Ed Stourton is pretty religious, a Catholic, often suspected of having a Catholic agenda in the programmes he presents….Ed Stourton reveals his liberal Catholic bias again as he puts the boot into the Ordinariate

Stourton has come out with this:

David Cameron’s attack on Islamic extremism at this month’s Slovakia security conference included the charge that groups such as Islamic State believe “religious doctrine trumps the rule of law”.

The phrase is revealing in a way the prime minister probably did not intend: it underlines how far the role of religion has been eroded in British life.

For most of our history, most people in this country would have taken it for granted that God’s laws should trump those made by man – indeed they would have assumed that “religious doctrine” provided the proper basis for “the rule of law”.

Take Magna Carta, which we have heard so much about recently.

This cornerstone of law and liberty was explicitly laid on religious foundations.

The idea of an inherent conflict between law and religion is a very modern one.

But then Mr Cameron leads a country where religious faith, in particular as expressed through the established Church, is in precipitous decline.

The Magna Carta was created eight hundred years ago and was not created by the Church but forced upon a reluctant King by the Barons, the Aristocracy, in the interests of a fairer society ….giving people far more rights than the Church ever would have.

It is curious that a BBC man should be trying to justify Islamic beliefs and the creation of the Caliphate by comparison to Christianity when the BBC normally tries to deny any link between Islamic radicalism, fiundamentalism really, and Islam.

He might also have mentioned that all this denounced by Cameron..‘The cause is ideological. It is an Islamist extremist ideology one that says the West is bad and democracy is wrong that women are inferior, that homosexuality is evil.’ is also from the Koran.

But…if you’d read this from Stourton last year you might understand why he admits that there is a religious basis to ISIS……

BBC’s Edward Stourton: British media suffers from religious ‘blind spot’ leading to ‘skewed’ coverage

BBC journalist Edward Stourton has said Britain’s lack of appreciation for the importance of religion across the world damages its news coverage.

Stourton, presenter on Radio 4’s religious programme Sunday, believes British journalists have a “blind spot” when it comes to religion, meaning coverage can be “skewed”.

He highlighted coverage of the Ukraine crisis, the Middle East and Boko Haram in Nigeria as examples of stories which would be covered better with more understanding of religion.

“I do think that there is a problem with British culture… in the way that we treat religion as a sort of curious ‘ghetto’-like thing,” he told Press Gazette.

“And I don’t say that from the point of view of arguing that religion is a good thing – because very often it’s not.

“But it does damage our understanding and our ability to perceive stories accurately.”

He suggested that British news organisations have not considered the importance of the growth of churches in Russia and what Russian nationalism means in coverage of Ukraine. And on Middle East stories, he said “we continually misread the story because we don’t think what a powerful force religion is”.

He goes on…

“But it’s been perhaps made more apparent than ever by events since 9/11, because a whole area of quite complex religion has become very essential to the understanding of mainstream news.”

So understanding Islam is essential to understanding what is going on in the world.

Who’d have thought.

And just a curious coincidence…as Stourton pushes ‘Religion über alles’….so does Giles Fraser on Thought for the Day…….telling us that Christians should run their own ‘Caliphate’ and ignore the democratic, political, national, patriotic government….instead adopt the ‘revolutionary spirit’….and ignore the established Church….it’s not the job of Christians to be patriotic, their identification is with a god that supercedes all national boundaries.

Giles worships the Prince of Peace not the Duke of Wellington apparently.

Good old Giles, getting more like George Galloway every day.

Trust in me!!

The Government is reportedly set on removing the regulation of the BBC from the BBC Trust and handing it to Ofcom as the Telegraph reports:

For the first time in the broadcaster’s nearly century-long history, it will be governed by an external body, as part of the renegotiation of the BBC Charter.

The move is expected to be signalled in a Green Paper that will formally trigger Charter renewal negotiations within weeks.

If true it’s not before time….how can the BBC regulate itself?  Clearly it can’t judging by performance.

The other issue is the Charter…at present it requires the BBC to ‘sustain citizenship and civil society’ but fails to set out what that means, what is a ‘civil society’?, what do you have to do to be a good citizen?, which allows the BBC to interpret that obligation how it likes….in other words if it thinks mass immigration is good for Britain, and it does, it can broadcast pro-immigration propaganda, similarly for climate change or Europe or indeed any subject it likes.

