Author Archives: DB

something something US REPUBLICAN NAZI !!! something something

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For at good few hours today this was the main news story on the BBC US & Canada page:


A Republican candidate for a very safe Democrat seat is a member of a re-enactment society and dressed up as, among other things, an SS officer. A bit embarrassing for a political candidate when the photos come out, but was it really the most important news item in North America? No, of course not, but the BBC wasn’t going to miss the chance to bash the Republicans. Added bonus – using “Republican” and “Nazi” in the same headline. “Republican” appeared in the blurb beneath, and in the opening sentence of the actual story, too. [Read More…]

How very different from the BBC’s treatment of stories embarrassing to Democrats where the party name is either not mentioned or buried so far down the page you’ll probably miss it. That’s when the BBC even covers such news items. Here are some recent stories the BBC hasn’t reported on, let alone given number one headline prominence:
Democrats run fake Tea Party candidate in Jersey congressional race.
Democrat aide calls female Republican candidate “a whore”.
Democrat Congresswoman’s phone message asking for lobbyist money.
Democrat Jesse Jackson Jr accused of trying to buy Obama’s old Senate seat.

The Nazi uniform story quotes “the BBC’s Ian Mackenzie in Washington” (note to BBC subs – it’s “Iain”). As Craig pointed out in the comments a few days ago, Mackenzie is another whose Twitter account is quite revealing. Here he is summing up Obama’s inauguration day:


And here’s what he thinks of Sarah Palin:


This comment about Fox News is a bit rich given the BBC’s huge preference for leftie guests (not to mention presenters and of course journalists). MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann only likes to have people whose views he shares on his show but you won’t find sneering comments about that from an Obama-lovin’ hipster Beeb journo like Mackenzie. The received wisdom is strong in him. A perfect addition to the BBC’s team of Right-hating US correspondents.

Full marks for this snippet of honest self-analysis, though:


Helen Boaden claimed that impartiality is in the BBC’s genes. She’s either a deluded idiot or a liar.

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IMPARTIALITY GENES?

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Piers Scholfield, one of the many BBC journalists reporting from the Chilean mines, was a new name to me. Just had a little look back through his Twitter account. You couldn’t make this stuff up:


Caroline, please listen to my gushing report about your election chances, slurp slurp.

A Brighton-based BBC Green Party supporter reporting on the Green Party in Brighton during the election. Your licence fee at work.


I’m getting quite a collection of screenshots of BBC employees expressing political opinions on Twitter. They’re all lefties. Funny that. I guess the BBC’s thousands of right-leaning employees take their duty to uphold the concept of impartiality more seriously. Unless – and I know this might sound crazy – there aren’t many right-leaning employees at the BBC, and they don’t express political views on Twitter because they fear opprobrium and career stasis.

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JUST SAYING…

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On Twitter:

Oh well, that’s it then. Discussion over. Eurosceptics are wrong, clearly. Well done Justin and your Tory stockbroker acquaintance for sorting that one out for us all. Met anybody else on your travels whose views we might find valuable?

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LAUGHING MATTERS

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Listening to the first ten minutes of The News Quiz last night (couldn’t take any more than that) I was struck by how the audience reaction seemed a little out of proportion to the “funny” comments of the panellists. Even allowing for the fact that I – a right wing bastard – am never likely to be particularly impressed by The News Quiz, something still didn’t ring true.

Here are some clips all taken from the first ten minutes of the programme. You’ll hear the final few words of some “amusing quips” by Andy Hamilton, Sue Perkins (x2), Sandi Toksvig, Miles Jupp and Jeremy Hardy, and the audience reaction to each. Each clip is followed by a shorter clip isolating part of the audience response. Finally, the 6 isolated clips are played one after the other for direct comparison. Is it just me or is there something a tad similar about them?

Listen!

What do you think – is there a bit of laugh track manipulation going on there? Could it be that even the sort of people who attend News Quiz recordings aren’t as impressed by the jokes as we’re led to believe?

Update. In response to a request in the comments, here’s the relevant part of the 6 clips in the form of sound wave graph thingies. Obviously they’re not entirely identical because there’s other stuff going on in each individual clip, but I think they’re close enough to suggest the same bit of laughter may have been added to each one:

Also via the comments I’m reminded that during the opening ten minutes of this week’s show Sandi Toksvig said, “It’s the Tories who have been putting the ‘n’ into cuts”. I’ve become so jaded by Radio 4 comedy, so inured to the bias, that this passed me by as just another unfunny joke. On reflection it really is quite a thing to say, especially when one considers the time the show goes out.

(On the other hand the Tories will indeed put the ‘n’ into cuts if they back down and say “Not now”, as that idiot Huhne has suggested.)

