Here is possibly some of the worst and most sanctimonious, malevolent of BBC reporting you’ll ever see…

The ‘sanitised narrative’ of Hiroshima’s atomic bombing

The conventional wisdom in the United States is that the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war, and because of that it was justified – end of story.

Is that really the end of the story?

It’s certainly a convenient one. But it is one that was constructed after the war, by America’s leaders, to justify what they had done. And what they had done was, by any measure, horrendous.

Americans were told a sanitised narrative of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: that a great scientific endeavour had brought quick victory, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.

How about that ‘told a sanitised narrative of the bombings‘  Really?

How is it then that this news reel from the time tells of the ‘dramatic story of destruction and terror that followed in the wake of the first atom bomb…30% of the city’s population was killed, some by radioactive gamma rays, some by the heat of radiation that showed its intensity in many freakish ways [images of casualties]…in a city of rubble and destruction…a year later it’s still a city of the dead’?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVFPjVnm-Cc

Or how about this film that tells of ‘the effects of the death dealing atomic power’ where ‘the devastation speaks for itself’.….

Or how about ‘a new and revolutionary increase in destruction’...

So did the Americans get a ‘sanitised’ narrative of the bombings or is that just a prejudiced and ignorant BBC narrative that allows the reporter to then go on and use it to spin a tale of American war crimes?

So there you have it, the BBC is going to revise history for you and tell us that the bombs did not end the war abruptly saving hundreds of thousands of Allied casualties.  It can be no coincidence that Japan surrendered almost immediately the two bombs were dropped but as with the ‘Religion of Peace’ the BBC doesn’t like to make the obvious links that destroy their narrative. A BBC reporter, Rupert Wingfield–Hayes, who wasn’t born back then, wasn’t having  to fight his way to Japan island by island in a very bloody war, who didn’t see his mates blown to pieces beside him, who didn’t have to write the letters of  condolence to the parents of the killed soldiers, who wasn’t indeed one of those parents who received a letter telling them their son was dead, can blithely denounce the American effort to end the war quickly and say saving those American lives, and probably many civilian lives as well, was not worth while.  Perhaps he should ask his Japanese wife what she thinks.

Curious that he has this blinkered attitude when he has previously admitted in this, again anti-American, piece that the invasion of Japan would have been bloody if Okinawa was anything to go by…

There is deep bitterness here, in particular about how their overlords from the “mainland” sacrificed them at the end of World War 2.

“Okinawa is the only place in Japan that experienced battle on the ground,” says Satoru Oshiro “We cannot forget the tragedy, the horrible past.”

And it was unspeakably horrible.

On a hilltop just outside the capital Naha, I find Takamatsu Gushiken digging for human remains.

“When I find the bones of child and woman together, I cannot help but think that must be a mother and child and think about which died first,” Gushiken says.  “I heard of lots of babies sucking their mother’s breast after she has died. Was it like that or did the child go first and the mother hung on to the baby? It makes it very hard for us to see sights like that.”

All the more so when you realise that many of the victims he unearths did not die in battle but killed themselves on the orders of Japanese military commanders.

The carnage wrought by this policy is terrible to think about…Perhaps a quarter of a million people died here in three months of slaughter from April to June 1945. 

He makes no mention of the 14,000 allied soldiers that died, or the 50,000 injured, taking what was the relatively tiny island of Okinawa….multiply that up for the invasion of mainland Japan and the consideration that the defence would have been even more fanatical and the casualties may have been vastly higher.  I imagine the soldiers were extremely grateful not to have to fight their way into Japan…in fact you don’t have to imagine you can read it in many of their compelling and bloody and very unglorified accounts written direct from their own experience of combat against the Japanese …but what do they know, a BBC journalist is willing to sacrifice them for his own smug, sanctimonious narrative.  Like to see him storm a beach with 50lbs of kit and bullets coming his way or patrolling inland with the constant threat of attack  from all directions , or being pinned down under relentless artillery and machine gun fire for days on end and then tell us what he thinks of the need to end the war and whether he’d be so ‘gung ho’ about soldiers’ lives.

