A new open thread to start you off…..

Did the BBC read the book?  Of course they did.

I had to try and check the claim  that it’s in the book [self-published on Amazon] but not having a copy best I can find is this comment from 2015 referring to Whittingdale on Amazon….

Not sure what this means…sure we’ll find out…

•  

  Natalie Rowe ‏@RealNatalieRowe 29m29 minutes ago

  Oh Dear ! I was advised to keep your name out of the sordid saga, but when someone lies on me , game OVER ! @tom_watson.

 

• Natalie Rowe ‏@RealNatalieRowe 31m31 minutes ago

  Are you taking the PISS @tom_watson. You’ve forgotten, our text messages & phone calls. My account very different http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/14/how-john-whittingdales-attempts-to-find-love-on-matchcom-led-to/ …

Strange how none of the Press, or indeed the Tories, has retaliated against the BBC and asked why it didn’t publish information about Whittingdale which it must have known.

They attack the BBC for the hatchet job on the person who is responsible for the Charter review but why not tackle them for the glaring ‘elephant that’s not in the room’….the BBC’s knowledge of the story and its, therefore, hypocritical attack on the Press?

This radio interview with Rowe is interesting…in relation to Whittingdale not knowing Olivia King was ‘Mistress kate’ Rowe tells us that her own boyfriend, William Sinclair, didn’t know for a long time what her job was….so entirely plausible Whittingdale did not know.

Whatever next…the BBC is right wing, Paul Mason is a Tory….decades long EU critic, Jeremy Corbyn, will be coming out as an ardent fan of the EU next.

Thanks to Stewgreen [and Craig at Is the BBC biased?  Is there any doubt?] for pointing this out to us…

How could you help people take collective action on climate change?

For this year’s #EditorsLab Final at the Global Editors Network conference in Barcelona, the teams were set the challenge of coming up with new ways to report on the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).

Our BBC team was made up of a journalist (me), designer Tom Nurse and developer Sam French. We were asked to build a prototype to engage audiences and innovate coverage on the issues.

We wanted to look at goal number 13, which is to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. The idea we settled on was to look at using the News website’s real-time analytics data to show readers the potential impact of collective action.

The UK government wants to reduce C02 emissions by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. Consumers will have to make some radical changes to their behaviour if we are to reach that goal.

Most people understand the climate problems and are concerned about them, but they feel helpless as individuals. We wanted to show in a dynamic way that together our audience could have an impact: “If you were one of 300,000 people on the website now and you all changed your behaviour, what would that mean? How much C02 could you save?”

Nothing unexpected there….a continuation of Roger Harrabin’s project to get the BBC to disseminate climate change propaganda throughout its programming to deliver subconscious messages that influence the audiences’ perceptions and reactions.

Always interesting to see it in black and white though..and it also led to the discovery of  BBC Newslabs….

Founded in 2012, BBC News Labs is an innovation incubator charged with driving innovation for BBC News. We are part of Connected Studio – the pan-BBC Innovation Programme.

Now no surprise that the BBC wants to improve its journalism, its honesty, accuracy and reach, or as they put it to ‘to support & accelerate the News Industry’….the question is, is that what BBC News Labs is all about or is it being used to develope ways of presenting news to the public in order to deliver a very particular message?

Judging by this project, The 19 Million Project, the aim is to mislead the audience, engage and exploit their emotions and harness that by skewing the debate on immigration so that it favours mass immigration, and opening the borders to uncountable numbers of refugees…..that’s not news, that’s campaigning…

Status: active

Break from traditional conventions of journalism and communications to develop radical new ways to share the narrative of the refugee crisis.

3 Team members from BBC News Labs are participating in the first part of The 19 Million Project – an 11-day combination of a Hack Event and an Education Summit.

This event brings together journalists, developers, designers, academics, government and business leaders and human rights organisations from the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa to explore how Europe’s pressing refugee crisis came to be, and what can be done to best address it.

