Category Archives: BBC bias

Here you go, a new Open Thread to commence the fresh week of BBC bias.

The BBC famously preferred this picture on their newsroom wall….

“I mean in our office there’s a picture of Bush as Hitler.  I don’t know where they got it, but yes, Bush as Hitler.  It’s quite a serious thing comparing Bush to Hitler! So did anyone in the newsroom in question object?  No.  Nobody did.”

In the last post I noted the BBC’s failure to fully represent the true demographic make-up of the UK by not having a good many Fascist’s in the ranks of its presenters. What you cry…what about Gemma Arterton who channelled Hitler in a 5 Live interview as she compared refugees to Zombies and told us that her life philosophy was that of the survival of the fittest…She suggests that if migrants [sorry… Zombies] outnumber you you must surrender your country to them….it’s only fair….if the new ‘normal’ is Zombies then the previously normal people have no right to stop the Zombies…she takes her recent film role and tells us that it is very redolent of today as the massed armies of refugees are at the gates…raising questions about who has the right to live where and other very relevant issues for today.  Naturally the BBC’s Simon Mayo far from disagreeing went with her and agreed.

The story tells us that as long as there are uninfected humans and Zombies there will be war therefore the uninfected humans must be infected or die.  Very redolent of course of the Left’s ideas on race and immigration and indeed the EU…the celebrators of diversity ironically working to stamp out national and cultural differences in the name of ‘peace’…as the Arabs say…they make a desert and call it peace…..and it sounds like the story is channelling Labour’s immigration policy…attempting to wipe out the Whites by ‘browning’ Britain.

The Zombie girl in the film starts off as sweet and timid and by the end……hmmm…sounds familiar.  Not sure how Arterton then thinks such a scenario demonstrates that the vicious and deadly ‘Zombies’ should be allowed to take over just because there are more of them.

You may have noticed in the past few months the increasing number of BBC presenters who are non-white, a disproportionately large number of them obviously Muslim.  Apparently this is because the BBC’s output must reflect the ethnic make-up of Britain….BME people will supposedly only watch other BME people on the BBC.  The ever rising number of Muslims is of course the BBC’s attempt to normalise Islam.  Let’s have a few Far Right, Fascist supporting presenters then….surely they also must be represented on the diverse BBC.

A BBC spokesman explained: ‘Everyone pays for the BBC so it’s important we reflect all audiences. ‘

Let’s normalise Fascism too.

Luckily for the BBC Chris Packham is considered a freelancer by the BBC Trust and anyway, he’s not involved in news programmes nor public policy-related output from the BBC….therefore he can say whatever he likes in BBC magazines….such as declaring that  hunting and shooting fans are the ‘nasty brigade’ as he campaigned to stop grouse shooting.

The BBC gives us a short report of the Trust’s findings but fails to mention comments from Ian Botham such as ‘This decision is a risible whitewash.  Yet again it shows the BBC’s metropolitan elite insulting the intelligence of the countryside by allowing Packham to continue to use the BBC as a platform for his extreme views.’

The BBC’s decision kind of flies in the face of reality…Packham to all intents and purposes is employed by the BBC...he is constantly presenting BBC programmes year in year out….and of course he made his claims in a BBC magazine.

If this were Sports Direct and their ZHCs the BBC would be all over it declaring him an employee with full worker rights…and responsibilities.

The Trust says that even if he were a ‘regular’ presenter as he doesn’t present the news or public policy-related output he is not covered by BBC rules on impartiality.

So….not doing the news or output related to public policy (however the BBC defines that) and you can say whatever you like…BBC employee or not.

No wonder the BBC Trust is being canned.

