‘The Long View’  on R4 this morning discussed nations who ignore carnage and human rights violations in other countries because they support the country committing the violence.

The examples compared were Syria today and Putin’s Russia blocking moves to change regime there, and the Ottoman Empire attacking Bulgaria in 1876 whilst Britain turned a blind eye because the Turks were a buffer preventing Russian encroachment into the Balkans and the Middle East.

That’s almost by the by and all very interesting but there was another thread…that of the effect of the media on government policy….The British ‘Daily News‘, a liberal paper reporting on atrocities from Bulgaria made it difficult for the British government to carry on ignoring events and eventually they were forced to intervene.

The Syrian ‘civil war’ is perhaps an unusual choice. The Syrian conflict has only been going for a few months and therefore there has been relatively little historic media coverage and seen little commensurate change in public opinion and government policy…unlike say in Israel.

The war against Israel has been continuing for over 60 years and in that time the effect of media coverage is perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the conflict.

The media coverage itself is highly controversial and has sparked many inquiries…such as the BBC’s secretive Balen Report.

It is odd that a very recent conflict such as Syria’s should suddenly be the subject of a BBC discussion on the power of the media when there is a much more obvious and powerful example in Israel.

BBC reporter Paul Wood told us ‘What a powerful medium television is…a single image can change people’s perceptions…it can change the whole conversation.’

He was asked ‘Do you attempt to move Public and Political opinion?’

He replied ‘You become a government employee, a propagandist if you do so’…but he was happy if his reporting had an impact…‘and we are all shallow egotists…we try to be impartial but we like to make an impact.’

He went on to say that in Yugoslavia there was a false report of a massacre that went out on the news services….but once established as false it is too late…‘People forget the attribution but they remember the ‘massacre”

…and of course I suspect some news services know this and publish regardless because they know even after a retraction the image or idea is still out there in the minds of viewers and readers…that little suspicion that always makes them doubt.

His final point was ‘Crucially you have to get it right.’

The problem of course is that so often BBC journalists don’t get it right…don’t even attempt to get it right…no one can forget Orla Guerin’s pro Palestinian propaganda from Jenin.

The effect of French TVs showing of the staged death of Muhammed al Durra and blaming Israeli soldiers, but likely killed by other Palestinians and not Israelis, set the scene for the second Intifada and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza….which then, due to adverse media coverage, led to massive anti-Jewish feeling around the world.

The BBC’s coverage of Israeli actions has been unremittingly hostile to Israel and highly critical whilst ignoring or downplaying Palestinian atrocities.

This plays out into the wider world and is why schools in the UK have to have security guards, security fencing and bomb proof glass….in contrast the BBC panders to Muslim sensibilities and fails entirely to challenge Muslim assertions and explanations about their actions.

When a single image can change people’s perceptions and ‘the whole conversation’ it is crucial that they get it right and not start off a violent chain reaction resulting from either a single careless image or deliberate misreporting.

People die because reporters lie.

The BBC’s ‘Wake Up to Money’ programme on 5Live finally woke up to the world and started examining the claims that the Labour government may have urged Barclays to manipulate the Libor rate.

Better late than never…and fair enough it was a rigorous interview with Andrew Sentance, former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member, who said the Bank was “monitoring the level of Libor very closely at the height of the financial crisis”….But he said he “certainly didn’t know anything [about rate fixing].”

That was from this write up (I presume by the WUTM team)…but misses one thing Sentance said…’Nobody (in government) questioned the Libor rate.’

Now we know already that’s not true as ‘senior figures in Whitehall’ were questioning Barclays figures and reports of Libor rate fixing were in the papers….including the Wall Street Journal…out of which WUTM quoted this morning……‘Questions about Libor were raised as far back as November (2007), at a Bank of England meeting in which United Kingdom banks, the firms that process bank trades and central bank officials discussed the recent financial turmoil. According to minutes of the meeting, “several group members thought that Libor fixings had been lower than actual traded interbank rates through the period of stress.” ‘

The question has to be why has the BBC not been all over this story before now…Miliband, Labour leader, has been ranting on about it and calling for criminal prosecutions for bankers involved….and yet the possibility that in fact, the Labour government was itself involved has been ignored by the BBC….a big story surely?   If Bankers should be jailed for fixing Libor should not the politicians who may have told them to do it also be locked up?

