Monthly Archives: January 2018

Project Fear and Project Sneer

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The pro-EU propagandists have been out in force recently, but having learnt nothing from past failures they continue down the path of ‘persuading’ recalcitrant voters to change their minds about the dizzying delights of the Grand Project by assaulting them with reheated alarmist prophecies of doom first tried out so disastrously by the original Project Fear.  On top of that they add into the toxic mix a raft of insults and sneers at those voters which are unlikely, as before, to attract them to the cause.

Project Fear MKII has come up with an alarming scenario that whatever we do if we leave the EU the economy will crash in comparison to what it would do if we had stayed in the EU.  This of course comes ultimately from the Treasury and has the finger prints of Phillip Hammond all over it.  Considering Project Fear MKI couldn’t predict events a few months away how likely is it that Project Fear MKII can predict events 15 years away?  Apparently it doesn’t take into account any of the benefits flowing from Brexit so just a bit one sided.  And consider this…it is of course based upon the status quo now…in other words it assumes the EU and Britain, and the world, stay exactly as they are…

No scenario would be better for the economy than the status quo.

Really?  That’s just not realistic over one year never mind fifteen and also assumes the British economy can’t improve.  Does it take any account of events in Europe?  Catalonia, Poland and Hungary, Russia, mass immigration creating mass instability and conflict, growing terrorism and an EU intent on ever closer union.

And then there are the sneers and mocking insults such as from the German Ambassador…have to say it says a lot about him that for all his time here nobody has probably ever heard of him and the only time they do is when he is about to leave the job and decides now is the time to insult the British voters who voted for Brexit…which is a ‘tragedy’ apparently.  He tells Brexiteers ‘For you ze var isn’t over yet’ and complains that we only voted for Brexit because we live in some fantasy land where plucky Britain stands alone in the world and refights WWII every day.   Hmmm…not as if the Germans don’t make plenty of films and TV series based upon the war….are they going to ‘Deutschit’?  Probably not because they won the war as Heseltine told us…the Germans run the EU.

The Ambassador of course comes up with the usual trite nonsense about ‘populism’…I’m sure Merkel would love a bit of ‘populism’ right now…isn’t that what democracy is all about….Parties offering voters choices of policy that appeal to them and their interests?

Brexit, he said, was part of a wider, international populist revolt against politicians.

“Populism provides easy and understandable answers to very complex problems,” Ammon said. “If you say the words ‘single market’ or ‘customs union’ probably 99% of the population would not understand, but if you say: ‘Let us build a wall to stop these immigrants,’ people say: ‘OK, that will probably help.’ I know it is not a good answer to problems.

Naturally the BBC were happy to convey his words to us and Emma Barnett ran one of her phone-ins on the subject asking if our views of the EU are warped and driven by our view of ourselves as the victors of WWII harking back to past glories and a golden age that never was?  Hmmm…actually Britain came to the rescue of Europe as the Nazis invaded putting the interests of its fellow Europeans first over its own interests, once again saving it from tyranny…and as for Brexit that is about protecting the future not preserving the past.

We had a bit of pantomime on the Today programme as they invited on plumber Charlie Mullins who is a well known Remainder and a frequent guest on the BBC.  He was allowed to rant on about Brexit claiming hardly anybody supported Brexit anymore and that we will have a second referendum and May must go.  It was suggested that he might be out to sabotage Brexit but the BBC knew what they were getting when they invited him on and so must have expected the anti-Brexit outburst and decided to run with it…..a bit of mudslinging about Brexit with some mock interrogation thrown in for effect is all grist for the pro-EU mill.

Previous to that we had a piece about Hungary which began [starting off in a funfair horror ride] with a scream and then a laugh…timed to coincide with comments about the horror of the EU breaking up and Brexit.  Apparently the former Soviet bloc countries are ‘EUphobic’ despite the EU having presided over a huge boost to their economies and countries…naturally this would never have happened had they not joined the EU.  Hungary is having a crackdown on ‘internationally funded NGOs’…hmmm…no mention of the billionaire leftwinger Soros who is trying to buy up democracies around the world and corrupts them with his billions…odd the BBC dodge that when they are so concerned about the Russians in the US…not so concerned about Soros funding Clinton and Obama though.