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CASH PETERS UPDATE

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Rhod Sharp, regular host of Radio Five Live’s Up All Night, returned from holiday this week and on Wednesday morning received an update about recent events from Cash Peters:

Cash Peters: About three weeks ago I got into a little trouble with the very first stand-in we had, I got into a little trouble. We were talking about this RightNetwork, which is a conservative network, and I was going on about how I didn’t think it was very good – y’know it’s sponsored by Kelsey Grammer and he’s on it and I just didn’t like it very much. Well, I shouldn’t have said I didn’t like it because apparently I’m terribly biased for saying so [*]. Well then we breezed by that, I got over that crisis, then this week Kelsey Grammer writes to me and says…

Rhod Sharp: Oh, you’re kidding!

Cash Peters: Yeah – he’s following me on Twitter! I’ve now got Kel… I call it intimidation frankly, who knows what I’ll say about him next? But yes, Kelsey Grammer is following me on Twitter. It’s very exciting. I keep wanting to say something about him but then think nyah, better not. I better not say anything , it’ll only stoke the fire.

Rhod Sharp: That’s wonderful. Terrific. Terrific.

“Kelsey Grammer writes to me and says…”

Yeah, right. Try this – whoever runs Kelsey Grammer’s account decided to follow Cash Peters (probably as a consequence of Biased BBC) and Peters got the automatic “xxxx is following you on Twitter” email that everybody gets when someone follows them (such as nearly 10,000 other people have received from @Kelsey_Grammer) For the benefit of the BBC this became an ‘OMG Kelsey Grammer wrote to me personally!’ moment. And Rhod Sharp lapped it up. I’ve asked Peters about it on Twitter (yes, Twitter – like Stan with Facebook I’ve tried to avoid being sucked in but can resist no longer). I’ve had one somewhat evasive reply from him so far.

[*] “and I just didn’t like it very much. Well, I shouldn’t have said I didn’t like it because apparently I’m terribly biased for saying so”

Where might people have got that impression? This description of RightNetwork, perhaps?

“It’s all ‘Big business is more important than people, the rich shall not pay taxes, whatever makes a profit is far more important than people suffering.'”

Yes, nothing “terribly biased” about that at all.

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Double Standards

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Check out Laura Trevelyan’s hard hitting investigation about Ground Zero Mosque developer Sharif El-Gamal.

Sorry, did I say “hard hitting investigation”? I meant “credulous, predictable piece of propaganda”.

Unsurprisingly Trevelyan neglects to mention this recent news:

Sharif El-Gamal, who runs the real estate firm Soho Properties and is heading the project two blocks from Ground Zero, was slapped with eviction proceedings last month after tallying up $39,000 in back rent, a Manhattan Housing Court filing shows…
It’s not the first time El-Gamal’s company has fallen behind in rent.
Royal Crospin sued Soho Properties last year for nearly $89,000 in back rent. El-Gamal’s firm paid $56,000 to settle.

How unlike Katie Connolly’s profile of Christine O’Donnell which included these nudge-nudge, passive aggressive nuggets of information:

In 2008 she defaulted on her mortgage and in 2010 the US government filed a claim stating that she owed more than $10,000 (£6,430) in back taxes and penalties. She has said this was a mistake, and a computer error…
Accusations that she inappropriately used campaign funds – to pay her rent, for example – have also surfaced.

The GZM developer gets the full sympathetic spin. The Tea Party “witch” gets the full load dumped on her.

And while I’m on the subject, does anybody recall the BBC covering this story in July?

Election watchdogs have directed Joe Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign to pay the U.S. Treasury more than $219,000 to resolve issues caused by sloppy bookkeeping and accepting excessive contributions, including a discounted flight on a private jet.

The audit was released Friday by the Federal Election Commission.

It determined that the Biden campaign accepted an improper corporate contribution in the form of a round-trip flight between New Hampshire and Iowa in June 2007 for three people. The Biden campaign paid GEH Air Transportation $7,911 for the first-class airfare, but regulators say the campaign should have paid the charter rate of $34,800.

The FEC also found that the Biden campaign could not document repaying at least $106,000 in donations that were over the limit, and the campaign was ordered to pay the U.S. Treasury more than $85,000 for stale-dated checks.

The Biden campaign also failed to disclose more than $3.7 million in payments and roughly $870,000 in debts.

A bit more substantial than O’Donnell’s $10,000, and yet I can’t seem to find it mentioned on the BBC website. They did find space for this Biden story in the same month, though. I’m sure it’s nothing to do with the fact that Katty Kay’s good friend and co-author Claire Shipman is the wife of the Vice President’s chief spin doctor.

Update 19:45. Here’s Michelle Malkin on the double standards over O’Donnell’s financial problems.

