Category Archives: BBC bias

Media columnist Michael Wolff says journalists are “having a nervous breakdown” as they attempt to cover President Trump.

The Hollywood Reporter columnist and Newsweek writer told CNN’s Brian Stelter on “Reliable Sources” Sunday that the press goes into a “fit of apoplexy” after every move from the White House — an overreaction he said damages the media’s credibility.

 “As we try to go after his credibility, our credibility becomes equally a problem,” Wolff said. “I think individual journalists are, in many cases, having a nervous breakdown.”

Oh the irony of that statement by Wolff in February 2017….was he talking about the BBC’s Nick Robinson or indeed himself?

‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’…..the normal mental state at BBC Towers where they all believe it is Trump who is the mad one and yet it could be they, stuck in their bubble, constantly patting each other on the back telling themselves how great they are and how wrong everyone else is, who are the deluded ones.

Here’s the Spectator on a  newish arrival on the BBC’s News Quiz…a right-wing comedian…

I just exulted to my wife that Simon Evans had been on Radio Four’s The News Quiz. He’s a very funny man, Evans, but is also regarded as Britain’s only right-wing comedian. There are actually quite a few others – Leo Kearse, for example.

Anyway, Evans was in excellent form, defending Donald Trump and describing the NHS as a Socialist Utopia which did not work. The audience wasn’t sure what it should do, and Evans was of course ribbed for his opinions by the other three panellists and indeed the compere. Which is when I thought: hang on, why should I be grateful to the BBC for allowing one single representative of majority opinion on air? And yet it was such a breath of fresh air. Not because I’m a conservative, but just for the sake of diversity of opinion.

This is the thing. You think the BBC news programmes are bad? It is away from the news programmes that the BBC really shows its bias. And so we end up being grateful when someone who speaks for the majority – or at least a very large minority – actually gets airtime.

The BBC’s reporting of Trump shows perfectly their fall from grace, the corruption of their journalistic principles and their innate bias as they fail to stand aloof from the fray and instead join in shouting insults and abuse, telling lies, deliberately misinforming the audience, using their power and influence to target their chosen enemy, in this case Trump, though it could be you if you’re white and working class.  Jon Sopel’s attempt to get in some smart-alec comments aimed at Trump during a press-conference is one example of the failure to maintain professional standards and impartiality but his reaction is pretty much standard across the BBC….yesterday we had a US feminist on the Today show being allowed to continually call Trump a sex attacker on a par with Harvey Weinstein…no challenge from the presenter.  It seems anything goes as long as it heaps abuse upon Trump…this morning was no exception as extraordinarily and disgracefully the Today show gave up its prime slot at 08:10 to the author of a book that was written with the express aim of trying to discredit, vilify and demonise Trump in order to persuade people that he is unfit to be President.

Naturally it was the BBC’s goto presenter when they want someone to spread false stories maligning people and events that the BBC abhors [such as Brexit or the US election] , Nick Robinson, who was more than happy to conclude that Trump was ‘childish, stupid and unfit for office’...that he might be ‘dangerous in the White House’ and that the book might serve to back up claims about Russian collusion [lol….over a year and zilch evidence of that and yet the BBC keeps on insisting it’s true] and that it will help build a case for impeachment.

So Robinson is telling us that the book is a credible and serious source of information on Trump rather than what it really is, a classic hatchet job as the Swamp strikes back….you just have to look at the author’s photo to know which side he bats for….and it ain’t Trump’s….

Even the anti-Trump Washington Post casts a very doubtful eye over Wolff’s claims of probity and ‘truth’….

“Much to the annoyance of Wolff’s critics, the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created — springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events. Even Wolff acknowledges that conventional reporting isn’t his bag.” An editor who worked with Wolff told Cottle, “He is adroit at making the reader think that he has spent hours and days with his subject, when in fact he may have spent no time at all.”

