Category Archives: BBC bias

The IMF announces the world economy is in crisis and globalisation is under threat.   So we must have more globalisation.

Hmmm…so a world economy based upon globalisation of finance, labor and trade is failing and has been for a decade due to globalisation and the IMF wants more…and the BBC peddles that narrative for them…opposing the ‘little englanders’ and Trumps of the world who apparently want to close down all trade with other countries.

Remember it was Gordon Brown who told us one reason we had the Crash was because he failed to realise how interconnected the world was and that events in one place had effects elsewhere as well.

Gordon Brown has admitted he made a “big mistake” over the handling of financial regulation in the run-up to the banking crisis of 2008.

The former prime minister told a US conference he had not realised the “entanglements” of global institutions.

He said: “We set up the FSA [the City regulator] believing the problem would come from the failure of an individual institution. That was the big mistake.

“We didn’t understand just how entangled things were.”

So it is in fact globalisation that is the problem ‘some might say’.

The BBC however thinks that Brexit is the problem….Brexit which wants to, according to the BBC, close off all trade with the world and stop all immigration.

Seriously you couldn’t make it up…a supposedly expert BBC programme dedicated to business and finance, Wake up to Money, was telling us that Brexit is a threat to world trade [apparently ‘protectionism has raised its ugly head‘]when we know that a major narrative from the Leave camp is that Brexit will mean more world trade as the UK seeks out new markets and trade deals outside the EU.

WUTM [36 mins in…goes on for a while] didn’t mention Brexit for a while as it talked about ‘the threat’ to globalisation.  I knew it would though and I waited and waited, first a subtle, indirect allusion to Brexit [the risks to business if there is a ‘bit of a movement’ for certain sectors to be trading elsewhere in the world] and then bingo the floodgates opened and Brexit was blamed for all the ills of the world.  A very one-sided and obviously biased towards ‘globalisation’ and anti-Brexit programme painting a totally false picture of what Brexit means claimng that it is opposed to global trade when in fact it is global trade it champions.  Good old BBC…accurate, truthful and balanced as  always.

There is really no point in turning to the BBC for any balanced coverage of any aspect of the US Presidential election. Last night saw the first V-P TV debate, and this is what the BBC had to say.

It was a scattershot debate marred by frequent interruption, where moderator Elaine Quijado lost control of the discussion for stretches. In the end, however, it was a battle that Mike Pence won.

WHAT? Pence won? Good old BBC – showing some balance? But wait….it goes on…

The Trump-Pence ticket is still losing the war, however, and Tuesday night’s debate likely only succeeded in keeping hope alive that Donald Trump can mount a comeback.

Phew, amelioration in the next sentence, and then to further detract from any GOP sense of success…

That’s a low bar, but – as the saying goes – it ain’t nothing.

And then..

For the last week, it’s felt a bit like Donald Trump was routed.

By whom? The liberal media that has spent the past year mocking Trump? For the past week it has felt that the liberal MSM, including the BBC, is more crooked than Hillary Clinton.

His woeful (oh really? DV) first presidential debate performance was compounded by a series of unforced errors, capped by an early morning Twitter tirade and a damaging New York Times story about his near billion-dollar business losses in 1995. His poll numbers headed south.

That’s interesting. Check this out..

Presidential contenders Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are virtually deadlocked in the Rasmussen Reports poll, released Tuesday.

The BBC is behaving in EXACTLY the same way as it behaved during last year’s general election and this year’s UK referendum. It has decided what the result should be and is doing all it can to try and influence it. As such that makes the BBC a global menace. It is not a news organisation, it is a propagandist.

Well then, Diane James has quit as UKIP leader and the BBC are relishing the situation. Their delight is obvious and whilst I accept this is a wholly self-inflicted own goal from an imploding UKIP, just think back to how the BBC casually smooths over the chasms in Labour whilst desperately, oh so desperately, seeking to find any in the Conservative Party! UKIP has been a particular target for BBC hatred over recent years and they were always going to put the boot in when something like this happens.

Middle of the week and time for a new one of these! Detail the bias here please!

It must be good to be ‘one of the claque’, one of the elite who can snap their fingers and have the BBC hand over the resources and airtime to allow you to peddle your own pet prejudices.  Lenny Henry of course has been the most obvious recipient of such largesse as his mates get jobs on the basis of their skin colour at the Beeb and now actress Sally Phillips calls in a few favours and is now the proud producer of a very one-sided programme that is intensely personal for her and pushes a very controversial message that is essentially nothing less than moral and emotional blackmail on a very sensitive subject that people who are in the situation Phillips is talking about will be made to feel as if they are bad and immoral people.