If this had been a ‘Tory scandal’ the BBC would have been speculating like mad and going over every possible scenario and pontificating about which Tory ministers would be jailed.

Miliband has had a good press all day for his speech on banking with little analysis of its content or whether in fact the policies he proposes aren’t already put underway by the Coalition.

Sheila Fogarty brought on Labour’s Chuka Umunna and someone from the New Economic Foundation…a group which is an almost  anarchist economic think tank….much liked by Gordon Brown.

This is their recipe for getting us out of the financial mire that Labour left us in:  ‘We must work 20 hours/week to cut CO2, materialism and have a fairer distribution of work.’

NEF was founded in 1986 by the leaders of The Other Economic Summit (TOES) with the aim of working for a “new model of wealth creation, based on equality, diversity and economic stability”.

 This group has worked with the BBC and  Joe Smith (of CMEP and Harrabin fame) on climate change issues and policy development.

Hardly a credible group to ask to comment on banking.

Perhaps the BBC would like to invite on Boris Johnson who reminds us that we need banks….‘Stop bashing the bankers – we have no future without them.’

The BBC reduces the argument to black and white…bankers are bad people and we need to stop them earning money…for a major news organisation to adopt an attitude so naive and simplistic and that wouldn’t look out of place on any student demo is a betrayal of all the BBC is supposed to stand for and of the viewers and listeners who rely on it for accurate and balanced information and comment….using which they base their own judgements and decisions…and voting.

John Redwood writes an open letter to the new DG, George Entwhistle.

Unfortunately he falls into the usual Tory trap of being too polite and seems unwilling to really point the finger in an accusatory manner…Dan Hodges expresses thoughts I have long held about the Tories and why they so often do not get the good headlines…they lack the will to win and the ability to land a killer blow….most importantly they lack the will to tell the ‘grand lie’ that Labour so often does…..remember the one about the Tories ‘cutting’ £35 billion off the NHS budget…when in fact the truth was that Labour had promised to increase spending by £35 bn and the Tories refused to match that…but to maintain the spending on the NHS then current.

Labour gets away with it of course because they have a tame BBC who doesn’t ask too many awkward questions….it was ITV’s Nick Robinson who revealed Labour’s ‘trick’ not the BBC.

Are Tories too polite?…Well look at Redwood’s first conclusion…’I do not believe that BBC broadcasters overall have a systematic bias pro Labour or anti Conservative. ‘

That is clearly totally wrong….and just means that the BBC can carry on on its merry way….Redwood goes on to say near the end…‘There is above all at the BBC an assumption that state spending is good and more state spending is better. Rarely does the BBC give proper airtime to the case for greater freedom and lower taxes. So many interviews are arranged to regret “the cuts” and to find governmental answers to social and family problems.’  which shows he thinks the BBC are in fact pro Labour’s policies…so why not say so instead of allowing the BBC to hide behind his timid and irresolute criticisms that fail to point the finger and hold them to account?

If the Tories are unwilling to stand up to the BBC then they are doomed to always struggle handicapped by a bad ‘press’ from Britain’s most powerful news source.

‘Today’ (0850) finished with a bit of barefaced cheek, or complete idiocy, having decided to discuss Osborne’s sparring with Balls in the Commons.

The complaint was that surely the politicians should all be getting together to work out how to deal with the recession rather than engaging in a political bunfight, point scoring off each other.

Well perhaps…but then how does ‘Today’, Britain’s premier political bunfight programme in its own right,  justify spending 10 minutes talking about the bunfight instead of ‘Plan B’ or whichever Grand Economic Plan we’re going for now?