Robinson tried his hand at being a journalist ticking that box with a few questions about the book’s authenticity but then, having dabbled with due diligence, carried on regardless and treated the book’s narrative as very real, very true and very influential….despite the author admitting himself that he coudn’t confirm anything he’d been told is true and that he knew a lot wasn’t as much information he was given contradicted other information…he generously says he published it all anyway and wants the public to decide…so slinging as much mud as possible regardless of truth in the hope that the lies will grab the headlines…and indeed he admitted as much…his game plan was to get people repeating the slurs as much as possible in order that it will ‘up-end the Presidency’.  And the BBC is worried about the Russians and fake news [or indeed real news as the Clinton emails were damning real news about her and the Democrats]?

The BBC of course was happy to help out in slinging that mud pressing the idea that Trump is mentally unstable, stupid and unfit for office and should be impeached but just consider Michael Wolff’s premise that he bases his argument upon…that Trump is not leading, that he doesn’t listen, he is uncurious about events and is not engaged in the problems of the world.

Now anyone with the slightest passing knowledge of what is going on will know Trump is massively involved, much to the horror of the BBC et al, in world affairs as well as pushing through an ambitious domestic agenda.  It is absolute nonsense to suggest he is in some kind of information, action-free bubble where he gives no orders, has no ideas and doesn’t engage in the world around him…a totally bizarre suggestion given Trump’s infamous Tweets on just about everything.  However Nick Robinson didn’t see fit to pull Wolff up on that blatant lie, to do so might pull down the whole house of cards so carefully constructed over the course of the interview and instead show Trump was not only engaged but effective and bringing results…..possibly more in a year than Obama did in 8….Trump actually in command and driving through a coherent, intelligent and sensible [and popular] set of policies, foreign and domestic.

Incredibly blatant, partisan and false ‘news’ from our finest, most trusted and most reputable broadcaster which tells us that it is the gold standard that other broadcasters have to aspire to match.

Gutter press more like.

The problem with the NHS?  It’s a funding issue, not millions more patients, and ‘some say’ the NHS is being deliberately run-down by the Government. Car sales down?  It’s because of ‘uncertainty due to Brexit’.  Trump?  A sex attacker just like Harvey Weinstein, an allegation made repeatedly on the Today show without a word of dissent.  Want to fly to America after Brexit?….not a chance…all flights will be grounded….#duetobrexit [rest assured it’s not the BBC’s job to scaremonger the presenter tells us…however….lol].

Any more BBC bias?  List it all here….

The BBC described how the raging, embittered and resentful Remainer Lord [unelected] Adonis explained his ‘reasons in an excoriating letter’ for his resignation.  Trouble is, though the BBC presented his comments as rational and hard-hitting, they were far from that, being nothing less than a furiously frothy-mouthed, eye-swivelling, green-inked screed venting Adonis’s massive arrogance and frustration that he can’t have his way…a bit of a temper tantrum with teddy going in the corner.

How many more Remainers will make the leap from their ivory towers sacrificing themselves for the cause and the headlines?  Headlines the BBC is sure to give them along with a promise of constant referral to the ‘reasons’ they give for their resignation in any futher news reports that paint Brexit and the Government’s approach to, well, everything as a problem ala Alan Milburn.

Spot any more BBC bias….list it all here…..

From Kate Hoey in the Telegraph today:

For a strong supporter of leaving the European Union like me, who represents a Remain-voting constituency, it is easy to be downhearted amid the Westminster -Establishment bubble, steeped as it is in metropolitan liberal journalism.  Most of my Labour colleagues seem to take their opinions only from the Guardian, the Today programme and Newsnight.

The negativity of the reporting on the EU negotiations from these outlets is relentless.  Anything good is “despite Brexit” and bad news is always attributed “to Brexit”.  Michael Barnier’s words are treated as gospel while UK negotiators are continuously undermined.

A pretty good summation both of the liberal establishment and the ‘news’ sources that feed and reinforce their delusions. ‘Liberal Establishment’ meaning of course the exact opposite…they being elitist, contemptuous of the masses [the ‘ordinary people’ as the unelected Adonis demeans them], fans of democracy only when it goes their way and purely intent only on furthering their own interests and protecting their entrenched privileges and power.

