Author Archives: Natalie

is the description the BBC uses for the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. In a post for the influential left-wing site Harry’s Place, “david t” says:

Secondly, it is wrong to describe MPACUK as a “civil liberties group”. It is, rather, an extreme Islamist organisation which republishes material not only from other extreme Islamist organisations, but also from US and UK neo-Nazi websites.

Read and note his first point as well.

UPDATE: The BBC obviously read the post and have substantially edited the piece concerned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: For some reason you get the original, unedited version if you go here but the re-edited version if you go here. (Hat tip: Little Bulldogs.)

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

“Some critics suggest …”

This report on a church organisation helping out women who are the victims of sex trafficers: A ‘tiny drop in the ocean’

It contains a completely unneccessary comment about “some critics suggest that if the homes are run by the Church there is a chance its beliefs will be imposed on victims around issues such as abortion.” without identifying the critics.

It’s a nasty and snide comment that wouldn’t be applied if the charity had been run by anyone who wasn’t a Catholic nun,

Thomas Bridge

Annoying both sides.

I’ve just had a look at your Biased BBC blog. I have to ask : if the BBC has such an apparently blatant left-wing bias, how come it has regularly upset both right-wing *and* left-wing British governments since 1923?

Seriously, with the obvious exception of the WW2 Churchill administration, every single British government that has existed since the inception of the BBC has complained that the Corporation was out to get it. Harold Wilson, as Labour a Prime Minister as you could get, *loathed* the BBC. Jim Callaghan often complained that the BBC was out to get his government. Naturally, Blair has plenty of reasons to hate the BBC. And what about the MI5 vetting of BBC staff, as detailed here : link

Gareth

Actually, Churchill was no exception.

Michael Medved (presumably this Michael Medved whom I didn’t know until today was also this Michael Medved) writes:

I would like to send you the following link from the BBC:

“Lebanon’s president castigates UN”

“Showing a picture of a child killed in the conflict, Mr Lahoud asked: “How
many, children like this one here are going to die because nobody does anything for them?”

It’s interesting to notice that the photo shows nobody else but the notorious “Green Helmet”, carrying the same (freshly or for a long time)dead children relentlessly into the cameras over and over again at different locations in Lebanon.”

Green Helmet was first spotted by Richard North of EU Referendum. Here’s a You Tube clip of GH at work.

I am a kindly soul and I did wonder if it were not over-demanding to expect the BBC to zoom in and comment on some bit of paper in the hand of a national leader present at a UN meeting. Then again, they managed to zoom in and comment on this, so why not?

By the way, hello again. I have about a squidgzillion other emails in my in box. Some of them might even get posted.

UPDATE: Actually, it turns out that it’s a different Michael Medved. The Michael Medved whose email is quoted above writes that he is often mistaken for the US talk show host, and “I kind of got used to it :-)”

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

a plot to blow up US-bound airliners shows the US is still at war with extremists” – reports the BBC.

That’s the main news front page.

Liars.

He actually said, “The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.”

(Emphasis added by me in both cases.)

Clicking the link from the main news page to the actual story – fair do’s, it’s an improvement. Somebody worked quite hard; added a a totally unecessary paragraph break here, a line of dots covering up a single word there… all to make something nearly as accurate as just repeating the man’s actual words. It says,

President George W Bush has said a plot to bomb US-bound flights from the UK is a “stark reminder” that the US is still at war with Islamic extremists.

Mr Bush said it showed “Islamic fascists… will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom”.

Hat tip: Archduke and others.

ADDED LATER: It’s easy to find oneself beginning to accept the tendency of the BBC to make certain types of false statements simply because it keeps happening. For instance, as it did here, the BBC regularly changes non-PC words or phrases to their PC equivalents not only in its own reports (bad enough) but even when quoting people who did, deliberately, use words such as “terrorist” or “Islamic fascist”. Another example of a reprehensible behaviour that one finds oneself beginning to accept through familiarity is “stealth editing” – the BBC’s regular practice of quietly changing a story but not changing the “Last Edited” field at the top of the webpage. There have been dozens, even hundreds, of examples of this detailed in this blog – but one still meets people who are surprised that the BBC would allow a false statement to stand, and even people who say, “that story can’t have been changed, see, it says the time it was last edited up there.”

Events move fast. This roundup taken from scanning the newspapers, the blogs and our own comments over the last few days is already out of date. For instance EU Referendum – if you scroll up from the link below – is now posting the famous video of Green Helmet at the same tricks ten years ago, and Richard North is calling named journalists liars. I can’t keep up. I have several emails on file that I will make into posts when I get time. Still, here are some interesting links.

• EU Referendum says that John Simpson’s calmness and lack of a flack jacket while Israeli jets bomb Lebanon not far away displays a confidence in the ability and wish of the Israelis to target their attacks that contradicts his own complaints that the Israelis are indiscriminate.
• Hat tip to Will who flagged up this Sun mini-editorial.
• How the BBC tells a story – as described by pounce. More here.
• Mick in the UK comments:
  

  On Radio Four this morning [Monday] we were treated to a strange recording which was accompanied with a disclaimer.
  The item was used to bolster a description of the ‘bombardment’ of Beirut.
  It was a recording of constant explosions, BUT, before it was played the disclaimer said…”THIS RECORDING HAS BEEN CONDENSED”, and then afterwards, the presenter said, “This continued for another one and a half hours”.
  No it didn’t!
  If the sound we heard had continued for one and a half hours, there would have been nothing left of Beirut.

• Stephen Pollard’s BBC mole forwards a self-congratulatory internal email. Scroll up and down for more BBC-related posts.
• Brits unbiased? Bollocks! says the Toronto Sun.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

First it was “militant”. The BBC used to use that term to describe far-left figures like Derek Hatton – not an admirable man, in my opinion, but someone who worked within the political process. Now it means terrorist.

Then it was “activist”, which brings to mind images of earnest, sandal-wearing young folk seeking signatures for a Greenpeace petition. Now it also means terrorist. Does the BBC really think that using the same word for members of Hamas and someone like this Burmese woman who runs a Women’s Action Network in that unhappy country contributes to understanding?

The latest revamped word is “dissident”. Remember when dissident meant (to the BBC and the rest of us) someone like Vaclav Havel or Alexander Solzhenitsyn – men and women who peacefully spoke out against oppression and often suffered imprisonment for doing so? Now the BBC says that dissidents – not even “dissident republicans”, just “dissidents”, are people who firebomb shops.

Do you ever get the feeling that there is something the BBC is trying not to say?

A reader writes:

It’s visceral!
Paul Mason, a generally excellent reporter, let his prejudices show last night [Monday] on Newsnight. Surveying the fall in ITV’s popularity, he speculated that changes in viewing patterns had been triggered by changes in the British family. He stated categorically: “And there is no longer any typical British family”.

Well many at the BBC might want to see the end of the traditional family and put out programmes that help speed its demise. But, in fact, latest government statistics show (link) that we are not there yet. In fact, there are 7.5m married couples (and half a million co-habitees) with children, compared with 1.6m single parent families.