Some examples of the BBC’s reporting that clearly demonstrate its political inclinations….
Here the EU is the blameless victim as terrorists move freely around Europe…it’s not the EU’s open border policy but a failure of the selfish nation states that is a problem…we need to change the culture and have more co-operation and information sharing…ie give the EU more control….[oh…and having effective border controls will be hugely expensive…so let’s not have them eh? So Sir Ivan Rogers no?…the BBC ever keen to find something to create a negative and pessimistic tone towards anything that puts a spoke in the EU’s Grand Project]
Berlin truck attack: Can the EU stop another Amri?
Then we have Ivan Rogers…..no reference to his hugely damaging interventions in the EU reform negotiations pre the referendum in which he, a highly pro-EU mandarin, in effect said we aren’t going to succeed and so we shouldn’t bother…an attitude that he would of course have continued with had he been still at the helm of the Brexit negotiations…but the BBC doesn’t think that important…they don’t even mention his complete unsuitability for the role or his ardently pro-EU leanings in this write up on his behalf….
Sir Ivan Rogers: Former UK ambassador to the EU quits civil service
Rogers’ failure and the BBC’s own failure to mention it is odd as in this BBC report [naturally an anti-Brexit story] the failed reform negotiations are deemed a highly relevant example of what not to do…
Mr Faull warns that Theresa May’s government could be in danger of repeating the mistake of David Cameron who believed that Mrs Merkel would come to his rescue. Mr Faull was the senior European Commission official involved in the Cameron negotiations.
Here’s another example of the BBC’s finest reporting of fact….political change is dismissed as the result of some irrational, nihilistic ‘anger’ rather than people voting democratically for the policies they want….this take on the reasons people voted is purely designed to denigrate the voters, dismiss them as Clinton does as ‘Deplorables’, and to portray the voters as victims of a lack of education and a failure to understand the world, the useful idiots gulled by Fascist rabble rousers who exploit their ‘ignorance’ and emotions to get themselves elected….
2016: The year of anger
Does one emotion above all hold the key to understanding a year of tumultuous political change?
Both supporters and detractors see Donald Trump’s victory as a tribute to his knack for understanding people’s discontent, then channelling it.
“Trump gave anger the green light,” argues Arlie Hochshild, a sociologist based at the University of California. [hmmm…has she never heard of the Tea Party…or of the anti-Bush hate camapigns etc etc etc? Don’t think Trump invented ‘anger’]
‘Anger’ is portrayed as an irrational and negative state of mind….if you’re angry about something you’re a fanatic, an extremist not a reasoned and measured person who thinks rationally and calmly…you’re a victim of your emotions, emotions exploited and ‘channelled’ by the likes of Trump. Just another invented narrative created to attack The Donald and Brexit. The narrative that Trump gave licence to ‘anger’ is of course the same sort of narrative that the BBC wants to create in regard to Brexit as they now portray Britain, post-Brexit, as a ‘nastier, more racist place’.
Then there’s this fine example of reporting from Jeremy Bowen..
Five issues which shaped the Middle East in 2016
What would those five issues be? The Islamic State, Allepo, Yemen, young people and of course Israel.
Odd that Turkey’s role in the Middle Eastern mess gets barely a mention, just a quick line under ‘Aleppo’…
Increasingly the war is dominated by the agendas of the major powers that have intervened in the Syrian war. One example that affected matters in Aleppo was Turkey’s decision to make a priority of its fight with the Kurds.
That meant it needed better relations with the Russians, which meant looking away in Aleppo as Russia led the charge against its erstwhile clients, in return for Russian acquiescence in Turkey’s actions in northern Syria.
So Turkey’s influence is restricted to what happened in Aleppo? This from the BBC that races back in time to WWI and the end of the Ottoman caliphate to find excuses to blame the UK for what is happening now in the Middle East [apparently we ‘carved up the Middle East’ in a ignorant, arrogant and careless manner…it’s all our fault] but always fails to mention that it was Turkey that insisted Iraq include the Kurdish areas as it didn’t want an independent land for the Kurds on its borders.
