Interesting that the BBC doesn’t mention Charlie Hebdo at all in this report about an atheist blogger being hacked to death by ‘Masked attackers’.

The blogger, Ananta Bijoy Das , was a critic of ‘religious intolerance’…..eventually the BBC admits that an ‘Islamist’ has been arrested.  Is an ‘Islamist’ a Muslim or not in the BBC lexicon?  Did Ananta Bijoy Das provoke Muslims and insult their religion and so, you know, deserve to die?

The BBC tends to the view that Charlie Hebdo and the exhibition of Mohammed cartoons in the US that was attacked recently were ‘provocative’ and the people involved almost deserved to die….or at least we shouldn’t really mourn their deaths as they brought them foolishly upon themselves by ‘insulting’ Muslims.

The BBC is curiously quiet about who is to ‘blame’ for the deaths of these other people who express criticism of Islam in particular and end up dead as a result.  Why no mention of Charlie Hebdo in the report?  The BBC mentions the deaths of other Bloggers critical of Islam murderd by Muslims so where is the link to one of the most high profile  and politically significant of such attacks?

Does the BBC think these bloggers are somehow ‘better’ people? Perhaps the colour of their skin defines how the BBC inteprets whether or not they can be killed with impunity or not. Does the BBC not link to Charlie Hebdo because it thinks Charlie Hebdo deserved their fate and doesn’t want to give credibility to their criticism of Islam by linking them to other more ‘respectable’ critics of the same religion?  Of course we have seen that reaction before from the BBC and the Left….the EDL apparently ‘polluting’ the public discourse whilst other people, such as Peter Tatchell, who said exactly the same as the EDL, are heros.

The BBC’s take on what is an Islamist:

Ian Jolly, the BBC newsroom’s style guide editor, offers this guidance to BBC journalists; he starts by distinguishing between ‘Islamic’ and ‘Islamist’:

“The first simply refers to anything related to the religion. The second is derived from Islamism, defined in the dictionary as ‘Islamic militancy or fundamentalism’.

“Our own view is that an Islamist is someone who derives a political course from Islam. But it’s vital that we make clear what sort of course that is. For instance, there are Islamist political parties in various countries and Egypt has an Islamist president.

“So, if we are talking about Islamists pursuing a violent course, we should say so – ‘Islamist militants’, ‘Islamist rebels’, ‘Islamist extremists’. But context is, as always, important too and once we have established what we’re referring to then ‘Islamists’ on its own can be an acceptable shorthand.

 

Amusing to hear the BBC skirting the tricky subject of BBC bias this morning as John Whittingdale, BBC sceptic or is that licence fee ‘denier’, is appointed Culture Secretary.  They did manage to get out, without choking on their lattes and cinnamon buns, that the Tories might be upset about the BBC’s ‘supposed’ left leaning tendencies, but didn’t really put over the real anger that the Tories feel about the BBC’s election coverage…nor did they bother to explore the issue.

One big question the BBC fails to ask itself, and you know it would ask a similar question about the Mail or a Murdoch publication,  is ‘Is the BBC biased?’.

Not sure how the BBC can avoid investigating that if it takes itself seriously as an unbiased, impartial and accurate provider of news to the public….one legally obliged to be impartial by its charter unlike the newspapers.

The BBC only a couple of days ago was trumpeting the fact that ‘TV’ had had the biggest influence on the outcome of the election…..if that is true then the BBC, as the most dominant source of TV news, must question its role in that election and the professionalism and credibility of its output…..especially in light of the BBC having misinterpreted the whole tenor of the election campaign pesenting Labour as an almost certainty for government in an alliance of some kind with the SNP….and misjudged the issues that the election was being fought on preferring to present the Labour narrative of inequality and poverty as the defining issues that people were concerned about, or should be concerned about.

Will the BBC Trust commission a report into the BBC’s election campaign? How the BBC reported on the election is surely central to its existence in many respects.  It should play a crucial role in providing accurate, coherent and impartial information for the Public to inform their decision making in the voting booth.  The question is did it do that?

No.  And many, many people think that.

Even if there weren’t so many critics of the BBC’s coverage the Trust should initiaite an inquiry just from a professional point of view.  Most organisations would have a post mortem of their performance especially concerning such an important and high profile event as the election.

Wait out.

This is initially encouraging;

Anyone else listened to BBC 5 Live today? It sounded to me like they were having a collective emotional breakdown following the trouncing of Labour. There was a stream of Labour and SNP mouthpieces on to assure us that whilst Cameron has a “thin” majority, in-fighting over the EU will destroy this. The SNP rabble were allowed to spout about “forcing” the UK Government to accept their “anti-austerity” agenda. It’s amazing to witness all this turmoil within the BBC. I also listened to the BBC Nolan Show and Stephen Nolan was leading the revolt against “Tory cuts that will affect the ..cough..most vulnerable”. The truth is that the BBC was a cheerleader for Labour and like Labour, it has been confounded by the voice of the people. Great to see and hear.

