Nick Robinson’s Immigration Truthspeak – An Outsider’s View

I wrote this up while watching Nick Robinson’s “The Truth About Immigration”. After it was over, I rearranged a few things, but except for the last couple of paragraphs it was nearly all written as I watched. However, after having digested it for a minute, I think I can sum the whole thing up much more briefly.

Nick Robinson: How is it that a subject that was once taboo is now on every poltician’s lips? Why is it that the doors to Britain were flung open and what are the benefits and what are the perils of now seeking to close them?

Why is it now a major issue and what is the truth about immigration?

Shorter fisking: What Robinson covers is all old hat. See the BBC’s “White” Series for evidence that most of what he rehashes has been done before. In addition, everyone by now knows what Labour did and why. This is a dishonest discussion if one side of the issue is a strawman. Most people do not want to close the door, full stop. I suppose that makes for good TV, but it’s not honest.

What is the truth? Why is this issue now such a big deal that the BBC feels obligated to go over all this again? Aside from the obvious current event of Bulgarian and Roma(nian) immigration, Spot the missing murder of Lee Rigby with the murderer explaining himself on camera. Spot the missing no-go areas. Spot the missing imams preaching jihad. Spot the missing grooming gangs of Rochdale and Manchester. Spot the missing mass murders of 7/7.  Spot the missing discussion about how the BBC got it wrong as well, which was part of Robinson’s statement to the Mail.

I think that about sums up the BBC’s approach to the truth.

Longer version, if anyone’s interested:

So we’re expected to believe that the BBC’s original Young Conservative is straying off the reservation, are we? Sorry, no.

It’s all a big deal now, we’re told. Illegal immigrants are being told to go home. Robinson emphasized “illegal”. And what, exactly, were illegal immigrants being told until this national conversation hit an all time high? Oh, sorry, wrong national debate. I was momentarily stunned by hearing a BBC journalist use the words “illegal” and “immigrants” in the same sentence. I’m just so used to hearing them censor that word in their dishonest reporting about the issue in the US.

Notice the footage Robinson chooses to accompany that line. The police are clearly approaching someone who has just snuck across the border. This is an entirely different topic than the real concerns about immigration in Britain. By conflating the two from the outset, Robinson has already muddied the waters. Whoops, that’s a racist comment these days, isn’t it?

Nick’s Big Question: Why is it now a major issue?

Answer: Anything except third-world extremely fundamentalist Muslims coming in en masse and setting up segregated enclaves and not only maintaining those extremely fundamentalist behaviors and refusing to integrate, but causing certain local problems and then being enabled by politicians, police, and a BBC willing to kowtow to any demand in the name of political correctness and to give two fingers to their political opponents, as well as because they’re afraid.

I hadn’t even watched seven minutes of this before I could see it’s mostly a load of tired old talking points, and would ultimately be a dishonest approach to the issue. If the issues Robinson presents as the main concerns weren’t already talked about enough to be well covered, why did the BBC do that whole “White” Series a few years ago? What was “The Poles Are Coming” about, then? It was a deliberate attempt to control the national debate on this issue, and to demonize those who thought it might be a problem. If it wasn’t already a well-known concern, why was Mrs. Duffy such a story? The BBC was just as quick to paint her as a racist as any politician was.

And what about “White Girl”? That particular facet of the immigration issue was entirely absent from Robinson’s supposed truth about it. And let’s not pretend it’s not the main reason immigration is a hotter topic than ever.

Nick Robinson and the BBC think you’re all stupid. We could tell from their reactions to public complaints about Mandelapalooza, and Evan Davis more recently gave DB a hint of it: they hold you in contempt, now more than ever.

Another question – in two parts – left unanswered: If so many immigrants were needed, as Robinson states, to fill all those jobs, how many British people were unemployed at the time and why are there so many more now? Secondly, why was unlimited immigration the answer instead of training the citizens? Surely there must be a difference in cost – on several levels – between the two options. As was evident from the “The Poles Are Coming” episode, the “lazy British” Narrative has become an immutable object at the BBC. Now they don’t even think it’s worth addressing. It’s a given. Not a single moment was spent asking about  what to do with the unemployed youth in Britain.

(Side note to Nick Robinson and his producer: You really should have resisted the temptation to use the cute “boom and bust” reference there. It only highlighted how dishonest the BBC has been about that issue as well.

Other side note: I admit it’s nice to see Nick Robinson presenting politicians as being scheming and damaging rather than protecting and defending them, like he did for the Blair/Brown relationship or as the expenses scandal was at its height.)

I’ll grant that it’s good that Robinson got Labour politicians to admit how slimy they were on their policy, but if it’s just David Blunkett saying they were “on the side of the angels”, and Jack Straw saying Labour got it wrong, then the debate gets shifted to whether they were right or not, rather than how dishonest they were the entire time. Yvette Cooper was shown as trying to have it both ways, so nothing enlightening there, either.

Robinson, being of course ruled by the BBC’s requirement to remain impartial, leaves it there. For balance against three Labour politicians, two of whom essentially defended the policy without much reservation, we got Michael Howard. Oh, right, Robinson himself is supposed to count as being on the Right in this case, yeah.

The one saving grace of this entire hour was the part where Robinson showed non-white immigrants complaining about the same things that concerned the first round of complainers, meaning it can’t be called racist anymore. I know a couple people here have brought that up recently, and I imagine it would come as quite a shock to those who trust the BBC for their news on important issues. Unfortunately, it’s easy to predict that the BBC will forget all about that immediately and will be quickly back to calling it racist.

So David Cameron is putting a limit on “net immigraton” is he? How will that work out, Nick? No prizes for guessing. To make matters more pathetic, after going over the whole “We needed mass immigration to fill the jobs” theme, Robinson takes that to the next level to show that you need mass immigration to fill all those student slots at universities. Apparently, the university system will be economically threatened if you worry about the questionable student applicants and don’t let in enough proper ones.

Then we get to work permits. Um, what’s this about skills and the ability to speak English? Didn’t we meet some Eastern European kids who were picking strawberries and were told this is an example of the kind of jobs Britain vitally needs filling? Aren’t those the low-wage jobs lazy British young people won’t do, so limiting immigration to skilled workers will harm the economy? Of course that’s so, and Robinson is keen to tell you later on. He doesn’t have to come out and say it at this point, as that wouldn’t be, you know, impartial.

Then Robinson says that Cameron’s statement about allowing in skilled workers needed now (chefs in the shown example) – but he wants to train the next generation of home-grown workers – is a “blunt” message to stop hiring foreigners. Blah, blah, blah. This makes it all the more lame that Robinson didn’t flat out ask the practical question about training and unemployment I mentioned above.

Ultimately, Robinson tells us, immigration is a great net benefit to Britain. The only question now, apparently, is what’s the best plan to make it work more smoothly in future.

No. That’s not the question at all. Robinson asked at the start, why is this such a big deal now? He doesn’t dare touch the real answer.

I know why the BBC can’t touch the real answer. It’s because those of you who do want to shut the door (or at least put much more stringent limits than Cameron wants) want it shut mainly – and are talking about it more loudly than ever before, which is allegedly also what Robinson is meant to be investigating – because of the factors the BBC refused to address. So they just have to present that side of the argument as some phantasm. Everyone on camera is talking about limits, amd figuring out some common sense, not shutting it down, full stop. Yet Robinson frames that side of the argument in its extreme version. He and his producer know full well what they’re doing. This only makes it more galling that he avoided discussion of the BBC’s influence in the whole thing, after recently saying they made a “horrible mistake”.

This is a major public debate like never before because of things like the murder of Lee Rigby and the seemingly endless stream of stories about Muslim grooming gangs, not because a few Slovenians are picking strawberries for less than Wayne and Kaylee get on the dole. The primary reason it’s such a big deal now that even the BBC has to admit it is the reality of things like Tower Hamlets and Anjem Choudary, not Polish glass workers who moonlight as DJs and Bangladeshi students wearing the hijab at some hip university. That shot of the latter from the part where Robinson is discussing the need for students is almost like they’re taunting you. The only reason I’m noticing something subliminal is because I’ve been prepared to notice it. Perhaps they’re so far out of reality and intellectual honesty that they don’t realize what they’ve done.

Sure, Robinson at least briefly lays out the more general concerns along the way about too much pressure on communities and services, jobs, benefit migration, and people feel like they’re losing their own neighborhoods. But the only time Islam comes up is when he casually mentions that the Muslim population has rapidly doubled, as if it’s just another color in the rainbow.

If one thinks that the real reason unlimited immigration is such a hot-button topic right now is limited to jobs, then one will feel that Robinson has successfully opened the way for a more honest debate about the pros and cons of immigration. But it surely can’t be an honest debate if he reduces one side of the argument to some people wanting to “shut the door once again”. He doesn’t present anyone as saying they want the polar opposite of unlimited immigration, so why the reductio ad absurdum for only one side?

“Perhaps it’s time to have that open and frank discussion we’ve really never had.”

If only. And this documentary avoided that frank discussion at every turn. The BBC can now claim to have successfully addressed the issue, but they will only be lying to themselves, and to you. So where was the part where Robinson talked about how the BBC got it wrong? Where was the part where Robinson discussing how and why the BBC made a “horrible mistake” in suppressing concerns about unlimited immigration? The BBC has more influence on the national debate of every issue than any politician or political party could ever hope to achieve in their wildest dreams. Blaming politicians and I guess the media in general ignores the very real influence and deliberate policy the BBC had on the issue over the last decade, and still has now. This documentary is evidence of their desire to influence it.

Voyage Of The Damned Fools

The BBC reports today that a US ice-breaker, the Polar Star, has now been called in to rescue not only the trapped Akademik Shokalskiy, but also the Chinese rescue ship, the  Xue Long, which transferred those passengers from one to the other, and is now itself trapped. In other words, the ship which rescued the passengers from the trapped ship by flying them in a helicopter to another ship, which nearly got trapped, is trapped. There’s a Monty Python sketch in there somewhere.

The reality is that two ships, along with their crew (22 on the Russian ship, and 111 on the Chinese vessel), have gotten trapped in the ice due – allegedly – to the negligence of Prof. Chris Turney, who was out there to prove that the ice was, er, melting. I say “allegedly” because it’s pretty obvious that there will be legal repercussions from all this, and I’ll let all our lurking lawyers and journalists and non-lurking journalists go threaten Anthony Watts and others for prejudicing court proceedings instead of wasting our time. This post is about the BBC’s coverage (and cover-up in process) of the whole fiasco.

Yes, I know the ice melting was only one part of the official research reasons for the trip, which included studies of various wildlife and marine habitats. But the focus was on how Climate Change – which they all believe is caused by human activity – is affecting those things, just like the supposedly melting ice. Curiously, as some here have noticed, that purpose came and went throughout the BBC’s coverage of the story.

