Category Archives: BBC bias

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Stop the presses!’   The BBC would love to do that wouldn’t they?  Perhaps they should hold their own Frontpage instead of stuffing it full of self-promotional guff from TV-land luvvies.

Anyway…frontpage news on the BBC…is the BBC…..

Armando Iannucci: Britain needs strong TV industry

Comedy writer Armando Iannucci has called for an industry-wide defence of the BBC and British programme-makers.

However it does seem that Iannucci considers himself one of the BBC’s people…

Iannucci suggested one way of easing the strain on the licence fee was “by pushing ourselves more commercially abroad”.

“Be more aggressive in selling our shows, through advertising, through proper international subscription channels, freeing up BBC Worldwide to be fully commercial, whatever it takes.

Iannucci also spins an old falsehood that the charter review process will not have any ‘creatives’ in it…

In July, the government issued a green paper setting out issues that will be explored during negotiations over the future of the BBC, including the broadcaster’s size, its funding and governance.

UK Culture Secretary John Whittingdale appointed a panel of eight people to advise on the charter renewal, including former Channel 5 boss Dawn Airey and journalism professor Stewart Purvis, a former editor-in-chief of ITN.

Iannucci bemoaned the lack of “creatives” involved in the discussions.

That’s simply not true…the panel itself includes many ffom the TV industry and the BBC and the BBC Trust will have major roles to play in the review.  Not only that but many experts and interested parties will be called upon to give evidence and their opinion on the review.  So hardly the bean counters in charge, not the hit squad of ‘gravediggers’ for the BBC that we are led to believe.…

Firstly is the Panel the sole source of information and reference for the government?  No.  The BBC itself, through Hall and his executives and via the BBC Trust, will be having a huge say in what goes on and the Trust will be gathering information and data to support whatever case it decides to proffer….

One of the creations of the last Charter was the BBC Trust – set up to represent the licence fee payer. The Trust will, in thisrole, also be consulting on proposals for the future of the BBC. We will take full account of the Trust’s work and work with them on a range of public and industry events to explore in detail the important issues in the coming months.

The Public and whoever else is interested and concerned are also invited to contribute their views and opinions…

Reviewing the BBC’s Royal Charter is not just a case of publishing a consultation. We want to engage with the public and with industry to make sure that all views are given proper consideration. This is why we are engaging with people across the UK in a number of ways to make it easy for everyone to respond.

Not only that but other experts will be engaged to provide comment and relevant expertise…

There are also some areas where studies, reviews and research are needed – to add technical expertise or independence from Government. We will be commissioning these in the coming months.

Not only that but as well as the eight people on the review Panel other people or groups will be asked to join the panel as when the situation requires it.

Hardly the cosy little stitch up by a government in hock to the Murdoch empire as excitedly claimed by Fowler, Patten and Lee & Co as they paint a doomsday scenario for the BBC.

Sky has a slightly different take on what Iannucci said about ‘creatives’…no link to the BBC and charter review…

“If Britain is at the top of its game in TV creativity, I think it is because we have the best audience in the world.

“It takes the difficult, and the idiosyncratic, and makes it popular. That’s why we in television should feel lucky to be born in this country.”

He added that the future success of British television will depend on broadcasters’ willingness to trust the “creatives” who know how to make good programs.

The BBC’s Director General is also involved, as usual, in scaremongering, stating…

…that further cuts to the corporation’s funding and remit could result in more than 30,000 job losses across the TV industry.

“New research shows that, because of the boost the BBC provides, if you cut the licence fee by 25% you’d lose about 32,000 jobs across the whole economy,” said Hall. “These aren’t just jobs at the BBC, but across the TV industry – at independent producers, suppliers and studios up and down the country.”

“A strong BBC also contributes to a strong UK economy. A strong BBC will help deliver a strong Britain”.

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This [H/T  Craig at Is the BBC biased?…no, apparently not] is also highly relevant…and somewhat not unexpected from the cowardly Tories:

The BBC’s ‘nemesis’ John Whittingdale has been speaking at the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival.

Here are some of the things he said, as quoted by the Independent and the Guardian:

This idea that there is an ideological drive to destroy the BBC is just extraordinary, the people rushing to defend the BBC are tilting at windmills, they are trying to have an argument that has never been started, certainly not by me. 

Britain’s image abroad is enormously strengthened by the success of the BBC. 

Do I think there is general bias towards the left? No. 

