Category Archives: BBC bias

 

After the Brexit vote, the Leave side stopped campaigning – and this was a massive error. It has allowed Brexit to be defined by its enemies. Sure, the forecasts of an immediate recession didn’t come to pass. But that has made the publications who predicted it even more angry, and determined to portray it as a disaster. The human need for vindication has created a new media bias in much of the coverage, and we now see Brexit being attacked more vociferously now than in during the referendum campaign. So the government needs to step up its positive message – and activate its greatest messengers.

Fraser Nelson

Boris has written an article in the Telegraph spelling out why Brexit will be great for Britain.  He talks of many things but the BBC are only interested in targeting two of these…one, they insist this is a challenge for the leadership of the Tory Party [the BBC keen to stir the pot and encourage a general election which they believe Corbyn would win]…Fraser Nelson in the Spectator notes….

Needless to say, it [the article] was greeted with shock by his critics, whose main weapon against him is to accuse him of a leadership bid. I was on the BBC News channel earlier and asked why, if it wasn’t a leadership bid, he started his column with the words ‘My friends’. The answer is that Boris always talks in this way, especially to readers of the Telegraph and The Spectator whom he genuinely regards as friends.

…..and two, the BBC makes what is a deliberately dishonest statement about Boris’ claim regarding the £350 million.  It is an outright lie and complete distortion of his comments by the BBC to mislead the audience in order to discredit the Leave campaign.

The BBC has been telling us all morning that Boris said we would ‘save £350 million after Brexit’ or that ‘Brexit would make us £350 million per week richer’….but that is a lie.  I know it is a lie because I have read Boris’ article and I am pretty sure the BBC must have read it too and yet have decided to give the public an utterly false summary of his words…here’s the BBC spreading a lie of Orwellian proportions…..

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has repeated the controversial claim that leaving the EU would save £350m a week, which could be spent on the NHS.

But what did Boris actually say?…he said we’d take back control of ‘roughly’ £350 million…an entirely different meaning…and he didn’t say it could all be spent on the NHS as the BBC report…..

Once we have settled our accounts we will take back control of roughly £350 million per week.  It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS.

The BBC also tells us…

The figure, used by Leave campaigners before the referendum, was “misleading”, the UK statistics watchdog later said.

Actually no he did not…he said ‘potentially misleading’ but only because he felt the rebate and funds the EU spends on UK projects should be made clearer….the gross figure is in fact correct as the above chart shows [in fact it would be £377 million for 2015 as it changes each year]…..not sure you could get all that on the side of a bus….

The use of the £350 million figure, which appears to be a gross figure which does not take into account the rebate or other flows from the EU to the UK public sector (or flows to non-public sector bodies), alongside the suggestion that this could be spent elsewhere. Without further explanation I consider these statements to be potentially misleading. Given the high level of public interest in this debate it is important that official statistics are used accurately , with important limitations or caveats clearly explained.

Boris, and not the BBC, is correct…we will take back control of the money.  Even the rebate is still under EU control.  It is essentially only given to us on a whim and can be removed pretty much on a whim as many in the EU want….

UK got out just in time! EU plots to SCRAP budget rebates to Brussels’ contributors

Such limitations or caveats aren’t made clear by the BBC….but it does claim that the rebate shouldn’t count anyway as it doesn’t actually physically go to the EU…

The UK’s gross contribution was actually £361m, but – crucially – the rebate is removed before any money is sent to the EU.

Why does that make the slightest, never mind ‘crucial’, difference?…it is still money the EU would take off us but doesn’t purely because we have negotiated a rebate…one that can  be taken away at any time….and let’s not forget the Remainers would like to hand it back anyway. The EU still controls that money in effect….it’s called a ‘rebate’ for a reason.

The seemingly left-leaning ‘Fullfact’ site tells us...

£350 million is what we would pay to the EU budget, without the rebate.

Who am I to argue with such an august body?

And Fraser Nelson says…

Isn’t he supposed to be hanging his head in shame about that claim on the side of a bus? Not a bit of it: he’s repeating his (accurate) point that Britain will be ‘taking back control’ of the weekly £350 million sent to the EU. And yes, it’s a lesser sum once you factor in EU spending on Britain but the word ‘control’ is crucial.

