Category Archives: BBC bias

https://twitter.com/Independent/status/932657308584300550

I’d read Guido’s tale of the Independent and various other media outlets spinning a gigantic lie about the government not thinking that animals are ‘sentient’ and can feel pain and suffering gaining a willing and gullible audience, including a large number of lobby groups and organisations, who hyped the story as much as possible.  So it was with interest I listened to the Today programme…first their ‘what the papers say,’ and you’d be hard pressed to know what the story was about, they mentioned ‘fake news’ but what was it about?  They then gave the impression that the Independent was the victim almost of whatever was going on…this approach was set in stone at 08:10 as Webb interviewed Gove [who I have to say not totally impressed with…too eager to please and not got the killer facts to slamdunk what is a very stupid story].  Webb told us this was a story whipped up by ‘social media’ which the MSM got dragged into…not true as far as I can see…the Independent were pretty forthright in their story….as was George Osborne’s Evening Standard [which has deleted one, in fact several seem to have gone awol, of their guilty tweets about this…if they deleted everything they misled readers on about Brexit that would leave a few cartoons and the sports pages].  Webb worked hard to twist the story so that the Independent was almost right and the Government wrong…Webb, rather than seeking truth, sought to prove the Independent story was right.  Trouble is it wasn’t.  Far from it and very easy to demonstrate….literally 10 minutes on Google gets you a very full picture…certainly one more informative and insightful than the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme brings us.  Then again the BBC’s own report is far from innocent on this…and it’s own follow up still tries to suggest the government is somehow guilty of not caring about animal suffering.

For a start the Independent had already retracted the story last night…though remarkably it finds little fault with its own reporting.

Here is their initial headline….pretty clear what their sensationalist message is and what it is attempting to do….

The Tories have voted that animals can’t feel pain as part of the EU bill, marking the beginning of our anti-science Brexit

At least Laura Kuenssberg has put some effort in…

Important 'Animals can't feel pain' vote debunking here #AnimalSentience @estwebber https://t.co/mFVpzQxE5M

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) November 22, 2017

So a Labour MP tweets Labour’s narrative on the budget and what is more surprising, perhaps, is that the BBC comes up with exactly the same narrative almost word for word.

I had the misfortune to catch the first 5 minutes of Emma Barnett’s show.  It was more than eough, she’s always good value for money….this blog could run on her nonsense alone or what she calls ‘original journalism and surprising news stories.’

It’s certainly new and unusual though I’d have to question the ‘journalism’ claim…just seemed like a simple matter of regurgitating Labour’s anti-Tory, anti-Brexit propaganda today as Barnett informed us that the Tories were spending more on Brexit than on the NHS….and…just think how many hospitals, nurses and operations we could have if that £3 billion had been spent on the NHS rather than Brexit as promised to us by the Leave campaign on their bus.

Trouble is I was pretty sure Hammond had mentioned the figure of £10 billion for the NHS, it certainly wasn’t only £2.8 billion as Barnett was telling us. [And interesting to read the comments about the NHS on this BBC/Labour press release]

Checking his speech and we get an entirely different story…

It is central to this government’s vision that everyone has access to our NHS, free at the point of need.

That is why we endorsed and funded the NHS’s Five Year Forward View in 2014.

And met its funding ask – providing an extra £10 billion in real terms per year by 2020.

But even with this additional funding, we acknowledge that the service remains under pressure and today we respond.

First, we will deliver an additional £10 billion package of capital investment over the course of this Parliament.

To support the Sustainability and Transformation plans which will make our NHS more resilient.

Investing for an NHS which is fit for the future.

But we also recognise that the NHS is under pressure right now.

I am therefore exceptionally, and outside the Spending Review process, making an additional commitment of resource funding of £2.8 billion to the NHS in England.

£350 million immediately to allow trusts to plan for this winter

And £1.6 billion in 2018-19, with the balance in 19-20, taking the extra resource into the NHS next year to £3.75 billion in total.

Meaning that it will receive a £7.5 billion increase to its resource budget over this year and next year.

So the government is on target to fund the NHS with an extra £10 bn per year by 2020, there will be an extra £10 billion on top of this…and ‘exceptionally, and outside the Spending Review process, making an additional commitment of resource funding of £2.8 billion’.