The BBC is at the forefront of the campaign to blacken the Brexit referendum as a ‘racist’ campaign, the Leave voters being dubbed as xenophobic little englanders which is all a bit of an irony as the BBC and the Left complain loud and long about an apparent rise in hate crimes…what they do themselves would be considered a hate crime as they drum up hate, anger and abuse towards anyone who voted Leave.  Indeed only on Saturday we had the BBC’s News Quiz likening Leave voters to Nazis and expressing the hope that their faces would all melt…along with the thought that Britain is quietly racist…that’s of course everyone who is white.  The BBC fails to note how many non-whites were keen to vote Leave and that the man who was in court for swiping Eddie Izzard’s pink beret was Polish and an out voter.  We were also told that Trump ranted ‘angry, petulant nonsense‘…I thought that a good description of the News Quiz panel as they vented their bile about Brexit and Trump clearly unaware or not caring that so many other people outside the Bubble don’t subscribe to their left-wing views and that they also realise something the BBC does not…that Trump junior’s use of Skittles to talk about immigration was a metaphor.  All those english degrees must seem like such a waste.  But then if you’re a bigoted pro-mass immigration, pro-EU BBC extremist reason probably isn’t your strong point.

From the Mail:

The great Brexit hate crime myth: How claims of an epidemic of race crimes since the referendum are simply false

A fully-loaded gravy train clattered into the Grange City Hotel in central London on Thursday morning, when around 50 smartly dressed men and women shuffled across deep-pile carpets into its air-conditioned conference centre.

The group — or rather their employers — had each paid between £359 and £575 to attend the day-long event.

Some of these people were civil servants, others charity workers and academics. A handful worked in the private sector, though rather more appear to be employed by the taxpayer, via local councils, British police forces, and the Crown Prosecution Service.

The event bringing this eclectic and well bankrolled crowd together was the sixth annual Tackling Hate Crime Conference — an expensive and painstakingly organised shindig staged each autumn by the £6.5 billion FTSE 100 corporation Capita.

Its purpose, according to promotional literature, was to provide a forum to discuss how best to ‘respond to the surging growth of hate crime’ in the UK, which (the same literature breathlessly insisted) has ‘risen 57 per cent since the EU referendum vote’. With this in mind, speaker after speaker waxed lyrical about how violent and intolerant the nation has become in 2016, or called for Draconian measures to combat the ‘rising tide’ of bigotry on our streets.

Modern Britain, delegates were repeatedly told, is a country riven by homophobia and racism, where to be foreign, disabled or belong to a religious or sexual minority is to fall blamelessly into the firing line of virulent abuse.

‘There is more hate crime in London than in the whole of the United States,’ claimed a ‘keynote’ speaker called Mark Hamilton, who is Assistant Chief Constable of Northern Ireland.

Another speaker, from Southwark Council, talked vividly about the extraordinary bigotry she encounters on a daily basis, making the shocking claim that the ‘youngest perpetrator of hate crime’ she’d come across lately was ‘a four-year-old child who harassed a lesbian couple’.

All very sobering. Or so you might think. But behind the lurid rhetoric, not everything was quite as it seems. Take, for example, the conference organiser’s headline claim: that hate crime has ‘risen 57 per cent since the EU referendum vote’.

This eye-catching figure has certainly done the rounds in recent months, regularly bandied about by liberal commentators, the BBC and Left-wing newspapers.

Yet dig into its provenance and things soon start to smell distinctly whiffy. For the ‘57 per cent’ number was actually plucked from a single press release issued by the National Police Chief’s Council on June 27, four days after the EU ballot took place.

The document in question specifically stated that police forces had recorded ‘no major spikes in tensions’ since Britain went to the polls.

However, its footnote added that 85 people had logged hate crime ‘incidents’ on True Vision, a website that records unverified allegations of such behaviour, during the four days in question, up from 54 during the corresponding period a month earlier.

What exactly did this mean? The police press release made things clear. ‘This should not be read as a national increase in hate crime of 57 per cent but an increase in reporting through one mechanism’ over a single 96-hour period.

Fast forward three months, however, and the number was being used very differently.

As we have seen above, organisers of the Tackling Hate Crime Conference were using it to allege that hate crime had risen by 57 per cent across Britain during the entire period since the Brexit vote.

This is demonstrably untrue. Or, to put things another way, Capita was shamelessly promoting its £600-a-head event by falsely representing unverified raw data that had been collected over the internet during a single four-day period in June.

