Author Archives: Ed Thomas

Playing softball

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Say you’re an international organisation with a lot of skeletons in the closet. Say you know that your reputation will be damaged when news of these skeletons gradually filters into the public mind, as it must.

I suppose under such circumstances everything would come down to PR- you’d probably admit that bad news was going to come out and so suggest to a friendly party to conduct an “investigation” which would spread the blame nice and thinly, and then release the news through a friendly organ. It would be a little painless bloodletting, and then… back to work. The organ would probably begin its main article something like this:

“Children as young as six are being sexually abused by peacekeepers and aid workers, says a leading UK charity.

Children in post-conflict areas are being abused by the very people drafted into such zones to help look after them, says Save the Children.

After research in Ivory Coast, southern Sudan and Haiti, the charity proposed an international watchdog be set up.”

Sounds like a good idea. A watchdog. Sounds like a job for the UN- they’d be perfectly placed considering their clean hands and incorruptibility.

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Culture of corruption?

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As people have been pointing out in the comments (thank you very much), The Feral Beast has revealed that emails which led to the exposure of ex-London mayor Red Ken Livingstone’s racial right hand man Lee Jasper had already been handed to the BBC’s Tim Donovan and rejected as “of no news value”. One year after Donovan’s rejection, this “non-news value” was turned into scoop-of-the-year by an old friend of this blog’s, Andrew Gilligan*. Jasper resigned, Red Ken lost the mayoral election- and the BBC were left counselling their public “And what is your concern about Boris?”

I wonder why the BBC didn’t consider Red Ken’s corrupt crony a newsworthy story. Maybe, in the light of recent stories about BBC junketing, they just thought it was business as usual in NuLabour’s Britain? As DB rightly points out in our comments, Donovan certainly considered it a story later on, but I did notice that in Donovan’s account the potential criminality of Lee Jasper and misuse of hundreds of thousands was well in the background of the story.

*This blog-member is happy to acknowledge Gilligan’s success, having rather worried about putting the boot in when Gilligan was floored by Hutton.

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Who ate all the pies?

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More nonsense reporting from the BBC. A generous portion of the BBC’s bias lies in giving credence to outlandish leftist notions- such as that the cause of food shortages is obesity.

Why exactly the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is calculating the costs of John Prescott’s sad “condition” is one of many unanswered questions from this report.

Let’s just consider some real news shall we? How about Alistair Darling’s attack on EU grain tariffs, which actually do keep food prices high? I couldn’t find a BBC story on it or the backlash. Or how about the story mentioned in this report of how the UK Treasury is dealing with its debt problems by raking in from the high fuel prices which make food so expensive?

How about a bit more on the impact of biofuels on food production? Some number crunching there would be more than welcome.

The war on fatties is pure diversion from the machinations of politicians. The BBC is entirely complicit in these. Politics, statism, and the manipulation of the populace is the BBC’s stock in trade.

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General BBC-related comment thread

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! Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. This is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may also be moderated. Any suggestions for stories that you might like covered would be appreciated! It’s your space, use it wisely!

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Spurious balance in the celebrity culture

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Isn’t it terrible how today we are exposed to so much idiocy, not least through the BBC, just because of the cult of celebrity?

The response to the post David made about “most disliked” BBC personalities just shows the flip-side to the pursuit of celebrity- which is that many people are sick of their inanity.

This blog is about bias, but there are some intersecting themes. Sometimes a comment is made and reported not because of newsworthiness per se but because of celebrity. How can a journalist be balanced starting from a statement like “Chefs should be fined if they haven’t got ingredients in season on their menu.”? Mussolini, Hitler, would have been proud of such high kitchen standards.

If your ten year old brother said it you’d tell him to shut up, but if Gordon Ramsay said it, and you were a BBC journalist, it’d be “news” (there again, who made G.R. except the BBC-led media establishment?).

Two lines of criticism have been picked up by the BBC, unworkability! and trade for poorer countries, but as Neil Reddin points out, the biggest of all is missing: the freedom argument.