Phillips is the mother of a child with Downs Syndrome and wants to stop a new test for this condition in expectant mothers and any subsequent abortions that might result from a positive test.  She denies she is against all abortions but having listened to her it is apparent she is putting on a nice, mumsy, middle class front as she presented her case…the real her comes through when she is pushed on her views and she starts getting aggressive and references Hitler and the 30’s as she attacks abortion and defends her position.

The BBC has allowed her to make and front a programme pushing her views…A World Without Down’s Syndrome?

Driven by the experience of raising her son Olly, who has Down’s syndrome, Sally explores some of the ethical implications of our national screening policy.

By talking to experts in the Down’s syndrome community, the world’s top scientists and including people with Down’s syndrome in the debate, Sally investigates a thorny subject that begs questions relevant to us all: what sort of world do we want to live in and who do we want in it?

It has been hyped widely on the BBC but yesterday I heard an interview with her on 5Live that went quite pearshaped for all concerned.  Nidal was burbling about how beautiful the film was and they were all getting along famously in the interview until a few questions were lobbed in about Phillips’ attitude towards abortion….she got very upset, questioned if they hated the film and mentioned Hitler.  The presenters realised that what she was giving them at first was just a front, her real views were far more extreme than she was letting on and they kept on with the difficult questions.  Fair play to them.

For some reason the programme that the interview was part of [around 14:35 should it come on line]  is not available on iPlayer yet….is that because Phillips has objected strongly and loudly to her treatment?

Things certainly didn’t go as planned as the ‘beautiful programme’ turns out to be made by someone who expresses nothing more than a prejudiced, unpleasant polemic aimed at making anyone contemplating having an abortion due to Downs Syndrome feel as if they are evil and bad people.

So at least on this occasion the troops on the ground did their job and challenged the narrative that was supposed to be run.

The Guardian publishes a critique of the programme…

One of Britain’s leading antenatal experts has strongly criticised a BBC film about children with Down’s syndrome, before its broadcast this week.

The documentary, A World Without Down’s Syndrome?, will be shown on Wednesday and is presented by the actress Sally Phillips, who has a child with Down’s herself. In the programme Phillips, known for her role as Tilly in Miranda, makes the case against the introduction of a new NHS pregnancy screening test that would detect with 99% accuracy the foetal abnormalities indicating Down’s syndrome.

Jane Fisher, director of Antenatal Results and Choices, an organisation set up to support parents affected by foetal screening and its consequences, said she thought the programme – in which she is interviewed – was “not at all helpful” to people facing difficult decisions around a prenatal diagnosis of disability.

“Sally is a very compelling presenter,” Fisher told the Observer, “and – absolutely – it’s great to have the positive images of people [with Down’s] who are already here. But it’s very personal, and it’s an extra layer of difficulty for couples and families who might be making the decision now about whether to end their pregnancy. It risks offering the suggestion to those who have [decided to end a pregnancy] that they have made the wrong decision.

“It’s too problematic to have one individual representing that choice – one who is an advocate for not screening, who has a high-functioning, much-loved child. A woman who admits she has the resources for extra help with her absolutely lovely little boy.”

“We want to make sure that women who take the decision to end the pregnancy are not perceived somehow as saying they do not value people who are here – they are saying this is not something they can do, that it is not right for them or for their families.

“Not only does no one know how their child would be affected by Down’s, but the big conflict for women is the adult the child will be 20 or 30 years down the line. For most women, that is the bit that tips them to end the pregnancy. An adult who will be, at best, vulnerable,” she said.

Not sure how the BBC can justify giving over the airwaves to someone to present a programme given their views are obviously very one-sided and prejudiced on such a sensitive and controversial subject that will have such an emotive effect on others and is intended to do so.  Pure propaganda of a very unpleasant kind that is verging on moral blackmail.

A Biased BBC reader writes…

“A 98 per cent vote in favour of a referendum? That’s a landslide. Alas, for the BBC in its coverage of Hungary’s vote to decline the EU’s plan of handing them hundreds of Muslim migrants, the low turnout (43 per cent) “appeared to render it [the vote] invalid”.

Yes, like Brexit, the results have to be questioned. However, unlike the 48-52 per cent Brexit margin that was deemed too narrow to respect the will of the people, this time the narrative shifts to the “validity” of the vote as only 43 per cent of the Hungarian electorate voted. Apparently, this is short of the 50 per cent required to be “valid”.