Either that requirement needs to be removed from the charter or there needs to be a body that is from a far broader spectrum of society than is employed by the BBC which can give a much more balanced idea of what that Society actually thinks and wants and sets out guidelines for the BBC to ‘push’ as propaganda….propaganda that is at least more representative than what we get at present….obviously that is fraught with difficulties and would be almost impossible therefore the simplest and preferred method would just to remove the obligation from the BBC and let it simply be a broadcaster rather than an organisation that is sanctioned and legally obliged to engineer social change and which sets out to manipulate its audience with propaganda based upon its own left-leaning values in order to do that.

Whether it’s biased to the right or the left, and it’s the left, the BBC is biased……expose it here….

At least one media organisation checks those ‘explosive’ facts…….Channel 4’s ‘FactCheck’ :

It’s true that around 13 per cent of Americans are black, according to the latest estimates from the US Census Bureau.

And yes, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black offenders committed 52 per cent of homicides recorded in the data between 1980 and 2008. Only 45 per cent of the offenders were white. Homicide is a broader category than “murder” but let’s not split hairs.

As we found yesterday, 93 per cent of black victims were killed by blacks and 84 per cent of white victims were killed by whites.

Alternative statistics from the FBI are more up to date but include many crimes where the killer’s race is not recorded. These numbers tell a similar story.

In 2013, the FBI has black criminals carrying out 38 per cent of murders, compared to 31.1 per cent for whites. The offender’s race was “unknown” in 29.1 per cent of cases.

The verdict

There is evidence in the official police-recorded figures that black Americans are more likely to commit certain types of crime than people of other races.

While it would be naïve to suggest that there is no racism in the US criminal justice system, victim reports don’t support the idea that this is because of mass discrimination.

Higher poverty rates among various urban black communities might explain the difference in crime rates, although the evidence is mixed.

Thanks to David Brims for linking to this video which illustrates how there is more to the Dylann Roof story than the BBC cares to mention, preferring instead to blame the ‘usual suspects’…..as it did for the Boston bombings when they blamed white supremacists….the videos show how Roof was influenced by Media lies about the Trayvon Martin case…why is the BBC concentrating on Rogers rather than the Media’s protrayal of the Trayvon Martin case?

Roof’s manifesto:

‘The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?’

Black Criminals, White Victims, and White Guilt

The media have relentlessly fanned the flames of racial hatred, while engaging in a systematic pattern of misinformation and blatant suppression of facts surrounding the perpetrators and victims of crime.

 The figures come quickly but are never subjected to the necessary scrutiny. Last fall, for example, the George Soros-funded ProPublica published a claim that black youths are killed by the police at a rate 21 times higher than white youths. Mass media parroted that claim, but the data are incomplete and biased. They represent just 1.2 percent of police departments nationwide, and most reports come from urban areas, where the population is disproportionately black.

More reliable data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggest that in 2012, 123 blacks were killed by police using firearms while 326 whites, including 227 non-Hispanic whites, were killed. These data, however are also not entirely reliable, but represent a larger data set than the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR).

CNN’s Marc Lamont Hill, a racial agitator fired by Fox News for defending cop-killers, spread another misleading statistic about police shootings, claiming that “Every 28 hours, an unarmed black person is killed by police.” This too was trumpeted in the media. It became a twitter hashtag, “#every28hours,” and another mantra like “hands up, don’t shoot.” But it is demonstrably false. There were 313 blacks killed by police, security guards and other “vigilantes” in 2012. Dividing 313 into the number of hours in a year (8,760) yields 28. However, 177 of these “unarmed black persons” were actually armed with firearms. That leaves 136. Others may have been technically “unarmed” but were threatening the officer’s life, for example with their car—or as in Michael Brown’s case, attempting to take the officer’s gun. Many more were not the result of shootings, but accidents, e.g., during vehicular chases. Finally, some of the shooters were not police. When the hyperbole is removed, the facts present a much more reasonable explanation. Barring a small number of tragic mishaps, police shootings are usually justified.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MOgYL3lVR0

A man writes in a blog asking why the media ignores the race of those who kill white people but always mention the race of the killer if the killer is white and the victim black.

The BBC thinks this man and his questions about the Media’s ‘disparity of response’ may be responsible for the killings in Charleston…..

Disturbing message

Was Charleston shooting suspect inspired by this man?

Now the BBC is more than happy to give a lot of airtime to Muslims, Tell MAMA for example, or Black people, Lenny Henry springs to mind, who make similar claims about discrimination….are they ‘disturbing messages’…in that they may incite murder?  Mehdi Hasan has demanded that the Media be punished for publishing stories that report Muslims acting badly…he complains often and loudly about the Media protrayal of Muslims.

