomorrow? Or planning a holiday next week?
In a few year’s time hopefully we’ll all have a better idea of whom to trust. By then the Met Office might have recovered enough confidence to share with us its winter prediction of whether to buy a plane ticket or a toboggan.
Hope the tag team doesn’t fall out over that one. Harrabin is not shy when it comes to a punch up with those who disagree with him such as Delingpole or was it Booker? ….
“I’m not sure whether I should shake your hand. I want to punch you.” He sounded jolly cross indeed – and ranted that I was utterly irresponsible and had disseminated lots of lies – though he later apologized to me saying he was jet-lagged and had confused me with Christopher Booker. Hmm.
Black tries to dismiss the claims of those on the programme as rubbish…
Mr Stringer is allowed to claim without challenge that there is “no scientific evidence” linking the 2013/4 winter floods, to climate change, which is untrue; it’s not a simple link, but it does exist. [Possibly only in his own little head]
Unfortunately it’s Black who is being ‘untrue’ as even the Met. Office [ah, I’ve found a use for it…rubbishing old Blackie] says there was no link between the floods and climate change…
Prime Minister climate change opinion not backed up by science, says Met Office
Nicola Maxey from the Met Office said the Prime Minister failed to draw the crucial distinction between weather and climate change.
“What happened at the end of December and at the beginning of January is weather,” she said.
“Climate change happens on a global scale, and weather happens at a local scale. Climate scientists have been saying that for quite a while.
“It’s impossible to say that these storms are more intense because of climate change.”
She added: “In real terms we had a low depression over the Atlantic which deepened, which caused the swell, and that combined with the spring tide caused the coastal waves.”or….em…
Paul Davis, chief meteorologist for the Met Office said that very strong winds much of the UK experienced which was caused by jet stream.
“December has been the windiest spell since 1969, but unprecedented perhaps not. It probably feels unusual because the last few winters have been fairly settled and cold and we haven’t had the story conditions that just experienced.”or…em….
Direct from the Met. Office: There’s currently no evidence to suggest that the UK is increasing in storminess
Ever wonder how the Swarm arrives at Calais? The BBC doesn’t and the Today programme reports that “Four hundred people have been rescued from a capsized ship carrying migrants in the Mediterranean. Will Turner, an emergency coordinator with Medecins sans Frontieres was on a rescue ship that provided help.” Captain Will demands that the EU steps up to the plate and accepts MANY MORE of these “poor vulnerable” people who pay the people traffickers to get access to our welfare system. This was met with a murmur of agreement from Humphrys. The idea that Europe protects its borders is beyond the ken of the BBC and so they present these hordes leaving Libya as victims and then when the ranks at Calais bulge the BBC acts ever so surprised.
70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. BBC coverage focusing on the pain and hurt caused to the Japanese with scant acknowledgement that Japan brought this upon itself and that whilst it was indeed terrible that so many innocents perished nonetheless had this NOT happened many many Allied lives would have been lost. Through the prism of the BBC all war is wrong when it is the WEST carrying it out and so they pick over the radiated bones of Hiroshima whilst failing to recognise precisely WHY it was necessary to for Enola Gay to drop its payload.
BBC today in tears that the Kids Company has closed. Both last evening and this morning it is playing clips of angry Mums and Kids marching through the streets DEMANDING that this “charity” remains open. A tearful Camilla has been on to blame everyone for the collapse of this “organisation” but herself. All that’s missing is Elton John doing a tribute single. I notices that the Mums and Kids expressing their fury at the demise of this government funded “charity” all seemed to be of ethnic extraction, how odd. I also note that the “world class” journalists at the BBC are not asking any hard questions as to the financial running of this “charity” even though it is THAT which had led to its collapse.
The Guardian keeps pumping out the pro-BBC stuff. Here’s BBC executive Jane Tranter telling us how fabulous the BBC is…and yet not only is she jumping ship for the commercial world she also puts a whacking great hole in the BBC’s main line of defence…that it is the central prop of the creative industries in the UK which would whither and die without BBC support.