A real historian said this of people like Wingfield–Hayes who rewrite history from a modern perspective…..

“This is really a post-Hiroshima analysis, growing with more fervor as the distance from Hiroshima grows, about the moral legitimacy and the moral justifications for the act, and not about understanding the decision-making leading to the act.”

The decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t taken quickly or lightly and was in fact informed by the casualties taken on Okinawa.

The Japanese were known to be massing their troops for the defence of the mainland and it looked like any invasion would face at least an equivalent number of Japanese forces as the allies could muster when the acknowledged ratio for success was  three to one in favour of the attackers…- ‘“not the recipe for victory.”…. New intelligence indicated that American casualties would reach over 600,000 during an invasion. ‘

Rupert Wingfield–Hayes‘ opinions are naive, simplistic and pathetically grovelling and apologetic, no doubt due to having very close and personal associations to the land he must now call home.

Perhaps the BBC would like to rewrite some other Japanese history.

In 1937 the Japanese attacked the Chinese city of Nanking killing up to 300,000 of its inhabitants according to the Chinese, 200,000 according to the International Military Tribunal For The Far East...and they didn’t die well... ‘burial societies and other organizations counted more than 155,000 bodies which they buried. They also reported that most of those were bound with their hands tied behind their backs. These figures do not take into account those persons whose bodies were destroyed by burning, or by throwing them into the Yangtze River, or otherwise disposed of by Japanese. ‘

Will the Japanese be holding a memorial service for the dead, will the BBC be reporting it as a Chinese war crime?

What of the many millions of victims of Japanese militarism during and before WWII?  Will the BBC be reporting their fate in sombre, accusatory tones?

The Japanese mass murdering started long before WWII with the…

‘……Japanese seizure of Manchuria earlier. It really began in 1895 with Japan’s assassination of Korea’s Queen Min, and invasion of Korea, resulting in its absorption into Japan, followed quickly by Japan’s seizure of southern Manchuria, etc. – establishing that Japan was at war from 1895-1945. Prior to 1895, Japan had only briefly invaded Korea during the Shogunate, long before the Meiji Restoration, and the invasion failed. Therefore, Rummel’s estimate of 6-million to 10-million dead between 1937 (the Rape of Nanjing) and 1945, may be roughly corollary to the time-frame of the Nazi Holocaust, but it falls far short of the actual numbers killed by the Japanese war machine. If you add, say, 2-million Koreans, 2-million Manchurians, Chinese, Russians, many East European Jews (both Sephardic and Ashkenazy), and others killed by Japan between 1895 and 1937 (conservative figures), the total of Japanese victims is more like 10-million to 14-million. Of these, I would suggest that between 6-million and 8-million were ethnic Chinese, regardless of where they were resident.’

The Japanese were brutal, fanatical and ruthless. They killed millions, millions, of people by many different savage methods, not just shooting but by torture, starvation, crucifixion, bayoneting, beheading, burning, burying alive, chemical and biological attacks, or just working them to death.

The Japanese soldier rarely surrendered, preferring to fight to the death taking with him as many of his opponents as possible.  The Allies experienced this ruthless fanaticism during the war as they fought their way towards Japan.  This experience informed the decision to use the nuclear bombs on the Japanese mainland in order to make a powerful statement to the Japanese leadership that all such resistance was entirely hopeless and would lead to the destruction of Japan.

Wisely the Japanese recognised this and surrendered preventing the deaths of maybe hundreds of thousands of Allied troops had they been forced to invade Japan.

The BBC thinks that saving those Allied lives and the subsequent effects on their families was the wrong thing to do, that the lives of Japanese civilians were somehow more valuable than American or British soldiers, never mind that they had fully backed the Japanese military expansionism of the past decades.  Why does the BBC not ask the families of the US soldiers whether they are happy that the war ended as it did and their sons came home from the war?

The BBC prefers to ask an American student of the present day whom the BBC reporter thinks is ‘remarkable’….

I met a remarkable young man in Hiroshima the other day. His name is Jamal Maddox and he is a student at Princeton University in America.