Would Hasan or Tell MAMA be held responsible if a Muslim, enraged by the discrimination revealed by them, entered a Church and started killing non-Muslims ?  By the logic of the BBC story they would be.  In fact using that logic the BBC can be held responsible for the deaths in Charleston because it is left leaning media organisations like the BBC that Rogers is complaining about….their refusal to report the facts about murders of white people by Blacks whilst highlighting Blacks murdered by Whites is what Rogers complains of…therefore it is the left wing media’s political correctness that has resulted in Rogers’ complaint which was referenced by Dylann Roof and subsequently linked to by the likes of the BBC as the cause of the shooting.

The BBC and its ilk are therefore, by its logic, responsible for the murders in Charleston.

The BBC’s own reporting of those murders in Charleston demonstrates Rogers’ point….the BBC immediately, absolutely immediately, started emphasising that Roof was white.  In contrast we know that the BBC frequently censors out the religion of Muslim terrorists or criminals in just about every case from their reports, anyone needing to know the relevant facts that might give a clue as to motivation for the terrorism would have to assume it from the names of those arrested.  Roof’s colour was relevant to the story but so is the fact that a terrorist is ‘Muslim’….it gives context and motivation to the actions and informs the audience.

And of course the BBC was itself ‘noting’ the ‘disparity of response’ by the Media towards crimes like Charleston….the BBC is also happy to link to a narrative that declares the murders a terrorist act….now it was but compare that with the BBC’s response to Muslim terrorism, especially against the Jews….the use of the word ‘terrorism’ is suddenly problematic….and of course the Jews killed by the Charlie Hebdo killers apparently, in the BBC’s eyes, deserved it because of Israeli military action to prevent Israel being attacked by the Palestinian terrorists in Gaza.

As for that ‘disparity of response’….how did Obama, and the Media respond to a Muslim terrorist slaughtering US service personnel at Fort Hood….

“Well, look, we — we have seen, in the past, rampages of this sort. And in a country of 300 million people, there are going to be acts of violence that are inexplicable. Even within the extraordinary military that we have — and I think everybody understands how outstanding the young men and women in uniform are under the most severe stress — there are going to be instances in which an individual cracks. I think the questions that we’re asking now and we don’t have yet complete answers to is, is this an individual who’s acting in this way or is it some larger set of actors? You know, what are the motivations? Those are all questions that I think we have to ask ourselves”

And of course the BBC’s own Mark Mardell tried to say Fort Hood was a ‘senseless tragedy’ with no link to Islamic terrorism.

And how about the ‘white’ George Zimmerman?  He’s more Hispanic than white.  If he’s white then so is Obama who has a white mother….the BBC of course classifies Obama as Black and yet are keen to point out that ‘ Mr Zimmerman’s background is white and Hispanic. ‘

What did Obama say about that case?   “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”

Remarkable double standards from the BBC castigating ‘right wing press’ bias when its own record is abysmal as indeed noted by one of its ex head of news, Roger Mosey, as reported by Sue at ‘Is the BBC biased? [Yes it is] …

• Ex-BBC executive says broadcaster has ‘dysfunctional’ government
• Roger Mosey accuse BBC of ignoring white communities’ grievances
• Mosey say the BBC has succumbed to a ‘liberal group-think’ attitude

Here the BBC tells us how this innocent research ‘radicalised’ Dylann Roof……

Over the weekend, a website registered in Roof’s name came to light. It featured several photos of him along with a written manifesto. Authorities are still determining the authenticity of the site.

The manifesto specifically cited the discovery of research the Council of Conservative Citizens had done on “black-on-white crime”.

“I have never been the same since,” the manifesto author wrote.

Kyle Rogers is head of a website for the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), an organisation that says its members oppose “all effort to mix the races of mankind”.

Mr Rogers, 38, is a computer engineer from Ohio who’s been writing about race for more than a decade.

He says he started writing about race for one reason: “I didn’t like how the media would hype certain things.”

He’s careful in the words he chooses, and makes sure none of the language he uses is inflammatory. Instead he downplays the divisive – and destructive – messages his writings convey about race.

“There’s just issues that need to be addressed,” he says.

By his account he’s simply trying to help the public understand that white people also suffer from racially motivated crimes, and that the media coverage of these issues has been unfairly slanted. He says, for example, reporters often don’t tell readers the colour of a perpetrator’s skin, a detail he sees as important.

I love that last paragraph…‘by his account’ and ‘a detail he sees as important’…..a detail the BBC sees as crucial when in relation to Black people or Muslims…..but a white boy from the US South isn’t allowed to point it out.

