Category Archives: BBC bias

 

‘The assumption that many extremists had mental health problems was wrong.  Instead terrorists recruiters ‘vet out’ those with such conditions.

“Only 2% of members of terrorist organisations suffer from mental health problems compared with an average of up to 30% of members of the public.”

MI5

 

As terrorists roam Europe, and the world, the Sunday Times two weeks ago titled its editorial ‘Living with the murderous enemy within’  suggested that Merkel’s open door policy was ‘fraught with risk’ and imposed ‘severe difficulties on Germay’s EU partners.’  No kidding.  As with 7/7, it says there are two fears…one of many more terror attacks, and that there would be a backlash and an increase in racial tension.  Again, no kidding.

The BBC on the other hand blithely continues to campaign for open borders and mass, uncontrolled immigration, and naturally doesn’t connect such a policy with that ‘increase in racial tension’...whereas it rapidly and insistently associates Brexit with any hate crime it can.  In other words it looks the other way or downplays the conflicts when genuine problems are caused by immigration but exaggerates and politicises hate crimes by blaming them on something like Brexit that it abhors.

In the same way the BBC instantly connected the murder of Jo Cox to Brexit and has blatantly ignored the fact that the killer had mental health issues whilst at the same time instantly claiming that any killing by a Muslim is due to mental issues…the police of course are also complicit in this…glaringly self-evident in the case of the Russell Square attacker in which there was an instant announcement that this was nothing to do with Islam and radicalisation but was a mental health issue.

That may or may not be the case but it is hard to see how the police came to such a conclusion and stated it so confidently almost as they turned up on the doorstep of the attacker’s home especially when you know the background facts…which might indicate there is more to this than a man with mental health issues, a term which covers a whole range of issues from the very mild to very serious problems.

Looking on the BBC website the stabbings in Russell square seem to have been tidied away…the BBC isn’t going to be doing a follow up and a background investigation of the killer.

The Mail though is keeping an eye on the story….and ironically it is a BBC presenter, a Sikh, so not afraid to speak the truth about ‘race’ matters, who upsets the carefully contrived police and media narrative that this was purely a mental health issue and that Zakaria Bulhan, the killer, was a devout Muslim who pledged support for Moazzam Begg, now one of the ‘leading lights’ of Cage…the extremist, Islamist group.

Scotland Yard believe Zakaria Bulhan, 19, a Norwegian national of Somali origin who moved to the UK in 2002, was not ‘motivated by terrorism’ but its officers are trawling his possessions for extremist material.

Neighbour Parmjit Singh, a BBC radio DJ known as ‘DJ Precious’ on the Asian network, said he had known ‘impressionable’ Bulhan for seven years, adding: ‘His mental health problems are a scapegoat.’ 

The 36-year-old said: ‘They said he had mental health issues but that was not the boy I knew. 

‘The news of his mental illness is completely new, we never heard that. Honestly, I think his mental health problems are a scapegoat.’

Asked what he thought motivated the attack, Parmjit said: ‘I think peer pressure, hanging around with gangs. He wasn’t working, he was hanging around with Somalian boys and I think they had possible links to serious ISIS people – not directly, but they see all this stuff and are inspired by it.

‘Why would he attack an American woman tourist in a random attack? I think boys have put pressure on him to go there and do something. He was very impressionable growing up’. 

Friends have described their shock at the knife attacks, describing him as a ‘teacher’s pet’ and a ‘devout Muslim’ who would love debating religion.

Online postings show a man named Zak Bulhan is interested in Islamic study, and in another he pledges support to former Guantanamo Bay inmate Moazzam Begg. 

Rakesh Naidu, 18, said: ‘I can’t believe it, I’m just telling myself it must be a mistake. We used to get really competitive over grades in maths and debate religion all the time.

‘He was a devout Muslim and he would passionately defend it, but he respected my opinion too. He was a bit socially awkward but as far as I knew he didn’t have mental health problems.