Standing near the famous A-Bomb Dome, I asked Jamal whether his visit to Hiroshima had changed the way he views America’s use of the atom bomb on the city 70 years ago. He considered the question for a long time.

“It’s a difficult question,” he finally said. “I think we as a society need to revisit this point in history and ask ourselves how America came to a point where it was okay to destroy entire cities, to firebomb entire cities.

“I think that’s what’s really necessary if we are going to really make sense of what happened on that day.”

What if Jamal had visited Nanking or the Solomon Islands or Okinawa where so many American soldiers lost their lives?  Would he still have reservations about the use of the bomb?  We shall never know because that’s not on the BBC agenda. It is incredible how ‘Jamal’ is now the BBC poster boy, one man’s opinion, taken on the hop, being used to rewrite history and erase the real narrative behind the necessity for the use of the nuclear bombs in favour of the BBC’s preferred one of trying paint the Allies as the real war criminals in order to justify the BBC’s continued assault against the West, its history and its place in the world as it seeks to relativise everything and sell us a narrative that says there are no good or bad societies, no good or bad ideology, no good or bad cultures.  We should not judge how other people want to live their lives, unless you happen to be white and western, then it’s open season for the BBC.

This approach plays out back in the UK where Islam is given a free pass.  It is not intolerant, oppressive, authoritarian, misogynist, homophobic, violent, backward or unpleasant, it is a lovely, tolerant, peaceful and spiritual religion despite all the evidence being that it has never been that, and certainly isn’t today. Mishal Husain feels free to denounce Christianity as backward and unpleasant on the Today programme but no such vilification for her own religion.

The BBC’s hand-wringing, angst driven approach to reporting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is motivated by its anti-Western agenda, its hatred of what it sees as the European/US, white dominance of history, its kneejerk cultural cringe and guilt-ridden fawning towards other races and cultures by its white reporters and a gleeful free for all from its ethnic reporters who take a great deal of pleasure in attacking the West and its values whether they have lived here all their lives or not like a school child being rude to their teacher.

The BBC of course would be entirely sympathetic to the notion that Japanese war criminals were in fact victims themselves..how often have we been peddled this exact same narrative for terrorists and criminals by the BBC?…

‘Many Japanese reacted to the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal by demanding parole for the detainees or mitigation of their sentences. Shortly after the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect, a movement demanding the release of B- and C-class war criminals began, emphasizing the “unfairness of the war crimes tribunals” and the “misery and hardship of the families of war criminals”. The movement quickly garnered the support of more than ten million Japanese. The government commented that “public sentiment in our country is that the war criminals are not criminals. Rather, they gather great sympathy as victims of the war, and the number of people concerned about the war crimes tribunal system itself is steadily increasing”.’

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

The BBC has an agenda that is highly evident when it comes to reporting anything to do with race or indeed religion, one religion in particular of course.

When white people are filmed being racially abusive to non-whites on public transport the BBC will rapidly broadcast the videos with profound expressions of shocked sensibilities.  You see no such videos ffrom the BBC of black people abusing whites.  When a white police officer shoots a black man in America the BBC’s default position is that the shooting was a result of racial prejudice. The BBC will trawl the archives for anything remotely similar, or even not similar at all.  A black man dies of cancer or in a road accident and the deaths are all gathered together, conflated along with the shootings to create the narrative that somehow black lives are worth less than white ones and that all black deaths are somehow a result of racism whether overt or hidden….victims of a society that doesn’t care about them.

Yesterday we posted a look at the BBC’s latest such effort that was a very long piece of race baiting from the BBC designed to do what we’ve just stated, to merge together all black deaths of any cause into one bloated, censorious accusation against American Society, the white bit of society that is.

It is a typical piece of race hustling that we’ve come to expect from the racism industry and unfortunately from the ‘impartial’ BBC as well.  Institutions we are told can be racist, systems can be racist, even buildings can apparently be racist not meeting the specific needs of the black citizens, whatever those specific needs might be, and of course if they can’t find anything current to complain about there is always the legacy of history from which all black people are obviously suffering, whether they know it or not, and let’s not forget the innate racism of white people who, even if they never display any signs of racism, can never throw off the prejudices so natural to their race and indeed not being racist is a sure sign of being racist in its condesending patronising display of white supremacy…..the neo-colonialism of the do-gooder still ‘helping out’, civilising, the black man.

