Author Archives: Andrew

– you know, the one that the BBC did so much to promote in advance with daily mentions on BBC Views Online, complete with directions to the site (though stopping short of “and it’s handy for those coming by air too – just look for the BBC helicopter above the camp!” – though that wouldn’t have been out of character), I was surprised that we didn’t see this prominent banner in the BBC’s extensive coverage of the protest, as featured in the Uxbridge Gazette, the local newspaper:

“Revolution not runways” – revealing a wider agenda perhaps?

It’s surprising that the BBC missed this one, particularly since they ‘invested’ so much tellytax cash in the coverage of the story, a joint production with the Federation of Soap Dodgers and Association of Welfare Scroungers.

Thank you to an anonymous reader. Picture courtesy of the Uxbridge Gazette.

has joked at the Edinburgh Festival that:

Everyone at CBBC is either gay or childless and don’t like kids.

…before going on to say:

Still, at least we’re better than Palestinian children’s TV, which gets kids to sing songs about AK-47 rifles.

…which is interesting, because for some strange reason the BBC always seems to be looking the other way when Middle Eastern broadcasters spew hatred about other people and nations at their viewers, children or not.

Does anyone fancy starting a book on:

a) whether or not this story is mentioned on BBC Views Online;

b) whether or not they’ll mention O’Brien’s reference to Hamas and AK47s?

Thank you to reader Anonanon for the link.

, invites us to send a message to the TV industry on the BBC Editors blog for the mediagrauniad Edinburgh International TV Junket Festival this weekend (though Peter missed out the mediagrauniad bit for some reason).

Biased BBC reader Rockall tried to send a message, but was yet another victim of the BBC’s apparently buggy comment submission process. Knowing how keenly Newsnight follow Biased BBC, here’s Rockall’s comment for Peter:

I haven’t got a problem with most TV – its rubbish largely, but that’s fine.

I really resent the BBC though. You think you are there to make Britain better. Our self appointed moral guardians. You are so arrogant.

I have to pay for your services but you don’t speak for me.

At least if we don’t like what politicians are doing or saying we can vote them out. You are completely unaccountable.

You control the news agenda in the UK. You cannot control the internet. People can finally find out about all your grubby doings. Although it never appeared on the 6 o’clock news covering up the Balen report was a massive own goal. It showed you as a bunch of hypocrites rather than seekers of truth. I’m sure that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Everyone knows what the BBC thinks about America, Israel, Christianity, the Monarchy, the Conservative Party, President Bush, Multiculturalism, Immigration, Green Issues, Fidel Castro, Palestine, Islam, the European Union and the Labour Party so I don’t need to say what I think the BBC position is on any of them.

The reason I hate the BBC is perhaps because I once held it in such high regard. You were supposed to be working on behalf of the ordinary people of Britain. You sold us out and laughed at us while you did it.

Like I’m sure you are doing now – laughing into your cappuccinos.

…sentiments shared by many – especially paragraph six, “Everyone knows what the BBC thinks about…”. Sums up the BBC nicely. Will that do Peter?

, reckons that Truth is the first Casualty at the BBC, as he weighs into the debate about the BBC’s decision to change a Casualty episode depicting an attack by an Islamist terrorist into an animal rights attack:

I’m only surprised that they didn’t rule that the bus station bombing in Casualty should be carried out by “militants” linked to UKIP, demanding a referendum on the European Constitution.

Turning to the controversy over BBC message boards and the disparity of action against religious bigotry, he asks pertinently:

Anyway, when did it become part of the remit for licence-payers to provide a noticeboard for anonymous anti-Semites?

And then reminds us about the BBC’s apparent problem with the Balen Report, the one that they have gone to so much trouble and tellytax expense to keep under wraps:

Meanwhile, the BBC is still refusing to publish a report it commissioned into whether or not there is systematic anti-Israel bias in its news coverage from the Middle East.

So we’ll take that as a “yes” then.

I don’t like to indulge in gratuitous Beeb-bashing, because there’s so much good about the organisation.

But it is too big, too unaccountable and too riddled with an institutionalised mindset which holds that it’s fine to heap scorn on Christians and Jews, but cravenly appeases Muslims at every turn.

The BBC is a publicly-funded body which has a duty to be even-handed to all and not pander to the political prejudices of those who work for it.

If it can’t manage that, it should be broken up and sold off.

Do read the rest.

, Associate Editor of The Times, reckons We’re to blame for BBC bias. It’s an interesting, and hopefully wry, take on the causes of the BBC’s cultural mentality. Here’s the key part:

If Zimbardo is right, then the political slant of BBC reports is not the result (or at least, not mainly the result) of the disposition of the BBC’s reporters. It comes about because of the role they see themselves playing.

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards and the prisoners behaved very differently, despite being similar types of people. Each of them behaved as they thought they were supposed to. This is the key. Understanding BBC bias and how to change it depends on understanding how their reporters come upon the idea that they should behave as they do.

And I have a controversial candidate for the powerful group helping to make the BBC reporters biased against Israel. It’s us.

Listen to an immigrant talking to their British-born children. The parent talks with the accent of their homeland, but the children don’t. They talk with the accent of their peers, their mates.

This is how the BBC works. It is a very large, very diffuse organisation. There is no single source of power. In these circumstances, BBC reporters are constantly looking around, eyeing their mates, trying to work out what their identity is, what a good reporter should be saying, how people like them are supposed to behave.

I can see some merit in Danny’s explanation for the BBC’s collective groupthink, though I’m sure Danny is being facetious with his suggestion that the BBC would become less biased if the BBC’s critics ceased to point out its bias.

