Suppressio Veri (again)
The Department for Education and Skills recently commissioned pollsters Mori to conduct eight discussion groups with members of the public in London and Manchester on recent UK educational reforms.
See if you can spot the missing information when you read the BBC and Daily Telegraphreports of the findings.
A couple of ‘compare and contrasts’. The discrepancies between this BBC report on Friday prayers at the Temple Mount/al-Haram al Sharif – and this Jeruslalem Post report.
BBC – Jerusalem prayers pass peacefully
Islamic prayers at Jerusalem’s holiest site ended peacefully on Friday, a week after clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police.
About 3,000 police were deployed around the Old City of East Jerusalem, and men under 50 were barred from entering the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif.
Jerusalem Post – Muslims clash with police after Salah speech in east J’lem
Dozens of masked Muslim youths and children clashed with security forces and reporters in east Jerusalem’s Wadi Joz on Friday afternoon, throwing rocks, blocking streets and burning garbage bins.
Police dispersed the rioters with stun grenades, tear gas and water hoses.
At least one of the rioters was wounded and three were arrested, Israel Radio reported.
The protesters had been listening to a sermon delivered by Islamic Movement head Sheikh Raed Salah at a massive protest rally north of the Old City.
During the sermon, Salah urged supporters to start a third intifada in order to “save al-Aksa Mosque, free Jerusalem and end the occupation.”
He went on to say that Israel’s history was tainted with blood. “They want to build their temple at a time when our blood is on their clothes, on their doorsteps, in their food and in their drinks. Our blood has passed from one ‘General Terrorist’ to another ‘General Terrorist,'” exclaimed the Islamic Movement chief.
It’s true that the trouble was outside the Old City, so the BBC report is not untrue. It’s just our old friend suppressio veri in action. (hat-tip – Biodegradeable, who also notes the contrast between this story and this one)
He’s little known over here, but David Hicks is an Australian held in Guantanamo after being captured in Afghanistan. The Rottweiler Puppy fisks a somewhat anodyne BBC report which again features supressio veri.
Via commenter pounce, another ‘compare and contrast’.
The BBC and how the US is insensitive towards the needs of children.
Schools shun book over one word
A children’s author has said she is “horrified” after her book was banned from some US schools and libraries. Susan Patron’s award-winning The Higher Power of Lucky has run into trouble because it contains the word “scrotum”.
Patron, a librarian herself, condemned the idea of stopping families choosing reading material for themselves. “I was shocked and horrified to read that some school librarians, teachers, and media specialists are choosing not to include the 2007 Newbery Medal winner in their collections,” she wrote in Publishers Weekly.
Those people were afraid of parental objections or were uncomfortable with the word themselves, she said. “If I were a parent of a middle-grade child, I would want to make decisions about my child’s reading myself. “I’d be appalled that my school librarian had decided to take on the role of censor and deny my child access to a major award-winning book.”http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/enter…ent/ 6375501.stm
The BBC and how the UK is sensitive towards the needs of children.
School bans pigs stories
A West Yorkshire head teacher has banned books containing stories about pigs from the classroom in case they offend Muslim children.
Mrs Harris said in a statement: “Recently I have been aware of an occasion where young Muslim children in class were read stories about pigs. “We try to be sensitive to the fact that for Muslims talk of pigs is offensive.”
This seems to be a standard technique, albeit ‘unwitting and unconscious’. Some stories are ipso facto considered by the BBC to be ‘controversial’ – so opponents are wheeled out to give their views. The Today equivalent would be the ‘many people would argue that …’ or ‘but campaigners are saying …’. Another, ‘non-controversial’ story will beget no negative quotes.
An example – Two stories on immigration and asylum from 2003.
One – the Tory proposal that all immigrants to the UK should be screened for infectious diseases.
Two – an Industrial Society proposal that it should be made easier for asylum seekers to find work in the UK, as they are “skilled, willing and keen to work”.
Both of these stories could be seen as controversial. Pro-refugee and asylum groups would consider the first a disgraceful proposal. Organisations like Migrationwatch or journalists like Anthony Browne would take issue with the second.
But on the BBC, one story is considered so controversial that the reaction to it is played more prominently than the proposal itself. On Radio 4 the story is trailed – “the Conservatives have been defending their proposals”. On the BBC News web page there are four different reactions – all critical. I’m particularly impressed with the way Evan Harris remarks are inserted into a description of the report – as below.
Immigrants would have to pay for the tests and asylum seekers would be detained until it was clear the tests had been met, it said.
” This is an unnecessary, extremist, unethical and unworkable policy ” – Evan Harris, Liberal Democrat health spokesman
The document said more than 50% of TB in the UK now occurs in people born abroad, the majority of whom arrived in Britain within the last 10 years.