Turkey has been attacking and murdering the Kurds for decades now, thousands of Kurdish villages have been destroyed and tens of thousands of Kurds killed….and yet the BBC only reports what Israeli tanks do…or indeed what Saudi Arabia does in Yemen…Bowen does ‘report’ on that in this piece…and has a personal opinion which he generously shares with us…
Years of war, corruption and under-development weakened Yemen before the war between the Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition pushed it into catastrophe.
Figures are not precise but one estimate is that 10,000 have been killed in the war and 37,000 wounded. Many are civilians….Every war is brutal but the one in Yemen also features the grotesque sight of the region’s wealthiest countries bombing the poorest, helped by the US and Britain…Despite all that firepower, the Saudis have not crushed the Houthis, which means that misery and death will be the fate of many Yemenis in 2017.
Ah yes, all that ‘misery and death’…but not so concerned about the Kurds’misery and death’ at the hands of the Turks.
The Islamic State was only able to operate so freely and succesfully because Turkey allowed them to slip across theTurkish border unhindered allowing recruits and munitions into the Islamic State land. Turkey also refused co-operation with Kurdish forces fighting ISIS and indeed attacked them more often than not. Turkey was on the Islamic State’s side.
Turkey has played an enormous and influential role in events in the Middle East which has gone largely uncommented on by the BBC which prefers to bring us endless tales of Israeli transgressions…never once comparing Israel to Pakistan which is not only an Islamic mirror image of Israel but is vastly more dangerous and the exporter of so much trouble around the world.
Turkey’s role in the Middle East has been massive and yet Bowen barely mentions it…then agian as the BBC’s senior Middle East editor I suppose it is too much to expect a full and proper analysis of what is happening.
The BBC and ‘anger’ are uneasy bedfellows. Remember Newsnight’s Anger and Protest editor who was supposed to be reporting economics but somehow appeared first on the scene when it all kicked off?
Like so many other woeful contrasts in editorial integrity, the BBC sees and treats ‘anger’ very differently depending on a corporate value set it remains astounding is allowed to exist at all, much less uniquely funded by compulsion.
the BBC sees and treats ‘anger’ very differently depending on a corporate value set it remains astounding is allowed to exist at all,
Hmmm I would replace “anger” with “facts” when it comes to dealing with the BBC and the BBC has a very long rap sheet stretching back decades on this sort of thing
The BBC knows why I voted Brexit . It’s not the reasons I thought I had to vote that way , but the BBC knows why I did it the same as it knows why you vote the way you do . It knows because you’re not an individual , you are a tiny piece in a category the BBC loves to define . All blacks vote one way , all working class whites vote another way , all A and B social strata vote X , all women vote this , all Hispanics that , all people with degrees vote Y , etc .
Perhaps it’s because so many of them studied social sciences in the sixties and seventies , plus a heady mix of Marxist dogma about proletariat dialect ism or whatever , that they are reluctant not to put everyone into groups and sub sects .
Beeboids love to put their version of the news into a thematic straitjacket, often a randomly selected chronological one *, as with “2016: the year of anger”. The writer, Paul Moss, purports to find support for this notion from around the globe, e.g. in Venezuela, where, we are told,
“…angry crowds gathered to protest in 2016, not against a particular government, but against the very system by which they ruled.”
Those Venezuelans want Maduro out and the army, which exists, in Venezuela, solely to control the populace, either confined to barracks, or disbanded outright. Not only have Venezuelans very definitely been displaying “anger” against “a particular government”, but they were doing it well before the first of January, 2016. They’d be doing it in January, 2017, too, if finding food weren’t the overwhelming priority.