The piece was entirely negative about Hungary….a final summary writing it off as ‘nationalist, populist and anti-immigrant’.  The BBC deciding that all three characteristics are bad.

Yesterday we had Kirsty Wark asking if ‘the notion of home is legitimate anymore?’  In other words no-one can claim to be British…we are all citizens of the world and the world are citizens of Britain…and can thus come here unchecked, economic migrants are as much asylum seekers as any fleeing war and oppression.  Utterly one-sided and no-one on at all to put a different perspective to challenge the narrative being peddled…Wark in complete agreement.  Pure pro-immigration propaganda and not unrelated to the EU and Brexit of course.

Then we had this week’s ‘Book of the Week’…..hmmm..about Jews fleeing Germany…

Then 1935 heralded a dark dawn…

That old ‘warning from history’ the BBC likes to keep on about….Farage the next Fuhrer according to the BBC, Brexit the closest thing to Fascism today.

Then we had last week’s ‘Book of the Week’….It’s 1999 and the Dutch journalist Geert Mak, is travelling through Europe reflecting on the history of the last 100 years.

This turns out to be a long-winded tract with a not so hidden pro-EU message.  Sure, it tells us, the EU has had its problems and has made mistakes but it was created as a force for peace and its hallmark is not a single identity but its diversity.  He naturally slips into praising the Muslim Ottoman Empire as a multicultural paradise whilst deriding Europeans as colonialists who disdained the natives….and 19th century nationalism put an end to Ottoman tolerance.  Think we can see where he comes from.

The last episode was even more explicit...the BBC announced that it had been specially commissioned to update his book…not saying who commissioned it…but you can guess from the blurb for the programme…implicit but it suggests it was the BBC that specially commissioned this final update….so that he can include his damning thoughts on Brexit….

To conclude Mak has written a new epilogue bringing his reflections on the continent up to date.

The break up of the Soviet Union was a disaster [less than subtle allusion, possibly not a good one]….everything declined, the economy crashed, food, education, health, public safety, democracy….all bad…it was like a war or a famine. Stick with the devil you know kids!!!

The problem with the EU, yes it made mistakes as said, but the real problem was not of its making, it was the 2008 crash which ‘left citizens behind’ and encouraged the British to pull up the drawbridges as the EU ‘reluctantly’ edged towards becoming a superpower.

He tells us that ‘We Europeans are one people and we need to stick together’…kind of at odds with his multiculti paradise, open borders message.

Just more outright pro-EU, pro-immigration propaganda masquerading as mere historical whimsy.

The BBC has been in overdrive recently pumping this stuff out….no coincidence the Dementum activists have also been out in force pushing the anti-Brexit message in an attempt to sabotage it.

 

 

 

 

Frit?

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As Jordan Peterson said, it might pay to be a disagreeable woman, maybe the BBC women could learn something from C4 women…..[you’ve got 12 minutes and counting till the interview on C4 at 19:00]

 

 

 

 

 

‘Dementum’….The Remainiacs ‘Dad’s Army’

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Image result for churchill

 

Corbyn has his ‘Momentum’ stormtroopers, the Remainiacs have ‘Dementum’, their stay-behind-the-lines Dad’s Army band of guerrillas on a mission to sabotage Brexit.

A crackers squad of dyed-in-the-wool diehard blowhards who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the ‘good of the country’…naturally it is the ‘good of the country’ as they see it.  They believe that the voters were too stupid, too blinded by their own bigotry and prejudice to understand what they were voting for therefore it is only right and sensible that this small band of highly trained, highly privileged, intelligent, articulate, clever, highly educated and ethically superior EU mercenaries be allowed to make the decisions on their behalf….power of attorney you might say for the mentally and morally deficient plebs.

