Category Archives: BBC bias

Start the Week Open Thread 11 June 2018

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President Trump meets the Rocket Man today and its possible that the 1950 Korean War will officially end . Britain lost over 1000 dead in that war .So how will al beeb cover this historic meeting ? We can but guess.

This week marks a year since a fire in a tower block. There might be no better week  to abstain from Al Beeb…but for those witnessing the bias here be a new thread .

George Orwell, the professor and the BBC

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I’m indebted to Guest Who for posting this bizarre tweet by Nick Robinson about Orwell. I was stunned by it, struggling to absorb the fact that the BBC could put a statue of Orwell up at its headquarters, complete with the following quote:

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear

Once I’d recovered sufficiently to ask Google for help, I was directed to Jean Seaton, professor of media history and the official BBC historian, who last month wrote an article on Orwell. I found her assertion that, “Orwell would laugh at the statues of him that are sprouting up,” fascinating since it appeared to be a direct assault on those who had commissioned the statue and placed it at BBC headquarters. Could this be evidence of independent thinking, free of the iron grip of far-left ideology which has paralysed so many universities?

Well, maybe not since the professor also tells us that, “In the US, sales [of 1984] surged as people searched for a way of getting to grips with the reality of the Trump administration.” As if Trump, the embattled president of a democracy with all its checks and balances, resembles Big Brother, who has absolute power over life and death as the head of a dictatorship; as if Trump, as he struggles to drain the swamp, is in fact the alpha alligator.

Why did the professor need to signal her virtue with the obligatory anti-Trump stance? Perhaps she is simply making amends for being critical of the statue. She needs to understand that even if the rise in sales of 1984 can be positively linked to Trump, that says nothing about the president himself but is rather revealing about the paranoia and ignorance of so many who oppose him.

But to get back to the BBC, does it not realize that Orwell knew what the state propagandist was about even back in the 1940s and that he would be horrified if he could see it now?

Did the BBC read 1984 without understanding a word of it?

In attempting to align itself with Orwell, the BBC has committed an arrogant act of historical revisionism that, for me, is the culmination of all its previous sins. This alleged media champion of liberty is standing shoulder to shoulder with George Orwell and telling people what they do not want to hear? What rubbish. From climate change skeptics to Donald Trump’s remarkable achievements to the courageous stand by Tommy Robinson and others against the Islamic invasion of the West, the BBC is in fact not telling people what it does not want them to hear.

The Ministry of Truth is lying again and this one is the biggest lie it has ever told.

Updates, June 10:

1. Thanks for all those fascinating contributions. I learned a lot from them and have responded to some of them.

2. I have substituted ‘bizarre’ for ‘extraordinary’ to describe Nick Robinson’s tweet.

3. The following is taken from Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937, Penguin edition pp 189-90. Over 80 years later, it still rings true:

“It is usual to speak of the Fascist objective as the ‘beehive state’, which does a grave injustice to bees. A world of rabbits ruled by stoats would be nearer the mark. It is against this beastly possibility that we have got to combine.

“The only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism; justice and liberty. But it is hardly strong enough to call this ideal ’underlying’. It is almost completely forgotten. It has been buried beneath layer after layer of doctrinaire priggishness, party squabbles, and half-baked ‘progressivism’ until it is like a diamond hidden under a mountain of dung. The job of the Socialist is to get it out again. Justice and Liberty! Those are the words that have got to ring like a bugle across the world. For a long time past, certainly for the last ten years, the devil has had all the best tunes. We have reached a stage when the very word ‘Socialism’ calls up, on the one hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors, and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics, and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers. Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship, and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.”

BBC won’t headline this abuse of your money. Why not? You’re funding Arsenal FC.

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BBC have not, as far as I am aware, publicised another recent  abuse of your money from the Foreign Aid budget. I was listenening to LBC the other day and discovered that this year, we gave Rwanda Sixty-Four million pounds, taxpayer pounds, your money for which you have worked in Foreign Aid. Now then, what did Rwanda do with that gift. I expect they duly said thank you as there is much hunger, poverty, poor sanitary conditions and premature deaths in the country to spend it on.

Upon receipt of the monies given, The Rwanda government, under the Leadership of Paul Kagame, decided to sponsor Arsenal FC and gave the club a whopping thirty million pounds of that sixty four million pounds in a sponsorship deal. This means that Arsenal FC will this year have the words Rwanda written on its shirt and maybe the odd logo around the ground. As I see it, we taxpayers have just given a billionaire owned football club thirty million pounds. As if this was acceptable. Don’t they have enough money. I don’t even support Arsenal, but I’m giving them money and so are you.

When I see something that so obviously doesn’t look right, I always try to consider the counter argument. Will this marketing of Arsenal FC promote the country of Rwanda, enough to in time receive a financial return equating with that of thirty million pounds. It is difficult to quantify, but I doubt it very much. It has to said that if I was considering giving money via a charity to a Rwandan appeal, I would refrain from doing so, because I would think that here is a country that has enough money if they afford to give thirty million pounds money away to Arsenal FC.

The other thought I had was, should Arsenal FC have accepted this money from the Rwandan government. Is this the image that British clubs should have? Taking money from a starving, impoverished third world country. The Arsenal supporting Mr Kagame had the choice of either feeding the starving and providing providing health services or giving the money to Arsenel FC. He chose the latter. Where does that put Arsenal FC from a moral point of view. Should they have accepted that money? I’m not so sure they have done. Where are the BBC journalists? Why are they not asking Arsenal FC to respond in accepting this money?

The BBC have found nothing wrong with this, they clearly don’t see this as an outrageous abuse of peoples taxes.I cannot see it on any BBC web page. This is a national scandal yet is being ignored  by our national broadcaster. Taxpayers work hard for their money and it is being thrown away and into billionaires pockets, like the owners of Arsenal FC.

But then doesn’t this sum up the BBC, they take from the poor through the license fee, and feed the rich- Gary Lineker, but then pretend to be on the side of the downtrodden whilst being selective about what and how  to report something, so as to not imbalance or threaten their position through the medium of brainwashing. Quite clever really when you think about. Geobbels on stilts if you like.

On BBC websites and BBC news we currently have the unedifying diet of the incessantly mawkish Grenfell grieving and Raheem Sterling’s tatoo. Aren’t you proud of our national broadcaster? I’m not.  These days it really is sinking to new depths, just as I thought they couldn’t sink any lower.

Finally,I see  there is growing support for more money being allocated to the NHS. On the surface this seems fine but how on earth could  I trust the government to allocate my hard earned taxes wisely.  Are they financially competent. Not on any evidence I’ve seen.