If it’s all about ‘the economy stupid’ why spend any time at all on Today talking about this….consider that they spent only 8 minutes talking about Social Care.

The sheer nonsense that was spoken  detracted from any usefulness that might possibly have been squeezed out of such a subject…. The Times’ Rachel Sylvester providing the comedy….arguing that we need more politeness and good manners to facilitate a reasoned debate…she then went off on one saying everybody, politicians and media, were all ‘Jerks’.

I would suggest part of the problem is a programme like ‘Today’ in which there is a very limited time given to each story regardless of significance and during that time a good portion is Humphrys and Co hamming it up enjoying the sound of their own voices with never ending questions and interruptions leaving politicians (Tories usually) with little time to say anything other than quick soundbites and digs at the Opposition.

So fewer, longer, more in depth reports with concise questions and time to give considered answers….and opposing views.

It is not the first time that Today seems to use an item to attack a particular target.

On Thursday Bob Diamond, Barclay’s ex boss, was turned over by the programme ostensibly discussing why during the Treasury Select Committee he called the questioners by their first names. 

Apparently this was a sign of contempt for them and a ‘truly sinister policy’.

Oddly the Committee calling him ‘Mr Diamond’ was showing their contempt for him…. as he was, according to Frank Dobson, a ‘thieving banker’.

When you  think that financial services provide the backbone to our nations finances you might think some of these politicians and media stars…whom we know are paragons of virtue themselves, would hold back on the highly inflammatory language that is designed to trash the City’s reputation.

When the credit rating agencies downgraded Barclays you would hope that would have opened their eyes a bit…no good cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Undoubtedly bankers need to row back on the riskier behaviour and become less venal…however we need banks…no banks, no mortgages, no pensions, no revenue stream for government, no NHS, no schools, no welfare..etc

Funny how I don’t remember Dobson shouting ‘thieving bankers’ when Labour’s coffers were overflowing with banker’s loot….or the BBC investigating Libor in 2007-08 when the scandal was being reported in the Press.

‘One lesson well understood in both Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany was that propaganda is most effective when it is backed by terror.’

In Britain today there are over two million National Socialists living mainly in large enclaves separate from the rest of British society.

Their lives are guided by the tenets taken from a book that orders them not to make friends with anyone who is not a National Socialist, in fact it instructs them to either kill non-followers or force to submit to slavery those who do not convert to their ideology…the book states that it is their duty to spread the ideology and one day to enforce it upon all.

The book praises the ‘family’ and women but ideally would prefer women to be kept at home as housewives…respected but different from men in authority and ability to run their own lives.

The book imposes severe and draconian punishments upon those who commit the ‘crime’ of adultery amongst others.

At times impatient ‘hotheads’ will strike out at the non National Socialist community and government using extreme violence in order to raise awareness and terrorise the Establishment into appeasing them…the Establishment ‘recognises’ their grievances and hands out money and positions of influence in order to ‘assure’ the minority that ‘they’ are part of the national concern.

The National Socialists use this influence and the undertow of  threat to continue to press for even more concessions towards their ideology and thus successfully subvert the established community by forcing them to slowly adopt, bit by bit, their National Socialist values…..such as dietary requirements, clothing and the compulsory learning of their ideology in schools…and all supported by a public service broadcaster which is worried that to be critical of the ideology would only antagonise the National Socialists and lead to anger, fear and violence from that community and possibly between communities.

Therefore in order to ‘keep the peace’ nothing will be said about an ideology that is at heart violent, racist and oppressive….nor the fact that it is spreading at an alarming rate.

The public broadcaster cannot ask the question ‘What will be the consequences to this country if the National Socialist community is allowed to grow and force its ideology upon an ever greater swathe of the country?’

It cannot ask the question because the answer would be terrifying for all who value democracy, liberty, and peace.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

Would the BBC throw Mein Kampf …

……”the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.”

in the Room 101 bin?