For the moment, the licence fee or something like it is the best option.

It always amazes me the sort of thing that so concerns the comrades at the BBC. This…as way of example. Is this the sort of drivel that requires £3.5bn per year to churn out?

Is it OK to dress up as Cecil the Lion’s killer or Caitlyn Jenner?

The BBC gives every appearance of outrage because the Ulster Unionist Party is walking OUT of the Stormont Executive now that is has been confirmed the IRA remains intact and still murdering. The BBC, ageing the Government and PSNI line, suggests that murder is not the same as terrorism so technically all is well. In this way, the UUP are being portrayed as the villains of the peace because they refuse to stomach Sinn Fein duplicity over something as basic as MURDER.

Biased BBC reader Robin writes…

What’s the Point of Britain’s existence?

Tell a BBC type and liberal/left person that the Foreign Office should be reduced by 95% and Britain should give up its Security Council seat at the UN ( India as a replacement ?) and see them be speechless for a minute .

It does work I can vouch for that .

For what you are doing is advocating diminishing their Rightful Place in the world , which is the one time you see them being – hold your seats – nationalist . A word they hate unless Scottish or Irish precedes it . To be fair they are not nationalistic in those two more honest sense of the word . The liberal / left have to sophisticate any patriotism they have in the greater scheme of internationalism while maintaining their Rightful Place .
Their Rightful Place is to have power in world events and to do this they need the British state to have ” influence ” .
The BBC have never asked why Britain should have influence . Why Britain and not say Indonesia, Brazil or Algeria ? There has to be a reason – so what is the reason ? Is Britain superior to others or conversely are the others inferior to Britain ? The BBC never say or ever ask , would the answer be embarrassing to the liberal/left ?
As the liberal/left don’t like Britain as it was or as it is now why do they want it to excist ? I can only conclude they want the British state and some of its institutions to ;
Levy taxes
Initiate equality programmes
Equalise wealth
Social engineer
Be a base for organisations that work to do the above
To do the above in the wider world via British ‘influence’ .

Let’s take another paradox of the liberal/left . They believe inequality of wealth within the world is wrong , but then tell us that mass immigration into Britain increases our wealth !  Note they don’t condemn our increased wealth , they tell us it’s a Good Thing . Again something missed by the BBC .

I don’t know what the BBC want instead of Britain and the people here , and I doubt if they would be honest enough to tell us .

The normal process for a news story as it develops is that we get more information about events, the causes of them and the people involved in them.

The BBC seems to have reversed that process and looks to be removing relevant information from the news.

In the US a ‘disgruntled’, to say the least, ex-employee of a TV news station kills two other employees and claims that one of them racially abused him.

The BBC in this ‘what we know about the suspect’ report tells us that ‘Mr Flanagan also accused the murdered reporters of making racist comments and complained to human resources about it.’   Though in fact that is wrong, Flanagan [known professionally as Bryce Williams] only complained that one of the employees had racially abused him, the other had actually filed a complaint against Flanagan.

Curiously even that small mention by the BBC of the apparent, and kind of important, motivating factor [though it seems Flanagan had a habit of making such allegations and had anger management problems] disappeared in this later report about the shooting... now all we get is that there was ‘discrimination’ and no mention that Flanagan is black or that race might have been a factor…

The Twitter account of Flanagan, known professionally as Bryce Williams, suggested he held a grudge against Mr Ward, 27, whom he accused of lodging a formal complaint against him, and Ms Parker, 24.

And local media reported that he had filed a lawsuit against WDBJ7, alleging discrimination by the whole station and naming most of the staff in his complaint. The case is said to have been dismissed by a judge in July 2014.

Flanagan’s motivation is reduced to a ‘grudge’ against Ms Parker (the reporter he accused of racism) and that he alleged ‘discrimination’ against the whole station…….That’s a very round-about way of reporting this when there are already well established facts about the case.

Flanagan seems to have been sacked a couple of times for anger issues and had to be escorted by police from the WDBJ building when sacked in 2013…the network that the two dead reporters worked for. The BBC merely tells us that….

He left in 2013 according to his own LinkedIn account, which also listed several positions in customer service and a undergraduate degree in broadcast media from San Francisco State University.