This post is linked to the last in that it looks at the BBC’s hypocritical stance on hate crimes…those done by Muslims being swept under the carpet or excused as ‘justifiable’ in some shape or form…for instance the killing of Ahmadi shop keeper Asad Shah, we are told, was because he was a blasphemer and had offended ‘real’ Muslims by insulting Islam….his death was really his own fault.  Naturally no-one on the Left wanted to label this ‘terrorism’ unlike the murder of Jo Cox.  The BBC is also partial to excusing those whom we can be in no doubt are terrorists….the BBC ‘understands’ their grievances…they’re unemployed, or disenfranchised in some way or marginalised, allegedly, or they don’t like British foreign policy [the BBC of course doesn’t ask if they therefore consider themselves British…the BBC prefers the narrative that the vast majority of Muslims are proud to be British, more so than what you might call the ‘first nation’ Brits…when the evidence is that that isn’t true at all].

As the BBC peddles the myth of a Britain that is heading towards a neo-Nazi future with mass pogroms of foreigners it curiously, as with the Ahmadi community, downplays the violence and hatred coming from the ‘real’ Muslim community, for instance, towards ex-Muslims…

Young Muslims who quit the faith ‘live in fear of violent revenge’: Support group says some have been warned they will be killed if they abandon their religion  

ITV are broadcasting a programme on October 13 about this…what will be the BBC reaction?  To completely ignore it if its reaction to the shocking revelations on Dispatches ‘Undercover Mosque’ is anything to go by.  Perhaps the police will try to prosecute ITV for hate crimes for broadcasting such revelations.

Perhaps the BBC is wise to stay out of this as it would have to ask about the religious sanctioning of such violence towards ex-Muslims…the Islamic guidance being that people can leave Islam but if they criticise the religion, and that of course means explaining to anyone why they left, they can be killed.  This is Islamic law.

Whilst of course any violence towards Muslims should be condemned the BBC’s very one-sided narrative about racism and hate crimes is extremely damaging to society as it completely distorts the truth about what is happening and tries to shape and limit the political response to hate crimes by white people or that against Muslims alone.

The ‘white’ hate crimes are being politically linked to Brexit as part of the BBC’s campaign to undermine the referendum result in the hope that it will be overturned.  The BBC’s wilful blindness towards Mulsim hate crimes (including homophobic and anti-Semitic) is just its usual refusal to be open and honest about this and part of that is its line that it is in fact ‘Islamophobia’ that is the real problem and that that is driven in part by the government’s Prevent strategy…the BBC has long given much airtime to Muslim opponents of this programme…such as the dishonest Warsi and countless numbers of other Islamists from groups which are clearly extremist….Douglas Murray notes the betrayal by the liberal left in regard to this…

The ‘academics’ criticising the Prevent strategy are nothing of the sort

This is how the madness spreads. While some politicians of the left continue to pretend that the situation in the Labour party and on the British left in general is salvageable, they seem not to realise that all their sluices are up.

Take a piece in Thursday’s Guardian written by Alice Ross. The headline is ‘Academics criticise anti-radicalisation strategy in open letter.’ Of course only in the Guardian does an ‘open letter’ by such ‘academics’ as these merit a newspaper article. For only in the Guardian would the reporting be so piss-poor that the ‘academics’ in question would include people who are not even academics.

Murray is wrong about ‘only in the Guardian’ because of course the BBC is more than happy to give a platform to the same voices…again and again and again….to undermine the anti-terror programme.  Why does the BBC want to help do that?

It is striking that in the past the people who have sought most publicly for the policy to be scrapped are those who quite simply do not want Britain to have a counter-radicalisation strategy because they themselves favour the radicals or are radicals themselves. Only now that the left’s ability to exercise the most basic hygiene has reached its current level could a Labour shadow home secretary join such people.

The BBC updates what is happening in the Jo Cox murder trial…

Jo Cox MP death: Murder accused Thomas Mair refuses to enter pleas

Naturally they avoid mentioning that Mair had mental health issues whereas they mention it relentlessly as an excuse for Muslim killers.

The death of Jo Cox resulted in an outpouring of anguish about the state of political discourse and how Brexit had poisoned the delightful and warm atmosphere that had prevailed before the idea of a referendum raised its ugly head.

Strange than that the BBC has generally avoided any similar ‘outrage’ at the massive surge in hatred being spewed out by Corbyn’s supporters towards anyone who dares have different thoughts and the oh so usual visceral hatred towards Tories so often displayed by the Left…such hatred not being a recent occurence that the BBC can link to Brexit but something that the BBC itself has been part of ever since Thatcher took power.