Today they launched a sneak attack ‘out of the bushes’, as Lord ‘adiEU’ Adonis might not say.  A classic tactic of dropping a fake document into enemy hands in the hope that they will believe it and act accordingly to their detriment.  Naturally it helps if you have a willing collaborator in the plan to help disseminate the ‘fake news’ far and wide, one who is supposedly neutral, honest and beyond reproach.

And luckily for Dementum they had just the platform, one that gladly broadcast the bad tidings, that the British economy would tank if it left the benevolent clutches of the EU, without question….repeated frequently throughout the day the broadcasts gave hope to those Dementum saboteurs stuck behind the lines that the cavalry, or is it Calvary, was on its way.  D-Day would once again free Europe from the dark, looming prospect of a Nazi take-over…otherwise known by the code-name ‘Brexit’.     Dementum Day….put the flags out for that one, the day we rejoin the EU.

Fifteen years to the minute from today, the document warned us, the British economy will implode, apocalypse not now but in 15 years time.  Birds will fall from the trees, the skies will darken, dogs will run wild in the streets and Murdoch will buy Sky.  Be assured, if Brexit happens, no good will come of it.

The fake news document, launched like a cruise missile targeted right at the heart of Brexit, turned out to be more of a North Korean firecracker as it veered wildly off target and took out its own control centre packed as it was with Herr Hammond and his Treasury manadarins who had cobbled this piece of junk news together as yet another part of their grand plan to stop Brexit…. ‘Project Fear’.   The true Brits looked on as they had during the last time Europe had tried to blitz them and they laughed, flicked the V-sign and dug in for the long war.

Yes, the ‘True Brits’, the ‘conscies’, ‘treacherous’ conscientious objectors who refuse to be conscripted to the Dementum cause….they who paused for thought and decided life under a totalitarian regime was not for them and who bravely stood up for the real good of the country, the good that the majority of the country voted for rather than the conveniently shaped self-serving fantasies of the Dementum.

‘V’ for Victory over Europe.   Go tell that to the German ambassador.

 

 

‘The BBC doesn’t do equal pay’

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BBC review finds ‘no gender bias in on-air pay decisions’

Er….‘We’re addressing unfairness in individuals’ pay and want to close the gender pay gap’

“The BBC has a special role representing Britain. That is why we need to be, and want to be, an exemplar on gender pay, and equal pay.

 

Now some of its own know what it is like to go up against the monolithic BBC and find themselves stonewalled and dismissed out of hand.  An irony that the BBC which campaigns relentlessly for equality of varous kinds is now being taken to task for its own lack of equality…its own bias.  Like the Roman Empire it is its own follies and indulgences that bring it down.

Despite massive evidence to the contrary PWC have concluded that the BBC doesn’t have an equal pay problem….which is why some of its highest paid men are taking huge pay cuts and hundreds of women are getting pay rises….why might that be?

From the Guardian today:

‘The BBC doesn’t do equal pay’: Why female staff are fighting back

National radio presenter: “The line manager told me ‘the BBC doesn’t do equal pay’”

National broadcaster: “I have been offered a 65% pay rise, whilst also being told ‘there was no issue of equal pay’”

The TV news presenter: “I sat next to a man with an identical job paid tens of thousands more”

Eleanor Bradford, BBC Scotland: “I discovered I was one of the lowest-paid correspondents”

BBC reporter: “I don’t resent my male colleague… but we need parity of pay”

News programme presenter: “I am paid £45,000 less than my immediate male predecessor”

Sports broadcaster: “What you are worth is solely at the whim of management who essentially in sport are always men”

UK-based on-air editor: “The BBC has refused to accept there is an equal pay issue, but offered me an on-the-spot 10% increase”

Nations and regions presenter: “I raised the equal pay issue many times over the years, but nothing was done”

Sports editor: “Four men doing the same job have confirmed their salary is higher by up to £10,000”

Reporter, Radio 4: “I am considering further action as they refused to backdate my pay”

National radio presenter: “I have worked with my male co-host six years and for all that time been paid one-third the rate he is paid”