Way back in 2000 he was fired for similar behaviour [‘ND’…News Director]:

• Heather Myers ‏@HeatherMyersSD6 3 hrs3 hours ago

  Our ND hired and fired suspected shooter @Bryce_williams7 in 2000 in Tenn. Fired for bizarre behavior and threatening employees. @SanDiego6

From San Diego 6 news:

Flanagan worked as a reporter in several different markets including Tallahassee, FL where he worked as a reporter for current San Diego 6 News Director Don Shafer.   “He was a good on-air performer, a pretty good reporter. And then things started getting a little strange,” Shafer said.   Shafer hired Flanagan at WTWC in 1999.  In 2000, Flanagan was fired by Shafer for what Shafer called “odd behavior.”Flanagan later sued the Tallahassee station, but the case was thrown out. 

Sky reports more details:

The man suspected of gunning down WDBJ news reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward during a live broadcast had a history of workplace wrangles.

Vester Lee Flanagan, who used the screenname Bryce Williams, was fired from WDBJ in 2013.

The CBS affiliate’s general manager, Jeffrey A Marks, said Flanagan was “an unhappy man… who quickly gathered a reputation as someone who was difficult to work with”.

Mr Marks added: “Eventually after many incidents of his anger coming to the fore, we dismissed him. And he did not take that well, we had to call the police to escort him from the building.”

 

Is the BBC a bit conflicted in this?  A black man, alleging racial discrimination, but who was likely fired for his own strange behaviour, who then shoots two white people, only one of them for ‘racism’, or discrimination as the BBC now seems to prefer.  Just what will the BBC narrative be?    Somehow the black killer has got to be made into the victim…it will be interesting to watch the BBC’s tortuous attempts to ‘blackwash’ this story….which already seems to be happening as noted above.

Here you go, a new thread to detail the relentless bias. What’s been bothering YOU about BBC news coverage today?

The BBC tells us:

Europe ‘must open up to migrants’

How can it be so sure that this is the way ahead?

European leaders should do more to open up and help migrants instead of using language that dismisses their rights, a UN expert on migrant rights has said.

Ah, one of those UN ‘experts’.  Who might that be then?

Talking about “marauders” and “swarms” was an unsubtle way of dismissing their legitimacy, said Francois Crepeau.

European countries should open official channels and their labour markets to migrants because building fences would not stop them coming, he said.

Ah, Le Crackpot once again on the BBC given a free ride to say what he likes a completely unopposed by anyone with a modicum of common sense….as noted before.  And still attacking, still at war with Phillip Hammond and Cameron.

Le Crackpot is a man with absolutely no desire to stem immigration and has not a clue as to what the end result will be……eventually things will be taken out of ‘government’ hands and ‘the people’ will start dealing with the issue.

Le Crackpot lives in fantasy land, here suggesting you could keep the borders open and yet control who comes in…

The UN expert urged Europe to regain control of its borders from the smugglers by offering official channels to enter Europe.

“Opening up the regular labour markets through smart visas allowing people to come to look for work and incentivise them to return if they don’t find the job in question would allow for a much better regulated and controlled official labour market,” he said.

He’s not actually saying control the borders, all he is saying is make the borders even easier to slip across and that will pull the rug from under the smugglers…..well hardly, more people will then flood in and the smugglers will still have a good business bringing in people who don’t qualify for a ‘smart visa’, whatever the hell that is.

Le Crackpot claims that fences will not stop immigrants, well actually borders will stop them, reinstating national borders and checking who is trying to cross them will stop the tidal wave of migrants sweeping across Europe in search of Eldorado and the good life paid for by European tax payers, expecting, and demanding, free houses, health services, schools and jobs.  And when they don’t get the non-existent jobs in 5 or ten years time they will start to riot and the BBC and Guardianistas will tell us that this is because the immigrants have been marginalised, neglected and disenfranchised…when the real truth is that they forced their way in and there were not enough resources or jobs for them.  The fault lies with the immigrants themselves in the first instance and then with those BBC types and Guardianistas who insist we fling open the borders…..a collaboration between some immigrants and those on the anti-Western Left which leads to the rise of Anti-Semitism for instance, as the Spectator notes:

The prejudice currently popular in Britain is a sort of Arabised version of the European original. Revived hostility is clearly spurred by large-scale migration from Islamic countries, and the influence of Islamists on the European hard left, with whom they have a lot of contact.

The welfare state, the ‘State’ itself, is in danger of collapse.  What then?

Here’s a classic example of the left in action…..the loony left I think might well be a fitting description….