The other proposal ? Obviously entirely uncontroversial – no critical voices are present. And no mention of the fact that the report’s author, one Gill Sargeant, is a Labour councillor (in Barnet), nor that the Industrial Society, now rebranded as the Workplace Foundation, is headed up by one Will Hutton, Guardian journalist and New Labour guru.
And finally : 18 Doughty Street have a video interview with Robin Aitken, author of Can We Trust The BBC?.
If this was covered on B-BBC at the time, but I can’t find it. Maybe I missed it.
LEFTIES
Wednesday 17 May – Friday 19 May 2006
In this three-part series, Vanessa Engle revisits the turbulent era when the extreme Left was a serious and significant political force that believed it could change the world for the better.Weaving together interviews and archive footage, each film relives a different aspect of the Left in Britain in the 1970s and 80s.
1. PROPERTY IS THEFT
BBC Two: Monday 10 July 7pm-8pm
Fascinating story of a squatted street in the 1970s, where the residents lived by the unconformist ideals of the time.
2. ANGRY WIMMIN
BBC Two: Monday 17 July 7pm-8pm
The rise and fall of an extreme strain of feminism, that called on women to become ‘political lesbians’.
3. A LOT OF BALLS
BBC Two: Monday 24 July 7pm-8pm
The story of the News on Sunday, an attempt by a group from the far left to launch a left-wing, mass-market Sunday tabloid.
There was a similar Radio Four programme in 2004 on “The Revolutionaries”. At the time I pondered the likelihood of the BBC displaying its legendary balance with a matching programme about the far right.
There definitely was a far right in the 70s and 80s – I was involved in demonstrations and other activism against it in various Pennine mill towns. I think we may wait a long time before we see a series of reminiscences by grizzled National Front activists, now tenured professors or running armed compounds in Montana, on those days when “the extreme Right was a serious and significant political force“.
UPDATE – Commenter Will points out this review at the SAU :
One episode in the series, A Lot of Balls, includes a detail that is beyond parody. The programme concerns the ill-fated left-wing newspaper News on Sunday, which appeared briefly in 1987. Alan Hayling, one of the founders, is portrayed as largely blameless for paper’s demise. However, BBC4 leaves it to the final credits to point out that:
Alan Hayling is now head of documentaries for the BBC.
as they present The Conspiracy Files this week on 9/11.
The Editor’s blog has some interesting comments that the BBC have left up:
Comment 44:
Anyone who has read and absorbed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” will know it is all part of their megalomaniacal plan to give us a one world government. They are using events like Sept 11th, July 7th in London (another government sponsored terror event) to fear us all into giving up our liberties! The sheep need to waken up and smell the coffee. The British are as bad as the US, they are run by the same group of Zionists. Blair and the cash for honours scandal? He was under growing pressure from it and BANG, a “plot” to behead a muslim soldier and an apparent pandemic of Bird Flu put that story firmly to bed. Waken up people! We had few problems with terrorists pre 9/11, now it seems the goverment on both sides of the atlantic are hell bent in creating this monster that is Islam against us when the whole concept was made up in one of their think tanks !
Apparently “Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the author has approved them”. The editor being Mike Rudin.
Monday’s Radio Four had something for everyone’s blood pressure. The Today Programme opened with American claims of Iranian involvement (RealAudio) in attacks on US and British troops in Iraq. The story was pitched in terms of America ‘raising the temperature’ (as it was described on the news bulletins). Web coverage continued the theme of ‘what are the Americans up to ?‘ – as Paul Reynolds says “Blaming Shia Iran for supporting Iraqi Shia militias makes it easier for the US to sell that policy (attacking Shia militias – LT) at home and abroad. Then there is the old tactic of blaming someone else for your own problems.”
This strikes me as showing the same kind of lack of perspective that we see when the slaughter of Iraqis by terrorist bombs is described purely in terms of its effect on George Bush’s domestic poll ratings. Note that the BBC don’t claim that the US information is false. It just seems to be irrelevant to the British state broadcaster that British and Allied soldiers are being killed with Iranian-supplied weapons. Hi-tech shaped charges are difficult things to knock up in a garage. Similarly the killing of soldiers with Steyr-Mannlicher sniper rifles, sold not long ago to the Iranians for fighting drug-smugglers, is off the BBC radar.
It’s half term in the UK, and children are off school (my nine-year old daughter was still in our bed reading at 10 am, with Radio Four on), so what better time for the Radio Four Woman’s Hour programme to open with a fifteen-minute discussion of sexual fantasies ?