From the 19 Million Project team:

We are a coalition of journalists, coders, designers, digital strategists, and global citizens. We are coming together to address the spiraling crisis of the estimated 19 million people a year who are forced to flee their countries and risk their lives as they attempt to escape persecution, conflict and war.

We are committed to finding innovative ways to advance the narrative around this human rights crisis–and explore how the latest technology and digital storytelling methods can improve the reporting and drive global action to address this tragedy.

So the project wants to drive global action, and from the language you can work out exactly what they want the ‘globe’ to do….read their micro biogs here.

Editor of The 19 Million Project. I want to bring my experience in journalism to highlight the problems with migration and pledge for policy change around the world.

No more Aylan.

 

Jukes ex machina (Latin: [ˈdeʊks ɛks ˈmaː.kʰɪ.naː]: /ˈdeɪ.kəs ɛks ˈmɑːkiːnə/ or /ˈdiːkəs ɛks ˈmækᵻnə/;^[1] plural: deik ex machina) is a Latin calque from Greek ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός (apò mēkhanês theós), meaning “god from the machine”.  The term has evolved to mean a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the inspired and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object. Depending on how it is done, it can be intended to allow a story to continue when the writer has “painted himself into a corner” and sees no other way out, to surprise the audience, to bring the tale to a happy ending, or as a comedic device.

Did the BBC find a way to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem with an inspired and unexpected intervention to bring a happy ending to their misery?

Curious…the Whittingdale story, headline news yesterday, has vanished completely from the BBC website’s frontpage, UK page and politics page.   Have they retreated after having overplayed their hand leaving people to think that maybe the Newsnight hit was politically motivated?

Timing is everything.

It is just a coincidence that this story broke ‘officially’ on Byline a few weeks [giving it a decent period of separation] after this ‘Report urges end to 94 years of BBC self-regulation.’….. Byline says it knew of the story for 6 months….why release it just at this time?

Many have known about the scandal for years: we’ve known about this scandal for six months.

Peter Peston in the Guardian thinks that report is the death knell of an independent BBC and the executioner is John Whittingdale…so if we’re looking for a sudden BBC motivation…..

One regulator fits all.  And who – as a conflicted trust more or less gives up the ghost – could possibly object to that?

Well, anyone who cares about independent journalism, for a start. Clementi is a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, a City man through and through. He even argues his Ofcom solution in terms of the Bank’s monetary committee. He’s very ready to trust HMG with the heavy lifting of BBC governance. Who appointed him? Why, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. If they’d appointed, say, Lord Puttnam, the report would have been different. But Secretary of State Whittingdale chose his chap.

He’ll be choosing a great many more once the Clementi formula is in operation. He’ll choose the new non-executive chairman of the BBC plus the deputy chair, the most important among other non-execs. He’ll choose four non-execs for the nations and regions. That’s six huge thumbprints for starters. And there’ll be maybe five more thrown up along the way, for Clementi reserves only three – out of 14 – top-board places for BBC men and women who actually work for the corporation, make or commission programmes, edit or control anything you see on screen.

As for Ofcom – incorporating the BBC in its overall media planning, issuing performance frameworks, balancing BBC interests against ITV and the rest – who chooses the chairman, the chief exec and the head of the new corporation-watching committee? Take another bow, John Whittingdale (with David Cameron grinning gently as selector of last resort).

Peter Jukes is a columnist and adviser to Byline and is also practically a BBC employee so often is he gracing them with his business. Jukes is taking a great deal of interest in the story and in defending the BBC.

Some at the BBC love him…

Praise for Peter Jukes’ coverage:

Jeremy Vine, BBC Journalist, said:

“If Peter Jukes is the future of journalism, our trade is safe.”

Owen Jones, Guardian columnist and author of Chavs, said:

“Peter Jukes is a genuine media pioneer, the citizen journalist personified, exposing one of the greatest Establishment scandals of our time like no other journalist.”