The Radio Times, the BBC’s independent but apparently still loyal, Pravda-like publication has trumpeted this finding today:

Two-thirds of viewers opposed to the licence fee changed their minds after just nine days without BBC services

“Being without the BBC was absolutely dreadful, just awful,” said one man involved in the ‘deprivation study’. “I just didn’t realised how much we watched it…”

First comment of  course is that no one is proposing abolishing the BBC and therefore the BBC’s association of licence fee changes and such an abolishment is clearly just outright scaremongering intended to whip up a storm in response however ridiculous and unthinking its roots.

Curiously the very same story came out a month ago  in the Radio Times:

BBC puts families through two weeks without Sherlock, Doctor Who… and everything else in “deprivation test”

Why, why you might ask is the Radio Times recycling an old story on behalf of the BBC?

The Daily Mail might have the answer as today it published this very disconcerting news for the BBC:

We would endure adverts to end BBC licence fee: Just over half of viewers back abolishing charge and forcing corporation to fund itself

Now I’m not claiming that the BBC, and its friends, are engaged in a Machiavelllian plot to counter that bad news with their own pro-BBC propaganda by grabbing the headlines with this recycyled piece of BBC funded self-promotion…but they are aren’t they?

The problem with the BBC’s ‘Deprivation Study’ is that firstly the BBC’s premise is based upon a lie that the BBC is to be abolished, and second, that no alternative was provided…even if the BBC were abolished in its present form there would be something else in its place…so to metaphorically  ‘broadcast’ a blank screen or the sound of silence on the radio is just slightly dishonest.

Very creative these creative types.

Here is the Comres poll as reported by the Mail:

Whitehouse Consultancy BBC Survey

Poll of 2,032 British adults about how to fund to BBC, on behalf of The Whitehouse Consultancy.

Base: GB adults (n=2,035). Changes may not sum to zero due to rounding.

Amused to hear the Today programme bring us a story about the government’s Ministry of Nudge…

0835

Behavioural scientist Dr David Halpern heads up Number 10’s ‘Nudge Unit’, the world’s first government institution that uses behavioural economics to examine and influence human behaviour, to ‘nudge’ us into making better decisions. We speak to him this morning.

Only to be followed by the BBC’s own masterclass in nudging us on immigration with yet another tale of desperation, danger, bravado and a lesson in humanity…..

0840

Europe is facing what the EU has called the worst refugee crisis since a World War Two. Greece alone has seen almost 160,000 people landing on its shores since January, the majority of them Syrians. We hear the story of one young man, who fled the war-torn city of Aleppo in pursuit of a new life in the UK.

Trouble is the story was entirely without any point other than that ‘nudge’, clearly designed to connect us emotionally to an immigrant, an ‘enemy’ only being someone whose story you haven’t heard yet, and once you’ve heard his tale your heart will open to him and you’ll be on his side rooting for immigrants and immigration.

It didn’t help though that at the end the immigrant said that his tactic was just to get into the UK and thereby force Britain to accept him just by stint of him being here already and the obvious trouble it is to return such as him from whence they came.  It hardly generated any sympathy towards him.

Remember this from a previous post describing how the public were to be gulled into accepting mass immigration?….

‘We had someone on from Oxfam.  He was asked how he would sell the public the idea that we must allow in more migrants…..not a leading question at all is it?, one that pre-supposes we should let them in….once again the BBC not reportng but campaigning.

His answer was that Britain has to accept more asylum seekers… he’d sell the idea by ‘describing the misery of the lives of people in Syria and the desperation of those who are crossing the ocean with terrible risk to their lives and terrible suffering….when you get that sense of personal connectivity you recognise that these are not just people who are looking for a sunnier tomorrow, they are people who are living in fear and in poverty.’

Curioiusly that is exactly how the BBC goes about ‘reporting’ the issues already.  In other words they are ‘selling us the idea’ of more migrants being allowed in to Britain….wherever they come from and for whatever reason.’

 

Justin Webb didn’t have a good day yesterday…….here’s yet another example….

Lock, stock and barrel from Bishop Hill:

The unmentionables

Today – Met Office BBC

Bob Ward, funded by Big Oil and Jeremy Grantham….not a scientist, just a PR monkey, a mercenary attack dog set to close down debate about the science….why so scared if the science is real?

Maybe Richard Black will be penning another green inked scrawl of outrage to the Guardian over this betrayal by the BBC.