Amongst all of the BBC’s vast number of highly emotive reports about police killing black people in the US are there any that mention white people being killed in a similar manner by police?  Because it’s bound to be happening…and indeed here’s one such killing that the BBC seems to have somehow missed….

The Independent reports the controversy…..

Zachary Hammond death: Shooting of unarmed white teenager by police officer sparks debate over ‘lack of outrage’ in America

The Guardian reports it…..

Zachary Hammond autopsy challenges police account of fatal shooting

The BBC hasn’t shown the slightest interest in a white man, unarmed, killed, shot in the back, by police in America.

If he’d been black his death might have merited some interest, considerable interest, and a whole narrative of police brutality and of a racist America spun and hung off of it.

The Independent reports…’The Hammond family’s lawyer has said it is because it was a “white on white” killing.  Eric Bland told the newspaper: “It’s sad but I think the reason is, unfortunately, the media and our government officials have treated the death of an unarmed white teenager differently than they would have if this were a death of an unarmed black teen. “The hypocrisy that has been shown toward this is really disconcerting.  The issue should never be ‘what is the colour of the victim?’  “The issue should be: ‘why was an unarmed teen gunned down in a situation where deadly force was not even justified?”’

Something for the BBC to consider before it once again exploits black deaths for its own, what is, racist, anti-white, agenda…..

“The issue should never be ‘what is the colour of the victim?   The issue should be: ‘why was an unarmed teen gunned down in a situation where deadly force was not even justified?”’

The BBC’s reporting on these issues is entirely worthless without the context of how many white people are also killed by police in America in similar circumstances.  Without that statistic it is impossible to judge whether there is any link between race and the police’s actions.  That doesn’t stop the BBC from making wild and dangerous accusations that ramp up the anger and ill-will not just towards the police but towards white people.  So much for the BBC ‘maintaining civil society and citizenship’. It seems more intent on inciting riots and race wars.

Perhaps once the BBC wakes up they will make a film about the young white man’s killing just as they are doing for the death of a black man, one who was armed and presumably willing to use the weapon against somebody…

Actors Wanted For Drama Doc For BBC

This is a really interesting 60 minute drama doc for BBC 1 about the incident that started the riots in 2011.

MARK DUGGAN (Male)

29-year-old Tottenham resident, was shot and killed by police in Tottenham, North London, England, on 4 August 2011. The Metropolitan Police stated that officers were attempting to arrest Duggan on suspicion of planning an attack, and that he was in possession of a handgun. Mark Duggan was not the notorious gunman the press have portrayed him to be; neither was he, as his family readily accept, “an angel”. In this film we will try to find the man behind the gangster stereotype and understand the challenges he faced as a young black man from Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm Estate, an area which has lived in a state of semi permanent siege since the murder of PC Keith Blakelock in 1985.

The BBC trying to paint Duggan as a victim of the police regardless of the verdict of the inquiry into his death andfailing that are clearly trying to persuade us that Duggan was a victim of society, not responsible for his own actions, forced into them by a racist and uncaring white majority society.  Such deaths never occur in Jamaica then?

Why is the BBC so obsessed with US police ‘brutality’, white police that is, when other police forces around the world are so much worse…this video claims that Jamaican police are the most violent in the world killing hundreds of people every year in a population that is one hundredth that of America?  Why hardly a glimmer of interest from the BBC?

Seen this?

‘The BBC’s flagship religious show Songs of Praise is being filmed at a touching chapel within a migrants’ camp in Calais, it has emerged.

Do what?

Producers have already spent two days shooting an episode at a makeshift Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the ‘Jungle’ camp, which will be broadcast on a date to be finalised. And the full crew for Songs of Praise is due to arrive at the centre of the 5,000-strong camp this weekend – but host Aled Jones said he would not be present.”

Presumably these are the Christians that made it across the Med, as opposed to those drowned by their fellow Muslim “migrants”? Why is the BBC now interfering in this Calais situation? Where next – Raqqa?