BBC refuses to screen play about Islamic threat to freedom of speech

Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general, says it will not screen the controversial ‘Can We Talk About This?’.

 ‘In the past, Thompson has conceded that there is “a growing nervousness about discussion about Islam”. He claimed that because Muslims were a religious minority in Britain, and also often from ethnic minorities, their faith should be given different coverage to that of more established groups.’

‘Today’ asks is Russia becoming more autocratic?:

‘Russia’s lower house of parliament will be debating a draft law later today which, if it is adopted, means that any non-governmental organisation in Russia receiving funding from abroad and considered to be engaged in political activity, will be labelled a “foreign agent”.

Vyacheslav Nikonov, an MP from the leading party and one of the authors of the bill believes Russian democracy “needs to be protected from outside influences”.

“When foreign money is involved in politics, that distorts the democratic process inside the country.”  

A more honest and informative question might be ‘Should foreign governments, NGOs or other organisations be allowed to fund political activities and ideological philosophies in another country?’

That would encompass not only the ‘autocratic’ Russians but also the overly tolerant Britain where Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Dubai etc are allowed to inject massive funds into Britain purely to finance what amounts to propaganda for the Islamic religion…through universities, other educational establishments, ‘information centres’, ‘community centres’ and of course Mosques….(and the new recruits to Islam are all too often all too easy to radicalise)

Is Britain too tolerant of foreign governments who peddle an ideology that is implacably opposed to our own way of life and values? 

Or how about the question ‘Is Saudi Arabia too autocratic because it doesn’t allow any religion other than Islam inside its borders?’

Odd how the BBC only pick on White, Christian Russia.

Questions you will never hear the BBC ask….unless the answer is scripted in advance….because the BBC does not have the interests of Britain at heart as Peter Oborne suggests. ….‘Surprisingly often, the BBC gives the impression that it does not care for Britain.’

Never quite sure about the ‘Wake Up To Money’ crew on 5Live….are they real financial journalists or have a bunch of school kids clambered in through a studio window  to  bluff us with gems from  Google and Wikipedia?

Apart from a determined effort to ignore any Labour connections to Libor a discussion about the new ‘Shard’ building in London caught my attention.

What really started me thinking was their comment that a flurry of property building always preceded a financial crash…ala 1930’s.

Which is strange really…because how often have we heard the BBC either agreeing not to disagree with Ed Balls or simply promoting the idea of a building ‘stimulus’ to get the economy growing?

Did that work for Ireland? Look at all those brand new empty housing estates….didn’t work for them did it?

Ireland of course borrowed to build which is the real killer…and one the BBC and Ed Balls seem pretty keen on.

The Irish ‘stimulus’ is the very thing that brought them to their knees.

What Balls’ scheme amounts to is a massive ‘make work’ enterprise, essentially unemployment benefit disguised as work…..how is the building funded? The distant prospect of Growth…..or so Brown promised…and that worked out well didn’t it?

Essentially that was ‘Casino’ government….gambling on all our futures…Brown broke the bank alright but it was us who lost our shirts whilst Brown jets around the world on a glorious reputation enthusiastically fluffed up and endorsed by the BBC.

Back to the drawing board.

Today had an expose of a national television network that broadcasts propaganda for the government…..Syrian  not British.

Ghatan Sleiba, an ex-correspondent from a government affiliated news channel, met with the BBC’s James Reynolds near Turkey’s border with Syria and provided some insights into how the government controls the media’s message.

The final words made me smile….

‘The people can’t trust us…..the Syrian nation is a simple nation…they believe who ever smiles on TV and they believe who ever cries on TV…God help the Syrian nation.’

In this article in GQ we are delivered of some fascinating facts about the Guardian:

Firstly that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger admits the BBC is VAST.

Second that the Guardian, losing £1 million a week, is sacrificing its journalism to make cuts…savings…or is it investing for the future?