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Today Editor: Twitter Main Source For Stories

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Nicholas Jones, former BBC political correspondent, recounting a Royal Television Society event held in June:

Ceri Thomas said the political blogosphere had a resonance in Westminster but it did not have a great purchase outside Westminster.  But the Today programme now realised the importance of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. ‘I get more story ideas from Twitter than from anywhere else… it has become the single most useful way to get information although that was not the case during the general election’.

Out: if it bleeds, it leads. In: if the luvvies tweet it, Today will repeat it.

Where once BBC editors would have to wait until the next dinner party to hear the bleeding-heart concerns of like-minded media types, now it’s all instant – news determined by the daily fancies of the right-on metropolitan echo chamber. Same as it ever was, only more so.

(Luckily for the Today programme Stephen Fry hasn’t expressed an opinion on the dropping of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case.)

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The "Centre"

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Damian Thompson:

Remember that people with a Left-liberal/BBC/public sector worldview believe that they hold the centre ground. They regard any reform of the public sector as “Right-wing” and all spending cuts (including those few they grudgingly acknowledge need to be made) as representing a tack to the Right. Ask yourself what policies you’d have to adopt to earn the adjective “Left-wing” on the Today programme… (Ed M. will) stick to his insane socialist position of maintaining the current size of the state, and that will be enough for Today to place him in the middle of their political spectrum. My guess is that the BBC’s ground troops at White City were in Ed’s camp, not David’s. Now he’s about to reap the benefit.

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Shh! Don’t Mention The New Black Panthers

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(Update added)

Imagine if members of a racist anti-Semitic white supremacist group, one of them armed with a nightstick, had been filmed at a polling station intimidating voters on the day of the 2004 presidential election. Imagine that this led to charges, but those charges were suddenly dropped by Bush’s Justice Department even though it had already won a default judgement in the case. And then imagine that two officials claimed that this was due to institutional anti-black prejudice within the Justice Department. Do you suppose the BBC would have made quite a big deal about all of that? Catholic Pope, defecating bears, swimming fish etc – damn right, the BBC would’ve been all over it, making sure that the whole affair got maximum exposure. It would’ve filtered down from BBC news to round-table discussion programmes, topical comedy shows and phone-ins. Oh boy, would we have known about it.

And yet the BBC continues to ignore the New Black Panther story. It’s not part of the BBC’s desired narrative, a narrative driven by hatred of the American right. We’ve been banging on about the Panther story here since polling day 2008 (in the comments and on the blog) but every new revelation that has emerged in the States has been met with silence by the BBC.

A Biased BBC reader emailed me to say that back in June he suggested to the BBC’s Americana programme that they have on as a guest the first of the Justice Department whistleblowers, J Christian Adams. Americana replied that it was “possibly something we could get to before the midterms”. Now a second employee (this one a Clinton appointee with ACLU bona fides) has testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and still nothing from the Beeb. The simple fact is that BBC U.S. correspondents just don’t like reporting on this sort of thing. It goes against their instincts, doesn’t get their juices flowing like a negative story about Republicans. “Nothing to see. Nothing to see. Nothing to see. Look everybody – a witch! And Stephen Colbert!”

This story can only get bigger and I think that the BBC will finally have to report it – reluctantly and with much anguish. As with similar controversies, those who rely on the BBC for their news will be last to know (if they get to know at all) and will receive but a fraction of the full picture. But once again the BBC will have done its job as gatekeeper, restricting the impact of the story on public consciousness by limiting its time in the spotlight.

In the comments on the open thread David Preiser points out that even The Washington Post had the story on its front page today. I’m amused by this from the Post’s article:

“the dispute became a major issue in conservative circles. It has been slow to gain traction among the general public…”

I wonder why that might be, MSM? As David L. Riddick pointed out in July, The Washington Post claimed it had ignored the story due to “limited staffing“. What feeble excuse will the BBC try?

Update September 27. The original version incorrectly identified both Department of Justice officials as former employees. Christopher Coates, who testified last week, is still employed by Justice having been transferred from his previous job as voting chief at the department’s Civil Rights Division to his current position within the South Carolina attorney’s office. He has whistleblower protection for his testimony.

Here’s a segment on the story from The O’Reilly Factor (h/t John Anderson).

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EVER COMPLAINED TO R4’S FEEDBACK ABOUT LEFTE BIAS…

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..and got nowhere?

Well, save yourself the trouble in future because the presenter isn’t interested:

“Of course everyone has views. It is undeniable that most editorial staff were, and probably are, of a liberal inclination when it comes to social issues, and that they cluster around the middle ground of the political spectrum. I would also suggest they are predominantly secular as well. We all have biases, the crucial thing is to be aware of them.

“However it is something else entirely to suggest that we flawed creatures made predominantly leftwing programmes.”

For further reference please see Jeff Randall’s quote in the right-hand sidebar.

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