The other side is that the attacker suffered from depression…

Today it has emerged that Bulhan, who was held miles from his south London home clutching a knife, appears to have been depressed and had tried to kill himself three times in the past six months, family friends have said.

One told The Times: ‘He has been very unwell. He wanted to kill himself. I saw his mother with an ambulance outside their flat and she said Zac had called it because he wanted to hurt himself. He’s called the ambulance about two more times because he was feeling unwell. His mother was very afraid’.

The police and the BBC have opted to only propagate the last narrative as the cause of this attack.  This may be so but what was the trigger that made him do this?  His sister was ‘westernised’ and suddenly became a very devout Muslim.  What influenced her?  Was it the same influence that lead to the attack by a man who was also very devout?

Such awkward questions seem to have been forcefully sidelined and buried in favour of a line about a man with mental health issues who acted violently because of them.

However people who deal in mental health issues will tell you that violence is very, very infrequently a result of mental illness….how do I know?  The BBC itself says so:

The Myth of Mental Illness and Violence

Violent crime statistics tell a different story, though. One survey suggested that only 1% of victims of violent crime believed that the incident occurred because the offender had a mental illness. In the UK, between 50 and 70 cases of homicide a year do involve people known to have a mental health problem at the time of the crime – but these perpetrators make up a tiny minority of the 7 million people in the UK estimated to have a significant mental illness at any given time.

So people with mental illness are very unlikely to commit murder.

The BBC also notes that just because someone has a mental health problem it may not be the actual cause of their crime:

Those who have examined the issue in detail point out that the figures don’t prove that mental health problems actually led the offenders in prison to commit their crimes.

And

The trigger for these attacks may have been frustration, not mental illness alone. The study showed that only a minority of patients behaved aggressively in the absence of aversive triggers.

And yet every Muslim who commits a terrorist attack or an attack that on the face of it looks very likely to be one is ‘excused’ by the BBC on the grounds of mental illness.  What is the BBC saying?  What is the connection between Islam and mental health?  The BBC seems to be suggesting that Muslims suffer very disproportionately from mental illness and that they are more likely to be violent if the stats are to be believed.

In the Sunday Times today the likes of the BBC’s claims about terrorism and mental health are rubbished as nonsense…by people who are steeped in the subject and don’t rely on a degree in English to help them interpret the world.

The Times reports on a specialist group in MI5 that helps to predict which terror suspect is likely to actually ‘go live’ and try to follow through on the talk and carry out a terrorist attack.  The group is expert in behavioural analysis and seeks to identify those moving on from rhetoric to violence.

What stuck out from the report was this:

‘The assumption that many extremists had mental health problems was wrong.  Instead terrorists recruiters ‘vet out’ those with such conditions.

“Only 2% of members of terrorist organisations suffer from mental health problems compared with an average of up to 30% of members of the public.”

The BBC ignores its own evidence about the ‘myth of mental health and violence’ and that of the experts in the subject.

A Brazilian illegal immigrant who came to this country and got a job at Byron Burgers using false documents and a forged National Insurance card complains on the Today programme (0840) that Byron Burgers used and abused him.  Not sure why the BBC felt the need to give him a platform to air his nonsense…it was he who abused Byron Burgers taking a job using deception putting them in  a very difficult position…facing a potentially ruinous £700,000 fine for employing illegal workers….unknowingly.

Perhaps the BBC should be talking to anti-terrorist police as left-wing extremists launch economic terror attacks intended to scare off customers from the burger chain….and the Black Lives Matter group is steadily going down that route also.  Protests or sabotage and economic terrorism?

The Today programme had an astonishingly dishonest report from Manchester this morning (0819) ostensibly looking at the effect of Brexit upon the city….the city that is wonderfully cosmopolitan and so European the BBC announces as it headed for a pavement cafe table full of foreigners to ask if they had noticed a difference in how they were now treated.  The report was entirely one-sided and aggressively anti-Brexit, painting a picture of a raicst Britain on the verge of econoic disaster because of Brexit.  Since 2010 the BBC has presented  Manchester as a failing city abandoned and neglected by the Tories, now it is a thriving, cosmopolitan success story…thanks to the EU and immigration naturally.