As Jane Tranter prepares to head her own UK production company, she talks about Doctor Who, her fears for the BBC – and why Wales is like New York.
It quotes Tranter saying this in response to the government’s review and the suggestion that the BBC should be smaller and do less…..
‘The BBC should mean something to all people, it should be the people’s broadcaster. To think the BBC should be made for a cultural elite with a more narrowcast is patronising.’
But the BBC is made for a cultural elite, made by them, for them. They have zero interest in your views on immigration, Europe, Islam or austerity.
Tranter goes on….
“One thing that really strikes me is how much time politicians have got to tell the BBC what programmes they should be making. You wouldn’t get Barack Obama doing that over here.”
Apart from the obligatory mention of the sainted Obama does she say anything of note here? Is she right? Should politicians keep out of BBC business? If not politicians who? The BBC itself? Why should that small coterie of culturally elite, metropolitan media types, have the monopoly on what the BBC produces and the values and views it propagates?
The BBC has a very self-serving view of its place and role in society. In its own eyes it is a unique stand alone organisation beholden to no-one. An organisation that has a very religious view of itself in that it is untouchable, beyond criticism and reproach and yet has the right to pass moral judgement on society and dictate the shape and behaviour of that society. Much like Jesus it believes itself to be the product of a virgin birth unsullied by association with mankind, sent to save us from ourselves…and claims it is being sacrificed, crucified, because of its beliefs and values.
Unfortunately far from springing from nowhere in an immaculate conception the BBC’s first incarnation was as a commercial enterprise before being nationalised by those dreadful politicians…it is the love child of politicians and commercial companies, and even those companies had their broadcasts shaped by government. When the BBC was nationalised as a public service, which the BBC seems to forget, it was still shaped by the government and owes its initial success to toeing the government line on the General Strike.
The BBC is a creation of the politicians in its present form….it owes pretty much everything to its unique status gifted to it by those politicians who set out its mission in the Charter.
To claim that politicians should have no role in deciding the size, shape and role of the BBC is absurd….it is their creature to start with…..and it is curious that when the likes of Harriet Harman, or Tories like Lords Fowler and Patten, speak up for the BBC then the BBC is happy to be the subject of their benevolent scrutiny and quote their warm words extensively.
The BBC is in any case far from independent of politics. Its charter obliges it to maintain civil society and citizenship….a very political charge on it. That’s an obligation given to it by parliament…politicians. They therefore have an interest in the BBC to ensure that it is carrying out its duty…one they generally neglect which is why this site exists.
The BBC, a public service, should not be left to decide what a ‘civil society’ or ‘citizenship’ looks like. That is surely for a democratic Parliament to decide not a small group of culturally, socially and financially elite people who happen to have got jobs at the BBC and then recruited like-minded people to work with them….the result of which we see today as they try to impose their very particular notion of what society should look like…and if you disagree they use all the resources of the BBC to either lock you out of the debate or to attack and destroy you as with Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson.
Politicians have an important role in deciding what such a society should look like and to require the BBC to work towards promoting and ‘maintaining’ that vision. The BBC’s independence comes in only in its decisions on how to carry out that obligation, but certainly not in deciding what that obligation should be.
That is of course if you believe the BBC should have such a role in engineering what a society should look like…which I doubt it should…being too open to manipulation by its own employees….
“The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”
Andrew Marr, BBC presenter.
Tranter goes on to say [Funny how she allows herself to have ‘very strong views’ about the BBC’s shape]….
“I have got very strong views about BBC Studios and they may not be the BBC’s,” says Tranter. “What they need to look at is why was it once the most exciting place in the industry to work in and why is it not now.
“I always felt the BBC was a really cool place to work, where you could make the kind of programmes you couldn’t necessarily get your hands on anywhere else. For me it was just really exciting and energising and challenging and they need to put that feeling back.”