When the Mail put this to Capita, the firm instantly deleted the 57 per cent claim from its promotional literature, describing its inclusion as ‘an innocent error’.

All of which may sound a bit rum. Yet spend an extended period of time exploring ‘hate crime’ and the growing and lucrative industry that increasingly surrounds it, and you’ll find such cavalier behaviour par for the course.

For the more you investigate, the more it turns out to be a deeply cynical industry where dishonesty and hysteria reign, truth has been replaced with Left-wing dogma, and verifiable facts no longer count for very much at all.

On paper, Britain is a remarkably tolerant country. London has just elected a Muslim mayor by a whacking majority. Gay marriage is not just legal but supported by a comfortable majority of adults. Children from ethnic minorities consistently outperform white working-class counterparts at school and in university.

Surveys by the respected and politically neutral think-tank Pew Research, along with the prestigious British Social Attitudes Survey, show racial prejudice in long-term and perhaps terminal decline.

Yet despite such trends, we are routinely described as being in the grip of a hate crime ‘epidemic’ where a few high-profile incidents — such as the appalling recent murder of a Polish immigrant on the streets of Harlow (which may or may not eventually prove to be race-related) — are said to represent the tip of a sinister iceberg, and where the number of hate offences seems to grow year by year.

(In 2014/15, police recorded 52,528 of them. The previous year, the number was 44,471. In 2012/3, it was 42,255.)

So how can we explain the disconnect? Let’s start with another pressing fact: that hate crime also happens to be one of the great political buzz-phrases of the moment. To this end, virtually the first thing new Home Secretary Amber Rudd did after taking office was to launch a ‘hate crime action plan’.

The Home Affairs Select Committee is holding an inquiry into ‘hate crime and its violent consequences’.

Next month, the Government will promote ‘hate crime awareness week’. It’s spending £2.4 million on a fund for churches and mosques to protect themselves against hate crimes, while the Met is creating a £1.7 million ‘crime hub’ to target online ‘trolls’.

Elsewhere, universities such as Leicester and Sussex employ academics in ‘centres’ for ‘hate crime studies’. The taxpayer hands over six-figure grants to charities which seek to ‘combat’ or ‘monitor’ hate crime.

Police forces employ staff to log it. Councils such as Kensington and Chelsea now have a ‘community support officer for hate crime’.

The Crown Prosecution Service has a ‘hate crime co-ordinator’ in all 13 regions, plus ‘area-based Equality, Diversity and Community Engagement Managers’ who ‘contribute to the delivery of the Hate Crime Assurance Scheme’.

These people, whose leading lights spent Thursday at Capita’s conference, often owe their jobs, status and mortgages to the fashionable perception that hate crime is somehow spiralling out of control.

That, in turn, has led to two distinct trends. The first is a relentless pressure to widen the number of people able to describe themselves as ‘victims’ of such crimes.

When Tony Blair first introduced hate laws, in 1998, they applied only to incidents of racial intolerance. However in 2003, the net was widened to include religious discrimination. Over subsequent years, first homophobic and then ‘transphobic’ abuse was added to the list, along with disability hate crime and, more recently ‘crimes against older people’.

All current categories (with the exception of elder abuse) can result in ‘sentence uplift’ — in other words, a likely increase in jail time — if a case goes to court and results in a conviction. Some 15,442 such prosecutions took place last year with 12,845 convictions, of which around a third saw a ‘sentence uplift’.

Last week, a new category of potential victim emerged: it was reported that several police forces may soon treat ‘misogyny’ as a hate crime, following the alleged success of a pilot scheme in Nottingham where it was decided that wolf-whistling could in certain circumstances constitute ‘threatening behaviour’.

Women may not be the only new demographic singled out for protection, either. Consider, if you will, the annual report of Stop Hate UK, an influential charity which gets around £240,000 a year from grants, largely from the public sector.

It suggests that ‘goths’ or people who choose to wear black clothes, are potential hate crime victims. To this end, it contains a ‘case study’ of abuse supposedly suffered by a ‘goth woman [who] has five facial piercings’.