The Aurora Australis has finally been told it can head home with its new passengers, and will eventually be allowed to go back and finish what it was supposed to be doing: resupplying Australia’s research base, Casey Station. Hopefully nobody else in the area will need rescuing by an icebreaker, because the Xue Long won’t be able to help. The US Coast Guard icebreaker is similarly abandoning its own proper mission, as even the BBC reports, to resupply the US research station on Ross Island. 133 people are stuck, and who knows how many more actual scientists and their research have been severely inconvenienced by this tourist trip. Or was it a research trip? We’ll see.

The BBC is currently describing the Akademik Shokalskiy as a “Russian research vessel”. If and when it gets freed eventually (there’s still the possibility that the ice will crush the hull), its next scheduled task is to take a group of tourists around the Antarctic Peninsula. See, it originally was an actual research vessel, so the BBC is being “accurate” as usual. Only it’s retired from that and has been refitted as a tourist ship. The Expeditions Online website lists it as an “Expedition Ship”, and the amenities look appealing.

The Akademik Shokalskiy is a fully ice-strengthened expedition vessel built in 1984 for polar and oceanographic research. This class of vessel is world renowned for polar exploration, because of its strength, maneuverability and small passenger numbers. The Shokalskiy provides comfortable accommodation in double and twin cabins with private facilities. All cabins have outside windows and ample storage space. On board there is a combined bar/library lounge area and a dedicated lecture room, where the science team and expedition staff will present a programme of talks.

Check out the website and you’ll see its “NOTICE TO REPORTERS” that they’re not the operators of the ship and are merely a booking agent. They know there will be legal ramifications and want to make sure nobody includes them as a defendant in any lawsuit.

Before we get to the inevitable legal repercussions, let’s examine just how cavalier with the truth the BBC has been during this whole saga. Aside from who is at fault here, there’s the question of the overall purpose of this little adventure. The official reason we’ve been fed by the BBC is that it was to retrace the footsteps of Douglas Mawson’s original tremendous scientific expedition to the region. We’re meant to ignore Turney’s own “Science Case” for the trip is all about the melting ice, and how Climate Change (and we all know there’s only one kind and one cause for these people) affects the wildlife and ocean habitats. All the other stuff is a sideshow, an aegis under which to do this.

Turney has written a book about Mawson (a free signed copy goes to anyone who sends him $400. A measly $200 will only get you the t-shirt. Hopefully all “expedition members” who paid $8000 minimum will at least get one of those for their trouble.). Mawson, of course, deserves all the respect in the world for his achievements. His truly scientific exploration essentially opened the world’s mind up to Antarctica. There’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting to retrace his steps and sort of duplicate his tests in celebration of the 100th anniversary of his pretty amazing expedition. When one considers that he barely survived the ordeal but through his own strength and initiative lived to tell about it, and compares his experience to the whining from certain members of today’s expedition, there’s much to discuss about what’s become of us as a species.

Unfortunately, Turney, who has done some proper science and is an experienced expedition leader, he set off expecting to find less ice. In addition to the terrific and often amusing coverage from Anthony Watts, Paul Homewood has been following this silly saga, and he too notices some BBC dishonesty. In this case, he’s calling out both Turney and the BBC:

BBC In Warmist Fantasyland

There have been various attempts to blame the debacle on global warming, but this one really is nonsensical.

According to the expedition report, filed by the Guardian:

“Direct access from the sea has been impossible for the past four years, however, ever since a 75-mile-long iceberg called B09B grounded itself in the entrance to Commonwealth Bay. A thick band of sea ice has since built up around the iceberg, sticking fast to the land and blocking ships from getting to Boat Harbour, where Mawson moored the Aurora in January 1912.”

And Chris Turney, leader of the expedition states that:

“The thick chaotic surface we see around the Shokalskiy is consistent with the idea that this ice is several years old and is considerably more difficult to break through by icebreaker than single year ice.”

NSIDC are quite clear just what sea ice is:

Sea ice is frozen seawater that floats on the ocean surface. Blanketing millions of square kilometers, sea ice forms and melts with the polar seasons, affecting both human activity and biological habitat. In the Arctic, some sea ice persists year after year, whereas almost all Southern Ocean or Antarctic sea ice is “seasonal ice,” meaning it melts away and reforms annually.

A scientist ignored other scientists, because of his own religious beliefs. And the BBC is enabling him to cover it up.

On Dec. 26, BBC journalist Andrew (Bad) Luck-Baker reported on how the science was continuing while they were stuck in the ice. In a moment of honesty, he admitted the Warmist intent of the expedition:

The goal of the modern day Australasian Antarctic Expedition is to repeat many of the original measurements and studies, to see how facets of the environment have changed over the past century. This passage of time coincides with warming and climate change in Antarctica.

Then we get to another level of spin. There’s also the question about who are all those other passengers who were not crew or scientists or PhD students or Guardinistas or Beeboids (or Google marketing mavens or Turney’s own family). Further down there’s this:

In addition to the Russian crew of 22, the expedition team consists of 18 professional scientists from Australia and New Zealand, and 22 volunteer science assistants. They are members of the public, ranging in age from their 20s to their 70s. They paid to join the scientific adventure.

So not eco-tourists, but “volunteer science assistants”.

A report on Jan. 2 stated that one of the goals of the expedition was “to track how quickly the Antarctic’s sea ice was disappearing”. So let’s not have any more denial that this wasn’t a Warmist expedition with a goal of “proving” their theory, rather than a simple historical retracing of Mawson’s journey.

On Dec. 28, it was a “scientific mission ship”. No mention of tourists, although they quoted one of them as a “science volunteer”. Actually, it was the same guy and the same quote (Bad) Luck-Baker included in the previous report. Didn’t he have time to speak to anyone else? Or were they all too busy with the yoga and knot-tying and songwriting?

Two days later, either he or the other BBC contributor (pulling double duty for the Guardian as well, naturally), Alok Jha, filmed “Expedition Member” Terry Gostlow telling the folks back home that they it was all “good fun” and they were hoping to get back home soon. Gostlow is not listed as either a Science Leader or a PhD student on the Spirit of Mawson website, so one assumes he’s another one of those paying volunteers.

On the same day, either (Bad) Luck-Baker, Jha, or a desk-bound editor filed a report when they learned that the Xue Long was on its way with the helicopter.

The Russian-flagged research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy has been stuck in ice for nearly a week. It is carrying 74 scientists, tourists and crew.

Oops. On the same page, there’s an inset extra commentary from (Bad) Luck-Baker, where he refers to “research volunteers”. A different BBC report from the same day also refers to tourists.

On rescue day Jan. 2, though, the BBC reported that “the scientists and tourists were now all aboard the ship Aurora Australis.”

Oops again. So we’ve gone from “science volunteers” to “expedition member” to “research volunteers” to “tourists”, all in the space of a week.

I’m sounding sarcastic about this because the BBC’s inconsistency is rather telling. If they were true paying field assistants, actually involved somehow in helping the scientific work, nobody would dream of calling them tourists. I’m saying the BBC seems uninterested in letting you know much these paying customers were contributing in between attending lectures and praying to Gaia, not because there’s no such thing as science volunteers, paying or otherwise. In fact, I’m well aware that this is a very common thing in a number of scientific disciplines. Many archaeology and palaeontology projects simply wouldn’t be possible without lots of people paying their own way to help sort artifacts, spend hours in the heat painstakingly brushing away dirt, and even make the tea. These things are advertised regularly things in science and history magazines.

The fact that the BBC – an organization known to have the promotion of Warmism as a directive from the top – sometimes refers to the paying customers as tourists tells us that it’s not quite the same thing as people paying their way to help excavate some dinosaur bones or catalog a mind-numbing amount of 5000 year-old ostracons.

The reason I’m looking at these paying passengers is because this appears to be the deciding factor in what happened. Now that people are becoming aware that hell and lots of money will be paid, and the lawyers are sharpening their pencils, blame is being placed on Turney not only for an apparent lack of preparation (it seems that he didn’t make sure they had adequate weather reports), but for indulging his paying eco-tourist customers instead of heeding the ship captain’s warnings and getting out of harm’s way while there was still time, the BBC has rushed in to help with his defense.

Meanwhile Prof Chris Turney, co-leader of the AAE 2013, has defended the scientific value of the expedition and rejected claims it was a “tourist trip” hampered by poor preparation.

Writing in the UK’s Observer newspaper, he said the trip had been struck by bad luck as opposed to human error. He said it was an important scientific expedition and its success would ultimately be measured by peer-reviewed studies.

I’m sure Turney is very eager to reject those claims. Whatever he publishes from this expedition will only be reviewed by peers who already agree with his conclusions, but that’s neither here nor there. The problem for him is that it’s not just people the BBC will claim have a vested interest in damaging the reputation of Warmists saying it was due to human error: one of his own passengers has said it. The Australian Green politician, Janet Rice, said this on her own blog (h/t WUWT):

The third drama of the day is the one which is still unfolding. Because of the Argo mishap we got off late, and had one less vehicle to ferry people to and fro. I’m told the Captain was becoming rather definite late in the afternoon that we needed to get everyone back on board ASAP because of the coming weather and the ice closing in. As I write we are continuing to make extremely slow progress through what looks like a winter alpine snow field – it’s yet another surreal part of this journey that we are in a ship trying to barge our way through here! I’m sure the Captain would have been much happier if we had got away a few hours earlier.

In other words, Turney ignored the advice of his captain – someone who is an experienced  professional and knows the area and its conditions very, very well – in favor of indulging his science volunteers/research volunteers/expedition members/tourists. Read the whole blog and you’ll see that, while at least one actual scientist was taking seal tissue samples, the paying customers were there to commune with the penguins and have nice day out. Turney also wrote at a few days before this that he was surprised to see some ice move in so quickly. A pretty cavalier approach from start to finish is in evidence in other blog posts collected by one of Watt’s readers here.

The Argo to which she refers is one of three amphibious all-terrain research vehicles, which they damaged by towing it back in haste. Who’s going to pay for that? And who do you think paid the way for a Green politician? She sure wasn’t there to help constituents. She’s a Warmist and was there to support the cause.

There were others there not for science but to support the cause. Google did one of their Google Doodle competitions, and awarded two free trips to teachers whose students sent in the winning entries. They were there to do lesson plans and video chats to promote Warmism to children. No lesson plans have been published yet. Google also sent along their Australia/New Zealand branding and marketing manager (listed as part of the Science Team!). For Warmism.

To sum up, we have evidence that the expedition leader had a pre-conceived notion to expect less ice, wasn’t completely prepared for everything, and had a lot of tourists on board to complicate matters and placed an apparently undue burden on the expedition itself. Allegedly, of course. Notice, though, that the BBC has reported precisely none of this. They have, however, reported Turney’s surprise and excuses for the ice trapping them.