That’s interesting isn’t it? The BBC insists that it is the lynchpin that the whole creative industry swings around and that the British economy would lose out if the BBC were somehow ‘diminished’ and yet here we have a BBC executive telling us the BBC maybe past it having lost its energy, its excitement and its challenge.
She tells us that she believes her new commercial enterprise will itself be a ‘lynchpin’ for the creative industries bringing huge benefits to the economy……
It is forecast the new company could bring in as much as £100m to the Welsh economy over the next 10 years.
Tranter said Wales could be a “world leader” within the decade.
“TV has changed beyond all recognition in the past decade. Huge international productions made on movie scale budgets have put British TV at the forefront of this revolution,” she said. “Bad Wolf has the potential to be a game changer for the creative economy in Wales.”
So now we know, the commercial sector is not only growing but bursting out and generating other businesses and creative opportunities…..as the Times tells us when it reported on the ‘Top Gear’ Amazon deal….with a sub-story headlined “Big money digital media are biggest threat to the BBC”.
The Guardian has noticed the huge success and massive investment that commercial media is putting into production…..
Such changes are happening fast. BT, with turnover of £18bn plus, is buying giant packages of TV sport. Sky, with revenues of just over £11bn, is fighting as seldom before. Netflix has billions to spend. American giants are expanding everywhere: Liberty on the point of buying another chunk of ITV, NBCUniversal to invest $250m in Buzzfeed. The temptation at takeover time – when, say, Nikkei pays £844m for the FT – is to see these deals in isolation. In fact, the information and entertainment world is solidifying.
However they still want to paint a picture of a world blighted by a ‘diminished’ BBC….
“Small” doesn’t mean beautiful; it may mean peripheral. Some critics know this well. They want a nobbled BBC. Some politicians are less savvy. They don’t understand the blight that threatens Britain’s creative sector. There’s a warning for the BBC here. Why concentrate on digital news at the expense of drama and entertainment? The royal charter writers must see a world queuing up to buy BBC content. Why turn it away, failing to understand what may be lost?”
The BBC’s Steve Hewlett, masquerading as an impartial observer, also notes the success of the commercial sector but tries to use it to deny the claim that the BBC’s licence to print money is a huge advantage over the private companies….
BBC’s rivals aren’t feeling the pinch as much as green paper suggests
What about its [The BBC’s] impact in the heartland arena of TV – where the big money is spent?
Conveniently, last week offered a chance to look at exactly how the BBC’s commercial rivals are spending that money, and how well they are doing at generating a return. And what a week they had – profits galore! Commercial television is on quite a roll.
Taken together the numbers make the idea mooted in the green paper – that the BBC is “crowding out” or in any way impeding its commercial rivals, in TV at least – seems almost absurd.
Indeed if there’s any cause for concern it might be something nearer the opposite: in other words that, after round after round of cutbacks (and in fairness an ongoing struggle too with its own inefficiency), the BBC could be in danger of being left behind.
So once again we hear of hugely successful commercial media companies that are ‘splurging’ money on investments in the industry and yet we keep hearing that without the BBC the industry might wither and die, or at least be reduced to a shadow of its former self.
Doesn’t seem like that is going to happen. The majority of hugely popular and successful TV is produced by commercial companies, even the BBC’s productions are more often than not done as joint productions with outside companies or totally produced by outsiders and bought in….The Voice is one example, produced by a Dutch company…now owned by ITV ironically.
The BBC’s own production facilities have been put on a commercial basis so it’s hardly a relevant argument anymore that the BBC is the backbone of the creative industries when clearly there is massive money flowing in from the commercial companies.