And naturally the foreigners were all now under attack from new born neo-Nazis given licence to be racist by Brexit….they just aren’t welcome here in Brtiain due to Brexit.  On the other hand apparently British people now feel ashamed of the vote and how it has treated our foreign legions.  So are the British racist bastards or are they all really Remainers and regretful Leavers who wish they’d voted to stay as the BBC would like you to believe?  Curious how a few comments and some actual attacks are taken as representative of all Brits…and of course blamed absolutely on Brexit.

A similar tone was taken by Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council as the BBC told us.  What they didn’t say was that he was a Remain campaigner and a Labour man. 

Manchester is to lead other major UK cities to campaign to stay in Europe , the M.E.N. can reveal.

City council leader Sir Richard Leese has agreed with chiefs in Leeds, Sheffield, Cardiff, Glasgow, Nottingham, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol and Newcastle that remaining in the union is in their best interests.

He told us of the terrible rise in racism since Brexit and the dire effects of Brexit upon the city….we must be more tolerant and welcome people from all over the world…hmmm….no one said we shouldn’t…so that’s just lie calling Leave voters racist.

Interesting that the BBC pointedly asked about ‘European’ funding being cut off by Brexit.  ‘European’ funding?  This is from a BBC that insists the Leave campaign lied throughout its campaign telling everyone that we sent £350 million a week to Brussels. In exactly the same way if the Leave campaign was lying then so is the BBC by claiming this is ‘European’ funding.  It is not…it is UK money sent to the EU and then sent back to us.  We could, as the Leave campaign pointed out, cut out the middle-man and his enormous EU cut, and keep the money in the UK and decide how best to spend it ourselves.

The BBC went on to wonder about the ‘Northern Powerhouse’, something which they had derided and mocked for so long.  Now apparently it is essential to the North…but is it to be abandoned due to Brexit?

Note though that government cuts to funding were on the cards long ago…

Leese talks about both these things with obvious enthusiasm, but there are caveats, not least when it comes to the cuts. At one point, he anxiously considers what might happen in Manchester thanks to Osborne’s looming spending review. Advance chatter, after all, has suggested cuts to local and city government budgets of between 25% and 40% – and even the lower number would cause the city no end of problems, leaving the council able to do little more than seeing to statutory social services.

And that success had little to do with the EU but a worldwide search for business partners…

…..relentlessly focused on developing necessary relationships, something seen latterly in the council’s close work with everyone from the Beijing Construction Engineering Group (who have a 20% stake in a huge new development around Manchester Airport), to Masdar, a set-up based in Abu Dhabi who have invested in work with graphene, the versatile industrial material pioneered at Manchester University.

The only mention of Europe’s contribution, not the EU, to Manchester’s success ifs how they tried to shape the inner city social culture in a Northern European style…

“From the late 80s, the council very consciously supported the notion of bringing people back to live within the city centre,” Leese says. “We very consciously supported creating pavement-bar culture. But it still needed people to come along and do it: it did need your Tony Wilsons and so on. But that was very much based on northern European cities. Stockholm is a good example. We looked at what was going on in other places and borrowed bits.”

Curious how the News is so fluid when the BBC comes to intepret it for us…one moment Manchester is a grim, failing Northern backwater, next it is the new Venice.  One moment we don’t send the EU ‘our’ money, the next the EU sends us ‘its’ money’ to kindly help us thrive and prosper.

And just to note this from Sir Richard Leese, Labour…a narrative that completely undermines Labour’s, and the BBC’s, narrative of the last 6 years about welfare and jobs…….