The BBC has been misleading about the reasons for the trip, the nature of many of the passengers, and the underlying as well as overt cause of their predicament. All in the name of supporting their Warmist agenda. They assigned two journalists, including World Service senior science editor (Bad) Luck-Baker, to follow the scientists around to tell you how the wildlife and environment was responding to climate change. Period. They say so  right here.

Alok Jha and Andrew Luck-Baker continue to follow the scientists on the ongoing Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013. They go out on fieldwork trips with the researchers studying how the wildlife that lives in this inhospitable environment is responding to climate change.

All the history stuff and retracing of Mawson’s footstep was window dressing for the Warmist agenda. In case there are any lingering doubts, the top listing on the Supporters page of the expedition website is Turney’s own Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales. I imagine not a few Australian citizens are going to question their government’s handing out taxpayer money for this as well.

You know what the BBC isn’t reporting? That the ice is, in fact, not melting the way they claim, and Global Warming isn’t ruining it. It turns out that the models predicting the horror show were not based on proper data, and so overestimated everything. You know that iceberg that Turney blames for trapping them? The one which AGW was supposedly causing to calve? In reality, actual scientists have discovered that it’s been ground away on an underwater ridge. Even what he blames for what he wrongly blames is wrong. BBC Science editor Jonathan Amos wrote about that underwater ridge once, but I think he got away with it. I can’t even find it now.

More recently, just as the whole expedition coverage was kicking off, Amos managed to report that satellite data showed ice loss in West Antarctica, nowhere near Mawson’s Hut, in order to reinforce the dogma that we were all going to be doomed by rising sea levels. He wisely refrained from openly blaming AGW there. He’s done more reports on the new satellite data showing a microscopic rise in sea levels due to a little melting Antarctic ice, but doesn’t remind everyone that it’s not due to AGW, which he ought to be doing at every opportunity so that people don’t get the wrong idea. Of course, that wrong idea is the correct one the BBC wants their audience to have.

The entire thing was expected to give a boost to the whole Warmist agenda, so the BBC eagerly assigned two people to go along, and spent who knows how much of your license fee to do it. Once the whole thing went wrong and everyone started to find out it was half science, half eco-tourism, all with a dedicated agenda, they played around with the truth in order to keep the image of historical reenactment going. I fear that information will not be available via FOI requests, because journalism. In any case, it’s your license fee hard at work.

I suspect Prof. Turney might get thrown under the bus by people who see this foolish voyage as damaging to the cause. Let’s see how the BBC covers it.

 

 

The BBC, Guns, and Mental Illness

There were two tragic shootings in the US this past week or so, and the BBC was keen to use them to promote their anti-gun agenda. Not only did they seek to exploit both events to further that agenda, but stooped to dishonesty, and in one case censorship, in the process. The fact that these occurred around the time the media was acknowledging the one-year anniversary of the sad Newtown massacre, what many of them felt certain was going to be the turning point for the anti-gun movement, only added to their urgency.

In honor of the one-year anniversary of the media seeking to exploit a tragedy to further a political agenda, Mark Mardell flew back from honoring his “secular saint” in Johannesburg to interview a mother of one of the little victims in Newtown.

(NB: Before I continue, let me warn you that this will be a very long post, the length of a magazine feature, as this is a complex issue and there’s a lot of ground – a lot of BBC coverage – to cover. If you’re one of those TL/DR types who believes all blog posts should be short and sweet, 500 words maximum, then please click away now. Also, it’s important to point out that my opinion and your opinion of gun control and of gun culture and gun laws in the US is irrelevant. This is about the BBC’s biased reporting on the issue. Whether or not one agrees with a given ideological perspective should neither deny the BBC’s right to report on something, nor give it carte blanche when it’s an issue with which one agrees. I’m going to repeat this more than once, because I don’t want discussion in the comments to degenerate into moaning about guns in the US. We should be able to discuss the bias on its face, with the evidence I’ve provided, whether we agree with the specifics of an ideological position or not.)

After painting the picture of a heartbroken town, using the tools of a professional wordsmith to evoke emotion and gently guide the reader towards the desired conclusion, Mardell presents the words of Nicole Hockley, mother of Dylon, one of the little victims of a mentally ill teenager who killed his own mother and stole her guns to use in a mass murder. It’s impossible not to be moved at least a little by her pain, the loss of love and the unimaginable potential of a young life. Her expression of the loss of the physical sensation of holding her child touches deeply. It’s why the media engages in this kind of reporting. They know it’s moving, they know people will feel deeply. Unfortunately, they know it can sometimes be used to manipulate, and in some cases it strays into exploitation. It’s also impossible not to detect Mardell’s disappointment that the woman seems to him not to have learned the correct lesson from the tragedy.

Mrs. Hockley knows something must change to prevent this kind of thing  from happening again, or at least make it so rare that nobody can make the case that, as Mardell has, it’s becoming as American as baseball. We’ll return to that highly biased bit of journalism later. Contrary to BBC reporting on the topic, nobody believes that nothing should change. Nobody wants these things to continue just so a few of us can keep our crazy arsenals. One of the lowest rhetorical tricks is to demonize one’s ideological opponent simply for disagreeing, denying the possibility that there might be a reasoned opinion on the other side worth discussing. With this trick, the debate is stifled before it begins, as Mardell demonstrates expertly:

President Barack Obama called for new gun laws after this act of mass murder. Congress has rebuffed every single one.

This makes it seems as if Congress (as usual with the BBC, it’s presented as a single, united body, which is dishonest), and by extension, the public who voted for them, opposed to any change, any improvement which might prevent further tragedies like this. For which laws did the President call? We aren’t told. Which laws doesn’t Congress want? We aren’t told. Does anyone in Congress have an alternative solution, or do they just want things to remain exactly as they are? We aren’t told. Informing you properly is not Mardell’s goal, of course. His purpose here is to make you believe that the US culture of gun ownership – in all its myriad forms, not the monolith nutter-with-an-arsenal portrait the BBC likes to present – is wrong, must be changed, and all right-thinking people seek a new momentum.

Nichole Hockley is disappointed but says she doesn’t back “gun control” and she doesn’t want, as some do, a ban on military-style rifles.

“Its not just about the gun at the end of the day. The gun is the weapon that was chosen to kill my son and others at Sandy Hook Elementary,” she said. “Certainly there are lots of common sense solutions required around gun safety – keep you guns locked up, make sure only people capable of having guns have them, report it if your gun is stolen.”

This reflects more of the consensus in the US than Mardell and his BBC colleagues are comfortable with. Contrary to the general BBC coverage of the issue, there are already plenty of laws controlling guns in the country. They vary from State to State (anathema to the BBC), yet we’re always given the impression that most of the country is one heated argument short of becoming the Wild West. (NB: Your opinion of whether or not people should own guns is irrelevant. The BBC’s reporting is biased, whether you agree with their ideology on the issue or not. Don’t appear to take the position that it’s okay for the BBC to be biased when you agree with them.) Fortunately, as the woman is being presented as an absolute moral authority, he must let her speak. No BBC censorship at this point.

But she says issues about mental health are just as important. There should be early intervention and programmes to stop people feeling isolated.

Now we get to the key element of this tragedy: mental illness. We aren’t properly reminded here, as the BBC expects we all know the details but anyone who remembers the story will know that a mentally ill young man killed his mother, stole her legally-owned weapons, and went on to commit mass murder against small children and their teachers. Here’s where the BBC begins to discuss the reality behind the tragedy, and to address the issues behind it.

Oh, hang on, no it isn’t. We’re back to gun control laws.

But she doesn’t see why Congress couldn’t have banned large ammunition magazines that can hold many bullets.

Connecticut has enacted such a ban on magazines of more than 10 rounds.

“The most lethal feature of a gun is the high-capacity magazine clips,” she said. “When you look at a lot of states there, hunters don’t have more than three or seven per clip because it is about being fair to the animals.

“I would like to see that same fairness given to humans,” she added.

That’s a great line, actually, better than just about anything put out by all the world-class, highly-trained, professional wordsmiths at the BBC. It’s so good it almost made me forget that she said the issue of mental illness was “just as important”. Mardell seems to have forgotten about it, because that’s the last we hear of it. The rest of the piece is about working to enforce more gun control laws. He even wheels out the traditional appeal to authority, this time in the form of the owner of a gun shop who denigrates some of the people who rushed to buy up certain unapproved weapons before laws banning them came into effect. Even the owner of a gun shop, you’re expected to feel, says that people who want to own these guns are idiots, and that it’s very dangerous. What more is there to say, right?

Wrong. There’s more – much, much more – to say about mental illness and the culture and laws surrounding it. Yet Mardell and the BBC swept it under the rug. Mardell simply doesn’t care that the woman – presented here as a voice you must listen to due to her absolute moral authority, remember – said that the issue of mental illness is of equal importance. That won’t do anything to push his or the BBC’s anti-gun agenda, so he ignored it entirely.

It’s likely that the journalist excuse for not spelling out the details of the mass murderer is that most people knew enough that it was unnecessary, and would have impeded the flow of the piece. I believe that one solitary sentence, not unlike the one I wrote above, would have sufficed, and would not have put a damper on the prose. It would, however, have detracted from the agenda. The victim’s mother said that it was just as important as what the BBC made into the main – and only – point of the story, so it’s hard to accept any excuse for leaving it out, practically denying the importance of the issue altogether.

Near the end of the article, after we hear the gun shop owner seemingly disparage many gun owners, Mardell amazing allows through one of the man’s sentiments, and perhaps the most important one of all on the issue of gun control:

He strongly believes that guns are not only a part of America’s constitution, they are also a part of its history and a bulwark against dictatorship – a frequently heard argument.

A frequently heard argument? Not from the BBC it isn’t. When was the last time you heard anyone from the BBC say this was part of the debate? It must be like racism and the Tea Party for Mardell. He’s admitted that he frequently hears people claiming legitimate opposition to Democrats’ and the President’s various Big-Government, redistributionist policies, and that he’s seen no overt evidence that it’s all due to racism, yet he remains convinced that it’s actually all due to racism – or crypto-racism – and pretty much all BBC reporting on opposition to any of the President’s policies is inspired by racism.

In the case of gun control laws, something that is apparently something Mardell hears frequently is never evident in his or his colleagues’ reporting on the issue. Right here, this tells us that he and the BBC just ignore a large portion of what they hear, because it doesn’t suit their agenda.

Getting back to the gun shop owner’s opinion, we get one more little mention of mental health issues, but it’s again subsumed by “common sense” gun control laws.

But he does insist that mental health is an issue and that people should be properly trained in using firearms.

Leaving it like this is sickening, as anyone who paid attention to the actual story will know that the mentally ill mass murderer was properly trained in using firearms, taken to training by his own mother. One can learn all sorts of hypothetical tactics from video games, but that doesn’t teach one how to actually hold, fire, and reload a weapon in meatspace. To claim, as many in the media did, that he learned it all from video games, is a lie, and is actually evidence of the naïvité endemic in the industry’s expert practitioners. So much for that point about proper training preventing this kind of tragedy, and so much for BBC honesty on the matter. Mardell should have pointed that out, but he didn’t, because he doesn’t give a damn. His real agenda is to promote the idea that the US needs to change.