As for the money the EU kindly spends in the UK the EU decides how to spend it and demands we thank them for doing so.  The BBC, whilst telling us Boris is lying and that we don’t send the EU £350 million per week because much of the money is spent on UK projects, then tells us, when it wants to promote the EU and encourage us to think how wonderful and generous it is, that the money it spends here is ‘EU money’….so on the one hand the BBC claims we don’t get the money back Boris claims we do because the EU spends it here and then the BBC tells us that it is EU money when it suits the BBC’s pro-EU agenda….all that deliberately misleads people as to the real point of the Leave claims…that this is about taking back control of how that money is spent not about the exact amounts of the contribution.

The BBC is trying hard not to discuss that real issue and instead tells a very obvious lie, one of huge proportions that the Leave camp should go straight to Ofcom about bypassing what we all know will be a wilfully hopeless response from the BBC complaints office [lol]

The BBC fails to note some other interesting comments in the article…..

There were lifelong Eurosceptics who decided at the last monet to remain; and a great many, in my view, whose heart said leave, but whose resolve was finally shaken by the warnungs of the Government, the BBC, Barack Obama, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the CBI, every major oltical party and much of the media.

Unemployment is at record lows, and manufacturing is booming “in spite of Brexit”, as the BBC would put it. (Have you noticed that any good news is always “in site of Brexit”?)

And always odd how Putin and the Russians perhaps interfering in US politics [what’s new?] is a BBC hot topic and yet Obama interfering in British politics is entirely uncontroversial.

Here we go, a new Open Thread on which to detail the egregious bias of the State Broadcaster.

R4 has been treating us to its interpretation of why we feel the need to identify as ‘English’.  The clue to the BBC’s narrative, and it’ll be no surprise to those who already familiar with the BBC’s attitude towards English and British identity, is in the title…‘The English Fix’.   It’s just a subtle version of ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’ type attack on those who don’t think of themselves as stateless citizens of the world.  Apparently ‘Englishness’ is only invoked in times of emergency, real or imagined…and naturally, again no surprise to find the BBC had an endgame, this was used as just another BBC attack on Brexit. The last episode tells us there is nothing wrong with the EU, any problems we now mistakenly blame on Brussels will still be with us and we will have to find someone else to blame them on.

The whole series was threaded through with almost subliminal anti-Brexit, anti-nationalism, messages… naturally all this Brexiteering and nationalism is merely nostalgic pining for a lost golden age that never really existed and an angry howl against progress and modern life. We heard pro-nationalists aplenty but who had the final say and whose word was treated as the authoritative voice?  The anti-nationalist voices that were brought on to ‘discuss’ what had been said and then give us their conclusions about the ‘dangers of popular patriotism’  The messages slipped into the programme based upon Orwell gives us another clue as it tried to build a comparison between the Germans blitzing London and those who want Brexit….the Germans were only normal folk ‘serving their country’….look how easy it is to slip from that into being a Nazi!

We of course, the BBC tells us, need more international interaction and cooperation rather than narrow nationalism [which will be the inevitable result of Brexit!?…..er…as Britain throws open its doors to the world for trade and cooperation] and English identity must be made inclusive [ie watered down and replaced by immigrant culture and values]….we also heard that many people might think of this nationalism as racist, and indeed, the BBC told us, some is racist.

Immigration is not a burden, the Poles are not a ‘horde’ invading Britain…and you know what…refugee Poles saved us in WWII…..hmmm….didn’t we in fact go to war in order to try and help the Poles rather than the other way around?

Brexit is all about prejudice, hatred and ‘othering’ immigrants…and all based upon invented, imaginary threats and hubris….the final word?…Pride comes before a fall.   Oh right…the BBC sanctimoniously telling us pride in country will ruin us.  Brexit is going to fail then?

Trust the BBC to spin a fantasy of lies and contempt in a programme ostensibly about one thing but really designed to send a message. You voted for Brexit?  You’re a Nazi.

Saw this trail in the Telegraph…

Fake news is about more than just elections: it can topple banks, sink firms, and ruin lives

….not just fake news….real news can sink banks and ruin lives if revealed injudiciously and without regrd to the consequences.

Ten years ago the once BBC’s Robert Peston’s desire for a scoop caused a run on RSB and banking confidence to fail thus triggering the banking crisis in the UK.  He reported that the Bank of England was loaning RSB emergency funding despite knowing that this might cause panic in the markets and on the high street as people banking there would be alarmed and would then head to the bank to withdraw their money as indeed happened.