To my mind, at least half of the problem is just getting the BBC to accept that they do have problem with institutional bias, that they are indeed out of step with the perceptions of their telly-taxpaying customers. Only then will the BBC even begin to do something about the problem.

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Max for the link.

linking to the Telegraph’s editorial Terror victims are BBC licence-payers, too, the Telegraph has more coverage of the BBC drops Casualty suicide bomb plotline story that has been discussed in the comments here. Lord Tebbit is quoted:

People were perfectly free during the violence in Northern Ireland to produce dramas about terrorism for which presumably they might have been accused of stereotyping IRA terrorists or even suggesting that all Catholics were terrorists. What is the difference here?
The BBC exists in a world of New Labour political correctness.

Meanwhile, Telegraph writer Damian Thompson has a new blog piece about how the BBC’s coverage of Islam is gutless, particularly in contrast to that of Channel 4, producer of documentaries such as Undercover Mosque, a hidden-camera investigation of what some Imams preach to their faithful.

came with this Radio Times warning:

I strongly suggest you keep your finger hovering over the mute button on your TV remote controls, because you’ll want to silence, yet again, the witless and sneering commentary that’s characterised the series so far.

My time watching the programme was interrupted (“Daddy, I can’t get to sleep”, “Well, come and watch this BBC tosh then, that’ll do the trick” etc.), and I got back to the programme as it reached Richard Attenborough’s classic Gandhi to hear (from memory):

[Gandhi] had been radicalised by his experience of apartheid,
a system that was still getting tacit support during Mrs. Thatchers time…

(or it might have been “from Mrs. Thatcher’s government”)… yet another revisionist BBC sneer-in-passing, aimed at smearing the reputation of Margaret Thatcher and her government.

Update: Ever knowledgeable, Peregrine points out that apartheid wasn’t introduced until 1948, the year of Gandhi’s murder, at the age of 78.

, reports a BBC Views Online front page ‘highlight box’, describing the featured story as:

Tale of two cities: ‘Not like in Dickens, kind of American’ – a visitor’s view of Brum.

…except that in the story, Not like in Dickens, it turns out that the visitor the BBC refers to is actually an immigrant – not normally a synonym for visitor, except perhaps in BBC La-la-land.

in a current BBC Views Online (Don’t) Have Your Say discussion:

Is manned space travel still relevant in the 21st century? Is it worth the financial burden or just a country’s expensive ego trip – a hangover from 60s?

…which was magically stealth edited into:

Is manned space travel still relevant in the 21st century and worth the cost? Is the risk involved in space missions worth it?

…except that the evidence is still plain to see in the Readers Recommended view of the discussion. As Bodo says, the public reaction makes Biased BBC look tame:

Is it just a country’s expensive ego trip? So let me get this straight, NASA goes to space and does cutting edge research and this is referred to as a country’s expensive ego trip? The BBC truly has no shame.

Tom

Seeing as the U.S is the primary country doing space exploration, I wonder how quickly the BBC will ‘aid’ this HYS [to] degrade into another U.S bashing session…

Azam Azam

Oh lord, I can only predict the comments from the communists “Space travel is a waste when the money could be redistributed to the poor.” Sorry my pinko friends, human curiousity is very strong, I think space travel should be expanded. I cannot wait for humans to head to mars and further. I cannot wait to find life on other planets. If you want to help the poor, donate money, don’t expect us to stop spending money so you can sing the Internationale.

Steven Coran

Good lord, such bitter grapes. I thought champagne socialism and government funded media was a hangover from the ’60’s. This is not your “financial burden”, you have different “priorities” (How’s that working for you?) but you still get the benefits of our “expensive ego trip”.

Dale Rider

Here at Biased BBC we invite you to join in our own Have Your Say in the comments. Here’s the question, after a couple of BBC-style Wikipedia edits (in bold):

Is the BBC still relevant in the 21st century? Is it worth the financial burden, or just a country’s expensive ego trip – a hangover from the 30s?

, in a good article recounting his experience of the media and the BBC in particular while trying to put forward serious policy proposals:

I was delighted that halfway through the week Helen Boaden, a senior manager at the BBC, graciously admitted it had been wrong to run footage of me singing, from 14 years ago, as their lead-in to their first report. I am the only politician who has regularly been given eternal youth by the BBC in this way.

I do not recall, every time Neil Kinnock made a statement as EU Commissioner, the BBC running the clip of him slipping on the beach. Gordon Brown’s statements are not introduced by running the recent pictures of him picking his nose on the front bench. I look forward to fairer treatment in future.

Redwood goes on to say:

Labour has persuaded many that if you want lower tax rates you must cut public spending – and of course you would cut teachers and nurses in their parallel universe, rather than management consultants, bureaucracy and publicity.

I have gone hoarse explaining that Ireland cut tax rates on business, and lowered capital taxes, and enjoyed a large surge in revenue from the extra growth it generated. Ireland shows you can have it all – much lower tax rates, and more revenue and public spending per head. After I explain this, I am normally asked again how many teachers I want to sack to pay for the cuts!

…which is so typical of the underlying presumptions and prejudice of the BBC’s leftist public-sector mentality. Do read the rest.

P.S. Still at the Telegraph: See how they spin: see comments 7, 8 & 9 on Damian Thompson’s Telegraph blog of our story about the BBC’s Wikipedia hypocrisy. Nice try Martin! (Martin is actually a reasonable chap, avid blogger and sometime participant in the comments here at Biased BBC. Martin also wrote an interesting series of blog posts about Biased BBC earlier this year).

Thank you to an anonymous reader for the first Telegraph link.