There’s no doubt guns are one of the issues that are central to the wide political gulf in America.

Compromise seems unlikely but Ms Hockley insists what she calls “a conversation” is possible with the focus on the safety of children.

It’s not possible with anyone at the BBC, as their minds are already made up to take what for the majority of people in the US would be an extremist position. The BBC has never, and will never, discuss the fact that, due to the police taking twenty minutes to arrive on the scene, never mind getting in their and stopping a killer, Lanza could have used one of those hunting rifles with clips of only five rounds to kill just as many children and teachers. These were just about the most defenseless victims imaginable, and couldn’t have stopped him if they tried. Hell, he could almost have used a muzzle-loaded musket from the 1830s and done the same thing. Even an amateur can manage one round a minute, and it’s not like any of the little children or their young teachers would have known the difference or dared move when a lunatic with a gun was stalking them. In essence, none of the stricter gun control laws Mrs. Hockley nor most other not as extremist as BBC journalists are talking about would have prevented the tragedy. Only addressing the national culture on mental health issues will be able to even begin to deal with this. Yet Mardell swept it aside.

The second shooting tragedy this week was also covered by the BBC, and they had a difficult time using this one to push their agenda. Not that it stopped them from trying. And in this case, they stooped to censorship in order to aid it.

Gunman dead after Centennial, Colorado, school shooting

A student at a Colorado school shot and wounded two students, one seriously, before dying of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, police say.

If this hadn’t happened one day before the Newtown anniversary, would the BBC have even bother with it? Possibly, as it still would have been a good opportunity to send Jonny Dymond over to tell you that this occurred just a few miles away from the infamous Colombine mass murders.

“In the cold, outside their classrooms, waiting to be frisked, the students of another terrorized school,” Dymond intoned ominously, describing the scene with his voice carefully measured and modulated, placing emotive stress on “frisked”, in order to give the proper dark impression, like an actor giving a dramatic reading of a Gothic horror. Professional, world-class BBC journalism in action.

And thus begins the Narrative, one of too many schools cowering in fear of gun massacres. Whatever shall be done? More gun laws needed? Yes, of course. After all, this is the BBC, and that is their agenda.

Just like with , though, all the stricter gun control laws currently being revisited wouldn’t have prevented this tragedy.

The gunman brought a shotgun to the school and was looking for a specific teacher when confronted by a classmate, the Arapahoe County sheriff said.

Nobody in the gun control crowd is talking about banning shotguns. In fact, Vice President Biden recommends owning one for home defense. Even some people in Britain, such as farmers, are allowed to own shotguns. No way are shotguns going to be part of the national debate the BBC dreams of, nor are they going to be restricted or limited in any way. So this isn’t at all a useful tragedy to exploit to further the gun control agenda. Yet the BBC wanted to do it anyway, and so we get Dymond’s dramatic performance.

In addition, the BBC assigned David Botti (just how many Beeboids are working in the US these days? It’s getting ridiculous.) to do a “bespoke” video magazine piece on how US schools are so scared of these mass murders that they’re locking down. The point of his piece is actually not whether or not schools are over-reacting to an existential threat. In reality, the agenda is to stoke emotions against gun ownership and encourage approved thoughts about stricter gun control laws. Think of the children!

As for the Arapahoe shooting, since the BBC had little success in finding a way to push their agenda with that story, they engaged in censorship so it wouldn’t detract from another Narrative: who engages in gun violence.

It’s a behavior we’ve heard all too often from the BBC. I’ve lost count of how many times a shooting gets reported, and BBC journalists and on-air talent start speculating that it must be a Right-winger or white supremacist (to most BBC journalists they’re one and the same), before the facts come out. For example, we heard it with the Toulouse shootings (eventually Gavin Hewitt had enough evidence shoved in his face to make him wonder if it was something else), we heard it with Norwegian shootings, we heard it with the Tucson shootings (some Beeboids tweeted that bias and even blood libel of Sarah Palin as well: see Mark Blank-Settle Jim Hawkins, Katty Kay, and Rachel Kennedy, on our “In Their Own Tweets” page), and we heard it with the Boston bombings. There’s no need for an editorial directive for this biased agenda to be institutional if they all think the same way already. In only one of those cases – Anders Breivik in Norway – did the perpetrator turn out to be driven by some sort of Right-wing ideology. And he was clearly mentally ill. The Tucson murderer, Jared Loughner, also turned out be mentally ill. Yet the BBC reflexively leapt to assume that all of them must have been, before waiting for facts. And in Loughner’s case, tried to sweep the mental illness issue under the rug in favor of pushing their gun control agenda.

In the Arapahoe case, we do know the ideology of the shooter, and we know why the BBC decided to censor it.

Arapahoe High gunman held strong political beliefs, classmates said

The teenage gunman who entered Arapahoe High School on Friday afternoon and shot two fellow students with a shotgun was outspoken about politics, was a gifted debater and might have been bullied for his beliefs, according to students who knew him.

Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson identified the gunman as Karl Pierson, an 18-year-old student.

“He had very strong beliefs about gun laws and stuff,” said junior Abbey Skoda, who was in a class with Pierson during her freshman year. “I also heard he was bullied a lot.”

The part about being bullied has a parallel in the Columbine tragedy, actually. In addition to the easy connection for the lazy journalist of the geographical proximity, somebody decided to tack on a gratuitous mention of the Adam Lanza’s obsession with mass murder stories like Columbine. It’s completely irrelevant to the story itself. The Arapahoe shooter didn’t seem to keep a scrapbook like Lanza did, nor are we hearing about any other shared obsessions. The BBC included that for Narrative purposes only.

As for the Arapahoe shooters beliefs:

In one Facebook post, Pierson attacks the philosophies of economist Adam Smith, who through his invisible-hand theory pushed the notion that the free market was self-regulating. In another post, he describes himself as “Keynesian.”

“I was wondering to all the neoclassicals and neoliberals, why isn’t the market correcting itself?” he wrote. “If the invisible hand is so strong, shouldn’t it be able to overpower regulations?”

Pierson also appears to mock Republicans on another Facebook post, writing “you republicans are so cute” and posting an image that reads: “The Republican Party: Health Care: Let ’em Die, Climate Change: Let ’em Die, Gun Violence: Let ’em Die, Women’s Rights: Let ’em Die, More War: Let ’em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?”

Carl Schmidt and Brendon Mendelson, both seniors at Arapahoe High, knew Pierson. They said he had political views that were “outside the mainstream,” but they did not elaborate.

And there you have it. He held similar political beliefs to most BBC journalists. This would have detracted from the anti-gun agenda, so they left it out. Unlike with other shootings where political motivations came from the other side, or at least when they assumed as much. Perhaps the cognitive dissonance was just too much for them.

(UPDATE Dec. 16: More info on the political beliefs of the Arapahoe shooter. This CNN report gives conflicting anecdotes from his fellow students:

Stutz, an offensive tackle on the football team, had known Pierson since the two shared a human behavior class when Stutz was a freshman and Pierson a sophomore. They worked on a class experiment together in which they went into the community and tried breaking unwritten rules, Stutz said.

“I did think he was a little weird, but I didn’t think he was, like, bad weird,” Stutz added. “He always kind of talked about how America was a communist country, how the government was, like, trying to take us over and stuff. I don’t know, just some weird stuff that I didn’t really pay close attention to, but nothing that alarmed me.

But then there’s this:

Senior Chris Davis, 18, was among many students Saturday trying to make sense of Pierson’s shooting rampage.

“He was a weird kid,” Davis said. “He’s a self-proclaimed communist, just wears Soviet shirts all the time.”

Pierson became easily aggravated, “always liked to be right” and didn’t like losing, Davis said.

“It seems realistic, now, that he did it,” Davis added.

It can’t be both. Either the football player misunderstood what Pierson was saying, or the other kid was hallucinating and imagined the Communist t-shirts. Of course we also get the usual “He seemed so nice, can’t imagine him doing this” statements, which never illuminate any of these stories. Two minutes of an internet search ignoring non-Left sites which seized on only one of those quotes found this from the Left-leaning LA Times:

Joe Redmond, an 18-year-old senior who was good friends with Pierson and was also on the debate team, praised his former teammate’s debating prowess, saying Pierson was the best on the team.

“He and I talked politics and economics a lot. He was very good when he was on the team, and he knew what he was talking about,” Redmond said.

Pierson, he said, was a self-proclaimed socialist. “But he also wore a Communist Party T-shirt to confuse people,” Redmond said. Pierson also sometimes wore an Air Force Academy hoodie and apparently wanted to attend the school, Redmond said. His political leanings, friends say, were more antiauthoritarian than communist.

Antiauthoriatarian. So not so much like your typical Beeboid. Although reading further about his arrogance and viciousness against people who disagreed with him politically, he’s sounding more and more like one. Actually, if he’s a self-proclaimed socialist but doesn’t trust the government, he’s like the Occupiers I’ve talked to. And one with emotional problems at least. This just makes it even more curious that the BBC didn’t bother following up on his political beliefs, seeing as how they usually aren’t shy about doing so. Perhaps it just added nothing to the Narrative, so never mind.)

The BBC, in fact, has a long history of pushing a gun-control agenda. And we have proof that it’s not mere supposition, something I’m only inferring, reading something that isn’t there. Mark Mardell himself admitted it. Near the beginning of this piece, I mentioned his quip that mass shootings were becoming “as American as baseball”. It came from this report on that shooting on a Naval base a couple months back.

In his online report about the incident, he admitted the agenda.

I’m standing in front of a yellow police cordon, the flashing lights of emergency vehicles in the background. The locations change, but the question from the presenters in London is as predictable as it is understandable.

“Will this tragedy make a difference to the debate on gun control?” The short and blunt answer: “No.”

Certainly the murders at the Navy Yard will give fresh impetus to a very old debate.

That’s what they were looking for, and came up empty-handed. Mardell’s disappointment was palpable (I wrote about that incident here). In fact, just like with the recent shooting at that Arapahoe school, the murderer brought only a shotgun to the party. As I said earlier, that’s not going to add one iota of support to the gun control agenda. VP Biden says we can have one, British farmers can have one, banning large-capacity magazines will change nothing. Funny how no Beeboids were tweeting that Biden had blood on his hands for encouraging people to get themselves a shotgun. Oh, and that killer was….wait for it….mentally ill. So was at least one of the Columbine murderers, come to think of it. And the BBC quickly abandoned the story once they realized it. Mardell swept the mental illness issue aside after paying lip service to its existence.