The BBC ends with this…

Ms Page, who lives with her parents in Summerville, says Mr Rogers has been “dragged through the mud” because of the manifesto and its reference to his work.

She and Mr Rogers both seem stunned by the attention and are struggling to make sense of the role his work has played in the shootings.

She says: “Everyone just wants to turn the blame on somebody else.”

Herman Bradley, a retired postal worker, points to motion-detector lights over Mr Rogers’ garage, recently installed for security.

“He may not even have a firearm,” says Mr Bradley. “If he’s going to get one, he ought to get a shotgun.”

Interesting that…the BBC knows reporting this story linking Rogers to the murders might end up with him being lynched and yet it makes a determined attempt to link him to those murders.

Good old Aunty.

The BBC makes the ‘significant’ point that Rogers sells Rhodesian flags…indicating he is therefore racist…in which case Amazon must be also.

The BBC has no such problems with this flag which he also sells

No doubt the BBC has no such qualms about this flag…..

Rogers undoubtedly belongs to an organisation that is racist but the BBC’s attack on him is not based on that, it is based upon his challenge to Media organisations, like the BBC, to report impartially about Black crime.  This is the BBC defending itself as much as it enjoys attacking white people.

Funny thing…pre-election millionaire revolutionary, Russell Brand, was constantly on the BBC giving us the benefit of his wisdom.  He was the voice of the people who’d all lost trust in politicians (and you know, the political system that meant no one party would ever take a majority again), then he was the man who interviewed Ed Miliband, and then the man who dumped the Revolution and said vote Labour.

He has had his come uppance as the Bruvvers and Sistas revolt…

Curiously, despite it being all over other news providers the BBC has chosen to ignore this…but we do have the millionaire Charlotte Church to instruct us on the perils of being poor…

Charlotte Church: ‘Austerity is not the only option’

Then there’s this indepth report of the march which tells us that the good Russell was there and yet fails to mention his debagging….the caption for the photo…‘Comedian Russell Brand addressed crowds in London’s Parliament Square.’

The BBC reports The final speaker to address the crowds in London’s Parliament Square was comedian and activist Mr Brand, who said he wanted a society that was better for “all of us”.

“I thought fame and fortune would make me valuable. I found out that it is empty,” he said. “I am going to spend the rest of my life belonging to community, embracing community and helping in whatever way I can.”

Odd that he doesn’t give up all that wealth that has made him feel so empty and worthless.

And this ‘Voices from the crowd’…curiously all those voices telling Brand to ‘Fuck off!’ haven’t made it into the BBC report.

A fresh open thread to start the week…..so much bias out there….it shouldn’t  take long to fill this thread…

Lord Hall’s main defence of the BBC is that it is the central prop for the creative industries in the UK and without the BBC they would wither and die.

You might object to the idea that the BBC has such a dominant role in the media and its programming and that Hall thinks this should be maintained, and you would not be alone in objecting….ITV is objecting strongly to Hall’s plans to mobilise the BBC and move its tanks onto the commercial companies’ lawns….

A subsidised BBC Studios “would undermine incentives to invest in this sector and as a result reduce diversity and the drivers of creativity”.

So the BBC’s dominance would in fact ‘reduce diversity and the drivers of creativity‘, the opposite of what Hall claims.

ITV says that the power of the BBC and its established reputation would steamroller the competition…

“The BBC brand has been built-up throughout the BBC’s entire history as a public service broadcaster; it is a distinctive and well-recognised badge of quality that would be likely to open doors for [BBC Studios] to pitch on any project, either domestic or international.”

Having the BBC invade your territory and claim that it is doing so in order to save you is kind of reminiscent of the  Iraq War….maybe an insurgent Media ‘ISIS’ will wipe them both out in future.

And if a lack of the BBC largesse wipes out the creative industry surely a ‘creative’ industry would just recreate itself….being reliant on a single benefactor cannot be good and leads to an uncritical attachment to that source of funding, particularly dangerous if that source is also a source of a partisan highly political narrative.

Having artists, film makers and writers scavenge for the scraps from the BBC feast cannot be good for the creativity, originality or independence of the creative industries.

Andrew Marr introduced his show with the words that ‘The BBC’s enemies are circling’, a narrative that David Dimbleby also used….that anyone who criticises the BBC or believes it is need of reform is an ‘enemy’…

“The BBC has enemies, it has powerful enemies. It has powerful enemies in the press and powerful enemies in Westminster. Some for ideological reasons, some for straight commercial reasons.”