Presenter, national radio: “My salary was only half the amount being paid to my male co-presenter”

Presenter, regional news: “There was a point blank refusal to a request for equal pay”

 

Can’t see the good for the wees

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Trump does an interview with ITV, much no doubt to the BBC’s chagrin…certainly the Guardian seemed somewhat sneery…

 

Have to ask why Emma Barnett was so surprised at Trump’s performance and why she needed to ask if anyone’s perceptions of him had been changed because, as we’ve note before, Trump did plenty of interviews during the election in which he was coherent, moderate and intelligent, if the usual brash boaster.  Did we hear any of this on the BBC?  If the BBC ever did report on them such reports were drowned out by the tidal wave of reporting by itself that amounted to a sensationalist, sniping, smear campaign based more often than not on the salacious gossip and bought-in Democrat black-propaganda with reporters like Jon Sopel more intent on mocking and point scoring than relaying a true picture of what Trump was like and what his policies were.

The BBC failed to do its job and failed its viewers, they who pay those enormous wages, and why did this happen?  Because the BBC was running a campaign to discredit, malign and demonise Trump.  For all its apparent outrage at supposed Russian inteference in the US election the BBC itself shamelessly attempted to change the course of those elections by supporting Clinton and undermining Trump.  Let’s see Mueller investigate the BBC’s interference and collusion with the Democrats….as well as it would seem the British intelligence services.

The BBC would never have been surprised at Trump’s performance on Piers Morgan if they had seen the previous interviews…which they have seen of course…they just chose deliberately not to report them in any meaningful way and instead chose to attack Trump and continue to do so to this day.

 

Here’s the interview transcript in the Spectator.

 

 

Lord AdiEU in the slow lane

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Ranty Remainder Lord Adonis is very upset with the BBC…..apparently they are pro-Leave and are the mouthpiece for the Brexiteers…..who knew?

 

Following his link to a fellow Remainder activist we see what has caused his bilious outburst…an article by Nick Robinson…one from April 2017…the infamous ‘BBC does not need to be balanced anymore’ one.  And the Remainders accuse Brexiteers of living in the past……you’d think with 20/20 hindsight the good Lord would be able to read the article with intelligent understanding and clarity…clearly not…and you suspect this is pretty much the standard he employs on all else he talks about on Brexit…

Naturally Nick Reeves, whomever he might be, and fellow travellers, have got hold of totally the wrong end of the stick and clearly have not read the article, possibly wilfully….as Robinson points out…..

 

 

 

Interesting that the Soubry who was a constant on the BBC not long ago crying into her whimple about ‘abuse’ is back to her normal abusive self…..

 

Marr by name….

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Image result for red andy marr

 

Why does it matter that Andrew Marr is such an appallingly bad, partisan and unchallenging interviewer?  The New Statesman tells us why it matters...ironically in praise of Andrew Marr…..

Despite new challengers, Andrew Marr is still the king of the Sunday-morning politics skirmish

The war among the UK’s television channels has shifted to new territory: now it’s Sunday-morning sofa skirmishes.

These things matter because the Sunday-morning political programmes often generate the headlines for the rest of the day’s broadcasting and for the Monday papers; and the commercial companies want to dent the BBC’s reputation for setting the agenda. The corporation can often do it by the sheer volume of its output on TV, including the estimable Sunday Politics, and on radio; but it’s a plus for audiences if other voices can be heard.

Marr has been slammed for this Sunday’s interview with Corbyn and last week’s with McDonnell who was allowed to stop an audio clip of him abusing Esther McVey and joking about lynching her being played. But Marr has always been pretty hopeless as mentioned in many previous posts such as this…

Marr is absolutely hopeless isn’t he?  Yet another interview with a Labour grandee, Corbyn, and it is red carpet treatment all the way with little in the way of demanding and probing questions…McDonnell was given a free ride and a very smug Corbyn couldn’t have got better treatment if he’d written the script himself.