Actually, I have to admit that’s not quite true. BBC journalist Debbie Siegelbaum (I repeat: just how many BBC journalists are there in the US?) reported that one possible reason the man was able to kill so many people is that the SWAT team was ordered to stand down. The BBC got the scoop (I don’t know which one of them got it), and the US media picked up on it immediately. Why or how a BBC journalist got this scoop, I have no idea. Right place, right time, perhaps. However it happened, this was – or should have been – an example of good investigative journalism, placing the facts of the story over any ideology or preconceived notions about the surrounding issues. It was then that the BBC quickly abandoned it. Why? This should have been major, worthy of following up.

Instead, the BBC chose ideology over journalism. No aspect of this incident was useful for the anti-gun agenda, so they simply moved on to bloodier pastures. They thought they found them this week. Because the BBC has so many journalists in the US, including BBC News America, a daily news broadcast produced in and targeted at the US audience, it’s deserving of scrutiny and concern. This is one of the ways that the BBC tries, as Jeremy Paxman put it, to “spread influence”. So let’s not pretend any longer that the BBC doesn’t try to do this, or that they don’t believe the BBC doesn’t have some sort of Divine Right to do it.

The BBC should be doing stories about how we need a national debate on mental health issues, rather than constantly seeking to push gun control buttons. Perhaps they’re simply intellectually incapable of making the leap. They’re certainly ideologically incapable of dealing with the entire issue reasonably or impartially. Or honestly.

More evidence of the BBC’s history of an anti-gun agenda can be found here, here, and here.

Socialist Venezuela Crumbles Along With The BBC’s Vision For It

Pity poor Wyre Davies. Having spent a few years as a BBC Heroic Palestinians vs. Jew-Nazis Middle East correspondent, where he must have felt like he was walking on eggshells stacked precariously on top of eggshells, he’s now back to his area of university study, Latin America. Except now he’s clearly having to, as they say, file with his editor in mind and give Venezuela’s descent into Pol Pot territory the soft touch.

The inspiration for his report is the coming local and regional elections in Venezuela. Davies does lay out the basics that the election will be viewed as a referendum on President Maduro’s extremist policies. We get a statement from one of the opposition candidates and are told that critics feel Maduro’s policies will harm the country. He dutifully balances the critics with a pro-Government voice, and lays blame for the heated environment evenly on both sides. Fortunately, this isn’t Israel vs. Palestinians, so Davies can be a bit more forthcoming about how bad the Left’s favored side really is.

In more ways than one these are difficult days in Venezuela as the government and the opposition accuse each other of trying to systematically undermine the country’s economy.

It is quite common these days to see queues outside shops where there has been a fresh delivery of milk or toilet paper – basic goods that many Venezuelans no longer take for granted.

The left-wing popularist government tries to offset the notion of a crisis by running heavily discounted food and produce markets – counteracting, it says, the actions of profit-hungry private companies.

Good enough so far. Davies then goes on to mention that Maduro’s extremist economic noise is more than just “rehtoric”:

Two weeks ago, President Maduro ordered a chain of electronic stores called Daka to slash their prices, accusing it of defrauding ordinary people.

The allegation was that businesses were taking advantage of the huge discrepancy between the official, controlled rate for US dollars and what it is possible to get on the black market.

What Davies doesn’t mention in this report is that Maduro has gone much further than this. Presumably that’s because Maduro made the announcement the day after Davies filed his report, so he wouldn’t know about it. Except this plan was already known, and the President was asking for support for it two weeks ago. There have apparently been a lot of protests against the policy from ordinary people, so it’s not just political rhetoric from the opposition party. It’s a real shame Davies doesn’t read the news in his new beat. It’s either that or he and his editor simply didn’t want you to know how bad it was getting. Surely it can’t be that, can it?

In any case, Maduro’s claimed that 99% of businesses his crew has investigated are gouging customers in pursuit of evil profits (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?), and that yesterday (Saturday, Nov. 30), he launched a new round of even stricter inspections to root out the “capitalist parasites”. It’s not just a few electronics stores now: it’s going to be thousands of businesses. And there will be an election on top of it, which should be fun.

Even Davies, still reality-based for the moment, is allowed by his editor to gently, softly admit that “it is difficult to see what such policies do for business confidence.” Only without knowing that Maduro has just taken it up a couple of notches, you don’t get the full picture of what’s going on. After this, we stray into the realm of Left-wing fantasy.

It’s now the point in these BBC reports where they wheel out a vox pops for that local human touch. And so Davies finds one. The topic is whether or not Hugo Chavez’s legacy of heroic wealth redistribution helped the poorest and most vulnerable. You already know the answer to that, so I’ll just let Davies set up the background story:

Critics say Venezuela is now becoming ungovernable. One stark example is the Tower of David.

This oil-rich country once had plans to build Wall Street in the heart of Caracas.

But in 2007, homeless squatters invaded an unfinished financial centre and more than 1,000 families now live in the Tower of David.

The residents pay a basic form of rent to keep the building running.

So the government owned it, and allowed a bunch of squatters to take over. No rent is charged, just some maintenance fee, which means the building itself is a gift. Which is why the building is unfinished. No evil profits means no completing the stairs or fixing anything if it breaks. But you’re not meant to think about that. I suppose it’s irrelevant since no other contractors wanted to take it over many years ago when the government was trying to auction it off, and Chavez apparently had better things to do with his oil wealth in the end. The BBC even sent a camera crew to do a nice video report on the wonders of this communal adventure.

To be fair, Davies doesn’t present it as any kind of paradise. Indeed he introduces it as a sign of dashed hopes and dreams. But without blame, of course, and the real ugliness is somewhat sanitized. If this existed under a nominally Right-wing government, you can bet the BBC would have some ominous music playing in the background. We can’t blame Socialism. However, he goes on to say that the squatters moved in due to “pressures on social housing elsewhere”. Sounds familiar, no? In other words, no matter how many people you drive into poverty because you’ve run your country into the ground, you must still magically provide housing for them all. Davies uses the language of the Left to describe the circumstances. That’s probably in the BBC style guide.

One has to respect the residents, though, as they’ve somehow managed to set up a church and school on the premises. There a bunch of shops, and there’s even a motorbike taxi service to take people around the complex. Hey, free market capitalism helping people get along! Don’t worry, Davies doesn’t describe it like that. It’s probably banned in the BBC style guide. Instead, it’s presented as one element of the quasi-normal lifestyle they’ve magically set up for themselves. (In case anyone is wondering how motorcycles carry people upstairs, here’s a good set of photos of the interior. You can get a real sense of the communal paradise the BBC isn’t quite showing you. It’s a tale of the success of the socialist communal lifestyle, remember.)

The reality of the building is somewhat uglier. It was originally started by the usual sort of wealthy financier back in the early 90s. Then Venezuela’s banking crisis hit, and the money ran out. It wasn’t recent, part of the global financial crisis the rest of the world has been dealing with, nor is it even Chavez’s fault, as this happened before his time. But we’re not told that. All we hear from the BBC is that this is the result of some vaguely-known crisis, once upon a time. Which dream was dashed, exactly? The one where an oil-rich, productive country with a thriving middle class was going to continue to build great things, or the extreme Socialist dream of Chavez and the BBC? And who dashed which one, eh? You don’t need to worry about that. All you need to know is that the government must look after the poor, no matter how many of them it creates.

Chavez got elected riding the wave of populist resentment about that 90s crash, so this Tower of David can actually be viewed as a symbol of his utter failure to truly help the poor. Note to Leftoids: “maintain at the lowest level in perpetuity” isn’t really “help”. All the tales of heroic redistribution and reducing income inequality we’ve been fed over the years are a load of nonsense. Instead of finishing this building when his government took it over and providing marvelous social housing for the poorest among them, Chavez funded FARC, set up that publicity stunt of an orchestra music program, and died a billionaire. A billionaire, for heaven’s sake. And Davies can’t even mention that.

But to the BBC, this is all just a sign of dreams dashed by fate, or something. You’re given only the vaguest background, and at no time are you told who or what really failed here. The BBC will have to be dragged into the horrible reality of their beloved Socialism kicking and screaming. As usual with Venezuela fail stories, the BBC doesn’t think it’s worth quoting an actual independent economist like they do with certain other countries’ economic policies. The only voices you hear can be dismissed as partisan.

Now for the vox pops. One of the residents tells his tale.

Among the residents is Wilmer Angel. He runs a small business, making metal moulds, from the room in which he lives with his wife and four children.

Wilmer’s outlook is positive and he is certainly not looking to anyone else for help.

“No government has ever done anything for us,” he tells me with an ironic laugh. “Yes, I’m a Chavista because at least under that government no-one stopped us taking over this place, but what we’ve got here we built for ourselves.”

And there you have it. He lives in a building the government let him have because it didn’t actually give a damn, is allowed to run his private, free market business without government interference, and has a US-style attitude towards personal improvement and industry. Again, BBC journalists wouldn’t dream of presenting it that way. But the cult of personality is strong, and he’s a Chavista in spite of reality. So he’s the perfect voice for the BBC. They’re probably all Chavistas there, not knowing any better (at the Torre David, I mean. Draw your own conclusions about the BBC). Magical thinking is hard to change.

Davies concludes his piece by mentioning the endemic corruption and the delusional Chavista voice is balanced out by another opponent of the government. Then he says this:

Nicolas Maduro says he is governing for all Venezuelans and for the national good, but as each day progresses the country feels even more divided.

You can tell this isn’t a story about the US because the BBC journalist isn’t blaming racism or an evil opposition for it. He’s actually blaming this President for divisive rhetoric. If only this honesty could be transported to the BBC’s US bureau.

Pity poor Wyre Davies. He knows what’s going on, but has to tread on eggshells when it comes to blaming the policies which has created the nightmare he’s witnessing, and to play down just how bad it’s become. Why? He must feel very foolish for what his editor has ordered him to do.

Parallels

With all the recent fuss about BBC mandarins wasting and trousering public funds, this BBC news brief caught my eye:

NPR to shed 10% of staff amid budget shortfall

The BBC reports that US public radio network NPR is having to cut loose 10% of its staff due to financial difficulties. What the BBC doesn’t want you to know: anchor of BBC World News America, Katty Kay, is the regular guest host for NPR’s Diane Rehm show.

The BBC tells you this about NPR’s funding:

NPR, based in Washington DC, receives about 2% of its annual budget from federal funds, with the rest from grants, licence fees from local affiliates, and listener donations.

Its revenue was projected to be $178m in the upcoming financial year.

There’s no bias here yet; the importance of the information will become apparent in a moment.

The broadcaster has also seen several high-profile firings and turnover in its leadership in recent years, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in severance payments.

What the BBC doesn’t want you to know:

NPR host’s involvement in Occupy D.C. leads to her firing from another show

A public radio host was fired on Thursday after the conservative political site The Daily Caller exposed her role as a spokeswoman for “October 2011,” the faction of Occupy Wall Street movement occupying Washington’s Freedom Plaza.