Israel to Abbas: No, Jesus was not a Palestinian

A happy New Year to one and all and may this site become redundant as soon as possible….though I somehow doubt it will as the BBC starts off as it no doubt means to go on…with Giles Fraser on Thought for the Day telling us Christ wasn’t  a Christian [surely the first one] …he’ll tell us next that Muhammed wasn’t a Muslim…won’t he?…but Jesus was, however, a ‘Palestinian’.  Fraser naturally trying to link Jesus to ‘Palestinians‘ today…which is a dodgy sleight of hand as of course ‘Palestinian’ is a politicised term whose meaning goes far beyond mere existence in a territory….one which Jews might want to call Judea not Palestine…or even ‘Israel’, an ancient name….has Fraser never heard of the ‘Tribes of Israel’?  It is a narrative used by Muslims, along with the ‘Muslim Jesus’ phrase, to hijack Jesus and make out the Jews are once again ‘killing Jesus’ or rather his descendants…the Palestinians…lol.  Good of the not so reverend Giles Fraser to adopt what is a anti-Christian, anti-Jewish Muslim narrative.

I’m sure you can spot plenty more BBC nonsense as they revise the past in order to write the future….list it all here….

Another Remain lemon goes Kamikazi for the cause as Lord Adonis, the unelected peer who owes his position to political patronage and privilege, resigns in order to, em,  further democracy, complaining that May has no popular mandate [other than a clear referendum vote on an historic turn out] to carry on with Brexit and he, as an unelected peer, will do everything he can to thwart that democratic vote in the interest of, em, democracy.  Whoever next?  Lord Hall Hall?

Would the BBC survive a ‘French Revolution’ as the pro-EU ‘elite’ tell the voters they can’t have their cake but the voters decide they will have it, and eat it?  Should the ‘elite’ manage to use the system to block Brexit I can imagine it would be a short-lived, Pyrrhic victory.  Enjoy it whilst you can Lord Hall Hall…and perhaps get one of those nice new blue passports.

Anyway, for now the BBC continues as normal, so spot any bias….name and shame here…..

97% of scientists support the theory [and it is a theory] of man-made climate change…due in the main to CO2.

Except that is bunk based on a lie as we pointed out in 2015…..

No expert on statistics but looking at this I would say the 97% claimed stat for scientific consensus on global warming is a crock….

Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature

‘We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.’

 

So hang on……66.4% expressed no position on the causes of global warming…

but……32.6% endorsed the alarmist position.

And the 97%?

The 97% is 97% of that 32.6%, or least of ‘those who expressed a position’, which definitely counts out the 66.4% who expressed no position and is even more definitely not 97% of  ‘all scientists’…by my reading of that explanation.

So maybe around 33% of the literature openly supports the man-made climate change theory.

We also noted this from the Guardian way back in 2014….the need to promote that ‘consensus’ message…

Why we need to talk about the scientific consensus on climate change

An interesting sequence of events followed the publication of a scientific paper I co-authored in May last year. The paper found a 97% consensus that humans were causing global warming in relevant scientific papers.  [Really?…see above]

So there is still much work to do. Several decades of casting doubt on the consensus has contributed to maintaining the consensus gap. This is why communication experts urge scientists to communicate the 97% consensus. This approach is based on a growing body of evidence underscoring the important role of perceived consensus and the necessity of consensus messaging.

Which is why the Guardian leads its climate change articles with this lie even now….

Interesting choice of main subjects for the Today show’s guest editors….we had Tamara Rojo interviewing George Osborne who took the chance to peddle his views on Brexit, then we had Prince Harry interviewing his dad who wittered on about climate change and then Obama who trashed Trump and social media, then we had Ben Okri on the Rohingya and Grenfell, and tomorrow it must be the turn of Lady Trumpington, the 95-year-old Conservative peer who worked at Bletchley Park during the second world war and wants to explore the legalisation of brothels.

All, except perhaps the last, definitive BBC issues that dominate its broadcasting agenda.  Guess the BBC just got lucky that the people it chose to guest edit the Today show were so onboard with the BBC’s own concerns.  Only surprised that Yemen and immigration didn’t get a look in…maybe they did and I missed it.