Third that Labour’s Lord Myners…he of the Libor inquiry, was Chairman of the Guardian Media Group….and a tax avoider big style. (So let me get that right…Murdoch, boss of News International had too much influence on politicians…but the chairman of the Guardian Group is made a Labour minister and it’s OK?)

The Article:

The BBC: ‘Rusbridger’s poker face falters in irritation when GQ puts this to him, and he rolls his eyes. “Think about the people we’re now up against,” he says. “Murdoch: vast. The Barclay brothers, [owners of the Telegraph Group and the Spectator] immensely rich. The BBC: vast. The Daily Mail, enormous company. And then the Googles and so on.’

The ‘cuts’:　The strong presence of the National Union of Journalists at the Guardian can make this change slow going, which is a real problem for an organisation that desperately wants the flexibility to adapt. By agreement with the union, the forced redundancy of a single member triggers an immediate strike ballot – and the embarrassment a strike would cause the paper would be immense. The only option this leaves is an expensive voluntary redundancy programme, and as the former Observer reporter says, “with voluntary redundancies, you lose people who are in a good position to get jobs elsewhere. You don’t lose the people who you really need to lose.”

Two hundred and fifty staff have taken voluntary redundancy since 2009, so some parts of the office are now eerily quiet

The atmosphere among Guardian staff is turbulent. A reporter tells GQ: “There’s a lot of grumbling. People don’t like what the management is doing. They get that we’re losing money hand over fist and we need to stop the losses as much as we can, but they think that what’s being sacrificed is journalism.”

Lord Myners: ‘In 2008, on the eve of the financial crash, GMG – led by then GMG chairman Paul Myners and then CEO Carolyn McCall – took out as much debt as it could at the group’s biggest asset, Trader Media Group, then sold just under half of it to private-equity firm Apax Partners. Then it co-invested about half of the windfall into co-ownership of Emap, a business-to-business publishing and media company, in a deal that valued Emap at more than £1bn.’

Paul Myners, Baron Myners:, CBE (born 1 April 1948) was the Financial Services Secretary (sometimes referred to as City Minister[1]) in HM Treasury, the UK’s finance ministry, during the Labour Government of Gordon Brown.[2] He held the position from October 2008 until May 2010, and was made a life peer in consequence of his appointment, as he was not an elected Member of Parliament. He also served on the Prime Minister’s National Economic Council.

Immediately prior to his ministerial appointment he was Chairman of the Guardian Media Group, publisher of The Guardian and The Observer newspapers,

In March 2009 the Sunday Times revealed that Lord Myners had been chairman of Aspen Insurance Holdings, a Bermuda-based insurance company, for five years, avoiding more than £100 million a year in tax. The Times went on to report that Myners was also chairman of Liberty Ermitage, an offshore fund based in Jersey. Besides this, Gartmore, the fund management company that Lord Myners chaired for 15 years, also ran a Jersey-based offshore business.[15]

Going to hit you again with another Libor tale of woe….It all seems plenty complicated but I have been trying to make some sense of it….so here is my very basic take on it….and a quick summary …Labour is lying, and the BBC, at least in many areas are not doing the homework or are deliberately downplaying Labour’s role in this…with some exceptions.

It is a curious thing but either by design or as a sign of dysfunction the BBC frequently doesn’t seem to draw together all the disparate parts of a story to make a coherent whole….often you hear the ‘expert’ journalist make his analysis but by the time it filters through to the news and other programmes that assessment has changed or been ignored…especially if it doesn’t fit the ‘usual’ BBC narrative…is that down to deliberate decisions by editors or merely lack of care?

After Bob Diamond appeared at the parliamentary committee today the BBC TRUMPETED that he had admitted that he didn’t believe that the message he received was an instruction to manipulate the Libor rate….this of course has been the BBC’s line all day….therefore it was solely down to Diamond that his bank went rogue.

But that is far from the whole truth.

