Author Archives: Laban

All over the blogs, differing views on who won.

I’m trying to imagine a John Pilger or Robert Fisk getting such an introduction.

“Ann Coulter, whose right-wing rants …” Paxo opened. Discussing her new book, of which he’d read one chapter, “Coulter argues – if that’s the right word …” then his first question, “I’ve read it (chapter 1) – does it get any better ?”

Paxman then asked “You also believe there is some sort of liberal hegemony in the media, do you ? … I just don’t see how this argument stacks up.”.

“No, you’re right – with the warm introduction like you just gave me – no – no liberal hegemony there …”

You would almost have thought he was blushing at that point. Make up your own mind – the video is at Youtube.

The BBC News search engine is a vital tool for analysis of BBC bias. How else could one find “your 99 search results for far-left” and compare against “your 1,329 search results for far-right” ?

Unfortunately the search engine ain’t very good. Worse, the ‘bog-standard’ search misses some results completely.

Eighteen months ago I wrote a post contrasting the media reporting of two murders – one by an Iraqi Kurdish refugee, one of an Iraqi Kurdish refugee.

When I wrote the original post, I could find no BBC report at all of the murder by the Iraqi. I searched using the vanilla engine for the victim’s name, Anthony Farrell and could find nothing. However I could find a result if I looked for the name of the murderer. The ‘vanilla’ engine, it turns out, will find “Anthony Farrell” in double-quotes (but not otherwise), but will find Ali Karim without quotes. The advanced engine finds both without quotes. Why ?

There’s a reason for asking. After the far-right BNP (far-right as opposed to the ‘nationalist’ Hamas) made gains in the Barking and Dagenham local council elections, some predicted a rise in racist incidents. Here’s a BBC report of such an attack, carried out on May 17th.

It was a disgusting attack, as are all such attacks on innocents, which the BBC were right to report. But it wasn’t the only violent incident in the Barking and Dagenham area that week. Six days later, on May 23rd, two men were left critically injured in a shooting in Parsloes Avenue, Dagenham.

There seems to be no report of the incident on BBC News. I’m not sure if they don’t think the story is worth reporting on, or if the search engine is so bad that I can’t find it.

UPDATE – an apology. Earlier in the post I described the death of Kalan Karim as ‘murder’. Of course the person who attacked and killed him without warning in Swansea was not at all a murderer, but was found guilty of manslaughter. His five years should be up around this time next year, given current sentencing discounts.

“Mystery over India freedom hero” says the BBCs Mike Thomson, reporting that “Indian independence fighter Subhash Chandra Bose did not die in a Taiwanese plane crash, an inquiry has found. The report into one of the great mysteries of India’s freedom struggle concluded that Mr Bose had died but not in the 1945 crash as widely thought.”

Chandra Bose may be considered by some Indians as a hero and freedom fighter (indeed the Forward Bloc movement he founded still exists as an Indian political party) – but I wasn’t previously aware that the BBC were given to describing him as such. Did the BBCs wartime bulletins use the phrase ?

The description is especially incongruous given the link from the story to this – “Hitler’s Secret Indian Army“, which describes Bose’s recruitment efforts among Indian prisoners of war in Germany (the Indian soldiers ended up in the SS, where they were to be accused of war crimes in their retreat through France).

” … by August 1942, Bose’s recruitment drive got fully into swing. Mass ceremonies were held in which dozens of Indian POWs joined in mass oaths of allegiance to Adolf Hitler.
These are the words that were used by men that had formally sworn an oath to the British king: “I swear by God this holy oath that I will obey the leader of the German race and state, Adolf Hitler, as the commander of the German armed forces in the fight for India, whose leader is Subhas Chandra Bose”

Bose was obviously one of those who, like the IRA in 1916, considered that England’s difficulty was India’s opportunity.

Thomson bends over backwards to offer extenuation. “In all 3,000 Indian prisoners of war signed up for the Free India Legion. But instead of being delighted, Bose was worried. A left-wing admirer of Russia, he was devastated when Hitler’s tanks rolled across the Soviet border. Matters were made even worse by the fact that after Stalingrad it became clear that the now-retreating German army would be in no position to offer Bose help in driving the British from faraway India. When the Indian revolutionary met Hitler in May 1942 his suspicions were confirmed …”

But by August 1942, when the recruitment drive was getting ‘into swing’, the Wehrmacht had been driving into Russia for fourteen months. According to Bose’s Wikipedia entry, “He was also, however, prepared to envisage an invasion of India via the U.S.S.R. by Nazi troops, spearheaded by the Azad Hind Legion; many have questioned his judgment here, as it seems unlikely that the Germans could have been easily persuaded to leave after such an invasion, which would also have resulted in an Axis victory in the War.”