Any thought that the BBC might have encouraged Jukes to persuade Byline to publish the Whittingdale story first giving the BBC the excuse to then splash the story without, they hope, looking like it was a deliberate BBC attempt to smear and undermine Whittingdale and hopefully get him removed from his job?  Of course not.  Just odd that that BBC is very reluctant to tell the real story and is still insistent that only the newspapers knew of this….no mention of Natalie Rowe, no mention that the BBC itself must have known….Did Rowe contact the BBC or the Guardian in light of their intense interest in Leveson and then the BBC charter?  Impossible to imagine she didn’t…and impossible to imagine the BBC weren’t aware of her Tweets in light of what else was going on at the time.  Remember the BBC also wanted to make a film with her…hard to believe they dropped all interest in her and Osborne.  The story was resurfacing at the end of 2015 in blogs in relation to the Independent so perhaps the BBC realised this was going to come out eventually and that they’d lose their bargaining chip and so decided to give the story a little push via Byline and try and squeeze some benefit out of this saga.

Also hard to believe Cameron didn’t know, especially as the police seem to have been used as a political weapon to harass Rowe….and she tells us she contacted Cameron as well…

Why did the BBC and Guardian not publish the story?  Was it a deeply held conscientious objection to invading a Tory politician’s private life or was it something else such as keeping an ace up their sleeves for Press regulation and the Charter negotiations?

Guido has told us that Rowe contacted Labour’s Tom Watson in 2014 urging him to name and shame Whittingdale…..

tom_watson Why are you not using your Parliamentary Privilege in relation to John Whittingdale, we spoke in detail on the phone – USE IT

— Natalie Rowe (@RealNatalieRowe) July 11, 2014

But  he didn’t.  No-one did for over two years.

In fact Tom Watson actively worked to suppress the story according to ITV news…..

The Sunday People was the first newspaper to be offered the story at the end of 2013.

It approached Tom Watson – the Labour MP, now deputy leader of the Labour party, then a colleague of Mr Whittingdale on the Culture committee – for his advice on whether it should publish.

He told them he did not see there was a public-interest reason to run the story on Mr Whittingdale’s affair, since he was a single man, this was his private life, and the People had no evidence that Mr Whittingdale had paid for sex.

This was just after Leveson so it was undoubtedly not the time to publish such stories about private lives….but Whittingdale was chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee at the time…so a case could have been made that it was in the public interest.

The BBC keeps hinting that there was a Press conspiracy to suppress this story, a right-leaning conspiracy [The ‘Press’ is always BBC code for the right-wing….note how they ignored the Mirror’s phone-hacking for so long], but that doesn’t make sense when the Guardian, the Mirror and the Independent didn’t publish.   Note that the BBC doesn’t mention the BBC.  Why not?  They cannot seriously suggest that they did not know about this story.  So did they suppress it to have leverage over Whittingdale, did they suppress it out of respect for his private life or did they suppress it because it would look too obviously like a hatchet job if they alone published?

Maybe a combination of all three…but as things start to look like the BBC is going to have to have some major changes, such as the end of the BBC Trust, the BBC may have decided to play that card it has long kept up its sleeve….by getting Byline to break the story first allowing the BBC then to ride in and give the coup de grace….they hoped.

But it’s gone, at least for now from the website main pages.

The BBC did tell us before it lost interest in the story that….

With this information about John Whittingdale now out in the public domain, Labour is suggesting that he cannot possibly be in charge of press regulation and should step aside from this part of his job – because he is vulnerable to pressure from the press.

Er…now it’s in the public domain there can be no pressure…that’s how blackmail works….the threat of exposure.

The Mirror gets all disingenuous.…..they tell us that they didn’t publish because it was not in the public interest but now claim it is a scandal because he was chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee…and so is in the public interest…so they could have published back in 2013…..

In late 2013, the Daily Mirror’s sister title The Sunday People was offered the story for a substantial five-figure sum.