In such a febrile environment, where almost anyone seems to be a potential victim, should we really be surprised if reported ‘hate’ incidents are on the rise?

Of course it should be stressed that genuine hate crime is not to be tolerated. In Friday’s Mail, for example, the Jewish Labour MP Ruth Smeeth described being sent 25,000 abusive messages by members of her party’s Corbyn-supporting far Left, one of which referred to her as a ‘yid c***’.

The problem, however, comes when the definition of what constitutes a hate crime becomes risibly vague. After all, the subjective way in which the police (who increasingly resemble glorified social workers) now categorise such offences is hardly forensic.

Under their official guidance, hate crime is now deemed to be ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice.’

Proof of such intent is not necessarily required, the guidance adds: ‘Evidence of … hostility is not required … [The] perception of the victim, or any other person, is the defining factor.’

In essence, this means that anyone, anywhere, can force officers to treat something as a hate crime. All it takes is a vague ‘perception’. Such rules are perverse and open to abuse. They mean that, in theory, a straight white male punched in a pub fight can falsely claim his assailant thought he was gay, and therefore motivated by homophobia.

Such an incident will duly be investigated as a hate crime, with the police and CPS under pressure to prosecute.

If they fail, the ‘victim’ can potentially claim to have suffered so-called ‘secondary victimisation’ in which the ‘hate’ he or she experienced is compounded by the police’s lack of sensitivity.

Such factors may very well have motivated the ludicrous recent prosecution of Kevin O’Sullivan, a TV journalist who was involved in an altercation on a train back from a funeral a couple of years ago.

Around 24 hours after the event, the other party — a straight white man who’d initially declined to press charges — informed the police that he now wanted them to prosecute O’Sullivan for a homophobic hate crime.

The man claimed that during their argument he tried to make a telephone call, only to be interrupted by O’Sullivan shouting ‘Are you phoning your gay lover?’

CCTV of the entire incident told a very different story, however. It showed that the man did not make, or attempt to make, a single phone call during the confrontation. Unsurprisingly, when the case came to trial, O’Sullivan was acquitted.

Though awarded costs, he expects them to cover only a fraction of his £15,000 legal bill. Recounting the episode in a recent edition of the Spectator, he said the affair gave him ‘a ringside seat at the edge of insanity’.

The second great modern trend has been for the police, assorted quangocrats and other publicly funded organisations to go to extreme lengths to ensure the number of reported hate crimes is as high as possible.

Consider, in this context, the aforementioned police website True Vision. It allows anyone, anywhere in Britain, to report an incident, even if they were not the victim, have no idea of the victim’s identity, can provide no supporting evidence, and would prefer to remain anonymous.

Their claims then get logged as official statistics and, as we have seen above, used by ‘experts’ to draw sweeping conclusions (invariably negative) about the state of the nation.

Seldom has such a system been more open to abuse than in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, when Left-wing media outlets predicted a ‘surge of xenophobia’ and disheartened Remain voters attempted to prove them right. On Twitter, the hashtag #postbrexit racism went viral.

On Facebook, a forum called ‘worrying signs’ was established for ‘anyone dealing with post-Brexit fallout’ to post reports of hate crime. From here, users were directed to True Vision.

Unsurprisingly, many allegedly racist incidents they carried turned out to be anything but. On the Monday after the referendum, a mobile phone snap of a smashed window at Donde Tapas, a Spanish restaurant in South London, was posted on Facebook. Its caption read ‘Spanish and Turkish restaurants in Lewisham had their windows smashed over the weekend. Very widespread reports coming in now.’

The post soon received 1,833 shares. One commenter noted: ‘The ghost of Sir Oswald Mosley now stalks the streets of England.’

The same picture and caption soon appeared on Twitter, where Dawn Butler, a Labour MP, dubbed it ‘awful,’ and another online commenter called it ‘Kristallnacht all over again.’