Corbyn told us he’d had a ‘brilliant manifesto‘….no comment from Marr despite the fact that Corbyn’s manifesto was big, huge, on promises, but failed completely to provide genuine costings….the IFS saying Corbyn would have to impose the biggest tax burden on this country of any peace-time era.  Nor did Marr challenge him on the fact that Corbyn was obviously bribing voters, buying their votes….for someone who presents himself as the ‘ethical’ politician, different from all the rest, that deserves some comment you might think.

Corbyn told us that his approach was ‘challenging an economic consensus that impoverished so many people’.  Marr’s response?  ‘It clearly was’.

No comment about Corbyn’s support for the IRA and Muslim terrorists despite the issue being of huge significance in the election and Corbyn doing a massive opportunistic u-turn on his support for terrorists.

Similarly Marr raises the subject of the ‘socially conservative’ DUP…but makes no reference to Corbyn’s close ties to Muslim conservatives or indeed his own extreme views.

Marr is well named.  It suits his style of interviewing.  Marred.  Maybe a new verb…to be ‘Marred’…to be let off the hook in a half-arsed interview.

If programmes like Marr and Today are setting the news agenda for the rest of the day, not just at the BBC but in the Press as well, it is clearly critical that Marr and Co gets things right, asks the right questions and gets the right answers.  If politicians like Corbyn are allowed to lie through their teeth it does major damage to the democratic process….the fact that May was expected to get a landslide majority but was almost defeated at the last election shows how the distortion and corruption of the news can effect the outcome of major political events such as general elections and thus have serious repercussions for the country…and may still as Corbyn and his Stalinist enterprise tries to lie and bully their way to power untroubled by a rigorous and questioning BBC which seems all too ready to put a Labour government into No10 regardless of its true nature.

 

Liberal with the Bigotry and Hate

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Image result for assassinate trump

Sir David Attenborough on Donald Trump: ‘We could shoot him. It’s not a bad idea’

What alternative do we have? Do we have any control or influence over the American elections?’ the naturalist says before joking about an alternative solution.

Thanks to Jerry Owen in the comments for reminding us of Attenborough’s incitement to kill Trump…and of course Attenborough’s not alone as we’ve noted before.

The BBC’s Paul Wood, who concentrates on Trump and Russia, asks in the Spectator…thus putting a firewall between his speculation and the BBC…

Will Donald Trump be assassinated, ousted in a coup or just impeached?

Let’s not forget that BBC virulent anti-Trump rhetoric almost certainly played a part in the actual attempted shooting of Trump by a British man and that a Republican congressman was attacked and shot in an attempted politically motivated murder.

Why refresh our memories about this toxic, extremely polarised, menacing anti-Trump liberal narrative?  Why?  Because Andrew Marr is once again treating us to his version of history, the Marr Book of Alternate Facts, as he reveals that Trump is a ‘bad man’ and that the Right are to blame for the polarisation and breakdown of US politics and democracy.

Marr is a bit of a star when it comes to history….history is apparently a moveable feast and what’s on the menu can be changed to suit your own tastes.  Here’s his view on the Boer war and the British Empire…and its consequences…

Andrew Marr some time ago presented us with his programme on British History…..The Making of Modern Britain.

In the course of this programme we learnt that Darwin’s ideas on the survival of the fittest and the British invention of the concentration camp led to the Nazi ideal of the ‘Aryan Superman’ and the concentration camps in which 6 million Jews were killed…..as the Independent puts it….‘Indeed, it is hard not to avoid the conclusion (watching Marr) that the British Empire was simply a dummy run for the Third Reich, and that, had they known what was coming, many of our grandparents might merely have concluded that “Adolf went a bit too far”.’

No different of course to the standard BBC narrative about the British Empire.