At the time he was a backbench MP. After considering issues of privacy, public interest and cost, the paper decided to turn down the story.

And…….

But he failed to declare it on the House of Commons register of interests – despite then having an influential ­position as chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee.

Tommy Robinson has had the threat of prosecution lifted as a judge throws his case out of court…

Tommy Robinson has had a charge of battery dismissed in court. He said the judge questioned the police’s motives for pursuing the case against him when they did.

“My case has been dismissed. Even the judge made comments about the police’s motive of prosecution. Thank you all”, he announced….“The QC absolutely tore it to pieces… Yeah, he made a mockery of it. He made a mockery of just another stitch up”.

This was always a politically motivated police action, no doubt directed by the Home Office which has mounted a campaign to ‘deal with’ Tommy Robinson and the EDL in order to silence them, was this their ‘effective public order policing response’…a ‘successful approach to dealing with the problem’ [of the EDL and its ilk]?….The same Home Office that  paid the unpleasant people of ‘Hope Not Hate’ money to produce anti-EDL propaganda….as this FOI request shows….

Dear Mr Green

Thank you for your email of 31 January requesting clarification of the response I sent you on 7 August 2012 – reference F0007043 on whether ‘Hope Not Hate’ had received any funding from DCLG.
On 20 June 2012 we signed a funding agreement with Searchlight Educational Trust for £66k. Searchlight Education Trust established community partnerships in four areas prone to EDL activity. Partnerships set up newsletters which contained: positive stories from the area that promote shared local identities; advertise events that bring the community together; and provide space for faith, community and voluntary organisations to advertise and encourage participation” and you can find more information about it on our website at https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/b…. Payments were made to Searchlight Educational Trust as follows:

Date Amount paid
6 September 2012 £16,750
22 November 2012 £46,623.38
26 March 2013 £2,626.62
TOTAL £66,000

Apparently it received over £150,000 in total between 2010 and 2012….how much more since then?

There can be little doubt the BBC has been recruited to help out as well, a very willing recruit no doubt.

Douglas Murray in the Spectator spelt out the State inflicted troubles that Tommy Robinson suffers…and the BBC doesn’t care one jot…if however he was a Muslim that would be a different story..one that would be on every BBC ‘front page’ demanding justice.

The BBC hasn’t bothered to report on the persecution of Tommy Robinson and the failed police action….if only he were Black or Muslim the BBC would be all over this injustice.

Speaking of which, the BBC’s desire to campaign for all things ethnic however dangerous and misguided their actions maybe….the BBC joined in enthusiastically with the anti-white, anti-police witch-hunt in the US, apparently #Blacklivesmatter…or #mattered…was it all merely infantile BBC Marxist posturing against the hated white man with no real interest in the Black man’s issues or lives?  Seems so…where is the BBC’s interest in the Blacks who are being killed in ever increasing numbers, mostly by other Blacks, now that the police have withdrawn from policing the streets due to pressure from the likes of the BBC?

Since the McDonald incident, police conduct has been affected. In the first three months of 2015, Chicago’s police officers stopped and searched 157,346 people for suspicious behaviour. This year, that number dropped to 20,908 – down 86%. This is put down to a drop in morale and a reluctance to stop and search for fear of becoming the next YouTube video that goes viral.

The terrible toll of gun deaths in America has tormented the presidency of Barack Obama unable to even moderately curtail the absolute right of gun ownership so entrenched in America’s political DNA. Now the media’s scrutiny of the issue has turned to the city where Obama first forged his political reputation, Chicago where gun crime, poverty, racial tension and policing have fused into a nightmarish vision for parts of America’s second city.

Police statistics clearly show this. Between January and the end of March 2016, there were 677 shootings, a staggering 88.5% increase from the 359 over the same period in 2015. Levels of violent crime are also up and the first quarter of this year saw 141 murders across the city – more than Los Angeles and New York put together – and a 72% rise compared with 2015.