The Institute Of Race Relations subsequently asked the poster: ‘Is there any chance we could use your pic for a round-up of post-Brexit racial violence?’

But soon: a reality check. On a South London internet forum where the picture was also posted, one contributor pointed out: ‘I’m no expert, but that looks like a robbery attempt.’

The Met soon admitted it was almost certainly just that, and was ‘not considered to have a hate-crime motivation’.

A second widely reported hate incident that started life on Facebook around the same time proved similarly flaky.

It began with a post on a Remain-supporting forum reading: ‘My friend works at a well-known restaurant in Mayfair, 15 people just came in to celebrate the Leave vote. The customers dismissed him and asked for a English waiter, because he was Italian!!!’

This anecdote was promptly included as case-study in an official study of post-Brexit violence by the Institute of Race Relations, before being widely cited in the Left-wing Press. Yet neither the restaurant, the supposed victim, nor any fragments of proper evidence have ever been identified.

The fact is that we may never know. Yet if the state-sponsored and increasingly powerful hate crime industry gets its way, we could all be potential suspects.

For, to quote the old saying, the Left has a supply-and-demand problem with bigotry: there isn’t enough to go around to support the apocalyptic world view they hold so dear.

The BBC gets ever more disreputable if you are known by who you employ as presenters and commentators.  It is slowly sinking into the gutter as its activism matches the naked anti-white racism and fact free zone that the Guardian occupies…all too often Guardian or Observer journalists also being the goto voices that the BBC brings on for impartial comment on a story.

The ridiculously prejudiced and bigoted James O’Brien was quickly brought into the BBC fold after he conducted his kangaroo court attempting to skewer Nigel Farage with a stream of half truths and outright lies, then the Muslim activist Myriam Francois-Cerrah was given the job of rewriting the history of Srebrenica as she forgot to mention that the reason the Muslim males of fighting age were massacred by the Serbs was because the Muslims had destroyed the Christian villages in the surrounding area and slaughtered the occupants, men, women and children.  Kind of an important detail which gives a bit of context to Serb actions…the BBC white-washing Muslim massacres but vilifying the Serbs.

Yesterday we had the Guardian’s anti-white Blacktivist, Gary Younge, giving us the benefit of his version of the truth on the renowned Today programme (08:45) in light of events in the US where a black man has been shot by police.

Younge was somewhat economical with the truth [Not as if it is the first time]but the Today programme itself fell far short of the expected standards as it forgot to tell us that the police officer who shot the man was himself black and that the police stated that the ‘victim’ had a gun.  The BBC also edited the soundtrack from a video to make it sound as if something else was going on.

The whole narrative was set up to suggest that the killing was a result of police racism when this patently was not the case.

Younge told us that the Washington Post claimed that Blacks were 21 times more likely to be shot than whites…this just isn’t true.  The Washington Post states this...

A Washington Post database of fatal police shootings nationwide has yielded a widely cited statistic: Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be shot dead by police. 

But that is in a report that is trying to undermine a study by a respected black academic, that we’ve looked at here before because the BBC at first ignored and then itself tried to undermine it, that said this…

The result contradicts the image of police shootings that many Americans hold after the killings (some captured on video) of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Walter Scott in South Carolina; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La.; and Philando Castile in Minnesota.

In shootings in 10 cities involving officers, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been carrying a weapon. Both results undercut the idea of racial bias in police use of lethal force.

And…

Mr. Fryer found that in such situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot if the suspects were black. This estimate was not precise, and firmer conclusions would require more data. But in various models controlling for different factors and using different definitions of tense situations, Mr. Fryer found that blacks were either less likely to be shot or there was no difference between blacks and whites.

Curious that Younge ignores that….and it was not the Washington Post that came up with the 21 times figure, it was ProPublica….

Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings.

Without going over the same data that they have seen it is hard to judge the accuracy of their claim but it is highly unlikely that their figure is anywhere near accurate….the Today programme greeted it with shock but did nothing to dispute or challenge Younge’s use of the statistic despite its seemingly extraordinary disproportion.