That’s not to say that the BBC shouldn’t do pretty much what it does now, less the bias, but claims of being the creative industries’ bankroller and mentor are shown to be an argument that doesn’t have much weight or credibility as a reason to keep the BBC as it is. The BBC is that comfortable fit, one that most people grow up with and enjoy its familiarity…and as Stalin said ‘Quantity has a quality all of its own’…the BBC is everywhere, nationwide, and provides a familiar backrop to whatever you are doing, wherever you are. Shame to destroy that in the quest for that elusive target driven efficiency that will never result in quality….and its not the amount of money we pay the BBC that is the problem, it is the way it is extorted from us under great duress. Subscription [not per programme] or a charge on income tax [not council tax] are the only two sensible funding options. It costs over £100 million to collect the licence fee at present…what a waste of that money.
As the Telegraph says the licence fee has been made redundant…
How, exactly, can anybody still justify the BBC’s licence fee? The TV industry is changing at breakneck speed, reminding us almost every day of why we don’t need the state to intervene for great content to be produced.
The news that Amazon, which recently entered the content market with Prime Instant Video, has signed up Jeremy Clarkson and his crew is another seminal moment in the demise of the old TV structures. The programme will air in 2016 and take on the BBC’s new Top Gear show presented by Chris Evans. Next year’s launch could be remembered as the tipping point – the moment a new generation of content producers finally dethroned the old TV incumbents, and the BBC in particular.
Even the BBC admitted that when discussing the Amazon deal on the radio last week…and reminding us that there are no adverts on Amazon.
And the Telegraph backs up the argument that the BBC isn’t needed as the industry prop…..
All of this is a major blow for the BBC’s model and rationale. Supporters of the current taxpayer-financed set-up argue that without public service broadcasting we would see a race to the bottom – but that is not what the investments that are increasingly being made by US entrants into the market would suggest.
Thanks to new technology, it is now possible to produce cutting-edge content that is both extremely upmarket and commercially viable. It is also possible to produce water cooler, mainstream TV that was once the preserve of terrestrial players.
The BBC’s licence fee needs to go, for two related reasons. It is unfair and a horrendous distortion of the market, allowing vast amounts of taxpayer-financed content to be dumped for free on its website. Streaming services, national and regional newspaper websites and commercial TV all suffer.
The BBC classes the BJP as a right wing party and therefore it is open season on anything and everything they do. Whilst Obama continues on his saintly progress reverentially recorded for posterity by BBC scribes, the BJP’s Narendra Modi is the subject of extremely aggressive and negative attacks that seem intended purely to mock and deride him and his party and to paint them in the worst possible light.
The BBC has already this week tried to claim that Modi is presiding over a vicious sectarian nationalist party that is set to wipe out all other religions, today it publishes what is nothing less than a extreme, negative, hatchet job on the BJP’s record in government after one year asking ‘Has India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi lost the plot?’
It paints a picture of a government out of control which is inept and incompetent. Whilst the BBC presented a picture of Obama at the mercy of Republican diehards who blocked his enlightened, progressive legislation, Modi is a victim of his own fumbling, inept mismanagement of Parliament.
The BBC tells us that the Congress party is involved in a principled stand as it blocks legislation, claiming that this is because they want certain allegedly corrupt BJP ministers removed from office.
Hoswever whilst they may want that the truth is that Congress are happy to use any excuse to block as much as they can and to disrupt the BJP’s policies.……‘The parliamentary stand-off in the monsoon session reached a new low on Monday with Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan suspending 25 Congress MPs for five days for “persistently, wilfully obstructing” the House.’
.and there is a reason they were kicked out of government and the BJP won a landslide….something the BBC seems to forget.
This BBC report almost gloats on the failure of Modi to push through some of his legislation…but isn’t that the point of a parliamentary democracy?…that legislation is put in front of Parliament for consideration and then voted on, or moderated as a response to public concern. The BBC seems to prefer a dictatorship.