Always thought ‘Citizen Khan’ was a documentary with the usual BBC policy of removing all the really awkwardly inconvenient truths about Islam.  Obviously not…..

A BBC sitcom has been criticised as “Islamophobic” during a Commons debate about whether the BBC’s programmes and staff reflect UK diversity.

Labour’s Rupa Huq criticised Citizen Khan’s depiction of a “quite backward” family of Muslims.

The show was accused of stereotyping Muslims when it started in 2012 and its creator, Adil Ray, has told the Radio Times he had received death threats.

Citizen Khan prompted complaints when it launched in 2012 and Mr Ray has previously said he had received abuse from people who believed it was making fun of Islam or stereotyping Muslims.

Muslims stereotype themselves….Citizen Khan ‘quite backward’ or quite a truthful picture?

Oh yes and another grandstanding complainer…

Mr Umunna attacked the “representation of our Muslim communities” on TV.

He said “rising Islamophobia” could partly be blamed on broadcasters’ use of “community leaders who purport to speak for that community but have no mandate whatsoever to do so”.

Well Umunna no doubt is entirely ethical and sincere in his statements…or you might think it is a cynical grab for the Muslim vote…

Labour Hasn’t A ‘Hope In Hell’ Of Winning Election Without Ethnic Minority Voters, Warns Chuka Umunna.

As for the BBC being the cause of rising Islamophobia that might just in fact be due to Muslims’ own behaviour and what the Koran says….and as for unrepresentative ‘community leaders’…does he mean like the extremist, sorry ‘conservative’, MCB which represents over 500 Muslim organisations and which is widely accepted as the main Muslim voice?  The MCB whose fingerprints were all over the Trojan Horse plot? As I said, Muslims ‘stereotype’ themselves.

The BBC picks Muslim speakers who do represent the mainstream Muslim view and that is the problem…the BBC also endorses the views of these people in relation to foreign policy, Israel and the alleged ‘war on Islam’ being conducted by the West and unfounded claims of Islamophobic ‘racism’….the BBC is a source of radicalisation itself…it feeds the Jihadi pipeline recruits by reinforcing their prejudices.

Look at the latest from one of the BBC’s favourites.…..MPACUK’s Raza Nadim….google him to see how often the BBC brings him on….

‘Uncle Tom’ and ‘House Muslim’ are not racist labels – they are political ones. Only an Uncle Tom would say otherwise.

Consider also that MPACUK urged its readers to become Mujahadeen and to fight Jihad you wonder how these guys stay out of prison…are they ‘house Muslims’ flying a false flag as extremist nutjobs?  Maybe they really work for Mossad.

Nadim’s whole case was based upon Muslims or Blacks doing what white people do…so the terms are racist and hugely offensive and intended to be so.  Still the BBC likes him.

The BBC also comes in for some stick from the ever vigilant Labour MP David Lammy who complains…..no, not this old one…David Lammy mocked for fuming at ‘racist’ BBC after report on Sistine Chapel’s black and white smoke…but for this…

The BBC must address its lack of diversity – or risk losing viewers

The BBC already commits itself to ‘reflect modern Britain accurately and authentically’, and one of its public purposes, set out in the Royal Charter, is to ‘represent the UK, its nations, regions and communities’. When it comes to making good on these intentions, the evidence suggests that the BBC is falling short of the mark.

Not one of the BBC’s eight executive directors is from a Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) background (and just two are women).  Meanwhile its 21 strong executive team includes only two people of colour. Just 13.2 per cent of BBC staff are non-white, a net increase of just 0.9 per cent compared to 2011, despite a raft of strategies and initiatives aimed at boosting diversity.

Ethnic minorities are well within their rights to ask why they should continue to pay their license fee at all. BAME viewers, which will account for a third of the total audience by 2050, are beginning to turn their back on the BBC.