The BBC has a pretty rigid set of social and political preconceptions that people, politicians, activists, commentators and Joe Public have to conform to or be cast out into the wilderness as ‘untouchables’.  The BBC is not a tolerant organisation, it does not accept difference despite its own grandiose self-proclaimed celebration of diversity.

Janet Daley in the Telegraph expands on the Left’s intimidation and bullying tactics…

In the end, what does the Left (and its army of media friends) accomplish by all this activist pressure on public opinion? In a circle of mutually congratulatory agreement, the liberal establishment may demonise the social attitudes of the majority until they are blue in the face. They may succeed – as indeed they obviously have – in making ordinary people afraid to utter their real views. But there is a dreadful price to be paid: if you browbeat people into withdrawing from the debate, then you will never know how robust their convictions are – until it is too late and you have catastrophically lost an election, or staked your professional credibility on unsound predictions.

This is the danger of the activist trap. As I said last week, if you are surrounded by a crowd of people whose opinions are identical to yours then together you can make a great deal of noise. But what you don’t hear is the silence of those outside the crowd. If parties of the Left are ever to become electable again, they will have to stop shouting and listen.

I won’t list the things we are not allowed to discuss on the BBC, the list is long, numerous and full of the usual suspects.   The BBC’s worldview is extremely narrow and uninformed, it sets the parameters of debate and limits what you can say in the hope that it can limit what you think…so far so Orwellian.  Of course the Internet has helped break the BBC’s stranglehold on free speech, free thought and the democratic, free flowing use of information…knowledge being power…giving strength to the arm….perhaps the Tories won a majority because of that…hard to prove but a quite probable likelihood that the BBC’s narrative was broken and the social media got its message out.

Here are a couple of examples of narratives that the BBC will not accept and in fact actively works against…the first a ‘peacenik’ who offered herself as a human shield to Iraq in 1991 but who now, after working with American forces in Iraq after the last invasion, has become a supporter of ‘liberal interventionism’ and the use of military power to maintain the peace.

The second is a female Pakistani, brought up in Saudi Arabia and now safely living the dream in Canada who talks of her conversion to the idea that free speech is absolutely essential and, well…

‘It’s important because religion.. all of it… needs to be questioned – too many humans blindly put their faith in it. It’s important because an instance from Mo’s life was used to justify the killing of 132 children in Pakistan last December.

It’s important.’

The ‘peacenik’ is Emma Sky who says in the Sunday Times (you need to read the whole thing really to appreciate the full import of what she says) that…

‘My opinions have changed…I understand more now what you can achieve with forcer.  I was aware before of the problems of force, the limitations of miltary force.  I have now seen first hand what it is that can be done.

I had no interaction with the American military before.  I had always been concerned about the US propping up dictators in the Middle East.  Now I am more concerned about disorder.  Before, I was worried about state violation of human rights; now I have seen what happens when the state collapses.

I am much more concerned with order.  I have come to appreciate what the US military can do, its capability.  You look at the world for the last 70 years and think stability was kept by Pax Americana.

Now I have a much deeper understanding of the role that America has played in the world.  When you look at American withdrawal from the Middle east, and look at the consequences of that withdrawal, you go ‘oooh’…the consequences of disengagement are tragic.’

Here she is in an interview….one thing of note is that she says the major mistake that was made in Iraq was not encouraging the notion of being ‘Iraqi’…rather there was a tendency to encourage identity politics, multiculturalism based upon religion or ethnicity…Sunnis, Shias and Kurds……which led to tension and infighting that might have been avoided….

MARGARET WARNER: You said you thought the big mistake was for the Americans and the British to try to get Iraq to reorganize on the basis of ethnicity and sect. What was the alternative?

EMMA SKY: I think the alternative was to create the sense of Iraqiness.

And you organize based on regions and towns. And so you don’t say we will have 20 percent Sunnis, 20 percent Kurds, 60 percent Shia. You actually think, we will have representatives from Basra, from Anbar, from Irbil. And that way, you’re building up geographical representation, not based on the sect and ethnicity.

Instead, we wanted to build a pluralistic society, but what this did was institutionalize sectarianism. So, there was nothing about being Iraqi. It was all about being a subcomponent.

Here is the second person who overturns the BBCs preconceived prejudices about Islam, racism, free speech and Charlie Hebdo…..

