Author Archives: VX

Bamboozled by Brexit? Don’t worry, remainer Sofia Bettiza will “explain”. The video largely consists of people negatively affected by Brexit though, and doesn’t have time to explain much. Is she biased? Yes: Sofia Bettiza – “Britain, please don’t Vote Leave!”

President Donald Trump has dramatically scaled back two public outdoor parks, or national monuments, in Utah. The policy is likely to provoke lawsuits from Native American tribes and environmental groups. But it will be welcomed by ranchers and business interests who view such monuments as federal land grabs.

Now guess the headline:

1. Anger as Trump shrinks Utah Monuments
2. Trump’s shrinking of Utah Monuments is welcomed
3. Mixed reaction as Trump shrinks Utah Monuments

You don’t need me to tell you the answer. I think if everyone in America supported Trump’s decision except one person, they’d still go with headline 1 and highlight that person’s views.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-42221082

Edit: Never mind, they have deleted it. Must not have been left wing enough.

They have this linked at the bottom of every news article now:

Learn how the BBC is working to strengthen trust and transparency in online news

They claim to be trusted and yet have to tell us that we should trust them. What a laugh! Usually I would dispute their claims but the entire Biased BBC blog already shows how often they can’t be trusted. For a change let’s look at how they are completely incompetent rather than just biased.

1. They claim to provide “high-quality” output, yet this has a basic spelling mistake: “We will consider all the relevant facts fairly and with and open mind.”

2. If you click on ‘BBC News Services’ either above or below the title, it leads you to this page which currently displays a 404 error.

3. The page includes the ‘Why you can trust BBC News’ link at the bottom, so if you click on it, it just loops back to the page you are already on. See here for more information about that.

Supermarkets ‘raise the price of Christmas biscuits’

Of course, as you already know, Brexit is to blame.

There has been a trend this year of rising food prices, driven by the weakness of the pound which makes imported food more expensive.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Brexiteers engineered this all along. Every time you try to eat a biscuit after we declare war on the EU by leaving it in March 2019, a racist white van man will punch you in the face and shout “NO TO FOREIGN NAMED SNACKS! DON’T YOU KNOW THAT BISCUIT MEANS ‘TWICE-COOKED’ IN FRENCH? YOU TRAITOR TO THE NATION” before robbing your GP of £350m.

But wait a minute…

The report says that a steep rise in butter prices is partly to blame.

What they aren’t telling you is that this is a problem that has developed in the EU, a result of EU interference in the production of butter.

The BBC quickly changed a blatantly incorrect headline which revealed their warped view of the world. Here’s the original headline:

It now reads: “Trump account retweets incendiary videos.” The reason for this is that the videos most certainly were not anti-muslim videos, and didn’t criticise Islam or muslims in any sense. According to the BBC mindset, simply showing a muslim doing something bad is ISLAMOPHOBIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Beating up a disabled boy is of course not as bad as retweeting a video of it, which is the real hate crime here. Met police should arrest Trump ASAP. It’s okay for the BBC to draw attention to the videos though, because it’s only bad when Trump does it.

A seat at the top table and those other silly meaningless metaphors about losing “global influence”. What gibberish.

Now WE, yes you and I, have lost OUR seat at the International Court of Justice. Gosh how will I recover from this? They deal with such important matters as Alleged Violations of Sovereign Rights and Maritime Spaces in the Caribbean Sea (Nicaragua v. Colombia).

“This is a failure of UK diplomacy“, says the BBC, and “a retreat from the international stage”. That’s it I’m getting in my nuclear bunker and I suggest you do the same, because Laos or Djibouti could invade any second and wipe us all out now that we are so tiny and frail. Little Britain all alone in the world. We’ll probably sink into the Atlantic some time soon if Laos doesn’t get us.

What these people are suggesting is that if we had a UK representative in the ICJ, they could simply ignore any kind of objectivity and legality in order to ‘influence’ things and make the rulings turn out in our favour – subverting international bodies to benefit the UK. Now that may be how many of these organisations work, and it’s certainly how the EU works, but to propose such a course of action says a lot about the neo-imperialistic approach some people support.

Sky News has just reported on a new paper which claims households are more than £400-a-year worse off as a result of inflation caused by the Brexit vote. It may well be true, who knows. The BBC hasn’t actually reported on this yet, but it seems almost inevitable with a finding like that, so let’s see how long it takes them to plaster it on the front page of the BBC news site. Neverthless, isn’t it strange that they only interviewed the co-author Dr Thomas Sampson, failing to mention at all the three other co-authors, Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain, and Dennis Novy? I wonder why that is? Beautiful British names.

As for the report itself, it concludes that “the Brexit vote caused a negative shock to the UK’s expected
future economic performance leading to an immediate depreciation in the value of the pound”. If you do a quick search of the document you’ll find 92 uses of the word ‘import’ but only a single use of the word ‘export’. How very strange…

If you have been following the Rohingya story, you will have heard how the Myanmar army cleared itself of wrongdoing this week. Jonathan Head, BBC South East Asia correspondent tells us:

To no one’s surprise, the army has exonerated itself of pretty much all blame. But its findings lack credibility, both because the inquiry was solely carried out by the very institution accused of committing the abuses, and because of the overwhelming testimony of so many Rohingya, detailing appalling atrocities.

If you have been following the accusations of BBC bias during the last few decades, you will have heard how the BBC cleared itself of any wrongdoing on numerous occasions. But its findings lack credibility, both because the inquiry was solely carried out by the very institution accused of committing the abuses, and because of the overwhelming testimony of so many viewers, detailing appalling bias.

One of the worst and most ridiculous arguments goes like this: “the right say the BBC is too left wing, but the left say the BBC has a right wing bias, so it’s probably quite balanced in reality”. You’ve heard variations of this argument no doubt.

The BBC has many presenters, journalists, employees. Not all of them have the exact same opinion. Andrew Neil is clearly more right wing than Emily Maitlis for example. Laura Kuenssberg is clearly more right wing than a lot of Corbyn supporters would like.

Everyone is biased. Everyone has opinions and preconceptions, and anyway what would true neutrality even look like? Centrism is not unbiased, and even supporting democracy or economic growth are not unbiased. Everyone at the BBC is biased and they simply cannot help it.

BBC output can therefore be biased in different ways at different times, both right wing and left wing (whether this is all “balanced” or not is a different matter). Likewise, the Guardian publish some more right wing articles from time to time, despite their obvious left wing stance. The difference between the Guardian and the BBC is that the Guardian are openly left wing and don’t try to present themselves as some sort of neutral source of “facts” as opposed to “opinions”, like the BBC do. Another difference is that my bin isn’t full of nasty letters the Guardian sent to me because I didn’t pay for their newspaper license.