Author Archives: David Vance

ALL A MATTER OF SUBJECTIVITY?

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Here’s an interesting letter of complaint from one of our readers to the BBC;

“Hello, like many of your readers/contributors, I listened to the surreal experience that was the Today programme last saturday (20.08.11) which studiously avoided any mention of fridays arrest of an officer involved in Operation Weeting. This prompted me to make a first time complaint to the bbc as follows.

‘Dear sirs, given the importance the BBC and radio 4s Today programme has placed on coverage of phone hacking over the past few weeks, I listened to the whole of the Today programme on 20th August to find out more about the arrest of one of the police officers involved in Operation Weeting for allegedly leaking information to the press. I was very surprised to discover it did not warrant any mention whatsoever. Perhaps you could explain the reason for this.’

Here is the reply I received today:

Dear Mr XXXXXXX,

Reference CAS-947408-F931RG

Thank you for contacting us regarding ‘Today’, broadcast on 20 August.

I understand you were disappointed with the content of this programme.

Choosing the stories to include in our bulletins and the length of time devoted to them is a subjective matter and one which we know not every listener will feel we get right every time. Factors such as whether it is news that has just come in and needs immediate coverage, how unusual the story is and how much national interest there is in the subject matter will all play a part in deciding the level of coverage and where it falls within a bulletin.

Essentially this is a judgement call rather than an exact science but BBC News does appreciate the feedback when listeners feel we may have overlooked or neglected a story. To this end, I can assure you that I’ve registered your comments on our audience log.

This is a daily internal report of audience feedback which is made available to all BBC programme makers and commissioning executives, including their senior management. It ensures that your concerns are considered across the BBC.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.

Kind Regards

Jamie Patterson
BBC Complaints
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

NB This is sent from an outgoing account only which is not monitored. You cannot reply to this email address but if necessary please contact us via our webform quoting any case number we provided.

So that’s alright then?

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SHAMNESTY KNOW BEST

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Been away all day but listened to a debate on Radio5 Live this morning concerning the fate that awaits Ghadaffi. Best laugh was when the Amnesty International mouthpiece came on. Her view was that he should be tried in the Hague because there were “problems” with the Libyan Judicial system. It would take a few years to fix them to the high standard that Amnesty deigns to accept. She was also adamant that the Death Penalty should NOT be applied and for good measure she confirmed to a breathless BBC interviewer that Saddam was “denied justice”. She repeated this for all to hear. However a Libyan came on and he denounced her typical Amnesty arrogance in no uncertain terms and with considerable success, to the evident concern of the BBC who swoon at the court of Shamnesty. It strikes me that Shamnesty are fully aligned with the BBC and so it was very uncomfortable to hear an ordinary Libyan declare that his country was quite capable of putting Ghadaffi on trial, with execution as one very possible outcome.

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PRESSURE DROP

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There was an interesting story on the news this morning about the best way to diagnose people to see if they suffer from high blood pressure.

A quarter of patients may find visiting a GP stressful, leading to misdiagnosis and being given drugs they do not need.Patients in England and Wales will be offered extra checks using a mobile device that records blood pressure over 24 hours, says the watchdog NICE.

The BBC response? Can this be afforded because of the dreaded (but imaginary) cuts?

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A RIGHT SIR ANTHONY….

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We are not the only people who see the bias that so characterises the BBC output. Take the recent Radio 4 programme “The Reunion”. A B-BBC contributor notes…

“I didn’t listen to this programme because you can only take so much…and you know exactly the direction these fellow travellers will take when discussing Communism….lucky for me Charles Moore has done the hard work and has put the BBC well and truly in the stocks and brought such ambivalence toward ideological and actual threats to this nation up to date:

‘When will the BBC ever tell the truth about Anthony Blunt?’ Charles Moore reviews an edition of The Reunion (Radio 4) that focused on the disgraced art critic and his treachery.

 ‘Blunt was a virtually innocent victim, we were told, and the only villain was the press”.