A Former Apologist on Free Speech & Tribalism

Being a Pakistani child, raised in Saudi Arabia left me feeling like I never really belonged in Pakistan. My upbringing in Saudi was too westernized for me to ever fit in, in my motherland. I have never felt more alien anywhere else, in fact. Yet I shared the same pigmentation, the same struggles with a strict, patriarchal culture, the same language, the same history…. I didn’t belong in Saudi because they have strict rules putting foreigners in their place. We have no rights there, regardless of how many years we call it home. My siblings were born there, and knew no other place, but Saudi ..they were still told at every step that they were foreigners. It’s kind of hard to feel a sense of belonging in a place like that.

In teenage years, I searched for my tribe through subculture. The place I fit in terms of interests and ideas was predominantly white. Dog collars and fishnets, were fun for self-exploration…the ‘goth’ subculture gave me a huge sense of belonging when I needed it most in young adulthood. But I was still the ‘token’ brown girl. Despite many in the ‘scene’ having similar values and ways of thinking to mine, no one really understood the struggles of belonging to a culture like mine.

When we moved to Canada, I felt like I was home for the first time in my life. Only because my city (Toronto) embraces the diversity I’ve always been accustomed to (as an expat amongst other various expats). Anyway, I digress… my point is, that these constant instances of ‘unbelonging’ everywhere helped me dismantle my tribal feelings. It took a while, and I still have feelings I recognize but try not to cave to.

She says she used to think that critics of Islam shouldn’t be so vocal and should raise matters within the community…..

How naive I was. No… Ayaan, could not take it up internally within the community. Obviously, she would be killed for even trying. Anyone that raises their voice from within – in any context…is at the very least, collectively shunned (I would soon learn this for myself). Any critic, or any challenger of Islam is shut down on many fronts. You’ll lose liberal Western support in this regard for standing up for women’s rights (bizarre, I know), you’ll lose progressive Muslim support too. You’re basically left with conservatives, anti-immigrants and conspiracy theorists as allies. This happens because many of us internalize blasphemy concepts to some degree…if we perceive someone as challenging something ‘sacred’, even with the most valid reasons, we just cannot offer support. We don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, even if that means politely tolerating homophobia, misogyny, oppression.

At large, we are taught to think of imperialism as a white-on-colour occurrence. Rarely do we acknowledge the Arab imperialism spreading throughout the Muslim world, even today.

And so on…read the whole thing…..and when you next hear the BBC piously lecturing us about white racism, Islamophobia or the evil British empire think of what this girl says and compare.

Maybe we’re not so bad, as the BBC tars us, after all.

‘Overall, television coverage of the whole election has not covered itself, or anything else, in glory.  Too often it has bought the line fed to it by pollsters and pundits on one hand and been childishly confrontational on the other.

This should be the last time that Television attempts to force the political reality into a preassigned format.

The BBC needs fewer gimmicks, more real journalists and a new helmsman; ITV needs to be less deferential to the BBC; Channel 4 needs to grow up.’

AA Gill in the Sunday Times today.

Listening to the BBC news in the car and I heard that Mandelson had pilloried Miliband for not laying out Labour’s plan for economic growth… the web report doesn’t quote him on growth but limits itself to this….

Comparing Labour’s economic strategy to a polo mint “with a great hole in the middle”, he said it gave the impression it was “for the poor, hate the rich, ignoring completely the vast swathe of the population who exist in between who do have values like ours”.

Mandelson’s words reminded me of something from earlier in the week that I let go by at the time, a Nicky Campbell debate on Tuesday in which he asks ‘Are the politicans failing to talk about the issues that are important to you?’

Now if he had asked that back say in January you might have thought yes, let’s stick our oar in and make ourselves heard but two days before the election, you have to be kidding!, and is the BBC really trying to lay the blame for a lack of debate over a wide range of subjects at the politician’s door?

Surely it was the BBC’s job to broaden the debate and ask those relevant questions about subjects the politicians want to skirt around such as education, foreign policy and immigration…and yes Labour’s plans for growth….the one subject they did want to get their teeth into was the Tory’s plans for welfare reforms and the £12 bn of savings/cuts….funny that.

The BBC had a bad election as I said before….it showed clear bias in what subjects it concentrated on, who got the headlines and who it sought to undermine….but it also had a bad election in its role as a news and current affairs broadcaster just from a professional point of view, failing to explore all the issues and challenge the politicans of all colours and creeds about them.  It had a very lazy election.