The BBC’s use of Younge as a commentator must be questionable as he is a hardcore Black activist and such a stranger to the truth…by all means have him on to challenge his assertions but to use him as a reliable source of impartial and informed comment is like using Anjem Choudary as a commenter on Islamophobia.  The BBC have disgracefully also used Younge to present a programme on Brexit…naturally he concentrates on the tidal wave of racism that has swept the country due to the rise in Fascism that has broken out.  This is a taste of his opinion’s about Brexit and the UK…

Brexit: a disaster decades in the making

The leave campaign did not invent racism. The deployment of bigotry to suit electoral ends has a longstanding tradition in this country, which is often denounced even by those who have done exactly that.

Xenophobia – no longer closeted, parsed or packaged, but naked, bold and brazen – was given free rein.

The BBC must love him…the UK is inherently racist, Leave voters are racists and Brexit is a disaster.  Tick, tick, tick.

Why would the BBC employ him when he has a well known antipathy towards white people and it seems, er, Israelis…

The bigotry of Guardian columnist Gary Younge

Younge ticks all the BBC boxes and more that it deems essential for one of its presenters.

Back to the BBC’s reporting on the shooting in Charlotte.  The BBC commendably, and unusually, did initially report that the officer was black, however that essential fact has gone missing from its news bulletins, as has the police statement that the victim was armed.  The Today programme failed to mention both facts…not good for the BBC’s flagship news programme…never mind using a blacktivist to give us a balanced and impartial view of events.

The BBC also, as said, edited a video soundtrack so that we heard a misleading version of events that made it sound like the wife of the victim was telling the police not to shoot as she said ‘Don’t you do it’.  However she was in fact telling her husband repeatedly ‘Don’t you do it.’

The full course of events not reported by the Today programme….

Rakeyia Scott can be heard urging her husband to comply with the officers who had instructed her husband to “drop the gun, drop the gun.”

“Keith, don’t let them break the windows! Come on out of the car,” she can be heard yelling, “Keith, don’t you do it! Don’t you do it”

“Keith, Keith, Keith — don’t you do it!”

Here’s the video…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdM3ishglQ

The BBC edits out the first two times the wife shouts ‘Don’t you do it!’.  The question is why would the BBC do that?  Why would the wife say that to her husband?  Just what was it that she urged him not to do?  The police said he had a gun…did she really know that he had one and might use it?  That’s what this audio track suggests to me…and why the BBC have edited it to sound like she is possibly telling the police not to shoot which the full audio makes clear is not the case?

The Today programme is too busy pushing the narrative of racist cops to bother with the facts or making the slightest attempt to investigate the story properly.  This video was posted on the 21st…..strange the Today programme can’t find the time to report the same days later…

Just getting the Open Threads realigned so here is the one to take us all off into the wide blue yonder of the weekend. Please detail the bias here!

So predictable. Ever since June 23rd the BBC have been PRAYING (to Allah?) for some grim economic news that they can hang on the Brexit decision. Entertainly, economic conditions continue to be positive which clearly annoys the BBC. So their new position is that whilst Economic Armageddon did not happen in the way so many of their “experts” warned us, it still could. Hence the way they downgrade  good news and add a future warning. They are so desperate for the UK economy to grind to a halt. Instead it keeps on moving forward!

Another great joining-the-dots insight by a B_BBC reader…

“A very interesting development in terms of the BBC’s transparancy on trans (and bias in general).  The BBC website is running the to-be-expected formulaic propaganda story about how amazing transgenderism is. I won’t bother deconstructing the whole article (although I have to cite the hilarious line: “She is a trans person who has scorned societal labels by refusing gender reassignment…”) but it is written by Olivia Crellin, who states she works for the BBC.  After trawling through the piece, there is something at the foot of the article that caught my eye: “This article was made possible through a grant to the author from the One World Media foundation.” A BBC employee is being PAID by a third-party special interest entity to write a blatantly biased material (that was pitched to them: 2016 Production Fund | One World Media) to push a specific social agenda…

At last, the Beeb finally admits it.”