So the £2.8 bn is on top of large increases in NHS funding…it is extra to already promised funding.  The NHS will get £7.5 billion over 2 years, the £3 billion for Brexit was also over two years….so the NHS is getting at least double what Brexit gets.

It’s the same story with wages….the BBC is going into overdrive telling us a big lie…..that income has stalled and that we are being ‘squeezed’ more than ever.  They pump out a forecast from a think tank, the IFS, as if it were the voice of God and use it to continue peddling their narrative that ‘we’ve never had it so bad’ and it’s all #duetoBrexit.  They introduced their news bulletin with the claim that things were grim as we are set to lose two decades of earnings growth….according to the IFS… does real world experience of people bear that out?  Doubt it.  Amusingly that was followed by a Freudian slip as the announcer told us Hammond’s Budget day had  ‘passed off better than many hoped’.  Yeah…I’m sure they were all hoping he’d fall on his face in BBC Towers.

Trouble is they ignore, as always, a few salient facts…such as a massive, and endless, influx of EU workers who undercut wages, we have had incredibly low interest rates for a decade, inflation has been low and only rose to 3% as a peak….as predicted [and Hammond predicted it would fall back to 2% next year…’With inflation peaking at 3% in this quarter, before falling back towards target over the next year.  And today I reaffirm the remit for the independent Monetary Policy Committee, and its 2% CPI inflation target.’], then there’s the Living Wage and the Minimum Wage rises, and of course tax allowances have increased enormously and will increase again next year giving us more cash in our pockets……

Making work pay is core to the philosophy of this government.

That is why we introduced the National Living Wage in 2016.

From April, it will rise 4.4%, from £7.50 an hour to £7.83.

Handing full-time workers a further £600 pay increase.

And taking their total pay rise, since its introduction, to over £2000 a year.

We also accept the Low Pay Commission’s recommendations on National Minimum Wage rates.

Today, income inequality is at its lowest level in 30 years.

The top 1% are paying a larger share of income tax than at any time under the last Labour government.

The poorest 10% have seen their real incomes grow faster since 2010 than the richest 10%.

And the proportion of full-time jobs that are low paid is at its lowest for 20 years.

When we came into office the personal allowance stood at £6,475.

From April, I will increase the personal allowance to £11,850.

The typical basic rate tax payer will be £1,075 a year better off compared to 2010.

And a full-time worker on the National Living Wage will take home more than £3,800 extra.

The BBC happily ignores all that as it blasts out sensationalist and alarmist headlines and context free brief news bulletins spreading gloom and doom as fast as it can and as far as it can.

The BBC’s reporting seems entirely out of touch with the real world…some might think deliberately so….here we have this from Kamal Ahmed who provided us with such insightful and intelligent briefings during the Brexit referendum…..the BBC, always peddling Corbyn’s Marxist line about capitalism….I seem to remember the BBC telling us it was dead 10 years ago when ‘Occupy’ was all the rage and on every journalist’s[BBC’s] lips as the coming future…

Analysis: Kamal Ahmed, BBC Economics Editor

What is the point of capitalism?

That might seem like a pretty big question, but one answer could be “to provide people the opportunity through work to become richer”.

What, though, if the economy fails in that endeavour?

If the system leaves you – despite all your efforts – worse off in December than you were the previous January?

Or worse off now than you were a decade ago?

It was Lord Adair Turner, the former head of the Low Pay Commission, who put it succinctly.

“The UK over the last 10 years has created a lot of jobs, but today real wages are below where they were in 2007,” he told me earlier this year.

“That is not the capitalist system delivering its promise that over a decade or so it will raise all boats, and it is a very fundamental issue.”

About time for another open thread…definitely no shortage of BBC bias #duetoBrexit….list it all here….

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

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

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

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

Talk about ‘Fake News’!  The BBC’s most prestigious flagship current affairs programme, Today, broadcasts a piece of fictional tripe as ‘news’….

What appear to be the last diary entries of Jim Hacker, of Yes Prime Minister fame, have been unearthed. Sarah Montague spoke to Jonathan Lynn, the co-creator of the series.