Lisa Simeone, the host of the nationally syndicated “World of Opera” show, and former weekend host of “All Things Considered,” is a freelancer working for WDAV, NPR’s Davidson, N.C., affiliate, where “World of Opera” originates. She also was the host for the weekly D.C. show “Soundprint” on NPR’s WAMU affiliate.

NPR terminates contract with Juan Williams

Juan Williams once again got himself into trouble with NPR for comments he made at his other job, at Fox News. And NPR’s has unleashed an unprecedented firestorm of criticism directed not at Williams – but at NPR.

NPR fired Williams Wednesday night after 10 years with the network for comments he made about Muslims on Fox News.

Thursday was a day like none I’ve experienced since coming to NPR in October 2007. Office phone lines rang non-stop like an alarm bell with no off button. We’ve received more than 8,000 emails, a record with nothing a close second.

NPR’s garnered more than 6,800 comments, many supporting Williams and others asking why it took so long to fire him. Here’s Thursday’s .

At noon, the deluge of email crashed NPR’s “Contact Us” form on the web site.

The overwhelming majority are angry, furious, outraged. They want NPR to hire him back immediately. If NPR doesn’t, they want all public funding of public radio to stop. They promise to never donate again. They are as mad as hell, and want everyone to know it. It was daunting to answer the phone and hear so much unrestrained anger.

Schiller’s fall puts NPR funds at risk

News accounts of the sacking of National Public Radio Chief Executive Vivian Schiller are careful to point out that she is not a blood relation to Ron Schiller, who, until Tuesday, had been NPR’s senior vice president for development — before he was caught on tape disparaging Tea Party members and the Republican Party in general.

But, unfortunately for her, she is related to Ron Schiller in the sense that he was one of her first big hires after she took the top NPR job in January 2009. WNYC President Laura Walker referred to the duo as “The Schillers,” because they traveled the country together meeting with donors and local public radio officials attempting to build a fundraising juggernaut that would benefit all of public media, with NPR at the center.

As chief executive, Schiller defined her top priority to be creating a stable funding base for NPR to do its thing, which is a pretty important thing, actually: delivering high-quality journalism in which listeners of all political stripes can hear their issues addressed in a serious manner.

It is tragic that, by hiring Schiller and botching the firing last year of former NPR commentator Juan Williams, a favorite of conservatives, she has placed public radio funding on its most precarious footing in recent memory.

Emphases mine. Sounds eerily familiar, no?

In other words, this is a largely Left-wing network. Why is the aforementioned financial data important? Because the BBC then goes on to say this:

The network is a favourite target of conservatives and Republicans, who see it as biased and an inappropriate recipient of taxpayer funds.

Of course, right-on thinking people are supposed to snicker at this, because these terrible people are making a mountain out of a molehill, raising a fuss over a lousy 2%. I’m not putting up a straw man here. This argument has been going on for ages. And as we can see, there’s clearly something to those charges of bias. It’s bias not to see that, if you know what I mean.

However, I’d suggest that there might be a legitimate concern about giving $3.46 million (2% of $173 million) of taxpayer money to a media outlet catering almost exclusively to wealthy white people:

AIR Director: NPR Serves ‘Liberal, Highly Educated Elite,’ Wonders How to Justify Public Funding

After working in many parts of public radio — both deep inside it and now with one foot inside and one foot outside — I believe there’s an elephant in the room. There is something that I’m very conscious of as we consider this crisis that I’d like to speak to.

We have built an extraordinary franchise. It didn’t happen by accident. It happened because we used a very specific methodology to cultivate and build an audience. For years, in boardrooms, at conferences, with funders, we have talked about our highly educated, influential audience. We pursued David Giovannoni’s methodologies. We all participated. It was his research, his undaunted, clear strategy that we pursued to build the successful news journalism franchise we have today.

What happened as a result is that we unwittingly cultivated a core audience that is predominately white, liberal, highly educated, elite. “Super-serve the core” — that was the mantra, for many, many years. This focus has, in large part, brought us to our success today. It was never anyone’s intention to exclude anyone.

Nor was it ever, by her own admission, anyone’s intention to include anyone else. Then there was this more recently:

NPR: mostly white audience produces mostly white teen novels list

There’s controversy at NPR over the service’s latest 100 best-ever teen novels list. 75,220 NPR listeners voted for their favorite young adult novels. The list quickly drew fire for its lack of diversity.

“Only two—yes, two—books on the list are written about main characters of color,” noted reading and English teacher Shaker Laurie in a blog post, they being Sandra Cisneros’ ‘House on Mango Street’ and Sherman Alexie’s ‘The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian’.

How did this happen, you ask?

But NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos contends that the problem wasn’t with the judges:

“The issue with NPR’s audience is that it skews white and mature. As I detailed last year in a report on diversity in NPR, roughly 87 percent of the radio audience was white, compared to 77 of the country’s over-18 population, according to NPR’s Audience, Insight and Research Department. African-Americans and Hispanics are particularly under-represented; Asian Americans are slightly over-represented, but they are a much smaller group.”

“The poll result, in other words, was innocent, normal and natural,” he concluded. “If still sad.”

Why should any tax money go to fund this, when it could be used instead to help the poorest and most vulnerable (who tend not to be so hideously white) or, heaven forbid, not taken from taxpayers in the first place? The BBC wouldn’t dream of such an objection, apparently, or at least can’t be bothered to mention it. Sure, it’s only a news brief, but that shows how they don’t see the big picture behind the story, or choose not to. These own-goals certainly contributed to NPR’s current funding difficulties, and it’s worth discussing.

I ask any lurking journalists who wish to dismiss my point by saying that I simply don’t understand how news works to please spend a moment explaining why it’s not worth discussing. It’s an honest request.

Also, this goes some way to discredit Mark Mardell’s repeated assertion that conservatives and especially the Tea Party movement he loathes has no legitimate objection to wealth redistribution because they really object only to redistributing wealth to people not like them. Even when he admits that there are a few who aren’t racist, he goes on to tell anecdotes about people who are, and concludes that the whole issue is sharpened by redistribution to people who “are not like us”. Well, if the Tea Party movement is supposed to be made up of almost exclusively “white, largely well-off people” who mostly have a racial animus towards the misuse of their taxes, then by his logic they wouldn’t object to around $3.5 million going to NPR.

Of course most Beeboids (aside from Jeremy Paxman, apparently) wouldn’t see anything wrong with forcing all taxpayers to fund this kind of media organization.

Mark Mardell: What’s So Special?

Mark Mardell is having a little freak-out about his beloved Obamessiah’s relentless rush to war (or is it only a rush when Bush does it?), which I’m enjoying immensely. It’s caused him to reveal his ignorance on US politics and scramble to find something that makes sense to him.

UK Syria vote leaves US asking ‘what’s so special?’

That’s Mardell’s concern here: how an intransigent Parliament is hindering the President’s wishes. Forget about the questionable evidence of Assad using chemical weapons, as apparently Susan Rice (who lied to the world about Benghazi, on orders from the President) and John Kerry (who was against intervention before he was for it – or was it the other way round? Depends on who’s President, I think) have presented new evidence about an intercepted phone call from some Syrian officer saying something they did got out of hand. France is all for His Obombing plan, so that will help His cause, according to Mardell.

My guess is that there will be renewed emphasis on the role of the French, the Turks and perhaps others. It will strengthen the hand of those in Congress who argue they should have their own vote.

Yeah, we always look for France’s approval on these things…..

So it’s only an opinion of some Congressmen that they should have a vote on war? I despair of this man’s appalling journalism sometimes, I swear. How many years has he been here now? While the President can order a very limited military strike, any real action requires a vote from Congress. This isn’t some partisan interpretation or something that sprang out of Rush Limbaugh’s fevered imagination. It’s the law. Didn’t we go through this whole charade with Libya? Remember when the President violated the law by doing too much warmongering for too long, after the date passed when Congressional approval was required? Has Mardell forgotten all about that? He sure is aware when Congress has the ability not to grant the President every wish.

Nobody seriously believes that a single round of cruise missiles will be the beginning and end of it. Just like with Libya, military forces will be required to hang around in war-mode for more than 60 days, and any more action than that requires Congressional approval, period. It’s not just politicians’ egos or enemies of the President trying to tear Him down this time, and Mardell would do well to remember that.

Mardell’s expert analysis has been way off on the Syria story. He assured us only last week that the President wasn’t going to rush into anything. What Mardell somehow fails to realize after all these years is that the President is all about Himself and His image, first and foremost. He’s perfectly capable of going to war just to prove a point, to stick a finger in the eye of His detractors. Nobody who’s been seriously paying attention for the last five years would think that this President will just gracefully step back after making such bold statements. The BBC’s US President editor, though, remains convinced that He wants to keep on deliberating and deeply contemplating everything. We saw the same error of judgment in his coverage of Libya.

Also notice how all the discussion is about whether or not the President looks good doing this, and about who’s going to join in. Neither Mardell nor anyone else at the BBC seems to be worried that this might be as illegal as anything George Bush did, even though he had two UN resolutions behind him, while the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate-in-Chief doesn’t need any. He needed only one to engage in regime change in Libya, and I guess even that’s not necessary now. Sure, the President now says He’s not doing regime change this time. But He’s already publicly demanded that Assad step down. Is that a “never mind” now? Mardell doesn’t want you to remember that. In fact, just the other day, he told a little white lie about it, claiming that the President has actually “repeatedly” said that He’s not interested in regime change. Well, maybe He has, but He’s also demanded regime change, so it’s no use pretending that didn’t happen. Can we call it dithering yet?

Since all of His promises seem to have an expiration date, who believes that regime change in Syria isn’t inevitably the goal once the shooting starts? We’re not going to have a repeat of containing Sadaam Hussein for a decade, are we? Who’s Mardell trying to kid here?

Then there’s the whole “poodle” thing.

It may be a different story now that it is clear Britain, so often cast as America’s poodle, won’t take part at all.

So often? How often, really? Back in the heady days of the “rush to war” in Iraq, and the initial invasion of Afghanistan, sure, we heard that a lot. But do people still go around saying that? I don’t recall Britain being called a poodle regarding Libya. And wasn’t it Blair was Bush’s poodle, and not really the way Mardell presents it? What happened to everyone loving this President? Surely nobody would be ashamed to follow Him.

I then laughed out loud when I read this:

It undermines the effort of the president to sell action to his own people, who seem to be deeply unimpressed by his arguments so far (the last opinion poll I saw had just 9% backing intervention).

Only a couple days late on that score, Mark. We all knew about that already. Don’t we always say that if it’s in the WaPo, the Beeboids know about it? Or maybe he just read it on this disgusting website. Skype Emoticons   I hope he’s not going to claim he saw that poll before he wrote that Sec. of State Kerry was “of course right that most people will think as he does” about it being “common sense” that Assad was behind the chemical weapons attack, “simply from watching the TV pictures”. Because that would be embarrassing.

Having said that, NBC has done a more recent poll, with more specific and helpful results.