Just as Mandelson says Labour was intent solely on bashing the rich and presenting itself as the party of the poor the BBC followed the same agenda telling us that inequality was THE major political narrative of our time.  How often did the BBC report from the poorest areas of a city or region, from foodbanks or concentrated on Zero Hour Contracts when such contracts make up a very small portion of the employment market and around 2/3rds of people on them are happy to be so?  This was the BBC that painted the bleakest picture of the NHS as a failed or failing enterprise rather than having a balanced look at what it provides…certainly it is under strain but not as a result of Coaliton changes.  Then we had the ‘living wage’, non-doms, the bedroom tax and the apparent lack of productivity.

All Labour policy concerns given headline status by the BBC.

What did the Tories get?  The sole big Tory splash that I can remember the BBC going big on was the Tory NHS announcement…but that of course was only to try to rip it apart with claims that the promise was unfunded.  However, despite a couple of interviews when Miliband was on the rack over his NHS plans, the BBC machine ignored the fact that Labour’s own plans were unfunded…the Mansion tax and tax avoidance money making schemes ridiculed by most commentators.

Labour promised to spend £2.5 billion above whatever the Tories promised….and yet even that £2.5 bn was, as said, unfunded….so how on earth would they fund the rest?

That takes us to growth and Labour’s lack of plans to increase it…central to funding all its promises, and especially in addressing the ‘living standards crisis’, unless they aimed to fund it all by soaking the rich…..where were the BBC questions asking about this important factor in Labour’s utopian dream?  How was Labour going to fund that improvement in living standards that was the backbone of its attack on the Tories?

The IFS, led by a man with links to the Labour party, told us that Labour could make very few cuts, borrow more and still cut the deficit…just how would that work?  The BBC didn’t ask.  Even when the BBC did quote something from the IFS that criticised both parties the criticism of Labour was soon massaged out of the news.

The BBC failed both in its remit to be impartial and also just from a professional stand point…failing to explore the issues, failing to challenge the Parties on subjects they didn’t want to talk about and failing to really get what the Public thought important into the debate…which is all a bit ironic as the BBC claims it was at the heart of it all…

Election 2015: TV debates ‘most influential’ for voters

More than a third of voters were influenced by the TV debates between the political leaders in the run-up to the election, a survey has found.

According to a Panelbase survey of 3,019 people, 38% were influenced by the debates, 23% by TV news coverage and 10% by party political broadcasts.

The research group said TV was “by far the most influential media source”, outscoring newspapers and social media.

Of those surveyed by Panelbase, 62% said TV coverage overall had been the most influential in informing them about the general election, the parties and their policies – helping them form their opinions.

TV wielded far more power on those surveyed than newspapers at 25%, websites at 17%, radio at 14%, and speaking to family and friends at 14%.

A paradox there….if TV coverage is so influential why is there not a Labour government?  Perhaps the answer is that  we would have had an even bigger Tory majority if the BBC had been less, far, far less, biased.

Anyone else seen Chuka Umunna interviewed by Andrew Marr this morning? I was amazed at the easy ride he was given by Marr and how he was even able to get away with saying that Labour had NOT mismanaged the economy the last time they were in power! London-based liberal elitists such as Umunna appeal to the BBC – even better that he is black. Whether the trade unions are quite as indulgent we will see. It was touching to see Umunna and Mandelson unite around the vital need for the UK to stay in the EU  – with Andrew Marr’s smiling agreement.

I can see that the AFTERMATH thread is overflowing. So, here’s a new one. BBC still distraught and have decided it is timely to hype up Conservative splits over the EU as well as continuing to pander to the irrelevance of the SNP. The floor is yours…

What would the political landscape be after a PR driven ‘earthquake’?

The BBC has kindly provided us with a breakdown…

UKIP would have won 83 seats and the SNP only 25.

Leave you to express your thoughts on that one.

DB on this site (h/t Craig at Is the BBC Biased?) noticed that the BBC’s Hugh Sykes was in a frenzy of sefl-righteousness about the Times using the word ‘earthquake’ as Craig reveals…

I hope the @thetimes will apologise to the relatives of the recently dead in #Nepal for describing the #UK #election2015 as an earthquake.

— HughSykes (@HughSykes) May 9, 2015

 

I hope the BBC will apologise for a similar use just one day ago…….

UK ‘political earthquake’ rocks EU

The words “political earthquake” have been translated into numerous European languages today, making front page news across the continent.

The mood is possibly best summed up in the Le Monde headline: Triumph for Cameron. Concern for Europe.

Of course the Times is from the Murdoch stable and no doubt the ever more dumb Sykes is not on a sanctimonious moral crusade but a political and ideological one.

Looking at Sykes’ Twitter feed he has this gem…which could indicate something…wishful thinking possibly….and ironically from the Times…..