They quote a commentator saying Modi was guilty of “spineless populism” when he backed down on some policy…presumably they’d prefer he totally ignore the People’s voice? In contrast how pleased was the BBC when our government backed down on the sale of forests after a ‘public outcry’, not ‘spineless populism’ but a correct response on a measure that as Miliband said ‘“Virtually every person in the country could see selling off our forests was a foolish and short-sighted policy”. Imagine the outcry if Cameron had ignored them and sold off the forests.
The BBC gives a very simplistic view of tax reforms by Modi whilst others have a more rounded approach to reporting this…
Mr Jaitley [BJP] published a Facebook post pointing out that Congress had been an initial advocate and consistent supporter of the GST.
He accused the party, which suffered its most humiliating defeat in last year’s national elections, of disrupting parliament for “political reasons”, or because they were “upset with the electorate for their 2014 verdict”.
“Should its [Congress’s] obstructionist tendencies inflict an economic injury on the country?” Mr Jaitley asked.
Why no mention of this though from the BBC?…
BJP government’s first year is one of the best years of Indian economic reform: US Expert
The first year of the new BJP government is one of the best years for India in terms of liberalisation and economic reforms, a top US expert has said.
“While we cannot claim this has been a perfect year in terms of liberalising the economy, it has been one of the best years on record. Certainly well ahead of the first year of either the Vajpayee or the Singh governments,” said Rick Rossow, senior fellow and Wadhwani Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies – a prominent think-tank
Rossow argued so far he believes the Modi government has done an excellent job of quickly opening new sectors to foreign investment and making other policy changes that will positively impact foreign investors.
Or why not report a different take on Modi’s ‘failures’? That it is all a cunning ploy…he’s not really interested in these policies, they’re a side show as he plots to run India as a one party state and crush his opponents forever…
You know, it is wrong to say that Narendra Modi has done little in his year-plus as prime minister. This impression is common among those distracted by his casual and incoherent approach to economic reform, which was never his interest or his priority. Mr Modi is, in fact, settling in for the long haul. He is solidly and intelligently putting into place the structures that will change the nature of India’s liberal democracy forever, and make it something that he, his organisation, and many of his voters will be more comfortable with.
Which could just go to show that much of the criticism of Modi is from highly partisan sources…ones which the BBC is liberally quoting as reliable.
The BBC though has more dirt to dish as it tells us ‘That’s not all’…
This week’s hasty and inept decision to block access to internet porn and almost immediately lift the ban made the government the butt of social media jokes.
Sounds very simple doesn’t it?….the BJP wanted to block porn sites and then backed down completely. Not true.
Acutely aware of the response in the mainstream media, the government too backtracked and said the ban applies only to websites projecting child porn.
So it was the likes of the Indian liberal press that forced a backtrack, a partial backtrack…it still intends to block child porn. Curious that the BBC should gloat about a failure to control such porn due to media pressure..how ironic. One of the problems is that the ISPs are complaining..
Internet service providers (ISPs) have refused to follow the government’s directive to allow adult websites that do not carry child pornography, saying the order is “vague and un-implementable.”
“ISPs have no way or mechanism to filter out child pornography from URLs, and the further unlimited sub-links,” Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) said.
Nothing new in governments finding such bans are more difficult than they hoped.
And that the sweeping measure caught up many innocent sites…
In its hurry to implement the order, the telecom department had even blocked sites hosting jokes, memes and other humorous content. A day later, it realized the mistake and decided to lift the ban on such websites.
The Guardian goes for outright lies as it claims the Indian Supreme Court passed a judgement that a ban on porn site was illegal and unwanted…..
The BJP’s ban on ‘porn’ sites mocks India’s democratic pretensions
But like all the BJP’s bans, what may initially seem amusing hides a darker truth. Vaswani first took his petition to the supreme court. Last month the court rejected his petition, and refused to block access to online porn. The chief justice of India, HL Dattu, called a ban on porn a “violation of Article 21” on the right to personal liberty. He said adults had a right to watch porn “within the four walls” of their home.