Just blatant, contemptuous propaganda from the Remainders…apparently the voters just didn’t listen…to their betters…and so we must of course have another referendum as after all we have general elections every 5 years or so, thus no referendum is set in stone.

OK…we’ll have a referendum on the EU every 5 years if a second one voted to stay in the EU.  No?  Thought not.

And let’s not forget that it was the EU that kept peace in Europe for 75 years.

No…it was the threat of the ‘CCCP’ that kept everyone onboard, and it was American tax dollars, nuclear weapons and a massive standing army that kept the peace in Europe.

NATO not the EU…

Poor old Benedict Allen.  Thought he was off to meet some old chums in Papua New Guinea and comes back to the UK branded a racist, colonialist, imperialist white man by the Guardian.  Which you might think an irony as the Guardian must be the archetypal ‘white man’s burden’ model with its patronage of every ethnic, anti-white cause under the sun…..Don’t worry you little Black folks, you Muslims, you repressed Asians….the Guardian’s here to save you!

And what of Brexit and immigration?  Doesn’t the BBC et al love immigration because it brings such diversity and interesting and unusual cultures to our doorsteps….we don’t even have to get on a plane or a boat…we can just import the exotic natives and watch them from our cars as we go on safari around Brixton or darkest Birmingham.  An open zoo for the multicultural, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, elitist white man!   The Guardianistas love it!

Today had a little discussion[08:20] on the subject with Ben ‘nice but dim’ Fogle and Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff [I think it turned out to be Afua Hirsch…..but it made no difference..their sentiments are exactly the same…here’s Hirsch in the Guardian on Allen]…Cuff is black and female.  Black or is she white?  Cuff is mixed race….but ‘black’  Naturally she makes a living as a ‘professional Black’…concerned with…… race, feminism, social justice and politics.  She has all the jive talk off pat and can populate her spin with all the righteous sounding phrases that have been coined by the race industry to make their case sound credible and important…she, and Hirsch, can do it without thinking…which is the problem.  

Sarah Montague didn’t say much but did stick up for Benedict Allen on a couple of occasions.  This might be because of the video above [sorry about the lack of quality] which is a BBC film of Frank Gardner with Benedict Allen earlier this year in Papua New Guinea.…

Thank God Ms Hirsch didn’t see this photo…King Gardner being held aloft by dusky natives ….

Hirsch complains that a photo of Allen in his western clothes alongside the native inhabitants in their own clothes is a picture of colonialist, imperialist superiority that treats the locals as interesting specimens.  She is pretty ignorant of anything about Allen as she complains about his ‘colonialism’.  Cuff tells us in her Guardian piece that he is “othering” foreign cultures and people with darker skin tones…..has he considered he could bring deadly diseases to an isolated tribe? That his presence might be unwelcome? Or that he is feeding into an ancient narrative of black savagery? His actions scream selfish midlife crisis.”  Hirsch thinks along the same lines.

Here is Hirsch winding herself up into a frothy state of indignation…

I don’t begrudge men like Allen for their adventures, but I do wonder if they have ever contemplated the imagery and messages they are creating from the perspective of someone like me. It’s a giant act of “othering”, of placing people like the Yaifo as scary savages under a white gaze, and promoting raw colonial era ideology.

Hmmm…not really true though is it, he’s done this all his life and he was revisiting the Yaifo tribe that he met 30 years ago….and in which he participated in a 6 week initiation ceremony…or ordeal.

The initiation had been designed to make me ‘a man as strong as a crocodile’. I was thrashed every day for six weeks.

Hirsch and Cuff have no idea what they are talking about and if anything it is they who are exploiting the Yaifo tribe as they use them, without any knowledge of what they think or want, to further their own racist views…and Cuff is a racist.  Her whole life is wrapped up in ‘being Black’…here’s what she thinks of Allen and Whites…

White men such as Benedict Allen should cease their meaningless, problematic “explorations” and focus instead on the ways they can counter the privileges they inhabit, at home and abroad.