Marr had a trial run airing his views in the Evening Standard not so long ago attacking Social Media [as directed by the BBC whose interests, commercail and political, lie in demonising and reining in social media] as the source of all that is wrong in society today, suggesting that it will lead to civil war and the rise of a new Hitler in Britain. He finished off with a pompous and arrogant bit of advice to Trump…‘Got that Donald?’….and a hint of where he gets his own thinking confirmed by the liberal echo chamber that resounds to anti-Trump conpipracies and rhetoric…

And it’s dangerous. In a new book about Trump’s America, two political scientists from Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, discuss “How Democracies Die”. In it they emphasise the importance of not just political rules but how we behave. These “soft guard rails” include mutual toleration or “the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals”. Got that, Donald?

So yes, we need basic civility and some mutual respect even when we disagree. This is going to be a difficult year. The last thing we need is a spitting arms race of abuse. History, as so often, tells us why.

Today in the Sunday Times Marr expands and expounds on the narrative he touched on above as he critiques [lol…not in the slightest does he ‘critique’] the book he mentions above….Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die”.  This book is targeted squarely at Trump and accuses him of being a dictator who will kill American democracy.  Marr’s analysis is in fact one long nod of agreement with everything they say….Trump is a bad man and the Republicans are white supremacists who want to make America white again.  The whole premise of Marr’s diatribe is highly one-sided, blinkered, extremely partisan and wrong.

Marr admits that the two authors are ‘anti-Trump politics professors at Harvard’ and yet he fully accepts everything they say as the one version of truth that is true and ominously warns that ‘democracy is in danger’ and that ‘Britain could learn a lot from this study’.…’study’?…..he means of course very partisan, one-sided polemic.

He tells us that they ask if a modern American President could destroy American democracy and then lays out the criteria they used to judge Trump by…naturally this is window dressing for they used no criteria other than their own hatred of Trump and Republicans.

He tells us that every democracy needs ‘gatekeepers’ who can identify the anti-democrats and tyrants before they can establish themselves in the system and take it over.  What are the criteria they use to identify these anti-democrats?

Do they reject, or have a weak commitment to, the democratic rules of the game?

Do they deny the legitimacy of their opponents?

Do they tolerate, or even encourage, the use of violence?

Are they ready to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media?

Marr tells us ‘They find Trump guilty on every count’.  Really? Evidence?  He certainly denies Clinton’s legitimacy to be President but that is run of the mill politics and quite possiby fully jusitified….the other three accusations are based upon the author’s own prejudices aganst Trump.

The problem with Marr’s approach is that it is entirely from the liberal’s very prejudiced and blinkered viewpoint…as said he claims the Republicans are a racist white supremacist party and it is they who created the dangerous politics of ‘identity’.  He has correctly identified ‘identity politics’ as at the heart of the problem but not who created that problem.  It is pretty much orthodox thinking that the Left abandoned the working class and class war when they realised that capitalism had dragged the poor out of poverty and had given them lives far, far better than anything they had known before and that they were just as likely to vote for Right-wing parties as Left.  What to do?  The Left decided that the battle to derail the West would continue with new soldiers….recruited from the various ethnic, religious, gender minority groups that could be exploited by apealing to their own self-interests and buying them with promises that the Left would put them first.  This is the old ‘divide and rule’ game that pits Black against White and Muslim against Christian and Straight against Gay.  A very dangerous game and one the BBC itself plays to the full….ironically in contradiction of its charter requirement to maintain a civil and cohesive society.

The lefty New Statesman claims  that Marr is ‘a transformative political editor for the BBC and possesses an original and free-thinking take on the issues of the day.’

Nothing could be further from the truth.  Marr peddles liberal/left orthodox ‘cure-all’ commentary like a doctor mechanically pushing anti-biotics…without intelligent consideration and without thought for the consequences.  Nothing original or free-thinking about Marr…nor is he a challenging interviewer for those of similar mindset to him…such as just about any Labour politician or anti-Trump polemicist.

Let’s go back and consider those four criteria Marr’s new friends put forward as a way of identifying anti-democratic tyrants who are a ‘danger to democracy’.  Do not all the criteria in fact define the Left’s approach to political discourse and indeed, defines the BBC’s own approach?

First…Do they reject, or have a weak commitment to, the democratic rules of the game?