The BBC is desperate to try and equate voting for Leave with racism and indeed reports uncritically this load of old tosh today:

Human rights report warns over ‘anti-foreigner sentiment’

Xenophobia in the UK has been stoked by “considerable intolerant political discourse”, a European human rights watchdog claims.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance said racist violence had been “on the rise” in the UK.

There had been an increase in anti-Muslim violence since 2013 as well as record levels of anti-Semitic incidents in 2014, it said in a report.

Complete rubbish.

The BBC loves the attack on Farage (and fails to mention the death threats to him and his family from the pro-immigration extremists…all whipped up by the BBC anti-Farage reports?) and tells us…

The watchdog accused UKIP and “some Conservative MPs” of “large-scale scaremongering” over the lifting of EU restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian nationals’ access to the labour market.

Trouble is it wasn’t scaremongering…the figure of 50,000 a year was entirely accurate and probably an underestimate if anything.  The BBC don’t admit that.

Naturally Muslims get a good press from this ‘watchdog’ and the BBC doesn’t question it at all…

While it welcomed Mr Cameron’s £20m language fund to teach Muslim women to speak English, “it regrets that the prime minister associated it with countering ‘backward attitudes’ and extremism”.

The report also said:

                      Muslims were portrayed in “a negative light by certain politicians”

Muslims’ alleged lack of integration and opposition to “fundamental British values” was “a common theme adding to a climate of mistrust and fear of Muslims”

The government’s counter-terrorism strategy, Prevent, “may fuel discrimination”

Hate speech in some traditional media, particularly tabloid newspapers, “continues to be a problem”

Cameron’s action was about counteriing backward attitudes and extremism…stopping women being seen as second class chattels and allowing women to control their own lives and mix with a wider society…the BBC is constantly telling us that women are the key to steering children away from radicalisation….but apparently not when it doesn’t suit the narrative.

And Muslims just aren’t integrated and do oppose so many vital British liberal, democratic values….Trevor Phillips admits it himself…

Warning on ‘UK Muslim ghettoes’: Nation within a nation developing says former equalities watchdog

• Trevor Phillips says many Muslims hold ‘different values’ to rest of society

British Muslims are becoming a nation within a nation, the former equalities watchdog warns today.

Trevor Phillips says many hold very different values from the rest of society and want to lead separate lives.

Most worryingly, those with separatist views are far more likely to support terrorism.

A very one-sided narrative from the BBC and a highly political attack on Brexit voters as the BBC continues o try and smear them by labelling them as violent racists.

As reports continue to come in of businesses booming on the low pound the BBC had to think of a solution to the good news news after trying to terrify us with tales of how terrible the falling pound would be.  The BBC’s answer?  To warn us that the pound could go up as well….so don’t think the good times will last for ever.

So after having spent the last few months telling us how apocalyptic the fall of the pound would be the BBC has switched tack and is now warning how apocalyptic a rise in the pound could be.

And as the IMF backtracks and admits that the UK will have the fastest growing economy in Europe this year the BBC’s headline?

IMF says global economic recovery ‘weak and precarious’

Had the IMF’s verdict been that the UK was heading towards recession you can guarantee the BBC would have headlined that…but they sideline the good news.  Here is the BBC’s very low key line on the IMF’s report on the UK…

The IMF also warned that the Brexit decision will hit the UK economy as it halved its 2017 growth forecast to just 1.1%.

The Fund raised its 2016 forecast slightly as UK retail spending has held up better than expected after the June vote to leave the European Union.

What’s missing from that?  The BBC reports the IMF’s forecast that the economy will slow in 2017 but why has the BBC missed out the verdict for 2016…that the UK will have been the fastest growing economy in the world as reported by the Telegraph?

IMF crowns UK world’s fastest growing major economy, but hard Brexit fears push pound to 31-year low

The BBC prefers this heading in its latest update on the IMF report:

IMF warns of hit to UK economic growth

Maybe Boris is right about the BBC:

Boris blasts the BBC’s ‘shamelessly anti-Brexit’ reports: Foreign Secretary hits out at ‘infuriating’ coverage

Boris Johnson hit out at the BBC yesterday over its ‘shamelessly anti-Brexit’ coverage.

The Foreign Secretary told delegates at the Tory conference that the way the Corporation had reported on the EU referendum result was ‘infuriating’.

A new week dawns and a new Open Thread for your attention. Please detail the bias here!