Next week on Woman’s Hour : “How those nasty capitalist advertisers are sexualising our kids” followed by “Britain has Europe’s highest rate of sexually transmitted infections – Why ?”
And to finish the evening, the World Tonight offered a nice interview with freed Red Army Fraction terrorist Astrid Proll, during which she was asked to give her views on modern Germany, and expressed sentiments to the effect that ‘we’ve all done things we regret in our youth’.
Next week – the Shankill Butchers talk about the Northern Ireland peace process.
The Rottweiler Puppy on the BBC, corporations and the environment, citing this BBC report.
“Really, this isn’t journalism. It’s caricature, demonisation.”
The BBC tread carefully around issues of race, culture and demographic change. So it’s not surprising that the report on Sir Keith Ajegbo’s ‘Diversity and Citizenship’ report reached sixteen revisions in four days.
The headline and the main thrust of the story itself is not an honest reflection of Sir Keith’s main findings and recommendations.
Schools in England should teach “core British values” alongside cultural diversity, a report says.
In fact the phrase ‘core British values’, used in quotation marks by the BBC, appears nowhere in the report (pdf). The document’s ‘vision’ is ‘for all schools to be actively engaged in nurturing in pupils the skills to participate in an active and inclusive democracy, appreciating and understanding difference’, a slightly more flexible and loosely-defined aim. Neither do the 23 recommendations of the report, headed “Education for Diversity”, include the word ‘British’ or anything about teaching British values. Instead we read that “all schools should be encouraged to audit their curriculum to establish what they currently teach that is meaningful for all pupils in relation to diversity and multiple identities“, or that “the QCA should work closely with awarding bodies to ensure, wherever possible, that education for diversity appears in syllabuses and exam questions” – a recommendation which I look forward to seeing implemented in Mathematics.
Among the background information in the report was that “the 2001 census shows that nearly 1 in 8 pupils are minority ethnic. By 2010 the proportion is expected to be around 1 in 5.”
This statistic was quoted by Education Minister Alan Johnson in version 1.
“By 2010 one in five pupils in our schools will be from an ethnic minority – this is a challenge but also an opportunity to instil a culture of understanding and tolerance at an early age.”
By version 7 this statistic had vanished.
Nigel Farndale in the Telegraph takes issue with the BBC’s Diversity Tsar.
Sooner or later she was bound to feel the need to justify her salary. So, just six months into the job, she has made a pronouncement. It is about the BBC’s coverage of Saddam’s execution. When BBC reporters expressed horror at the manner of it they were being “culturally insensitive” she says, because doing so imposed Western values on a different culture.
Mary, Mary, Mary. Where to start? The Nazis were a “different culture”. Does that mean we should have been more sensitive to their robust views on race relations? Or what about the Taliban? Is it insensitive to say that we find their enthusiasm for stoning adulterers a bit hard to stomach?
Another term for cultural relativism is moral cowardice. It means you don’t have the courage to stand up for what your culture believes in. As it happens, our culture believes in liberal democracy, freedom and tolerance. It also believes in equality for women. But when confronted by cultures that don’t believe in those things the BBC, or Mary FitzPatrick at least, wobbles.
In London last weekend the hottest ticket in town was the debate “A World Civilisation or Clash of Civilisations ?” hosted by Ken Livingstone and attended by around 5,000 people and 150 media representatives.
Extensively covered by the blogs, it was surprisingly ignored by the BBC. With the exception of this report. In Arabic.
Lastly – I wonder how the BBC missed this story. I bet they’re kicking themselves.
Bolton Council has scrapped its annual Holocaust Memorial Day event at its town hall on Sunday in favour of organising a National Genocide Day and claims by doing so “does not mean that the holocaust is being ignored”.
The north west England council will still mark the day by flying flags at half mask but has decided instead to host its own event in June which it claims will be supporting an interfaith council idea.
The move has been seen by some groups as bowing to local Muslim pressure for a renaming of the day which the Muslim Council of Britain has called for.
In a statement, the council said: “Following consultations with the town’s Interfaith Council and other faith groups it has been decided to take part in Genocide Memorial Day later this year in June when a bigger, outside event, in which more people can take part, is planned. Victoria Square outside the Town Hall could be the venue.”
(kippot-tip – FW)
Two race-based extremist groups, one black, one white. Many unsolved murders from decades ago are laid at the door of their members, and at last the law is making arrests.
You would simply never guess which story the BBC reports and which it doesn’t.
“For me it’s always been a programme in the best traditions of the late 1970s alternative movement” – Newsnight editor Peter Barron remembers. (Hat tip: Tuscan Tony in the comments at Guido’s).