Well then, it looks like Alan Yentob is a man with a lot of explaining to do with regard to HIS role in a/The Kids Company and b/Newsnight coverage of this story. Guido has additional insight here. The increasingly bizarre behaviour of this senior BBC executive raises more questions than answers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncRGoqNUb1w

Most Black youths in America, and in the UK, that are killed, are killed by other Black youths.

The BBC doesn’t want to know about that, their sole concern is the black men killed by white police officers or the callous disregard of society for black lives…and the BBC isn’t too interested in the whys and wherefores, just in portraying the issues in a stark black and white way that strips the debate of any real meaning.  The police officer in the video is right…why is there a sudden lack of concern about those black men killed by other black men from the people who shout and scream about the deaths of people like Michael Brown in Ferguson?  Why do they suddenly go MIA?  Do they not think all black lives matter, or is it only those black lives that have been ‘snuffed out’ by white police officers that they think will get them on the news?

In 2013 of 2,491 black Americans murdered only 189 were killed by a white killer.  Hardly seems like there is a race war going on ouot there.

The BBC chose a US journalist, Jessica Lussenhop, to write a piece on black youths being shot by police knowing that she is highly partisan on this and that she has a history of critical reports on the police.

This is in essence her view of what happens to black people on the streets of America at the hands of the brutal police….

‘More than you ever wanted to know about the police attitude to feral Blacks and how they kill them. When federal agents are picking them off from helicopters, there’s obviously more at stake than just nuisance. Between the millions of dollars in damage and the idea of the Blackman as an ‘invasive species,’ I was shocked by the serious problem (and solution) posed by these animals, who are smart but ugly, therefore fair game for mass eradication in police eyes.  This is, to me, a classic, successful alt-weekly story — take something that’s under the snout of normal people, zoom in, examine. ‘Some species just don’t play nice with others.’

No, no of course she didn’t really write that about the police, it’s been slightly edited, but it is pretty representative of the undertone and narrative that the BBC  seeks to present but in a slightly more measured way about supposed police attitudes with a not so subtle subtext that suggests they really do think white police officers are trying to eradicate Black youths…because it’s in their white genes.

As an example of that Lussenhop brings us a long list of Black deaths that ‘prove’ either that the Police are racist killers or that they and the rest of society just don’t care that black lives are being lost….though Lussenhop is coy about the racial identity of the killers other than when it is a police officer.

Here’s her piece……..Ferguson: The other young black lives laid to rest in Michael Brown’s cemetery..

It is an enormously long denouncement of American police whilst ignoring the real cause of most deaths.  She starts off with a complete fabrication and continues in that vein.

Michael Brown, remember him….That extremely large and threatening Black thug who attacked a police officer by punching him in the face whilst he was in his police car, then tried to take his gun and who was subsequently shot as he refused to surrender and instead charged at the police officer?

This is Lussenhop’s description...’One year ago this August, former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot Brown, who was unarmed, six times.’  You get the idea.

She admits that there might be some doubt about the version that claims Brown was a completely innocent victim of police brutality but she dismisses this with the suggestion that the police officer, Darren Wilson, was subconsciously influenced in how he reacted to Brown by the racist culture of the Police…

Supporters of Wilson referenced the security footage of Brown pilfering some cigarillos at a convenience store and manhandling the clerk just prior to the incident. Opponents pointed out shoplifting is not an offence worthy of execution.  [er what?  Why include that?  He wasn’t ‘executed’ and he wasn’t shot for shoplifting but for asaaulting and further threratening to assault a police officer]

After two separate inquiries, the officer who shot Brown was found to be acting within the law. A St Louis grand jury declined to bring charges and a US justice department investigation concluded “Darren Wilson’s actions do not constitute prosecutable violations”. They cited “no credible evidence” that Brown had his hands up, and in fact found evidence of a struggle between the two.

But another justice department report found that Wilson was working within a system plagued by inequity and unfair practices. The citizens of Ferguson, where the average per capita income is $21,000 (£13,500), were routinely and repeatedly stopped and fined for minor transgressions that filled the city coffers – and though African Americans made up 67% of the population, they constituted 93% of the traffic stops…. It painted a portrait of a city populace straining under the weight of racial bias and classism.’