The BBC’s Robert Peston was accused of helping to trigger the tumultuous fall in UK bank shares on Tuesday by breaking news of a private meeting between the Chancellor and bank bosses.

Viewers and listeners awoke to hear the Corporation’s business editor reveal that three of Britain’s biggest banks  –  Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB  –  had asked Alistair Darling for billions of pounds in funding.

But the report by Mr Peston  –  rapidly becoming known as the man who moves markets  –  set off a fresh bout of chaos in the City, with shares in RBS plummeting by almost 40 per cent, wiping around £10billion off the bank’s value.

City traders were angered by his report, which unleashed renewed market turmoil, and there was astonishment at the Treasury and fury within Government that news of the secret meeting had been given to Mr Peston.

Amid speculation over precisely who ‘leaked’ what to the BBC man, one political website described him as a ‘market menace’.

Mr Peston revealed details of the meeting  –  clearly highly sensitive at a time of unprecedented City jitters  –  on air and on his BBC blog early on Tuesday morning.

Under heavy selling pressure, shares in all three banks fell after Mr Peston’s report, fuelling fears over the health of Britain’s banking system.

Peston denies it all...his defence is that he was reporting the truth and would do so regardless of the consequences….

He told the Treasury select committee he had acted responsibly in reporting the facts, which were from multiple sources and had been checked.

Mr Peston said he had never held off from reporting a story he knew to be true to serve a wider interest.

However he did admit elsewhere that his reporting caused a meltdown…

Three years later, in another article, Mr Peston admitted: ‘In my naivety, I had thought I was merely doing an impartial reporter’s job of describing Government thinking, based on conversations with ministers and officials in Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Treasury.

‘But this was one of the rare occasions when a news story became a political event in its own right.

‘Markets went crazy, share prices went through the roof, enjoying their biggest-ever one day rise.

‘The reverberations were felt in bond markets and foreign exchanges  –  and caused the occupants of numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street to lose their bearings.’

What was the purpose of Peston’s revelation?  It served no good purpose other than to provide him with a scoop.  Revealing the emergency funding would cause only harm and it did.

Peston’s defence of reporting the truth doesn;t ring true because he also revealed in his book that he knew the economy was on the rocks and that a crash was coming but he didn’t report that…he deliberately held it back.

“We are from Allah and to Allah we shall return. I am informing all brave Muslims of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr, Allah Willing. Meanwhile if someone has access to the author of the book but is incapable of carrying out the execution, he should inform the people so that [Rushdie] is punished for his actions. Rouhollah al-Mousavi al-Khomeini.”

The BBC continues to promote the musical career of a Muslim man who said he would kill Salman Rushdie for blaspheming about Islam.

5 Live interviewed Yusuf Islam [14:15 ish], aka Cat Steven, and rigorously challenged him on his previous statements about Salman Rushdie.  LOL…don’t be silly…never going to happen.  Nihal expressed delight about him…‘Oh what a guy!’ never mind that Nihal usually has the biggest chip on his shoulder about alleged racism or anything that he thinks is a generalisation which he will challenge with an abrupt put-down more often than not.  But a guy who wants to kill people who blaspheme about his ideology?  He apparently gets the thumbs up from Nihal.  Oh what a guy Nihal is.

Nihal raised the subject of Islam’s statements but did so in a way that managed not to mention ‘killing’,  saying only that Islam had not exactly been ‘on the frontfoot on condemning the fatwah‘….we weren’t told what the fatwah commanded….see above….mass murder of anyone involved in production and sale of Rushdie’s book.

Islam denied he agreed with the fatwah and said he had been ‘entrapped’ in the situation and that the media had invented stories about him…he told us that he never said ‘kill Rushdie’….a lie he has used consistently…

I never called for the death of Salman Rushdie; nor backed the Fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini—and still don’t.

This was accepted by Nihal and co who then went on their merry way laughing and joking with Islam.  Trouble is Islam was lying through his teeth as even the slightest research by Nihal and Co would have shown had they bothered to do it.  One can only imagine they just didn’t want to do it…or worse they knew and decided to allow Islam to cover up his Islamic extremist views.

On 21 February 1989, Yusuf Islam addressed students at Kingston University in London about his conversion to Islam and was asked about the controversy in the Muslim world and the fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s execution. He replied, “He must be killed. The Qur’an makes it clear – if someone defames the prophet, then he must die.”