Of course, the Beebyanka basically approves of the Bolivarian Republic and mustn’t be expected to supply any genuine analysis of the catastrophe in Caracas. In any case, Venezuela and the other outbursts of “anger” alluded to (not including the Turkish attempted coup – does the Beebyanka know something it’s not sharing with us about that?) are sideshows. In the “year of anger”, only two dates really matter, out of three hundred and sixty-six to choose from: the twenty-third of June and the eighth of November.
On the face of things, the author seems barely to touch on Brexit, but he comes back to it, quoting an author who claims that
“Anger seeks an object,” he argues, “it’s very Newtonian. There’s action and reaction, a divisive process which continues to accelerate divisions… some sort of slow-motion catastrophe is what’s required to press reset.”
Quite how Newtonian it is to juxtapose accelerating divisions with “slow-motion catastrophe” I can’t quite fathom, but the intent is clear: Brexit is synonymous with irrational anger and only cool reflection (and ignoring more than seventeen million votes) will restore us to equilibrium, i.e. docile submission. The article ends with a promise from Nigel Farage that those unhappy with political events now are likely to become even less so. Typically, for the Beebyanka, this is positioned to sound like a threat, an extension of “the year of anger”, which is just a figment of Beeboid imagination.
Probably the most sick part of the article is the section on the Dallas murders of five police officers, owing to blacklivesmatter agitation. Paul Moss is desperate to say that the BLM crowd are angry, as well, but that would mean bracketing them with evil Brexiteers and Trump-voters, so the fury is ascribed to the “local residents”. Never fear: Moss manages to find “a fellow African-American”, who does not “condone the killing” ( “killing”, note, not “murder”), but understands it. Did this “fellow African-American” conceivably have the surname Sharpton?
* In the Nineties, Brian Redhead constantly used to berate Conservative politicians on the Today programme: “These are supposed to be the Caring Nineties!” The idea of the “Caring Nineties” was a purely Beebyanka concoction, the obvious contrast being with the supposedly uncaring Eighties.
That’s a good point not to forget Turkey’s role in current world affairs. The BBC & other left media outlets seem to disregard that the Middle Eastern point of view is… well, Middle Eastern. Their centre of focus is in many ways different from our own. I think the likes of the Beeb are overlooking just how important the restoration of the Caliphate is to most Mideast Muslims. And just how dangerous Turkey could be.(They know very little about Islam despite singing it’s praises daily)
Turkey has the second largest military in NATO & Erdogan, Sultan-of-the-false-flag-coup is highly favoured throughout the Muslim world. He has a great deal of support. (to the horror of the Saudis.)
If anyone has kept an eye on Middle-Eastern news (Not Aljazeera) It has been evident that the Iranians & Saudis have been squaring up. There could yet be a major conflict in that region. I am hard pressed to find a MSM news item suggesting that Iran & Saudi are having a spat at the expense of Yemen. Perhaps that may have something to do with the “military conflict” there? Things are moving & it’s largely based on that most peaceful of world religions. (Oh how we in the West think we can continue to marginalise religion!) It’s a bit more complicated than a mere Sunni/Shiite divide. But again, the leftards have very little knowledge or understanding of Islam & the Mideast. They stuff up their ears & dismiss you if you try to explain anything to them.
Lucy,
I quite agree. I have family connections with Turkey , going back to about 1962, and I lived in istanbul for 2 years in the 1970s. The tragedy is that all of that great man Ataturk’s reforms are being dismantled by that bastard Erdogan.
The last attempt was by Menderes in the 1950s and he was hanged in 1961.
The real sadness was the failed, botched coup, last year. The first failed coup in Turkey, I believe. Erdogan’s vicious crackdown following this should be publicised. No way of knowing how many he has murdered in the last few months, but it will, almost certainly be in thousands.
The BBC will not investigate this because their policy is ” Islam , right or wrong “. You are right, they are ignorant of Turkey.
Putin gets it and , maybe Trump, gets it. Treezer is more interested in trousers and “social society” whatever that means !
Why did the BBC often mention food on their Perils Of Brexit programme fron Northern Ireland at 12.30 midday on Radio 4 today ?