One might have expected the British Broadcasting Corporation’s view of Bose to include the terms ‘rebel’ and perhaps even ‘traitor’. I shall ask my children to take a look in forty or fifty years and see if this “notorious insurgent” has become a “freedom hero”.

We have this every few months. Last time, I remember, the debate in the comments was about whether Islam was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. This time it’s the BNP.

Email :“The threads at BBBC seem to be being hijacked by a few people interested in slipstreaming their support for the BNP under cover of discussing BBC bias. For example, the current thread has one correspondent who has popped up two or three times recently with links to the BNP site over various issues – Nick Griffin talking about this and that, some BNP list of Conservative and Labour MPs who’ve been convicted of crimes, etc etc.

It’s beginning to feel like BBBC has become a covert portal for introducing the BNP and its policies to BBBCs moderate, but disgruntled right-wingers. The last third or so of the current thread, illustrates what I mean. It makes me, for one, feel very uncomfortable. I do not wish to limit anyone’s free speech, but if I want to read a defence of the BNP I think I should have to go to dedicated sites to do it! And frankly, I can’t see how being associated with the BNP in any way can be of any possible benefit to BBBC.”

Reply : “I took a look today. Ed, Natalie (and I, when I’m posting – I tend to do it in bursts) have pointed out to the commentariat before that the blog is a place to discuss BBC bias, not (for example) whether Islam is a Good or a Bad Thing.

b) sympathetic people who are neither will be put off reading or contributing by the tone of the debates”

So if you want to debate the BNP, there are places on the Web where you can do just that – type “BNP blog” into Google and go from there.

Debate is a good thing. But this blog debates BBC bias – that alone, that above all, that all the time. Please respect that.

The President of China is visiting the US – and the Today Programme’s first item after the eight o’clock news decides to focus on China’s attitude to human rights (RealAudio), which “is not exactly compatible with Western standards”.

Would the BBC care to give us an example ?

“One huge cause for concern is China’s fondness for the death penalty …”

So let’s ask Ken Livingstone’s ex, Kate Allen of Amnesty International, to give a little talk on how China is ‘by far the worst offender’.

Now there’s a case for a close look at China’s USE of the death penalty – it is applied for cases of ‘economic sabotage’ for example. But Kate Allen’s position is that ALL executions are a violation of human rights, and in her interview she makes it plain that it is the fact of the death penalty, not the reasons for its use, that concerns her .

Her views are shared by only a minority of the UK and US populations, though by probably a majority of Today presenters. Among who exactly is the fact of the death penalty a cause for ‘huge concern’ ?

The death penalty has been compatible with western standards for most of the twentieth century, and is still used in the greatest Western nation. How strange that, of all the criticisms that could be levelled – lack of democracy, no freedom of expression, no freedom of religion, for example – that the BBC should choose this as an example of what’s wrong with China.

It’s Easter time, when the BBC gear up to cover the annual ritual that means so much to so many of the faithful – the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers.

This year, those teachers who want a national strike against Government education policy are being described on Radio Four as ‘committed activists’. Way back in December 2001, when I searched the BBC News website for occurrences of the phrase ‘far-left’ and ‘far-right’, the NUT, with its ‘various far-left groups’ was one of only five mentions of a British far-left.

The other four were in a Scritti Politti review, a story about Peter Hitchens having been a youthful far-leftist (how come we never hear that about Andrew Marr – or indeed any of the vast number of other BBC journalists to which it would apply ?), a story that the Animal Liberation Front had both far-left and far-right members, and a Peter Tatchell profile.

There were 32 stories about the British ‘far-right’ – of which no less than 11 involved the Tory party.

The overall figures were – ‘far-left’ 46 stories, ‘far-right’ 338. I repeated the search in August 2002 – 66 far-left, 502 far-right.

And one minute ago – Fascinatingly 97 far-left, 420 far-right. Is this an indication that the BBC is now reporting at a 1/4 ratio rather than 1/8, or does the BBC’s search engine needs its indexing looking at ? Fortunately I kept all the 502 search results, but further analysis will have to wait till I have more time.

Not needed – try the ‘advanced search’ option and drop down the date listboxes, while leaving the range at 1997-2006. You still get 97 far-left stories, while the far-right feature in a staggering 1,550. Looks like the ratio is 1/15. Anyone using BBC search is advised to use the advanced option.

If, like most human attributes, political views were subject to a normal distribution about a mean, you might expect far-left and far-right views to have a pretty equal distribution. Unless, of course, there’s bias in the measurement. The kind of bias, say, that doesn’t consider the Socialist Workers Party, who support the Iraqi ‘resistance’ while simultaneously controlling the ‘anti-war’ movement, to be far-left. After all, half their college friends were in it.

The Today programme like to think that they don’t just report the news, that they “help to set the agenda” – and to a great extent they’re correct. You can hear Humphrys or Naughtie worrying away at a point like a terrier with a rat. hoping to get an admission which will make the NEXT news headlines.