She goes on to describe another young Black life lost...’Directly across from Brown’s grave is another that, according to the small stone marker, belongs to Jarris Brown. Michael and Jarris are not related. However, some quick arithmetic reveals that Jarris, like Michael, also died young, at just 16 years old. ‘

But hang on…Jarris Brown was shot by his own friend as Lussenhop admits…and many more of the deaths she is trying to exploit in an attempt to conjure up a picture of a community under some sort of siege are in fact from car accidents, suicide or ill health…she tells us the majority are shot but not who shot them…other Black youths shot them that’s who.

We get the sad statistics of Black victims…but no statistics for who shot them….

As homicide rates rise around the country, the vast majority of the victims are young black men. Blacks in St Louis are 12 times more likely to be murdered than whites. So far in 2015, there have been 116 homicides, which is at least 50% higher than it was at the same time of year in 2014.

The number of victims jumped from 120 murders in 2013 to 159 in 2014. While that may be new for the city, what has been true for years is that the state of Missouri has the worst rate of black homicide victimisation in the country – twice the national rate for black victims and seven times the overall national rate.

‘The state of Missouri has the worst rate of black homicide victimisation ‘…. What the hell does she mean by that highly misleading phrase…..‘victimisation’…by who?  Who is doing the shooting, that ‘victimising’? 

Nor do we get the statistics for white victims…either shot by police or killed by black youths.

We hear that black people are more likley to be poorer but then gives us a long story about ‘OJ’ who actually comes from a very respectable family but who turns out to have been a drug dealer with a very nice car…

OJ is shot by ‘three masked men charging up the driveway towards her [OJ’s mother]. When they demanded to know where OJ was, Jennifer feigned ignorance. But his distinctive car gave him away.

“Where is the money?” she remembers them screaming as they pushed her towards the basement door. When they threatened to kill her, OJ opened the door to his room and the basement exploded in gunfire.’

Why is this story relevant?  Lussenhop is claiming the Police don’t bother with black deaths and don’t try to find the killers and yet they spent years trying to find ‘OJ’s’ killers as she admits…‘St Louis County Police investigated OJ’s murder, but after several years and several pushes in the local media for information with thousands of dollars in reward money available, no one has ever been caught. A letter from a tipster in jail led to nothing. OJ’s case eventually got reassigned to a different detective and Jennifer stopped calling to check on the progress.’

So a young black man, probably owing money to a drug gang, shot by that drug gang, and the police spent years trying to solve the case. and she admits that ‘the police have cleared at least three times as many cases with black victims as with white.’  So what exactly is Lussenhop’s point?

She quotes this…“This is systemic. This idea that black people are ‘less’ – that it suffuses everything in our culture in America,” says Jesamyn Ward’.  Guess that’s how they got a black president.

We get to the meat of the matter at the end when you realise the police can’t win…“When people were saying, ‘black lives matter’, one of the things that made that appealing is the fact it was ambiguous. It could be related to police brutality, but it could also relate to the callous indifference with which we regard the abysmal homicide numbers,” says the New Yorker’s Cobb.

Either the police are ‘brutal’ or they are indifferent.  No other choices available.  Guilty of something. Guilty by virtue of being white.

Oh but hang on….Lussenhop slips this in as well….”The narrative in which someone’s morality and stereotypical ideas around morality can be deployed to invalidate their humanity or right to equal treatment – we’re very familiar with that,” says Jelani Cobb, a staff writer for the New Yorker who has written extensively about these issues. “Don’t be surprised if black people, too, don’t think those dudes’ lives matter who died in these types of ways.”

So do black lives, the lives of black criminals, not matter to black people?  Seems maybe not so much.  So a criminal gets killed and nobody, black or white, cares too much…they probably think he deserved it.  And yet that’s not an attitude that gets reported on the BBC and in this case it goes against the stream of Lussenhop’s whole narrative…..and yet a whole campaign, a barrage of accusatory rhetoric, is aimed at white people because of that narrative, one that the BBC keeps on playing up, a narrative that is ultimately hugely dangerous in the way it whips up racial tensions using exaggerated and false claims to incite black anger at white people.