Two months later, Yusuf Islam appeared on a British television programme, BBC’s Hypotheticals, an occasional broadcast featuring a panel of notable guests to explore a hypothetical situation with moral, ethical and/or political dilemmas. In the episode (“A Satanic Scenario”), Islam had an exchange about the issue with the moderator and Queens Counsel Geoffrey Robertson.^[5][6] Islam would later clarify the exchanges as “stupid and offensive jokes” made “in bad taste”, but “part of a well-known British national trait … dry humour on my part.”^[1]

Robertson: You don’t think that this man deserves to die?
Y. Islam: Who, Salman Rushdie?
Robertson: Yes.
Y. Islam: Yes, yes.
Robertson: And do you have a duty to be his executioner?
Y. Islam: Uh, no, not necessarily, unless we were in an Islamic state and I was ordered by a judge or by the authority to carry out such an act – perhaps, yes.
[Some minutes later, Robertson on the subject of a protest where an effigy of the author is to be burned]
Robertson: Would you be part of that protest, Yusuf Islam, would you go to a demonstration where you knew that an effigy was going to be burned?
Y. Islam: I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing.

The New York Times also reports this statement from the programme: ‘[If Rushdie turned up at my doorstep looking for help] I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I’d try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is.’

 

The BBC continues to try and scare the young about Brexit with stupid stories…maybe that’s why they are completely in the dark about the real world…the real world that isn’t suddenly shut off when Brexit happens whatever BBC journalists and Remainders tell them and they seem to believe…..

Young people fear for futures in Brexit Britain, says study

More than two-thirds of young people in the UK have an “international outlook” and many fear for their prospects once the UK leaves the EU, says a report.

Ipsos Mori questioned a representative group of almost 2,000 18 to 30-year-olds for a study by cross-party think tank Demos, for the British Council.

Many of those interviewed were still “angry and emotional” about last year’s vote to leave the EU but the report notes that, while 69% of young people who voted were in favour of remaining, about half did not vote.

Of those polled, six in 10 said they would vote to remain if another referendum was held now.

“While there are certainly those who see leaving the EU as a great opportunity, many participants in our focus groups were worried about impacts on their lives, prospects and future plans, including constraining opportunities to work and study in other countries,” says the report.

“Furthermore there was some concern that internationally the UK will be seen as a country looking inwards at a time when global co-operation has never been more important.”

Hmmm…so a nation that seeks to head out into the world breaking free from the constraints of the EU is isolating itself?  How dumb can you be to believe that?  Just look at the map at the top of the post and see where Brits are emigrating to….and it’s not Europe for the jobs and opportunity…Spain is the most popular destination in the EU but that’s for people who want to retire in the main and so doesn’t count in a survey about young people upset that they won’t be able to work in Europe….supposedly.  It is the young in this survey who seem to have a ‘little EU’ mindset, unprepared to look beyond Europe’s borders for opportunities….it is they who are isolationist and anti-globalisation it would seem.

What do these young want from an education at school?…

The report also found many were frustrated with an education system they saw as overly focused on grades rather than life skills like money management, healthy eating, mental health and relationships.About half felt their education had failed to properly prepare them for the world of work or for adulthood generally.

Snowflake generation…think so.  Not sure how an employer is supposed to assess your suitability for a job when they aren’t able to judge your competence and ability and your willingness to work for a result via grades.  Still, the skill of chatting up the opposite sex, lettuce eating and not spending more than you earn are no doubt also of value in the workplace.

Just another example of how the negative and false BBC narrative on the EU and Brexit damages Britain and society.

Guido has been doing the maths and shows Nick Robinson is peddling pro-EU messages in bulk…

Data Guido has been hidden away in a dark room, crunching the numbers to see whether our top broadcast journalists really are impartial on Brexit. Yesterday we analysed Robert Peston’s relentlessly negative Twitter feed, categorising his tweets as having either a positive sentiment about Brexit (not many), a negative sentiment about Brexit (82%), or being neutral. Today it’s the turn of the BBC’s Nick Robinson…

Robbo has sent 157 tweets about Brexit since 24 June 2016.

3 tweets had a positive sentiment, that’s just 2% of his total tweets.

65 tweets were neutral, that’s 41%.

89 tweets were negative, that is 57% of his total Brexit tweets having a negative sentiment.

No surprise there…it’s just the standard BBC approach to Brexit…..anything the EU says is reported as if it is sensible and credible however wrong, insulting and mocking it is, whilst anything the Brits say is treated with contempt and disdain….the Brits are presented as foolish, naive, delusional, chaotic and disorganised, if not incompetent.

