Category Archives: BBC bias

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.

Britain’s standing in the world has been reduced [BBC fact] and we may lose our place on the International Court of Justice the BBC informs us….the unspoken term?  #duetoBrexit.  Note in the video Dimbleby once again denying that the BBC uses the term ‘inspite of Brexit’ or other forms of implying that.  Charles Moore also got similar treatment….and Guido has helpfully listed many examples where Moore and JRM are proved right and Dimbleby wrong.

Loads more BBC bias out there…..list it all here……

 

“Full employment never meant zero unemployment,” says Christopher Pissarides, professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

Philip Hammond said there was ‘no unemployment’….naturally, with 1.4 million people without jobs, the usual suspects jumped all over him in politically motivated attacks….

Philip Hammond says there are ‘no unemployed people’

Hammond, or ‘Spreadsheet Phil’ as he is also known, is a dry technocrat who allegedly lives and breathes figures [though seemingly unable to master the detail of his brief….hence ‘white van man’ and NI debacle]…..when he says ‘No unemployment’ he didn’t mean there are no unemployed people, he meant there was full employment, a  technical term which he clearly made a hash of explaining…. he should have expected the reaction he got…but perhaps might have expected better from the BBC who frequently state that there is a natural level of unemployment in any economy that is more to do with churn than actual inability to get jobs….and here is the BBC telling us that itself.….

“Full employment never meant zero unemployment,” says Christopher Pissarides, professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

Instead there is what the free market economist Milton Friedman termed a “natural rate” of unemployment, where nobody stays out of work for long, unemployment fluctuates between 5% and 6% with jobless workers quickly being hired in growth sectors of the economy.

‘No unemployment’ was a clumsy way of saying ‘full employment’

And here is the BBC again as Osborne proclaimed he was aiming for ‘full employment’ in the economy…

There are a number of different definitions of full employment:

Sir William Beveridge, the architect of the welfare state, thought it should be when 3% of the workforce is unemployed

Other economists have spoken of a higher “natural rate” of unemployment, where nobody stays out of work for long, with joblessness fluctuating at between 5% and 6%

And in August this year…

The increase prompted some economists to suggest that wages may finally be responding to an economy which is closing in on full employment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H/T StewGreen

The BBC is screening a new programme today…a play from the National Theatre. 

In the days following the Brexit vote, a team from the National Theatre of Great Britain spoke to people nationwide, aged 9 to 97, to hear their views on the country we call home. In a series of deeply personal interviews, they heard opinions that were honest, emotional, funny and sometimes extreme.

The writers?   Carol Ann Duffy and Rufus Norris.

Both of course voted to Remain…Norris was shocked by the result and set out to find out why it happened…though you get the feeling he thinks Leave voters are somehow misguided despite saying this…

“We’ve got to try to do what little we can to address the complete vote of no confidence in our system that that was,” Norris said.

“I don’t believe 17.5 million people are racists or idiots. I categorically don’t. I think we’ve got to listen.”

What does he mean by ‘address the complete vote of no confidence in the system’?  Does he mean change the system or ‘educate’ the Leave voters into why they are wrong in their beliefs about that system?  You suspect the latter though he admits “The challenge is to keep our own personal politics out of it; the point is to give a voice to other people.”

He tells us:

“I think what comes through very clearly is a strong rejection of modern politics, the selfishness, the career-driven nature of it,” he says, summarising the fury that emerges from the interviews. “Everybody is fed up with their communities being broken apart, the breakdown of the NHS, the wealth imbalance in this country. You feel a real kick against the misinformation, an awareness that everything they are being told is fiendishly biased.”

But then we get possibly the real Norris…

Norris, who voted remain, is nevertheless furious at the way the referendum was conducted, the way the media reported it, the lies, the propaganda, and the unfolding events in the US. He is uneasy at the powerful influence wielded by the Daily Mail. “How can we have an unelected person steering the country this way? Paul Dacre? Who the fuck is Paul Dacre? Who is he? Why does he have so much influence?” He has to pause, reminds himself to calm down, and laughs.

He is uneasy at the powerful influence wielded by the BBC….”How can we have an unelected person steering the country this way?  Who the fuck is Lord Hall Hall?  Who is he?  Why does he have so much influence?”

And as for Leave voters…not idiots he claimed earlier…now, the real view?….

“What’s sad for me is that the referendum followed on from another referendum on these islands that was done very intelligently, where all the arguments were laid out clearly and everybody had a chance to look at both sides of the arguments and vote accordingly. The difference between that referendum and this one was massive. It was like the one we had was for idiots.”

And these Leave voters…what was the real cause for their vote maybe?  Extreme selfishness….

“With the death in belief of the great them – whether they are politicians, kings and queens or experts – what do we believe in? We believe in ourselves. Cameras now are only used to take photos of ourselves – not of anything around us. We know we are in an age of extreme selfishness.”

Clearly Leave voters were not thinking of the harm and misery that artists would suffer, the trauma of no longer being an EU citizen, never being able to go to Europe ever again, no more entente cordial, no more ooh la la…..how will they survive?  No idea that it is those who refuse to accept the vote who are selfish in the extreme then?

The Guardian’s take on the play…

I was struck by how often people’s fears, on a variety of subjects from the EU dictating the shape of bananas to the notion that asylum seekers are sending money home to “murderers and rapists”, seem to reflect the prejudices of the anti-European press…however well-intentioned, the show offers little in the way of fresh information or insights. We already knew that the EU had become a scapegoat for popular discontent and that there are serious fissures between, and within, the UK’s separate parts.

So he comes away with the idea that the Leave voters are all prejudiced and misled, that the EU is scapegoated and that Britain is divided.

It is a curious thing how the Remainers all like to paint Britain as a divided wreck, rent asunder by Brexit….why no such wailings after any general election…surely the country is even more split as the votes go to so many different parties?  Just a political trick to paint Brexit as a disaster.

And one more thing…apparently 96% of artists were pro-EU and yet…Brexit will result in more art being done by more people, by more ethnic people and be seen by a far more diverse crowd, not only that but artists will be [miraculously battling the drawbridges that went up after Brexit] increasing their cooperation and work with Europe and the world….some failure, some isolation and some withdrawal into the bunker of a ‘little england’….

Norris believed the vote would be a catalyst to increase collaborations with arts organisations in Europe and further. “We are a world leader and we are not going to give up that position,” he said. “For us it is going to spur an increase in our collaborations with European partners and our international work. Being isolated is bad for culture and is very bad for society and there is no way we are going to go down that path.”

Asked what the cultural landscape might be like in 10 years as a result of Brexit, Mitchell said: “The culture and the art we look at will be much more representative of the Britain that we live in: more black faces, more working-class types of art, more regional representation.”

In other words the bunkers and bubbles were in place well before Brexit and it was those most opposed to Brexit that occupied them…isolated and aloof from the real Britain.  Now they have to get off their backsides and really be creative and do some work.