The BBC plays with fire.

Relax.

How times change…or not.

Dennis Potter laid into the BBC in 1993 in a vitriolic and bile filled rant against the predations of John Birt whilst also, naturally, raging against Thatcher and Murdoch.

What’s interesting is the BBC’s defence of itself when it was under review as it is today…….

“Broadcasting is at the heart of British Society. The structure and the competition of the broadcasting industry, the purpose and motivation of broadcasters and the programmes and services they offer are vital factors in reflecting and shaping that society.”

Pretty much the Hall line today.

Potter launches into a tirade against ‘management’ and commercialisation as he saw it that was tearing the heart out of the BBC…..curious that the BBC seems to have not only survived but thrived since those supposed threats to its existence were highlighted…..could it be that the BBC once again comes out of any review with a renewed vigour, sense of purpose, a flourishing success despite all the doom-laden predictions?  Note Potter suggests a smaller, more nimble BBC, maybe other broadcasters also taking on the remit of ‘Public Service Broadcasting’.  No doubt he would be horrified to find he was thinking on the same lines that the current review is at least contemplating.

Here’s some choice cuts from Potter’s rage against the machine…..

Our television has been ripped apart and falteringly re-assembled by politicians who believe that value is a monetary term only, and that a cost-accountant is thereby the most suitable adjudicator of what we can and cannot see on our screens. And these accountants or their near clones are employed by new kinds of Media Owners who try to gobble up everything in their path.

The cry of Yuppie to Yuppie sounded in the land, as chilling as any call from the carnivores in swamp or forest. And the deep hatred of any other claim, any other way of seeing, of anything other than the forces of law and order in the public domain, was always going to be arrowed with poison-dipped barb at the slow, decent, stumbling and puzzled giant run from Broadcasting House.

We must protect ourselves and our democracy, first by properly exercising the cross-ownership provisions currently in place, and then by erecting further checks and balances against dangerous concentrations of the media power which plays such a large part in our lives. No individual, group or company should be allowed to own more than one daily, one evening and one weekly newspaper. No newspaper should be allowed to own a television station, and vice-versa. A simple act of public hygiene, tempering abuse, widening choice, and maybe even returning broadcasting to its makers.

As a writer who needs to clutch his pen as though it were a lifebelt, I have to admit that I have nevertheless improved many a shining hour with a probably untransmittable little playlet about one of the more intriguing encounters of our time. I was not there when Fortnum met Mason, Laurel met Hardy, or Murdoch met Mephistopheles but I would have given my old Thesaurus or my new sequence of Readers Digest Prize Draw Numbers to have been a hornet on the wall at that surely entrancing fascination and maybe even comical occasion when dear old Marmaduke first met dear young John and each of them sort of half-discussed what was sort of half-wrong with the greatest broadcasting organisation the world has ever seen.

Where, I wonder, did they meet? Who was the first to smile – lethally? Who said, um, “structural walk-through” as he ordered the mineral water? And did the waiter say “Pardon?” Was the table well laden and did it groan when the un-advertised post of the twelfth and not thirteenth Director Generalship was finally settled?

I fear the time is near when we must not save the BBC from itself, but public service broadcasting from the BBC. The old Titan should spawn smaller and more nimble offspring if its present controllers cannot be removed. Why not think about it anyway?

Why not separate Radio from Television? Why not let BBC2 be a separate public service broadcaster? Let us begin to consider afresh how the thousands of millions of pounds of licence money could be apportioned between two, three or four successors to the currently misled Corporation. One of the successors could certainly be a publishing or commissioning authority on the model of Channel 4.

Indeed, Channel 4, if freed from its advertisements, could continue to evolve out of its original, ever precious remit into a passably good model of the kinds of television some of us seek. Michael Grade is becoming, by default, the new Director General, and the ironies if not the comedy of such an unexpected grace remind me that it is time to wind down before I exhaust myself with my own restraint.