She wants to ‘Black’ up Blacks…herd them into some sort of cultural, racially defined ghetto, her word…compound, in which they circle the wagons against outside influences…it’s how she makes a living…leeching off Black concerns about racism which are all too often whipped up by the likes of Cuff herself…keeping herself employed and ‘relevant’…just the usual ‘race-baiting’ agitator who want to generate the idea that Black people are oppressed by the nasty Whites….like the old joke about newspapers starting a war in order to sell more papers…except it’s not a joke here, it’s real…..a race ‘war’ in this case……

 

The aims of Cultural Compounds are to:

Race card played to the full.  The irony is that it is people like Allen who really appreciate and celebrate local, native culture….People like Hirsch and Cuff, who live in their modern, metropolitan ghettos and write from their ebony and ivory towers in the right-on Guardian, having probably never been to Africa let lone ever tried to live as one of their African families or communities as Allen and Bruce Parry do.  They are plastic Africans…enjoying the benefits of Western civilisation whilst pretending to be African.

Racist hypocrits.  On this occasion the BBC, as said, was somewhat subdued, but providing a platform for such Blacktivism is what the BBC lives for…all those privileged white middle class boys and girls who are so guilty about their place in life….desperate to over compensate and, Robert Fisk-like, offer themselves up for some righteous flagellation because of past sins of the colonialists.

Wasn’t it ‘Africans’ who populated the world by emigrating out of Africa?  Colonialists?  We are all African.

A Single Migration From Africa Populated the World, Studies Find

Modern humans evolved in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. But how did our species go on to populate the rest of the globe?

In the journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists survey DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and conclude that all non-Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.

All non-Africans are closely related to one another, geneticists found, and they all branch from a family tree rooted in Africa.

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

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

The Remainders keep telling us that they are defending democracy and doing it for Britain and are not at all trying to stop Brexit and return us to the crushing embrace of the EU…..this of course tells the lie of that…

The time has come for Theresa May to tell the nation: Brexit can’t be done

Alistair Campbell

You can hear this classic line from Alistair Campbell as he condescends to Gisela Stuart [8 mins 20 secs]…oh…he doesn’t care about the EU, he cares about Britain…can’t quite remember who elected him or who funds the EU propaganda rag that he edits…..

At least Campbell is honest about his call to stop Brexit, others less so and the BBC all too often allows them to get away with it.

Time for the BBC to be more robust and more honest when dealing with the likes of Clegg, Soubry, Umunna, Adonis and Cable and call them out on their dishonesty when they claim to be seeking only the best deal for Britain and they respect the referendum result.

'If we want peace we need one thing – less Islam'. New, in today's Sun: https://t.co/kN03199KAr

— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) June 4, 2017

‘Out thought and undereducated.  We have lost the ability to think, to acquire knowledge, to advance intellectually and then we wonder why our community is in such decay.’

 

‘Islam choked in the vicelike grip of orthodoxy….It was the end of tolerance, intellect, and science in the Muslim world. The last great Muslim thinker, Abd- al Rahman ibn Khaldun, belonged to the 14th century.’

MarkyMark in the comments draws our attention to this in the Guardian which illustrates why the BBC peddles the ‘glorious history’ of Islam in order to persuade us that the realities of Islam within our society today are  not the real Islam…Islam is peaceful religion that embraces human rights, women’s  liberation and forward thinking on many issues from the economy to science and philosophy…in essence Islam, the BBC insinuates, is not a threat to you or your culture and society…..

The scale of hostility in Britain towards Islam and Arabs is revealed in a YouGov survey showing most UK voters believe Arabs have failed to integrate themselves into British society, and their presence has not been beneficial.

The three characteristics most closely associated with the Arab world by British people are gender segregation, wealth and Islam, with extremism and a rich history the next two identified characteristics. The degree of association with innovation or forward thinking is miniscule.

In a survey that also reveals widespread self-confessed ignorance about the Arab world, a total of 63% say they believe Arabs have failed to integrate themselves into western society and live in isolated communities.

Faisal J Abbas, editor in chief of Arab News, said the poll showed on the one hand a shocking lack of knowledge of the Arab world.

“What is concerning is that these opinions are based on very limited knowledge about the region. The Arab world is home to some of the poorest countries in the world.