Demonising anyone who raises the possibility of change at the BBC as an enemy is nothing more than a rhetorical trick designed to present the BBC as a ‘victim’ under siege from those who seek only to damage it rather than to improve it with those suggested reforms.  The BBC is out to win the Public round to its own view of itself and its place in the world and its not shy about using every underhand tactic in the book to do so….and you might ask why the BBC is defending itself….certainly it can say what it does and what it won’t be able to do if it loses funding but making value judgements about the worth of its services and what the nation needs is not for the BBC to decide….suggesting that the BBC’s ‘enemies’ are enemies because of ideological reasons tells us that the BBC must therefore have its own opposing ideology….something that it is legally not meant to have and which it categorically denies having….but which this site and many other analysts repeatedly demonstrates it does have.

Lord Hall, being interviewed by Marr (21 mins in), seemed to be in almost total denial about the need for change with the licence fee….at most he would accept a bit of tinkering though he would be happy to have something along the lines of a household tax, which is essentially the licence fee but he wouldn’t have to bother collecting it, and it would raise more money….the impression given is that Hall far from accepting the need to rein back on the licence fee actually wants wants more money to be raised through the back door.

He claims that the Public are ever more supportive of the case for funding the BBC with a licence fee….but that doesn’t look to be true and hasn’t been for years…

Nearly half of those questioned – 49 per cent – said the charge should be scrapped entirely, while a further 21 per cent said the current £145.50 price should be reduced.

Hall says that this is a crucial time for the BBC and for the debate on its future….a debate that must include the Public’s voice….and yet he’s quite happy to ignore that voice, or actually make false claims about what the Public thinks, in his defence of the BBC licence fee.

The BBC’s record on listening to the Public is far from impressive…..immigration, Europe, climate change, politics, religion…all ‘crucial’ issues that the BBC completely ignores the Public discourse on.

The BBC got it completely wrong on the dominant national feel politically…the BBC are blaming the election polls but their coverage has been the same for the last 5 years so blaming the polls isn’t at all justified….and you might question why the BBC allows its coverage to be led by polls….is it not ‘independent’?

You just have to see what Labour politicians are saying now, and how the BBC ignores what they say, to judge how badly wrong the BBC got things…here’s Harriet Harman…

Many people felt Labour was not talking to them because it raised issues such as zero hours contracts, the living wage and food banks,  she said. 

Ms Harman believes  a common problem all over Britain was  that voters felt the party “doesn’t talk about me”. Labour was seen as supporting “people on benefits” but not those who “work hard.” She said: “It doesn’t matter how many leaflets you deliver if the message is not right.”

And here’s Andy Burnham…

In an interview, Mr Burnham criticised the ‘spiteful’ plan for a mansion tax – saying even his mother was turned off by it. ‘My mum picked up the phone to me and said: “This never works, people don’t like it, it sounds like the 1970s,’ he said.

He said he had never been given the chance to argue against the proposal, saying it made voters think Labour was against anyone who succeeded and made money.

The BBC doesn’t seem too interested in raking over those issues…nor in challenging the Labour politicians volte face after having supported Miliband and his policies throughout the last five years.  Indeed on Marr’s show as they looked at the newspapers one story was that Mail one about Burnham….Marr, instead of examining what Burnham said dismissed it, without saying what it actually was, as Burnham ‘veering strongly to the right’.

Nick Robinson recently targeted David Cameorn in a piece of BBC hatchetwork by claiming he had ‘threatened to close down the BBC’.  Robinson claimed that this was seen as a veiled threat and put a lot of pressure upon BBC staff.

Just what does he make of Andrew Marr saying that BBC middle managers will be ‘culled’ and that there will be a ‘bloodthirsty slaughter of BBC staff’ as he spoke to Hall about cuts to BBC management jobs?  Any stress or pressure arising from Hall’s looming cuts and Marr’s somewhat callous words….the threatened job losses being real and not some politicised apocalyptic fantasy dreamt up by a BBC reporter?

Marr’s guests cast their eye over the papers..Andrew Roberts, Historian, Rupa Huq from Labour and Marian Prentoulis from Syriza who for some reason was hotfoot from an anti-Austerity march in the UK.

Roberts was kept off partisan politics and looked at ISIS whilst Huq was given a free ride to spout Labour propaganda and Prentoulis came at everything from her own far left perspective. Marr said he would ‘come to Labour later’…but of course, as shown above, he quickly dismissed that story as Burnham turning out to be a closet Tory.

[Trying to think who Huq reminds me of….Anne Widdacombe springs to mind.]

Not exactly a rigorous programme in any way, the Truth may be out there but I think it’s pretty safe from any BBC search parties.