Only 6.7 per cent of the corporation’s senior management are from BAME backgrounds. If those decision makers are overwhelmingly white, middle-class men from metropolitan London or the home counties, who hire people in their own image, then content and programming will lack the fresh perspectives and authenticity that will speak to minority communities.

The BBC must take bigger strides to represent the diverse tapestry of communities and identities that make up our nation. 

What’s the problem?  14% or so of the UK population is non-white and 13.2% of BBC employees are non-white.

Also if we go down that route, and why is it just non-whites that Lammy is concerned with?, is he racist?, what about Irish, or Scots, or Welsh, or Americans or French, Ozzies, redheads, people with one arm, people who like dogs or people who like farming programmes etc etc and then there’s the political identities…where oh where is the representation of the right leaning majority?….Andrew Neil just isn’t enough though he does his best.  Absolutely no voice or presence on the BBC for them…why should they pay the licence fee for a media organisation that pumps out programmes that present a world view that is totally at odds with so may people in this country?

The BBC always proudly proclaims its independence…but it’s not….a bit of whinging from Lenny Henry and the BBC fills its programming with BAME faces, a bit of sabre rattling from Muslims and the BBC fills its programming relentlessly with pro-Muslim propaganda, a word from Nick Robinson and we get little to no reporting on Jeremy Corbyn of any merit.

Citizen Khan may not be funny but that’s OK because the BBC’s very much the joke these days.

Andrew Neil….where does he find the time?….From the Journalists’ register of interests in Parliament:

Chairman, Press Holdings Media Group (The Spectator, Spectator Health, Life, Money & Australia; and Apollo, the international arts magazine). Chairman, ITP Magazine Group (Dubai). Chairman, The Addison Club (London). Fees for speaking at, hosting or chairing an event were received from the following organisations: Fishburn LLP (law firm), NQC (online procurement solutions), Cushman & Wakefield (property company), Green Mountain (Norwegian company that stores internet servers), BT (telecoms company), Macquarie (infrastructure bank), Aberdeen Asset Management (a fund manager), IBC (organiser of conferences on broadcasting), Bibby (financial services company), Securities Industry Association (financial trade group), Lazard (investment bank), Institute of Loss Adjusters (trade association for the insurance industry), Emap (publisher of business to business magazines, including for construction industry), Association of MBA Providers (provides MBA courses), International Hotel Group (global hotel franchise). RBS (bank), LSL (property finance company), Hogan Lovells (law firm), Barclays (bank), RBS (bank), Edwardian Hotel group (hotel group), Henderson (fund and asset manager), Tilestone (property finance company), SES (satellite company), City & Guilds (trade group), Housing Federation (trade group for housing associations), Frank Knight (estate agents), BT (telecoms company), SES (satellite company), RBS (bank), EY (global consultancy and financial services company), City Properties (umbrella group for various property interests), Chambers (publisher of legal publications), Brewin Dolphin (wealth management company), Food & Drink Association (trade association). (Registered April 2015). Forum for Human Resources and IT Directors (trade association for IT/HR executives); Lloyd’s Bank (banking); Royal Institute for Chartered Surveyors (trade association for chartered surveyors); European ATM Providers (trade group for cash machine providers in Europe); Raymond Jones Investment Services (wealth management company); Norwood (Jewish charity); Avis (car rental company); Brewin Dolphin (wealth and pension management company); YMCA (organisation of young Christians); IBC Amsterdam (IBC is major trade fair for broadcasting industry); Asset TV (digital media company); HSBC (banking); Securities & Finance Industry Forum (gathering of City professionals); Mitie (energy savings services and solutions company); OEE Consulting (business improvement and transformation firm); Construction News (trade magazine on construction); RBS (banking); KPMG (audit, tax and advisory services); Aberdeen Asset Management (asset management company); RSMR (investment research company); Environmental Services Group (provides services for waste and energy management industry). (Registered January 2016).

Here you go, a new Open Thread for you to detail the bias. The floor is yours…