Great excitement!!!!……renewable energy production has overtaken coal!!!!!   Wow, you could have knocked me down with a feather as I heard the unbelieveable news from the doleful voice of the BBC’s devout high priest of climate change, Roger Harrabin, as he breathlessly intoned the good news in the manner of a Spanish Inquisition torturer insisting with dread enthusiasm that the earth is flat and that you must believe him and renounce your previous disbelief!

The UK has achieved its greenest year ever in terms of how the nation’s electricity is generated, National Grid figures reveal.

In June, for the first time, wind, nuclear and solar power generated more UK power than gas and coal combined.

Separate findings from power research group MyGridGB show that renewable energy sources provided more power than coal for 90% of 2017, figures up to 12 December show.

British wind farms produced more electricity than coal plants on more than 75% of days this year.

So coal is down and out and renewables are stepping in to take its place?  That’s the BBC message they want you to believe.  Naturally that’s rubbish.

First, coal, after the government forceably cut its use as a fuel for generation, now accounts for a mere 2.9% of our electricity production….so hardly a surprise that renewables have ‘overtaken’ coal…or perhaps more accurately coal has undertaken renewables.  But have renewables surplanted coal as the BBC implies, the BBC pushing solar and wind?  No, gas generation was massively ramped up to fill the hole left by coal.  And of coure there’s nuclear….and the one renewable the BBC fails to hype in its bulletins…the controversial biomass.  And of course after all the headlines about renewables on a surge the BBC quietly admits….

Renewables overall – including wind, solar, biomass and hydropower – beat fossil fuels for only 23 days of the year.

And here’s the reality….solar and wind may have increased slightly but are in no position to replace gas and nuclear…and from the figures renewables may generate a good share of the power but the use is of non-renewable as wind and solar are produced at times when people don’t need power or is not produced due to adverse weather conditions.

Listening to the BBC’s news bulletins today you’d be forgiven for believing that wind and solar were rocketing in use and had replaced coal when the truth is that it is gas that has replaced coal, and nuclear and gas are still the main providers.  The BBC bulks out its sermon with messages from the converted…

Dr Andrew Crossland from MyGridGB and the Durham Energy Institute said: “The government has focused on reducing coal use which now supplies less than 7% of our electricity.

“However, if we continue to use gas at the rate that we do, then Britain will miss carbon targets and be dangerously exposed to supply and price risks in the international gas markets.”

He added that “refreshed government support for low carbon alternatives” is now needed to “avoid price and supply shocks for our heat and electricity supplies”.

Emma Pinchbeck, executive director of Industry body RenewableUK urged onshore wind to be developed across the UK in an “ambitious sector deal with the off shore wind industry” that could help secure a “golden age for renewables” in 2018. 

Hardly impartial…especially the renewable industry demanding the government subsidise a vast programme of onshore wind farm building.

Nothing new in the BBC ‘nudging’ the news to ensure we get the message it wants us to believe…and indeed its reporting from the US about the arctic weather they are having right now is a case in point as the extent and seriousness of the issue was played down by the BBC as half the US was engulfed in an arctic blast and is having record cold temperatures and snowfall.

The BBC almost mentions in passing in a small story yesterday the record cold across the US…

Snow emergency in US city Erie after huge storm

A record-breaking snowfall of more than 60 inches (150 cm) has hit the Pennsylvanian city of Erie over the Christmas period, with even more said to be on the way.

The city has declared a citywide emergency as a result of the storm, which began on Sunday.

New York, northern Ohio and northern Michigan are also heavily hit.

The cause?…

Forecasters say the extreme weather is caused by very cold air passing over the unfrozen Great Lakes.

Hmmm…but that’s not why it is ‘extreme’ is it?  Odd how this is just ‘weather’ and not ‘climate’ whereas record heat would be ‘climate’.

The BBC finally admits the truth in its headline today….but curiously no mention of climate change at all…

Brutal cold spell sets record lows across the US

Bitter cold continues to blanket the northern United States and Canada as forecasters warn that the deep freeze will continue into the start of 2018.

Can’t be long though before they start pumping out the ‘record cold is a product of global warming’ line to go with ‘record heat is a product of global warming.’