Then again Trump fares even worse as the BBC’s output must near 100% anti-Trump.  No surprise that it was Nick Robinson then that this morning suggested that the creator of Twitter must be ‘bitterly disappointed that Trump has used Twitter to such devastating effect’.  No bias in that tone then.  We had suggestions that Trump must be banned from Twitter, oh so liberal, and that he only gets so many watchers as he is a billionaire…nothing to do with being President then or that he is saying things, unfiltered, uncensored, that the Media wouldn’t let him say if he had to rely on them to publicise his thoughts?

Robinson was on his high horse grandly telling us how we must beware fake news, naturally his unspoken narrative was that we can trust the BBC and only it brings us the truth with accurate, impartial news.  Clearly not true as this morning’s reporting of Herr Juncker’s words reveal.

As always the BBC reports Juncker’s jibes and nonsense as if handed down from on high and yet he is the most ridiculous, pompous and puffed up politician in the EU.  Today he illustrates perfectly why we need to leave the EU…firstly his contemptuous, patronising and delusional tone is exactly what people dislike about politicians, and second his promotion of an EU that is to be forced into ever-closer union, financial, political and militarily, reveals what we always knew was the real intention of the EU…to create a super-state that smashed national states and governance…not something the BBC wanted to talk about during the referendum…when did you hear them raise the subject of what the dangers were of staying in the EU?

We heard that the EU would be seeking out free trade deals, they being good for prosperity and jobs…and yet the BBC’s Katya Adler made no mention of the EU’s attitude towards Britain and its trade negotiations…the EU clearly not wanting to negotiate a good trade deal beneficial to both because it would prefer to try and punish Britain for leaving the EU…yet another good reason to leave the EU as it chooses a political objective rather than economic in order to frighten other nations into staying locked into the EU regime…..

On trade, Mr Juncker hailed recent deals with Canada and Japan, and said deals with Mexico and South America were in the pipeline.

Trade talks should open with Australia and New Zealand, he said, and be completed by late 2019. But he said there had to be reciprocity in trade deals: “We have to get as much as we give.”

And he promised new openness in trade negotiations and – amid concern about Chinese investment in strategic European assets – said investors in the EU would be screened.

Not a single aside from the BBC relating this to Brexit and how the EU’s intransigent approach to negotiations is the real stumbling block.

Note also that Junckers wants to bring even more nations tighter into the EU fold growing the empire and tightening its grip on subject ‘nations’……

Europe had to pursue a “credible enlargement project to the countries of the western Balkans”, and it was high time for Romania and Bulgaria to be brought into the EU’s border-free Schengen zone, along with Croatia when it was ready, he said.

Amused by the BBC’s title for this report…

EU: Juncker sees window of opportunity for reform

‘Reform’ is the last thing Junckers and Co have in mind…what they intend is more and more of the same making the EU the only power in Europe.  Just more BBC spin intended to make us think the EU is open to reform and maybe we should jump back on board as things change for the better.

Then there is this….

He sternly reminded member states that final jurisdiction in the union belonged to the European Court of Justice, and said the rule of law was not optional. That might have been a tacit reference to countries such as Poland, which have defied judicial decisions from the EU on a number of issues.

In the EU “the rule of law, justice and fundamental rights” took priority, he said – and “that rules out EU membership for Turkey for the foreseeable future”.

Hmmm…The EU won’t let Turkey join ‘for now’ due to a clash of values…and in the same voice he attacks Poland and Hungary for not taking Muslim migrants…because they recognise that the clash of values with national culture and values would undermine their societies.  Hypocrisy from Junckers…hypocrisy that the BBC ‘fails’ to notice….they also fail to notice that the EU is still looking to accept Turkey as an EU member one day…something denied during the referendum with great vigour, calling the likes of Farage a liar and a racist for suggesting the EU really wanted to let Turkey in.

We also heard that Paris would be the biggest financial centre in Europe in 5 or more years…and yet that’s complete horlicks…London is by far the biggest and is growing whatever the BBC tries too imply.

Here we go, middle of the new week and time for a NEW Open thread on which to detail the bias!

I laughed at this…..

‘I’m afraid it’s one of those irritating pains in the bottom that just when you think you’re rid of it, it pops back up again – we call it a Tony Blair.’