The Reunion propagated the theory that spying for the Soviets in the Thirties and Forties was nothing worse than an excess of zeal. This is a shocking untruth. Hitler and Stalin were moral equivalents. Indeed, at the time when Blunt signed up for the Soviet Union, Stalin had actually killed far more people than Hitler because the Führer was only just getting into his stride. The BBC would (rightly) never dream of making a programme which sought to excuse traitors who worked for the Nazis.

In our generation, Blunt’s equivalents are the intellectual apologists for Islamist extremism. No doubt it will turn out that some of them worked secretly for countries like Iran, and no doubt, in due time, the BBC will laud them too.’ The BBC already lauds Binyam Mohammed and Mozzam Begg, not to mention the 7/7 bombers who were forced into their actions by our foreign policy and em, ‘discrimination, neglect, fury and resentment, bitter grievances, ignored and demeaned, kept in poverty by a system which cares very little about them.’

Apart from Malcolm Muggeridge’s articles on the USSR journalist Gareth Jones also did his best to expose the horrors of Communism: 

What to make of an organisation that refuses to openly debate history from 70 years ago…..could it be that so many of the Labour Party were Communists that it might be a tad embarrassing for a Labour supporting, but impartial, news gatherer?

Then again its recent coverage of Tony Blair’s article on the recent riots was in a similar vein….completely devoid of any reference to the facts. Should that be necessarily a bad thing, or is it perhaps slightly sinister? When you are told that Blair had an important warning to both politicians and the public…namely Cameron is implementing policies merely for political advantage and that the public should not be allowed to have any say influence on such policy…because of course ‘populist politics’ is the last thing you want in a democracy….you have to conclude it is sinister.

Stephen Glover’s take on Blair rewriting history here.

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WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS…

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Of course it is not just Evan Davies who has interests that are not immediately obvious; A Biased BBC contributor notes…

“Reference Evan Davis and his membership of the SMF board….John Humphrys is a shareholder in ‘YouGov’ the polling company. Any conflict of interest there when the BBC is telling us Labour is surging in the polls according to YouGov perhaps?

‘Humphrys, who has worked on programmes such as ‘Panorama’, ‘On the Ropes’ and ‘Mastermind’, has hit back at critics who said that there is a conflict of interest between his position on ‘Today’ and the shares that he holds with the company.’
http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/469491/Radio-4s-John-Humphrys-set-money-YouGov-float/

http://today.yougov.co.uk/homepage
‘YouGov is the authoritative measure of public opinion and consumer behaviour. It is our ambition to supply a live stream of continuous, accurate data and insight into what people are thinking and doing all over the world, all of the time, so that companies, governments and institutions can better serve the people that sustain them. YouGov is the most quoted research company in the UK, so by joining our panel of over 350,000 members and taking part in our surveys you really can get your voice heard.’

.. and hilariously the recession could all be John Humphry’s fault…or at least the company he holds shares in: ‘….financial institutions used its research in the past to make investment decisions.’
Though of course YouGov was founded by two Tory supporters (one now a Tory MP!)”

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ALL WRONGS LEAD TO MURDOCH

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There was a particularly nasty little item HERE on Today this morning. It’s yet another BBC led attack on Murdoch, this time bringing in Chris Mullins and Sheila Gunn – John Major’s former press secretary. Gunn, in particular, used the opportunity to have a go at those bad “right-wingers” and “little Englanders”who gave nice Mr Major such a hard time over Europe. It’s obvious that the BBC has determined that Trinity Newspapers and the Guardian have no questions to answer concerning the integrity of their behaviour and so all wrongs can only ever lead to Murdoch.

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WHAT A WASTE…

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A B-BBC reader observes of  BBC Countryfile
21/08/2011;

“Last evening they did
a piece (John Craven) on food waste, and it’s costs. The one scandalous item of
waste that never got any mention at all was the EU Fisheries Policy, you know
the one where should you catch the “wrong” type of fish you have to
throw it back (dead of course) or risk draconian punishments. Funnily enough
the policy never seems to bother the Spanish fishermen for example, wonder why?”

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