The BBC’s top story all day, and on its World page and of course on the US page, was its ‘Obama’ hatchet job on Trump on the Today show…following on from George Osborne [anti-Brexit] being the guest editor’s apparent choice of interviewee [for the life of me can’t think why a Spanish dancer should want to talk to Osborne]….guess the guest editors get some ‘guidance’ from the Today show on who to pick and what questions to ask.

As well as his less than subtle attack on Trump he gave us an extraordinarily patronising attack on people whom Obama thinks are rather stupid and live in echo chambers with no contact with the outside world…he suggest they must get out more and meet other people.

“Social media is a really powerful tool for people of common interests to convene and get to know each other and connect.

“But then it’s important for them to get offline, meet in a pub, meet at a place of worship, meet in a neighbourhood and get to know each other.

“Because the truth is that on the internet, everything is simplified and when you meet people face-to-face it turns out they’re complicated.”

Gosh, really?  Who’d a thunk?  Life is complicated!

Rather think it is lefty liberals like himself who create these echo chambers with the deliberate creation of identity politics and the ghettoisation of whole communities and thus the resultant antagonism and conflict that arises from that as each group is encouraged to demand more and more ‘rights’ and privileges for themselves…naturally at the cost of other groups.

Trump may tweet undiplomatic and strongly worded criticisms and messages but he didn’t run from Iraq and let ISIS take over and allow Assad to force millions of refugees to flee into Europe, he didn’t hand Iran billions of dollars, let them start trading again [thus raising more cash for weapons] and allow them to keep their nuclear programme on track whilst promising everyone they had stopped it, he didn’t preside over an increasingly divided and racially tense America, something that Obama helped create.

Obama was invited onto the Today programme deliberately to attack Trump….just the usual shallow, partisan rubbish that passes for news at the BBC.

Remember James Cook’s highly opinionated attack piece on Trump?  There was another similar hatchet job a month earlier from the BBC’s Nick Bryant…The time when America stopped being great.

If America ever did stop being great apparently it is all the Republican’s fault as Bryant can barely find a word of criticism for the Democrats…and indeed dismisses Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky affair as merely a ‘frivolous distraction’…and an ‘ostensible’ one at that….does the BBC doubt the affair?

He can though find much to criticise Reagan for…apparently he, like Trump, is a racist who played to the racist white southerners to get elected….and of course if you are white and southern…you’re definitely a racist….

Reagan’s sunniness was sullied by the launch of his 1980 campaign with a call for “states’ rights”, which sounded to many like a dog-whistle for denial of civil rights.  His chosen venue was Philadelphia, but not the city of brotherly love, the cradle of the Declaration of Independence, but rather Philadelphia, Mississippi, a rural backwater close to where three civil rights workers had been murdered by white supremacists in 1964. Reagan, like Nixon, pursued the southern strategy, which exploited white fears about black advance. 

Trouble is, not only are Bryant’s facts wrong his interpretation is wrong also….the speech was not in Philadelphia but 7 miles away, nowhere near the murder site and at the Neshoba County Fair which attracted 10’s of thousands of visitors in a state that was closely contested by the two parties….and immediately afterwards Reagan spent a week pitching his case to black voters in the North stating…

“I am committed to the protection of the civil rights of black Americans,” Reagan told the Urban League. “That commitment is interwoven into every phase of the programs I will propose.”

Why does Bryant not accuse him of pro-Black racism as he targets black voters?  Why does Bryant not mention that Carter opened his election campaign in the KKK’s homeland…

Meanwhile, President Carter opened his general election campaign in Tuscumbia, Alabama, then the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan (there was a Klan rally the day Carter came to Tuscumbia).

Reagan in fact launched his campaign nine months earlier from the Mississippi speech and he made almost exactly the same comments about taking back power for the states as he did in Mississippi….Here’s that part of his speech on national TV...absolutely nothing to do with race….