  • Only 26% think we should take military action against Assad in general, aside from the question of chemical weapons
  • 50% are against military action against Assad for using chemical weapons, with 42% approving. Is that a mandate, I wonder?
  • 50% actually approve of a very limited air strikes using cruise missiles launched from U.S. naval ships that were meant to destroy military units and infrastructure that have been used to carry out chemical attacks. That’s rather hypothetical, assuming that we know exactly who did it and where, which we of course don’t, and probably won’t even after the UN busybodies get there days after it’s all been cleaned up. But at least it’s a token some can wave around as approval of His Obombing plan. If Mardell gets around to reading the NBC poll, he’ll probably see that as a mandate to act without Congress’s approval.
  • 79% think the President should have Congressional approval before taking military action, and 21% don’t. Argh. Some of us are as dopey as Mardell. But at least the vast majority think Congress is more relevant than he does.

Not coincidentally, more people disapprove of how the President is doing his job, 48% – 44%, and more disapprove of how He’s handling foreign policy, 49% – 41%. Probably all due to crypto-racism, right, Mark? They like going to war, they just don’t like going to war under the direction of a black President.

Worst of all, though, is the continued absence of any mention from the BBC’s top man in the US – an experienced, world-class political analyst – of the President’s Nobel Peace Prize. Sure, dithering over whether to act, drawing a silly red line in the sand, boxing Himself into a corner over going to war, and losing a top ally in the process makes the President look less than the God-like creature so many at the BBC seem to worship. But how ridiculous is it that a Nobel Peace Prize laureate is now talking about starting yet another war against yet another country, this time not even “leading from behind”. This President must have the highest body count of any Nobel laureate, with more to come, yet Mardell doesn’t say a word about it. Hack, failure. I admit it’s refreshing to see him not advocating for one of the President’s policies for a change, but his coverage of this issue is pathetic. Like Justin Webb before him, he’ll probably get promoted for it.

Has anyone at the BBC mentioned His Nobel in this context yet? Anywhere? Has even a favored edgy comedian made a joke about it on the radio?

A Toxic Tale Of….Economic Growth?

Remember back in February of this year, when the US government was facing an across-the-board 5% budget cut, known colloquially as the “sequester”, because nasty old Republicans wouldn’t bow down to the Presidents spending desires? At the time, the BBC’s US President editor couldn’t have been more cross, calling it a “toxic tale of cruel dismemberment and government by crisis”. Oh, how we were fed doom and gloom. The emotive language, the hand-wringing, the tales of woe just kept coming. Remember, titled BBC editors somehow don’t have to be impartial at all times. They give “expert analysis”, which is opinion when its at home. Is it bias when all the opinions come from the Left?

In any case, the President wasn’t getting His way, and it looked as if the nasty white Republicans wanted to prevent Him from saving us all. BBC went into full White House propaganda mode. As I wrote in that post, the BBC also lied about how the sequester came to be. It was such a bad idea, they felt, that it couldn’t possibly have come from the President. Yet, it had. And so the BBC pretended it wasn’t true. Mark Mardell repeated the falsehood:

Many Republicans say the idea for the “sequester” budget cuts was President Obama’s in the first place. The White House rejects that.

Whoever came up with the idea, the 2011 law meant failure to agree would cut both cherished Democratic programmes that helped the poor and defence spending beloved of Republicans.

We know who came up with it, and so did Mardell when he pretended to be unsure. The President did, because He believed it would be a threat so great that the Republicans would cave. Of course, only a fool would think that the Republican leadership, under pressure from Tea Partiers and other fiscal conservatives, would see cutting government spending as something to be avoided at all costs. So Rep. Boehner didn’t blink, and we got the cuts.

Either Mardell or a sub editor gave his post the headline: ‘Sequester budget cuts: America’s grim fairy tale ‘. It was a very dark day for the country, apparently.

And how’s that “cruel dismemberment” working out now? Here’s how:

US economic growth revised upwards to 2.5%

Now that is cruel….to anyone who believed that the sequester was going to destroy the recovery. What was the actual fairy tale, then: the real story of the budget negotiations, or the BBC’s tale of “cruel dismemberment”?

The US economy grew at an annualised pace of 2.5% in the second quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said in revised figures.

That was more than double the pace recorded in the previous three months, and above estimates of 2.2%.

The rise, helped by an increase in exports, is a further sign that the economy may be getting back on track.

The government had originally estimated that GDP grew at a 1.7% rate in the second quarter.

Others have noticed that maybe the sequester wasn’t the horror show Mardell and the BBC believed it would be. Sure, the usual water-carriers at the WaPo and HuffPo have said it’s been restricting growth, but who here thinks that growth would be rocketing past 5% or something now if there had been no spending cuts? If the sequester was really killing the economy for two quarters, the BBC would be all over it.

And the BBC analysis about how the sequester wasn’t such a catastrophe after all, and that the President was wrong?

What’s funny is that the Beeboids probably see this latest report as a sign that The Obamessiah is saving us, that His Economic Plan For Us is starting to bear fruit, in spite of Republican intransigence and enemies wanting to destroy Him. So bringing the sequester into the picture isn’t going to help that at all, as they sure can’t make a case that we’d be going like gangbusters without it. The BBC links to other articles they’ve run recently trumpeting signs of economic growth and recovery, and no mention of the sequester anywhere. If it was as bad as the BBC’s top experts warned us it was, how can this be?

I think we can safely ignore any BBC expert analysis on the US economy, budget, or politics.

Biased Editorial Double Standards: US Ideological Violence Edition

Two people from Nevada appeared in court yesterday on charges of plotting to abduct and murder policemen. They are members of the fringe group Sovereign Citizens, a movement of people who have an extreme, quasi-anarchic (in the old school sense), anti-government view. Apparently they were busted after an undercover operation exposed their plans. Nothing new or unusual, really, except that it’s a case of two extremist white people getting arrested for plotting anti-government violence in a week where the public has been overwhelmed with the news of young black men murdering white people (stories which have been used to hype up racial animosity and as a counterweight to the media’s Trayvon Martin Narrative) topped off with two different criminal convictions of military men who espoused political views shared by the Left-wing media. So this minor story must have come as a great relief to the newsroom and editors who are responsible for deciding what gets published every day, a welcome break in what must seem to them as a stream of unfortunate news giving credence to Right-wing views about racial violence, terrorism, and the dangers of the anti-war movement and heroic whistleblowing.

Naturally, the BBC feels it’s worth reporting. It was just a plot thwarted, noting actually happened, nobody even close to being harmed. But it’s newsworthy because of what they represent.

No bias on that score, of course, since the Washington Post, the HuffingtonPost, and CBS all felt it was newsworthy. That’s the lemming-journalism defense we often get: it’s okay for the BBC to report/not report it, because other media outlets are/aren’t. The bias lies in the report itself, as well as the blatant double standard in how they cover incidents of “domestic terrorism”.

First, the quality of reporting. The BBC cites the Southern Poverty Law Center as an authority on the Sovereign Citizens movement. They describe the SPLC as “a non-profit civil rights group”, full stop. Many people here will have seen some of us refer to a “Rule #1” being in effect, and this is a classic example.

In this case, Rule #1 isn’t from the Philosophy Department of the University of Woolamaloo (although I think a BBC version could easily be made with one or two substitutions), but concerns how and when the BBC labels vox pops, guests, and think tanks or organizations they use in appeals to authority. The idea is that the BBC so rarely labels Left-wing, on-message groups or guests that, if they don’t label them, or call them “independent”, one knows which side they’re on. In contrast, those with opposing viewpoints are introduced with the health warning that they’re conservative, or take one side of an issue.

This isn’t just a Biased-BBC fever dream, either. The Center for Policy Studies recently published a report proving it, at least where think tanks and policy organizations are concerned. And here again is another example. The SPLC is independent only in that it isn’t officially owned or run by a political party. It’s hardly non-ideological, though, and the BBC’s use of “independent” is dishonestly meant to lead you to that conclusion. In fact, the SPLC has a long history as a Left-wing activist organization. It’s always been a civil rights and human rights advocacy organization (the “Southern Poverty” part should be a tip-off), more recently going on the attack against numerous non-Left organizations. For example, they labeled the Family Research Council a “hate group”, and featured it on a “hate map” (although they’re clever enough not to use Palin-esque crosshairs), which may have inspired an attempted murder. It’s a joke to present the SPLC as anything other than what it is. In other words, Rule #1 is in effect here, as usual. It doesn’t matter if they do the work of angels, or if you or I agree or disagree with their ideology. It’s a highly ideological organization with very clear political views and activities, and it’s simply wrong to hide that and mislead the reader.

In fact, this isn’t even the first time the BBC has used the SPLC as an authority to support an agenda. Jonny Dymond cited them in his dishonest story about how white supremacist groups have been on the rise since we elected a black President. Dymond presented the SPLC as an organization which tracks “hate groups and other groups on the far right”. In other words, not an impartial organization at all, but one dedicated to an agenda of attacking the Right. Much like some BBC journalists.

It would have been easy enough for the BBC to simply refer to the FBI, or even the Department of Homeland Security (surely not too partisan for the BBC), who have the same concerns about the Sovereign Citizens. Although maybe that would be a case of “they would say that, wouldn’t they?” about an anti-government group. Instead, the BBC went for an ideological fellow traveler, presenting it as an impartial judge.

This leads me to the biased double standard. A little over a year ago, the BBC published a news brief about the arrests of five young men in Ohio who were caught plotting to blow up a bridge. They, too, had known ties to a well-known organization, but for some reason, instead of reporting the connection and going into detail about it, the BBC decided to censor that key detail. I suspected at the time that the reason was that the organization in question was the Occupy movement. Laughably, the BBC managed to think of one possible motivation for the crime, which the FBI dismissed out of hand: the anniversary of Bin Laden’s death. The FBI dismissed that as a motivation because they knew what the BBC refused to tell you: they were Occupiers, and their motivation was to engage in some anti-government (or anti-establishment) ultra-violence. I say the BBC refused to tell you this because it’s impossible to claim that the BBC didn’t know, seeing as how the wire services from which the BBC gleaned this in the first place mentioned the Occupy connection. Outrageously, the BBC even quoted the FBI about ideology being motivation:

“The individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views,” said Special Agent Stephen Anthony, of the FBI’s Cleveland division, in a statement.

Which ideological views? Occupy views. It was deliberate censorship, because the BBC was (and still would be if it came back) highly and rather openly supportive of the Occupy movement, and was loathe to draw such an unsavory connection. When it’s a Right-wing group like the Sovereign Citizens movement, though, the BBC has no problem mentioning the defendants’ connection to it and citing its ideology as the motivation behind their plot to commit violence.

A clear double standard, and one unquestionably caused by personal, ideological bias. I wonder if either Daniel Nasaw, the man in charge of deciding what stories get published in the US section of the BBC website, or any lurking professional journalists, will be able to give us any other explanation besides, “Please shut up, you don’t know how things work in a newsroom.” (I paraphrase slightly.)