Leese became a city councillor in 1984, and eventually played his part in a convulsive debate between two tendencies within the Mancunian Labour party – the result of which, he says, set the city’s co-ordinates for the next 25 years. “There was the welfarist wing of the Labour party and the labourist wing,” he explains. “The welfarist view of how you tackled poverty was to just increase people’s benefit payments. The labourist wing said, ‘Well, hang on – what are the causes of poverty? The biggest cause is that people haven’t got jobs, or they haven’t got jobs that pay decent wages.’ The labourist side won the argument, when we were in the midst of very significant public sector cuts. Which meant that if we were going to create jobs and get people into them, it wasn’t us who were going to do that – it was going to be the private sector. And if we wanted to develop the city, the same thing applied.

“That debate probably took nearly four years. It went from 87, through to the introduction of the poll tax. But we came out of that period with the mantra of ‘jobs, jobs jobs’. And that’s been the driver of politics in the city ever since.”

And what does Leese think of Jeremy Corbyn’s policy for the North?

“It’s a load of rubbish,” Leese tells me. “First of all, there’s no coherent economic policy there. Second, it ignores completely the devolutionary route that Labour local authorities in the north have been driving. Nearly every solution in there has the word ‘national’ in front of it … And it ignores that northern cities, not just Manchester, are in a far healthier place than we were in the early 80s. We’ve all created new economic bases that we can grow from. You wouldn’t know it from that.”

Perhaps something the BBC could have asked him considering there is a Labour leadership contest ongoing.  But they didn’t.  Too wrapped up in peddling EU propaganda to report something useful.  Not that they ever seem too keen to report anything negative about Corbyn….and odd they don’t mention it as earlier (0725) in the programme they were asking…

What effect has the referendum and the leadership contest had in the labour heartlands?

I read this interesting statistic.

366 athletes will compete for Great Britain & Northern Ireland at the 2016 Olympics BBC are sending 455 staff.

How THEY spend YOUR cash.

The BBC’s coverage of the disruption of access to Heathrow Airport today by a bunch of narcissistic thugs from the ludicrous #BlackLivesMatter group has been cloying. Read this. Across in the States, this advocacy group has encouraged people to kill Police Officers. Maybe that gives the BBC some sort of perverse thrill from the idea that such thuggery based around race could take a grip in the UK? In a civilised world, ALL Lives matter, but when it comes to grievance mongering on behalf of a section of black activists here in the UK who are perpetually offended the BBC is in a league of its own.

Here’s a new Open Thread to see us into the weekend. Detail the astounding daily bias here!

From first thing yesterday, the UK media in general, and the BBC in particular, were out to sanitise the frenzied knifing rampage by a Somalian immigrant in central London. It appears the MET have unforeseen powers of psychiatric evaluation, and the BBC instantly grabbed and ran with the “mental illness” distraction. Then, it turns it the killer was “a Norwegian of Somali origin” … namely a Somalian who had gotten himself a Norwegian passport. Now we hear he was bullied at school. The next of kin must feel so comforted to see the craven BBC, and other media outlets, do everything possible to sanitise the killing spree in Russell Square.

Just to say that I have zero tolerance of trolls who come to this site for the specific purpose of disrupting it. I will block you and the site will be disinfected. Can I ask readers to email me if you see someone who is repeatedly engaging in such trolling tactics?

 

The media have an important role to play creating this future; they are not just disinterested bystanders. Whether they like it or not, journalists are not just reporting a financial crisis, they are performing it.

The BBC’s new favourite goto expert voice, IHS Markit, the people who bring us the PMI figures that the BBC insisted showed we were definitely heading for recession, has released some figures on the jobs market that say permanent job recruitment has fallen as employers turn to temporary or contract workers in uncertain times due to Brexit.

The BBC tells us:

Brexit hit recruitment in July, a new survey suggests

Which is an odd way of interpreting the data as IHS Markit tell us:

Data were collected between the 13^th and 24^th June, meaning the vast majority of responses were received prior to the result of the vote being known, so the survey illustrates the extent to which UK companies were pulling back on hiring ahead of the vote rather than after.