The 10th article of the Bill of Rights is explicit in pointing out that the federal government should do only those things specifically called for in the Constitution. All others shall remain with the states or the people. We haven’t been observing that 10th article of late. The federal government has taken on functions it was never intended to perform and which it does not perform well. There should be a planned, orderly transfer of such functions to states and communities and a transfer with them of the sources of taxation to pay for them.The savings in administrative would be considerable and certainly there would be increased efficiency and less bureaucracy.

Here’s his words from Mississippi…read the speech….I defy you to find anything racist in it….

I believe that there are programs like that, programs like education and others, that should be turned back to the states and the local communities with the tax sources to fund them, and let the people [applause drowns out end of statement].

I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

Bryant is peddling Democrat black propaganda about Reagan which is easily disproven…if one can be bothered to look, which Bryant obviously didn’t feel inclined to do…why let the facts spoil a good fake news story about a ‘racist’ right-wing politician?

Where is Bryant’s claimed ‘exploitation of white fears of black advance’ in the speech?  There is none, it’s a lie.  Bryant bases his claim that Reagan was racist on this…‘a call for “states’ rights”, which sounded to many like a dog-whistle for denial of civil rights.’   As we can see ‘state’s rights’ had nothing to do with race [essentially just like devolution here], and who is this ‘to many’?….does he mean to Democrat propagandists?  Once again the BBC adapting their stock phrase, ‘many might think’, to create the false idea that it was widespread amongst all right-thinking folk that they thought a particular way about an issue…such as in this case Reagan was a racist….which is a lie.

Bryant then goes on of course to trash Trump, the real aim of this piece…Obama is excused any blame….he inherited a terrible situation and the Republicans, of course, created a level of dysfunctional government unprecedented in US history…a ‘crisis of governance’…poor old Obama…just how did he cope?….

Barack Hussein Obama. His improbable success story seemed uniquely American.

Although his presidency did much to rescue the economy, he couldn’t repair a fractured country. The creation of a post-partisan nation, which Obama outlined in his breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, proved just as illusory as the emergence of a post-racial society, which he always knew was beyond him.

During the Obama years, Washington descended into a level of dysfunction unprecedented in post-war America.

“My number one priority is making sure President Obama’s a one-term president,” declared then-Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, summing up the obstructionist mood of his Republican colleagues. It led to a crisis of governance.

Not only that but all opposition to Obama was due to racism…a ‘whitelash’…

Beyond Capitol Hill, there was a whitelash to the first black president, seen in the rise of the Birther movement and in elements of the Tea Party movement.

Bryant dismisses Trump’s success as down to his TV appearances…thus doing what Obama does, labelling voters stupid, shallow and unthinking…

Norman Mailer once said of Reagan, that the 40th president understood “the President of the United States was the leading soap opera figure in the great American drama, and one had better possess star value”. Trump understood this, and it explained much of his success, even if his star power came from reality TV rather than Hollywood B-movies.

Nothing to do with his policies then?…Oh wait….his campaign was one based on grievance and identity….a dark campaign…

His politics of grievance, and the fist-shaking anger it fed off, struck a different tone than the Gipper’s more positive pitch. It played on a shared sense of personal and national victimhood that would have been alien to Reagan.

In the space of just three decades, then, the United States had gone from “It’s morning in America again” to something much darker: “American Carnage”, the most memorable phrase from Trump’s inaugural address.

Actually it is the Left that campaigns on such identity politics…Trump spoke to the whole nation about ‘America’ and making it ‘great again’….the BBC likes to say Trump only talks to his ‘base’ [white supremacists of course] but that is far from the truth.

Bryant set out to attack Trump….the whole piece is about setting Trump up as the bad guy who has betrayed America….

Few countries look anymore to Trump’s America as a global exemplar, the “city upon a hill” Reagan spoke of in his farewell address to the nation.

Hmmm…since when has the US been a ‘global exemplar’?  The BBC et al have hated the US and everything it stood for for decades….South America?  Plenty of states there that hate America, and what of the Middle East, Russia, China?  Did they all love America pre-Trump?

Bryant’s interpretation is based upon his own prejudice and how he thinks the world should be.  This is just another of these anti-Trump opinion pieces that BBC journalists churn out at regular intervals channelling their own bigotry and ignorance and pretending it is news.