BBC Salivating Over Possible Race Riots?

Yes, I know that’s a bit over the top, and I’m deliberately phrasing it as a question because I’m not categorically stating that’s what they’re doing over the possible result of George Zimmerman’s trial. But it sure seems that way. Having said that, let’s all note that this is the first BBC mention of the trial since just before it actually started. They’ve been absolutely silent about the trial the entire time it’s been going on, and it’s not difficult to suspect their silence has something to do with the fact that most of the testimony – from both sides – has discredited the case for the prosecution. BBC reporting on the incident before the trial has been dishonest, misleading, and has censored key facts in order to lead their audience to the approved thought: Zimmerman killed an innocent boy from a distance, in cold blood, due to racism and racial profiling, and Trayvon Martin was murdered simply for what we call “Walking While Black”. Let’s also remember that the BBC tried to stoke racial tensions with their World Have Your Say segment in which they encouraged discussion about how the US is essentially run by white supremacists, with a legal system driven by white supremacists. They did everything in their power to suggest to the audience that Zimmerman remained free initially due to a racist State, again misleading the audience to the desired thought. After five-plus years of Beeboids in the US finding racists under the bed and telling you that opposition to the President has racist underpinnings, the Narrative is all but assured.

Now that it’s pretty much over, bar the closing statements, and a verdict is coming soon, the BBC can resume normal operations. Notice that they continue to use the “undated family photo” of a smiling, angelic, pubescent Martin, instead of the more updated photos Martin himself posted on Facebook. This is a deliberate editorial choice to lead the reader in a specific direction. If they had shown the more recent photos of Martin in a hoodie, with the golden “grill”, the gun, etc., that might prejudice the reader into thinking maybe the lad was a possible troublemaker. What’s particularly galling about this editorial decision – for that’s what it is, the photo didn’t come up randomly – is that the mere fact that Martin had grown into being a bit of a troublemaker, and was all about the gangsta act, absolutely shouldn’t make anyone think he had it coming. Yet the BBC News Online geniuses decided that they didn’t want to portray Martin as anything other than in the best light possible. It’s only natural to wonder if someone with thuggish tendencies would start the fight, which is why the BBC kept all this from you. This is dishonest, and a failure of journalism. Of course, BBC journalism on this story has been a failure from start to finish.

Reminders of the BBC’s failure can be read here, here, and here. Note especially how the BBC has censored the fact of the physical altercation between Martin and Zimmerman from all reporting – except for one article. This physical altercation is the key to the entire case, as Zimmerman’s defense is that Martin was beating the crap out of him and then, when he noticed Zimmerman’s holstered gun, made a reach for it. It was then that Zimmerman grabbed his gun and shot Martin. This should be included in every single report about the case, from start to finish, because it’s the single most important element on which the jury will base their verdict. If one doesn’t know about this very close physical contact – and BBC audiences who blinked and missed the lone mention don’t know about it, as its been deliberately kept from them in nearly all reporting – then the entire case looks dramatically different from reality. Even though the BBC didn’t mention the fight once, I think they got away with it as they’ve never mentioned Zimmerman’s testimony that Martin was reaching for his (Zimmerman’s) gun, which would then make a clear case for self defense. An acquittal would seem like a sham of a travesty of a joke. Which would then mean that BBC audiences would not only be unsurprised at a resulting race riot, but would be inclined to understand and support the outrage. I think that’s the goal of BBC News producers and journalists here: to direct their audience to a specific opinion on the case.

As far as I’ve been able to determine, the BBC has never reported on Zimmerman’s history of fighting against racism, or his efforts in support of blacks. Nor have they every made mention of Martin’s checkered recent past. Can’t have those inconvenient truths interfere with the Narrative.

The  way the BBC opens the report betrays their agenda:

Florida officials have appealed for calm as the trial of a neighbourhood watchman who shot dead an unarmed black teenager enters its final phase.

“Unarmed”. This is “accurate”, but at no time does the report mention the physical altercation between the two. The BBC is once again censoring the most important fact of the case, and it’s important to call them on it. This makes it all the more bizarre for the BBC to then mention further down that both Martin’s and Zimmerman’s mothers said that the screams heard on a recording were their own son’s. Why was anyone screaming? Without the key fact of the fight, this is a non sequitur. Expecting the reader to remember the one mention of the fight from two weeks ago doesn’t work. Just in case anyone might possibly start edging toward an unapproved thought, the BBC makes sure to tell you that Martin’s mother was “absolutely” certain it was Trayvon. Wasn’t Zimmerman’s mother also sure? I guess the BBC thought her opinion was not as relevant because she didn’t qualify it with such a strong word. By elevating one mother over the other, the result is that the BBC guides you once again towards the desired conclusion that Martin was completely innocent, and that Zimmerman was possibly beating the crap out of him before drawing his gun and murdering the lad in cold blood. They reinforce the notion of Zimmerman’s complete guilt by informing everyone that the prosecutor told the jury that Zimmerman killed Martin “because he wanted to”. Again, without the knowledge of the physical contact – especially about Zimmerman’s repeated testimony that Martin was reaching for his (Zimmerman’s) holstered gun – people already inclined to believe the racist Narrative – which the BBC encouraged – will draw the desired conclusion.

It’s entirely possible that the BBC journalists who put this together believe in their hearts that Zimmerman is a racist who killed an innocent boy in cold blood. But that’s no excuse to censor the most important fact of the case, or to emphasize one side’s argument over the other.

In actual fact, the only racist remarks made were by Trayvon Martin to his girlfriend moments before the incident. He referred to  Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker”. This was all over the news after her testimony in the trial, yet the BBC censored it, as they have everything else during the trial. So BBC audiences have no idea about reality, and know only the dishonest Narrative forced on them by BBC journalists. As it became increasingly clear that the racism angle was a non-starter in the trial, Martin’s own family made a public statement that it wasn’t about racism. Yet the BBC kept that from you, and are now wringing their hands over a potential race riot in the event of an acquittal, because, well, that’s been the Narrative from their friends and acquaintances and thought leaders in the US mainstream media, as well as their friends and acquaintances and thought leaders in the far-Left blogosphere.

Just in case anyone doubts where the BBC’s sympathies lie, just look at the one report which mentions the fight. As always, we get the angelic photo of Martin, plus a sympathetic picture of Martin’s mother wiping tears from her eyes. Of course everyone is going to feel sorry for her, feel her pain. It’s still manipulative for the BBC to juxtapose that with the angelic, smiling image instead of the more recent and relevant thug shots. The BBC has also censored the recent news that the judge blocked from the trial a load of texts from Martin about learning to fight, how he could sucker punch somebody, and getting a gun. Again, this might make Martin seem less than angelic, and possibly responsible for his own actions and starting the physical altercation. It might lead the BBC audience to suspect that this wasn’t a cold-blooded racist murder after all, so they left it out. They know about it because even the Guardian made a brief mention.

John Anderson in the open threads has been keeping us apprised of the craziness of this trial, including how even prosecution witnesses end up supporting Zimmerman’s case. A couple of examples here, here. and here. The BBC certainly doesn’t want you to know any of that, and it’s not included in this report, either. So BBC audiences will have absolutely no idea why Zimmerman might be acquitted, if that’s what happens. There’s a reason the prosecution has demanded, and the judge has in one case allowed, that the jury consider lesser charges instead of the one they brought. Their case is a disaster, and they’re desperately trying to get a conviction on something, anything. But BBC audiences don’t know about the reality, so this news of a lesser charge being introduced must seem very curious indeed.

Quite simply, you cannot trust BBC reporting on this story. And it’s because of the personal ideological biases and prejudices of BBC journalists.

That “Conservative” Supreme Court

In the Monday open thread, I called attention to the BBC’s misrepresentation of the US Supreme Court’s vote to overrule an Appeals Court ruling upholding racial preferences in university admissions. The BBC claimed that the Supreme Court has gotten more conservative since 2003, when the Court originally voted to uphold racial preferences, and on which the present case was based. This was a BBC suggestion as to the cause of the ruling.

I called that assessment into question, not only because the vote was 7-1 (with the very Left-wing Kagan recusing herself, as she supported the case in a previous job), with two liberal Justices joining the majority, but because the Court had in 2003 and still has now a liberal majority, 5-4.

The Justices in 2003:

Chief Justice Rehnquist – conservative
Stevens – liberal
O’Connor – conservative
Scalia – conservative
Kennedy – liberal
Souter – liberal
Thomas – conservative
Ginsburg – liberal
Breyer – liberal

5 liberal – 4 conservative

Today’s Court:

Chief Justice Roberts – conservative
Alito – conservative
Kennedy – liberal
Thomas – conservative
Sotomayor – liberal
Ginsburg – liberal
Scalia – conservative
Breyer – liberal
Kagan – liberal

5 liberal – 4 conservative

Today, the Supreme Court voted to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred homosexual couples from having certain benefits and rights that heterosexual couples have. Spot the missing President who originally signed the bill into law. Can you guess which political party he was? Can you guess which leading Presidential candidate for 2016 with a close personal connection to him? Blatant bias by omission there. I do hope they add this relevant bit of information as the story “evolves” (i.e. an editor tells them to stop hiding what they already know). (UPDATE: The story has evolved. The BBC now mentions Clinton, although not his party. But they get points for admitting that it had bi-partisan support in Congress. Mark Mardell would have been pleased with their determination to reach across the aisle to get things done.)

This uncomfortable fact was also censored from the BBC’s Q&A on the issue of homosexual marriage. All you’re told is that the law was “passed by Congress” in 1996. Of course, when The Obamessiah signs a bill into law, it’s all about Him doing it. When it’s a law they don’t like, particularly when it’s one signed by a darling Democrat, there’s no President to be seen.

Also, check out how the Justices voted. Exactly along the labels I gave them above. More conservative still?

What’s funny is that this is now the third major ruling in the last year in which the Supreme Court ruled on the liberal side of an issue. They upheld the key portions of ObamaCare, and struck down the key part of Arizona’s “controversial” law about dealing with illegal immigration. Now with this decision, the Left-wing/Progressive faction has victories in the three biggest issues. Yet the BBC describes the Court as becoming more conservative when it returns a decision to the lower court. Note that no law was struck down or upheld specifically by the racial preferences ruling, but rather rejected a lower court’s decision. The law is still in place, yet the BBC decided to plant the notion that the Court had become more conservative, in spite of the evidence.

Now that there’s yet another Left-wing victory, the BBC is not pointing out the liberal majority on the Court, or even daring to remind you of the political party which originally signed the DoMA into law. Is the Court still trending conservative, BBC?

The BBC should simply shut down the entire US division and replace them all with a shaved orangutan managing a news aggregator. You’d be more and better informed, and tens of millions of pounds would be saved.