This is all pretty damning of the BBC’s coverage…it is failing entirely to adequately inform us of what really went on.  I know nothing about inter bank lending rates and the ins and outs of bank regulation, however just reading a wide selection of information and trying to make sense of it I come to the conclusion perhaps Barclays is not quite so guilty as the BBC and Labour would like us to believe.

In April 2008 the Wall Street journal published this, along with many other articles by others, that said there was huge doubt over the credibility of the Libor rate…ie it was being rigged too low.　

April 16, 2008

LIBOR FOG

Bankers Cast Doubt On Key Rate Amid Crisis

LONDON — One of the most important barometers of the world’s financial health could be sending false signals.

In a development that has implications for borrowers everywhere, from Russian oil producers to homeowners in Detroit, bankers and traders are expressing concerns that the London inter-bank offered rate, known as Libor, is becoming unreliable.

The growing suspicions about Libor’s veracity suggest that banks’ troubles could be worse than they’re willing to admit.

Bankers and other market participants have quietly expressed concerns to the British Bankers’ Association, which oversees Libor, about whether banks are reporting rates that reflect their true borrowing costs, according to a person familiar with the matter and to government documents. The BBA is now investigating to identify potential problems, the person says.

Questions about Libor were raised as far back as November, at a Bank of England meeting in which United Kingdom banks, the firms that process bank trades and central bank officials discussed the recent financial turmoil. According to minutes of the meeting, “several group members thought that Libor fixings had been lower than actual traded interbank rates through the period of stress.”

A spokesman for the BBA, John Ewan, said the trade group is monitoring the situation. “We want to ensure that our rates are as accurate as possible, so we are closely watching the rates banks contribute,” Mr. Ewan said. “If it is deemed necessary, we will take action to preserve the reputation and standing in the market of our rates.” Libor is expected to be on the agenda of a bankers’ association board meeting on Wednesday.’

Now today Diamond said he warned Labour about this but they ignored him (presumably because it suited them…a low Libor meant more confidence in the banks):

‘The Barclays executive said that he was concerned in autumn 2008 that the Government may seek to nationalise the bank if they thought Barclays was struggling to raise money.

At the time, Barclays was declaring a Libor rate higher than other banks – which may have been interpreted that it was in financial difficulty. In fact, Mr Diamond believed this was because other banks were manipulating their rates to be lower.

Mr Diamond also added that Barclays had repeatedly warned regulators in Britain and America about the problems with the Libor rate.

“There was an issue out there and it should have been dealt with,” he said. “We were disappointed.” ‘

So it was common knowledge that the banks were manipulating the Libor rate by at least April 2008….Diamond was warning Labour but they ignored him. 

In other words it was Labour that was condoning the manipulation of the Libor.

It was Labour and the Bank of England that were questioning why Barclays had a too high Libor rate…which presumably was in fact a more true reflection of Barclay’s position than other bank’s rates.

Why do this? Did they want him to lower that rate…somehow?

Shriti Vadera says it was the government’s job to be ‘concerned’ but the follow on from ‘concerns’ is surely some sort of action to remedy those concerns? What did Labour do…especially as Treasury committee chairman Andrew Tyrie says:

‘The memo reads like it was a ‘nod and wink’ to rig the rate.’

At least one at the BBC believes there is more to this than Labour is letting on:

afneil Andrew Neil To say there was no ‘instruction’ from Tucker to Barclays to lowball libor is Aunt Sally. V clear from Diamond note it was v strong steer.

Oh and look another doubter of the prevailing BBC line:

8.15 BBC Business Editor Robert Peston has been speaking to Radio 4 on the Barclays scandal:

“It’s inconceivable that the Bank of England and Barclays did not have a conversation around how to get Libor rates lower, and that Paul Tucker gave a hint Barclays should be doing this. Banks regard Paul Tucker as a hero for doing this.’　

So all in all it seems the Labour story might be unravelling but that there seems some confliction at the BBC on how to report this.