Well, it’s pretty clear that the BBC want to see another President Clinton in the White House but the spotlight was on her GOP opponents last evening and in particular Donald Trump in the Fox News debate last night. I thought this was a telling quote from the BBC analysis of the debate…

“Donald Trump was generally seen as an amusing sideshow.”

Not a hint of bias there. FYI – Trump leads the field of GOP contenders by a massive margin at this point.

And so to the wonders of the weekend! Here is a new OPEN THREAD for you to detail the bias.

The dynamic duo are back, the climate change tag team of Richard Black and Roger Harrabin return for, hopefully, one performance only.

Black is harrumphing loudly, in the Guardian, about Quentin Lett’s asking ‘What is the Point of the Met. Office?’

This is heresy and a damnable breach of BBC protocol. Damnit!

Harrabin joins in and expresses his displeasure with a sneering tweet…

• roger harrabin ‏@RHarrabin Aug 5

  #Climate sceptics have demanded “their” programme. They just got it. Radio 4. 09.00. @QuentinLetts_ on @metoffice. @ECIU_UK @CarbonBrief

Harrabin must have a short memory having himself asked a similar question….

The trouble is that we simply don’t know how much to trust the Met Office.

How often does it get the weather right and wrong. And we don’t know how it compares with other, independent forecasters.

Can we rely on them if we are planning a garden party at the weekend? Or want to know if we should take a brolly with us tomorrow? Or planning a holiday next week?

In a few year’s time hopefully we’ll all have a better idea of whom to trust. By then the Met Office might have recovered enough confidence to share with us its winter prediction of whether to buy a plane ticket or a toboggan.

Hope the tag team doesn’t fall out over that one.  Harrabin is not shy when it comes to a punch up with those who disagree with him such as Delingpole or was it Booker? ….

“I’m not sure whether I should shake your hand. I want to punch you.” He sounded jolly cross indeed – and ranted that I was utterly irresponsible and had disseminated lots of lies – though he later apologized to me saying he was jet-lagged and had confused me with Christopher Booker. Hmm.

Black tries to dismiss the claims of those on the programme as rubbish…

Mr Stringer is allowed to claim without challenge that there is “no scientific evidence” linking the 2013/4 winter floods, to climate change, which is untrue; it’s not a simple link, but it does exist. [Possibly only in his own little head]

Unfortunately it’s Black who is being ‘untrue’ as even the Met. Office [ah, I’ve found a use for it…rubbishing old Blackie] says there was no link between the floods and climate change…

Prime Minister climate change opinion not backed up by science, says Met Office
Nicola Maxey from the Met Office said the Prime Minister failed to draw the crucial distinction between weather and climate change.
“What happened at the end of December and at the beginning of January is weather,” she said.
“Climate change happens on a global scale, and weather happens at a local scale. Climate scientists have been saying that for quite a while.
“It’s impossible to say that these storms are more intense because of climate change.”
She added: “In real terms we had a low depression over the Atlantic which deepened, which caused the swell, and that combined with the spring tide caused the coastal waves.”

or….em…

Paul Davis, chief meteorologist for the Met Office said that very strong winds much of the UK experienced which was caused by jet stream.
“December has been the windiest spell since 1969, but unprecedented perhaps not. It probably feels unusual because the last few winters have been fairly settled and cold and we haven’t had the story conditions that just experienced.”

or…em….

Direct from the Met. Office:   There’s currently no evidence to suggest that the UK is increasing in storminess

Ever wonder how the Swarm arrives at Calais? The BBC doesn’t and the Today programme reports that “Four hundred people have been rescued from a capsized ship carrying migrants in the Mediterranean. Will Turner, an emergency coordinator with Medecins sans Frontieres was on a rescue ship that provided help.” Captain Will demands that the EU steps up to the plate and accepts MANY MORE of these “poor vulnerable” people who pay the people traffickers to get access to our welfare system. This was met with a murmur of agreement from Humphrys. The idea that Europe protects its borders is beyond the ken of the BBC and so they present these hordes leaving Libya as victims and then when the ranks at Calais bulge the BBC acts ever so surprised.