“See what was missing? Of course, there was no mention of consumers making their own choices over where their food comes from. Individual freedom and all that. Hard to believe that the BBC, an organisation funded by a mechanism that gives its consumers no choice, could miss that one *cough*.”

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The nonsense that passes for news

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One can’t push back against it all, but Dizzy has a great go at a story which the Independent-echoing BBC report about food waste. It’s probably supposed to make the supposed food crisis more, you know, “interactive”. An absurdly long BBC report misses most of the points which Dizzy raises. The money quote as far as I am concerned occurs almost at the bottom: “WRAP receives government funding from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.” (WRAP is the niftily named organisation which carried out the food waste study. Nb- interesting how Gvt funding is pointedly devolved). Good of them to tell those readers who actually consider the matter newsworthy enough to read to the bottom.

Picture the little group hug that all this involves: the Labour Gvt, WRAP, the Indy, and the BBC. On second thoughts don’t- wouldn’t want you to waste your dinner.

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You know where they stand.

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On the BBConline UK frontpage we see “Row looming over cannabis grading”

To its right, a survey is highlighted: “Third of staff ‘hungover at desk’“

Surveys and political “debates”- two of the BBC’s favourite things.

Well, what I am suggesting is that such tie-ins between a feature about the classifiction of Cannabis and the deleterous effects of alcohol is not coincidental- the BBC want to emphasise the old talking point about all drugs being equal (except the really hard ones).

Of course it’s manufactured news, opinion rather than reporting events, politicised rather than straightforward- the usual BBC thing.

People might hold all sorts of views on this but they don’t have to force the issue, whether there is a political demand to or not, through the media. Social experience is largely determinative, in my view. Against the BBC survey I would place my own experience- a cousin of mine died through mental ill-health which followed youthful cannabis usage. But, like, whatever…

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General BBC-related comment thread!

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Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. This is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may also be moderated. Any suggestions for stories that you might like covered would be appreciated! It’s your space, use it wisely!

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Waltzing Agendas

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Australia- the headline reads – Renews Republic Calls.

Interesting. The nation may have spoken a few months ago in electing a broadly pro-republican party, but they didn’t speak on this particular issue. In fact the nation did speak on that nine years ago, when they rejected a republic and voted for the monarchy. In fact it appeared that the call for a republic was not “Australia’s” at all, but of a minority of its people. On what basis then can Australia “renew” a call that it never made?

At least the meeting called by the new Prime Minister “brought together Australia’s best and brightest brains with the aim of plotting the country’s future trajectory.”

All very NuLabour I am sure (just like the golden years in the UK), but aren’t there any clever people who distance themselves from Rudd and his republican agenda? Evidently not.

Funnily enough, Tim Blair (very bright and rather good) manages a whole extended post round-up of the conference without mentioning the R word at all.

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Italian Job

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A lot of people, including the (generally more junior) BBC journalists who sometimes visit this blog and take part in discussion, admire what one could call the “big beasts” of BBC journalism- people like Marr, Humphries, Simpson, and Mark Mardell. Urbane and intelligent, they are seen as figures of substance. That’s troublous to an outsider to this circle of admiration as they’re biased too.

Well, take a look at Mardell’s reaction to the Italian election [correction- have a look here. Thanks Max]. His first comments “With Italy’s elections complete, does the domination of the media by the political elite distort the debate, and will the internet change things?”

Coming from a “big beast” from within the unquestionable behemoth of British media, the hubris is comic.

But also clearly unfair when one thinks about it, however one may object to Silvio Berlusconi and his media empire. The first point is that this “empire” didn’t prevent Berlusconi losing power to Prodi two years ago. The second is that Berlusconi turned his narrow defeat into a victory by a 9% margin- quite a feat. The third is that Italians apparently made an historic sea change in their politics this election- they gave their communist party (a long-time political player) precisely no seat in either chamber. Wow. Oh, and the greens went too- analysis here.

So of course Mardell is at the front of the queue undermining the legitimacy of the Italian public’s choices by implying their thought processes were skewed. After more than ten years of Labour government, one might start to consider whether the status quo in the UK might have anything to do with the Labour-dominated BBC.

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