The Left/BBC have no respect for democracy….witness their attempts to ignore and overturn the Brexit referendum result by any means possible, the cover up of the surge of hate and intimidation against Leave voters and instead reporting solely that it was Leave voters who were guilty of spreading racist hate across the UK, or the cover up of the violence and intimidation by Corbyn’s Brown Shirts as they try to cleanse his party of opponents by undemocratic means.  You can see a recent example of the Remain hate and violence in this report from Guido of a Tory Brexit supporting MP being attacked.

Second….Do they deny the legitimacy of their opponents?

Where to begin here…the Left/BBC have a long track record in demonising anyone who has views and opinions that are different from their own…Enoch Powell was just the start and acted as a template for all other actions to counter those who opposed mass immigration.  The liberal use of the slur ‘racist’ was used to shut down such people and has continued to this day….Farage, Tommy Robinson and Trump are the most prominent victims but it is a widespread tactic that is used on anyone to spread fear and self-censorship on the subject of immigration or Islam.  The BBC has also used similar tactics to try and silence the people who voice concern about the climate change narrative…they are lunatics, or deniers, or people who hate children or they shouldn’t be allowed to speak because they are not scientists…..never mind that BBC journalists are not scientists and indeed the politicians who make critical and expensive decisions based upon the science are not themselves scientists.

Leave voters also felt the firm smack of the BBC’s Stalinist counter-punch as it mobilised its pro-EU propaganda machine and derided them as ignorant and uneducated little Englanders, denouncing them as racists who had ‘made Britain a nastier and more racist place’.  The message being….Leave voters were too thick and bigoted to be allowed to vote.  Delegitimising them?  Just a bit.

The BBC that relentlessly portrays Farage and Leave voters as ‘far-right’, fascists or even Nazis and warns that Brexit is taking us back to the ‘thirties’…in other words to an era when the Nazis were in power and 6 million Jews were murdered by them.  No attempt to draw genuine comparisons between what Corbyn’s supporters are doing with the rise of Hitler and the rise across the world of socilaist utopias in which millions upon millions of people were slaughtered by those socialists or reduced to poverty and misery in police states.

Third….Do they tolerate, or even encourage, the use of violence?

Well we’ve seen the prevalent, casual incitement to kill Trump from the liberal/left, including those at the BBC, attacks on Tommy Robinson are celebrated and the use of violence by the street thugs of UAF are tolerated and indeed whitewashed from the news….the EDL was always to blame for violence despite it being almost 100% the UAF who started it….for the cameras of course.

The BBC covered up Corbyn’s support for terrorism during the election and went so far as to champion his claim that he was against it after the Manchester bomb went off.  The BBC was itself guilty of giving support to the IRA cause as of course Corbyn was, not to mention its cheerleading for Islamist extremists…who apparently should be seen as the new Churchills, Ghandis and Mandelas.  The BBC that gives publicity to anti-Semitic terror groups and suggests that Jews in Europe are legitimate targets because of what Israel does in Gaza [all bad of course].

So  the BBC clearly tolerates and encourages violence.

Fourth….Are they ready to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media?

The BBC that has tried remorselessly to shut down the Murdoch media and is even now generating an anti-Social Media narrative intended to rein that in?  The BBC that has demonised those whose opinions it does not like and tries to silence them and force them off all platforms for voicing their opinions and views?  The BBC that consistently attacks the Right-Wing press, the Mail in particular?  The attempt by the Corbynistas to silence the Mail by intimidating its advertisers?    The BBC that refuses to consider complaints against it in any meaningful way instead being immediately defensive, dismissive and obstructive…thus curtailing your legitimate attempts to get any redress or force the BBC to change its ways.

 

The BBC is guilty of all four charges…thus we must conclude, using Marr’s own criteria, that the BBC is a danger to democracy.  A conclusion you may have reached a long time ago if you have been reading this site and others like it for any length of time.

 

 

 

 

The (almost) complete history of ‘fake news’

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Just a week ago the BBC were investigating the history of ‘Fake news‘…..