Vaswani then approached Pinky Anand, a lawyer who was appointed additional solicitor general by the Modi government, and the ban quickly came into force. In other words, the Indian government went against an institution of the state to side with a man whose personal beliefs happen to match theirs.
The BJP’s violation of the supreme court decision is the loudest warning yet that the Indian government is dismissive of due process. Surely leaders who think they are above the highest court in the land must also think they are above the laws of the land?
However that is complete rubbish, a complete lie in fact…even the BBC itself earlier reported the opposite….
In July, the Supreme Court expressed its unhappiness over the government’s inability to block sites, especially those featuring child pornography.
Declining a plea to pass an interim order to block porn websites in India, the Supreme Court on Wednesday said it cannot stop an adult from exercising his fundamental right to personal liberty to watch porn within the privacy of his room.
“Such interim orders cannot be passed by this court. Somebody may come to the court and say look I am above 18 and how can you stop me from watching it within the four walls of my room. It is a violation of Article 21 [right to personal liberty],” Chief Justice H.L. Dattu observed orally.
Though denying immediate relief, the Chief Justice’s Bench acknowledged the seriousness of the issue.
“The issue is definitely serious and some steps need to be taken. The Centre [The Government] is expected to take a stand…let us see what stand the Centre will take,” Chief Justice Dattu observed, directing the government to reply in four weeks.
In one of the previous hearings on the PIL in August 2014, the Supreme Court had termed Internet porn “hydra-headed,” while the Centre had acknowledged that websites were getting too unwieldy to handle and were affecting ordinary households.
The court stated that it didn’t have the power to ban the sites not that such sites shouldn’t be banned…indeed it was pressing the government to ban them…which it subsequently did due to that pressure…….as these headlines show….
India Cracks Down on Internet Porn After Supreme Court Decision
Supreme Court’s observations prompt Centre to block 857 porn sites
The BBC’s reporting of Modi and the BJP is clearly very one-sided and partisan with an extremely negative approach to whatever the BJP government does. It seems to have no such qualms about left-wing dictators though such as Castro or any other South American fellow traveller….Guantanamo Bay was for the BBC an illegal hellhole and yet a few miles down the road the Cubans had a prison packed with political prisoners…oddly not a peep from all those lefties and human rights lawyers that raised such a stink on behalf of Islamist terrorists.
Calais migrants: British anarchists infiltrate camps to provoke trouble, police warn
This is being encouraged not by human traffickers, who wish to remain discreet, but by extreme Left elements here to manipulate the migrants in the name of their ideal of imposing a country without borders or police.”
“Among these activists are quite a few Britons,” he added. “For now they have been allowed to act with total impunity. It’s time for a return to the rule of law: they need to be identified and arrested.
Identify and arrest?….Perhaps they should look no further than the BBC’s extremist open borders incitement to immigrants and while they’re at it why not check out the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East when its correspondents gloat about the ISIS onslaught that cuts across so many borders which the BBC thinks were the result of Imperial arrogance and ignorance ‘carved out by the British and French’...when the truth is far, far more complex….perhaps those correspondents could also have their collars felt….as this fellow has had…
Anjem Choudary charged with supporting a terror organisation
Anjem Choudary, the radical cleric, has been charged with supporting the banned terror group, Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil).
The 48-year-old, from Ilford, was charged along with Mohammed Rahman, 32 with inviting support for a proscribed terrorist organisation, namely Isil,
The BBC is a cheerleader for mass immigration and terrorism….and yet it thinks politicians shouldn’t interfere in its business. If not politicians then it’ll have to be the police.
Well, despite the best efforts of Alan Yentob, it looks like Camilla Batmanghelidjh’s “Kid’s Company” is going down. This “charity” has received £30m from Government – so it’s another fake charity – and now the noose is tightening. The BBC report on it here. Naturally they spin it in favour of poor old Camilla and the “abandoned” children.
roger harrabin