“In an interview on the BBC Today programme, the Minister revealed that …”

But there are scoops and scoops. The BBC has an institutional bias towards a pro-abortion viewpoint – I’m sorry, the approved BBC term is ‘pro-choice’, and against the pro-life viewpoint – I’m sorry, that should have read ‘anti-abortion’.

Which might explain why this remarkable interview (RealAudio, 25 minutes in) with ‘pro-choice’ Dr Stuart Derbyshire wasn’t the main headline at nine-o’clock, and would just have been quietly forgotten before the Web.

Dr Derbyshire argued that babies did not feel pain until they were up to several months old, an argument which seems to fly in the face of common sense and human experience, as John Humphrys acknowledged. Such a bizarre claim made by a proponent of an unpopular (to liberals) ideology would have been picked up and amplified by the BBC, used to discredit their cause. The two sides of bias are promoting that which supports a view and ignoring or suppressing that which discredits it.

I can imagine how a pro-life BBC would have spun it.

“A pro-abortion doctor today claimed that babies cannot feel pain until up to several months after birth. Controversial psychologist Dr Stuart Derbyshire – who has previously claimed that vivisectionists have no duty to care for laboratory animals beyond what is necessary for successful experimentation, said that …”

Here’s the transcript (note Humphrys’ self-correction of ‘baby’ to ‘foetus’, so characteristic of the BBC):

John Humphrys : “Right – so your contention is that the baby – er, the foetus, cannot feel pain until … ?”

Dr Stuart Derbyshire, psychologist : “Until it’s had an opportunity to undergo some sort of learning process – until it’s had an opportunity to undergo a process whereby pointing and showing occurs”

Humphrys (interrupting) – “But that would suggest it’s weeks – possibly months – after birth – and surely that’s nonsense, isn’t it ?”

Derbyshire : “It possibly is weeks, possibly months – I mean it’s very difficult of course to ever draw a line as to precisely when it happens – but I do think we can draw a line and say that it is vitally dependent upon a process that’s going to take place outside of the womb. Pain – in the same way – all experience is in a sense social – it’s dependent on other people, and that doesn’t occur until the point of birth.”

Humphrys : “Dr Derbyshire, many thanks”

Dr Derbyshire was propounding an identical theory in the magazine Living Marxism ten years ago. Why is the BBC suddenly publicising him ?

“The US is considering legislation to make doctors tell women seeking an abortion it will cause the foetus pain.”

Ah, the Great Satan. Now I understand. Happy Easter.

… Justin Webb on yesterday’s Radio Five Drive show, being interviewed about Kate Couric, new CBS news anchor. He spoke about how the big networks were losing market share to cable and the internet.

“There ate three groups of people who don’t watch the evening news any more, and they are intelligent people, young people, and right-wing people – and obviously there are some people who fall into all three categories – at least (laughs) arguably – so right-wing people tend to watch Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, intelligent people tend to not bother with the telly at all, and young people get their news from the internet where they get it at all.”

I wonder what happened to the American left ? I suppose that’s synonymous with intelligent.

If anyone wants to listen, it’s here for a week (Wednesday’s show, 2h53m in).

… that make a BBC worldview. Take the coverage of today’s March for Free Expression, a response to the recent world-wide outbreak of cartoonophobia.

“Blog site

The free speech movement was born from a blog site on the internet and rallied hundreds from across the political spectrum to join Saturday’s rally.”

You’d think the story might contain a link to said blog. Ah yes, there’s a link at the side of the story.

But it’s a link to the cartoonophobic Global Civility site ! However could that have happened ?

Elsewhere, Stephen Pollard notes a remarkable contribution to BBC Radio Four’s “Thought For The Day”.

“Paying taxes is how love operates at a distance”

You can see how a service funded by a compulsory levy might warm to such a religion. As Pollard says, “we either pay to have this stuff broadcast or get sent to prison”.

that the moral relativism and non-judgementalism of BBC foreign affairs reporting is spreading to Home News. Here’s a news report which seems to miss half the story.

“Police said two men had entered the pub on the Langworthy estate, which was packed with fans watching a Manchester United game, and opened fire. The bodies of the two victims, who are both believed to be 27 and from Salford, were found on grassland across the road from the pub.”

A glance at this story gives the impression that the poor ‘victims’ had been shot by the bad men who entered the pub. Let’s find out what really happened, shall we ?

“The attackers, wearing balaclavas, walked into the Brass Handles pub in Pendleton, Salford, and opened fire.”

“The gunmen were then chased out of the pub, and while they were running across the little croft one of the men was shot in the back. His mate turned and was shot in the face.”

“Witnesses said a man got out of the Mondeo, took the guns and balaclavas off the bodies and sped off.”