So we have have a shocking lack of knowledge about the Arab world.  Really?

Even Arabs admit there is a problem with ‘Arab’ countries:

Self-doomed to failure

An unsparing new report by Arab scholars explains why their region lags behind so much of the world

The barrier to better Arab performance is not a lack of resources, concludes the report, but the lamentable shortage of three essentials: freedom, knowledge and womanpower. Not having enough of these amounts to what the authors call the region’s three “deficits”. It is these deficits, they argue, that hold the frustrated Arabs back from reaching their potential—and allow the rest of the world both to despise and to fear a deadly combination of wealth and backwardness.

The most delicate issue of all, again carefully skirted by the authors of the report, is the part that Islam plays in delaying and impeding the Arab world’s advance towards the ever-receding renaissance that its intellectuals crave. One of the report’s signed articles explains Islam’s support for justice, peace, tolerance, equilibrium and all good things besides. But most secularists believe that the pervasive Islamisation of society, which in several Arab countries has largely replaced the frightening militancy of the 1980s and early 1990s, has played a significant part in stifling constructive Arab thought.

[Islam]….discouraging critical thought and innovation and helping to produce a great army of young Arabs, jobless, unskilled and embittered, cut off from changing their own societies by democratic means. Islam at least offers them a little self-respect. With so many paths closed to them, some are now turning their dangerous anger on the western world.

So Islam creates Jihadis not just by virtue of its teachings but because it also destroys the innovative and creative thinking that produces jobs and a civil, employed society…thus we get angry young men who ironically fight to defend the Islam that is the source of their problems.

We are told by the Guardian that…’The emerging picture – fear, ignorance and hostility – underlines the tensions in UK society about attitudes to Islam and the Arab world in the UK’….Well there’s fear and hostility…but based on knowledge not ignorance.  People look around and see what Muslims do and say, they look at the Muslim world and what Islam has done for those countries, they look at countries where Islam has infiltrated and they look at the result…they also look at countries where there is little to no Islam and look at the result…and they choose which one they like…No Islam.

Labour’s [ex] Nasreen Khan asked ‘What good have the Jews done?‘

The Jews, in 70 years, have turned the desert into a highly productive, innovative, forward looking democracy…and that’s just Israel never minds Jews around the world…despite Israel being under attack for all of that time by Muslims who have produced what?  They have oil, but they didn’t find or develop that…the West did…and what do they do with the revenues?  Playboys and funding Islamists in the West….mostly.

The we have this from the Guardian…

The degree of association [of Islam] with innovation or forward thinking is miniscule.

That’s because Islam crushed innovation and forward thinking…don’t take my word for it, take a Muslim’s……

What has Mehdi Hasan got to say?

He states that there are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world….and between them they have a total of 10 Nobel prizes.  The Jews, with a population of 12 million have 150 Nobel prizes.  All 6 Jewish Universities are in the top 20 in a world ranking.  There are no Muslim universities in the top 200.

He goes on to say:

We wonder why we are losing battles, we are not being out fought, we are being out thought.

We are not under armed, we are undereducated.

We have lost the ability to think, to acquire knowledge, to advance intellectually and then we wonder why our community is in such decay.

Pervez Hoodbhoy is professor of nuclear and high-energy physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. This article is based on a speech delivered at the Center for Inquiry International conference in Atlanta, Georgia, 2001.

In the twelfth century Muslim orthodoxy reawakened, spearheaded by the cleric Imam Al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali championed revelation over reason, predestination over free will. He refuted the possibility of relating cause to effect, teaching that man cannot know or predict what will happen; God alone can. He damned mathematics as against Islam, an intoxicant of the mind that weakened faith.

Islam choked in the vicelike grip of orthodoxy.

It was the end of tolerance, intellect, and science in the Muslim world. The last great Muslim thinker, Abd- al Rahman ibn Khaldun, belonged to the 14th century.

For Muslims, it is time to stop wallowing in self-pity: Muslims are not helpless victims of conspiracies hatched by an all-powerful, malicious West. The fact is that the decline of Islamic greatness took place long before the age of mercantile imperialism. The causes were essentially internal. Therefore Muslims must introspect, and ask what went wrong.