So not a reaction to the vote but to the Remain camp’s strident alarmism, strongly encouraged by BBC coverage, pre-vote.

And IHS Markit’s own graphs show a different tale to that being peddled…..to me they show that demand for permanent jobs has been on the decline since 2014…….with a couple of peaks on the way…but the trend is down…..Was Brexit on the radar in 2014 for employers?….

Did laugh to hear the Today programme suggesting that the Bank of England was talking the economy down with its interest rate cut.  The BBC has been doing that for months…and on the same programme that they criticised the BoE the BBC fed us a continuous stream of news trying to suggest that Brexit had destroyed the economy or was just about to.  [And what of the scare stories about the ‘plunging Pound’?  The interest cut meant that the Pound would again drop…if that was so bad why did the BoE implement a policy that they knew would make the Pound drop…whilst the .25% interest rate drop was in reality a political move and not an economically necessary one?]

Remember it was the BBC’s reporting that helped turn an economic problem into an ongoing disaster that nearly destroyed us all…

Peston has been blamed by many others for the Northern Rock bank run, most notably by members of the Treasury select committee.  Peston’s reactions to committee members suggest that he thinks he is being blamed personally for all of Northern Rock’s problems. Like the committee, I am not arguing this at all. The roots of Northern Rock’s woes quite clearly lie elsewhere. I am instead arguing that he had a role in causing sufficient panic among depositors for them to run on their bank.

Does the BBC’s continously negative reporting actually create a self-fulfilling prophecy and bring on a recession that might otherwise not have happened?  The tone and accuracy of reporting is important…..

Has Robert Peston caused a recession?

In recent weeks the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston  has come in for criticism about his role in breaking stories of banks in trouble.

Of course the title of this article is mostly a rhetorical flourish. It would be unfair and untrue to accuse Robert Peston of single-handedly causing a recession. However, it is very much the case that media stories on the current turmoil are not just reflecting events; they are also creating them.

Two ideas from social psychology and sociology can be helpful in understanding what is going on here: social amplification and performativity.

Social amplification of risk is the process though which public perceptions of risks can be produced and magnified as a consequence of the ways in which hazards come to public attention. A key issue in social amplification is the interest key parties have in the story. For example, media outlets have an interest in generating high circulation or viewing figures and ‘scare stories’ sell. This media focus on generating headlines can thus be a key factor in amplifying risk perceptions. 

If I drop a rock, it will fall to the ground (or perhaps on my toe) whether I believe in gravity or not. Gravity is independent of my belief in it. But many ‘facts’ I believe in are social facts and are true only so long as enough people believe in them; the value of money for example. What you believe does not just reflect our social world; it helps create it.

Performative statements or beliefs are those which help bring about the conditions they describe.

The beliefs we subscribe to about banks are performative. By trusting that banks are safe places to keep our money we help bring about the stability which makes this true. By trusting each other with funds, banks ensure the stable operation of financial systems which in turn helps make that trust justified. Equally though, when we withdraw trust we help bring about conditions in which trust would be ill advised.

What we all think and feel about our financial security will have important consequences over the next few months. If we mostly fear the future, stop spending, withdraw our savings from banks, this will be part of the process which makes our fears true. Likewise as businesses take a view on the future and take decisions about investment and disinvestment, new hiring and layoffs these decisions will have a part to play in bringing about the future market conditions which that view is based on.

The media have an important role to play creating this future; they are not just disinterested bystanders. Whether they like it or not, journalists are not just reporting a financial crisis, they are performing it.

Here is today’s BBC onslaught.

Donald Trump’s top aide denies reports of campaign turmoil

Meanwhile, and nowhere to be seen on the ‘world class BBC news”

Obama paid $400M ‘ransom’ to Iran

I see. BBC swooning over Obama and Clinton, no longer any pretence of impartiality  -just pure bias.