In record time, the phrase morphed from a description of a social media phenomenon into a journalistic cliche and an angry political slur. How did the term “fake news” evolve – and what’s next in the world of disinformation?

It is, you may be surprised to hear, not a bad run down of how ‘fake news’ came to be the battle cry of the liberal elite…it does look mostly at Trump but concludes he’s not guilty…it was his opponents, including in the media, who weaponised the phrase to discredit him….

Nothing new here

Misinformation, spin, lies and deceit have of course been around forever. But what Silverman and others uncovered was a unique marriage between social media algorithms, advertising systems, people prepared to make stuff up to earn some easy cash and an election that gripped a nation and much of the world.

In the wake of President Trump’s victory, BBC Trending delved into the huge world of pro-Trump Facebook groups. Inside those hyper-partisan spaces there were some outright falsehoods circulating.

But most of the content was more traditional political communication: puffery, drumbeating, and opponent-slagging. There were memes showing Trump as a fearless leader, support for his pledges to deport illegal immigrants, and potted biographies describing the candidate as “the very definition of the American success story.” It was hardly balanced stuff – but nor did much of it qualify as “fake news”.

But pundits scrambling to explain the shock result (and in many cases, their own follies) turned to “fake news” as one possible explanation.

It admits Clinton used the phrase before Trump…despite many a BBC journo accusing Trump…

To say that President Trump was the first politician to deploy the term would itself be, well, “fake news”.

On 8 December 2016, Hillary Clinton made a speech in which she mentioned “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year.”

President-elect Trump took up the phrase the following month, in January 2017, a little over a week before taking office.

Also it noted that ‘fake news’ may not have much impact at all in elections…Nick Robinson, Emma Barnett and Co might do well to note that before claiming that Russian fake news won the US election and Brexit….which of course is fake news from the BBC itself….

The researchers also found that the visits were highly concentrated – 10% of readers made 60% of the visits. And crucially, the researchers concluded “fake news does not crowd out hard news consumption.”

“The reach was relatively wide, but not so deep,” Mantzarlis says. “It’s quite a big step further to say, are people voting on this, making decisions on it.”

“To say it’s poisoning our democracy or it won this guy or the other guy an election, we need a lot more research to be able to say that.”

But one thing is missing from this analysis…the BBC…of course….stories such as this from the Sun today:

LABOUR LEFTIE LEWIS’ BIAS

Labour frontbencher Clive Lewis admits broadcasting biased news reports while working as BBC journalist

A LABOUR frontbencher has admitted broadcasting biased news reports while working as a BBC journalist.

And last night the revelation by shadow treasury minister Clive Lewis plunged the corporation into a damaging storm.

Mr Lewis told left-wing Momentum members: “I was able to use bias in my reports by giving less time to one than the other.

“I reported on both but the angle and words and the language I used — I know the pictures I used — I was able to project my own particular political positions on things in a very subtle way.”

Mr Lewis made his damning comments last September at a Momentum rally in Brighton.

They were discovered in a secret recording and will be a huge embarrassment to BBC bosses.

Tory MP Damian Collins said: “He’s boasting about undermining one of our great institutions.”

A spokesman for Mr Lewis declined to comment. A BBC spokesperson said: “Our editorial guidelines ensure impartiality.”

Remarkably, or not, you won’t find the story on the BBC website.

A Labour MP admits that when he was a BBC journalist he used the platform to spread his own propaganda and the BBC doesn’t immediately investigate and put it up as frontpage news?  If it had been a Tory MP who had worked for the Mail, a Murdoch paper or Sky I can’t imagine the BBC being so coy.

Then again that’s why this site exists, because BBC bias is real, pervasive and dangerous to British society and democracy….just a few days ago David Attenborough was boasting how his nature programmes had changed government policy but he then also added that people must be careful who they vote for….given that Harrabin and Co seem to think that the Tories are toxic for the environment I imagine Attenborough isn’t suggesting you vote Tory when the chance arises.