Category Archives: BBC bias

Well, Miliband got to speak in the Commons today. Just over a month ago, the BBC was feverishly pushing the idea that he would now be PM, hooked up to the SNP, and delivering the leftist policies so central to the BBC outlook. Sadly for them, it didn’t work out so all we get is this very sympathetic piece from the Comrades to their fallen Comrade.

I did an interview on the topic of BBC bias for the Sunday Guardian, a major newspaper in India which is not a left wing rag – unlike its UK daily namesake. Here is one line from it…

Vance says ”Politicians are scared of the sheer monopolistic power of the BBC, it is not just an anachronism, it is menace”.

I will link the entire article when published. No punches were pulled.

I saw this headline on the BBC today.

Islamic State conflict: 10,000 militants killed in nine months – US

Islamic State is a TERRORIST organisation. It seeks to impose its radical Islamist agenda by killing and maiming anyone that disagrees with it. It has burnt people alive. It decapitates. It machines guns. It terrorises to achieve its end. So WHY does the morally bankrupt BBC not call it for what it is? I am sick of these euphemisms being deployed by the BBC to avoid using the T word lest this imply a degree of judgement on these savages.

Let me start by saying that like so many other people I was saddened to read of the death of former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy at such an early age. The loss to his family and friends will be immense. However, does anyone else find the BBC coverage of this excessive? Time after time in the past TWO days, I have turned on the various BBC channels to hear glowing eulogy after another paid to Kennedy. It makes me wonder how it can be that someone who was such a political giant was comprehensively rejected at the polls just a few weeks back? Kennedy was well to the LEFT of Labour and he was also avowedly anti the Iraq war – as was the BBC. I wonder does this colour the scale of the coverage afforded? I am not seeking to be mean spirited or unsympathetic BUT the grief-fest the BBC has been engaging in seems way too much. Thoughts?

Middle of the week and time for a new one of these. Here is where you detail the bias.

James Harding has made a resignation speech, or rather if the contents of the speech are a true reflection of what he actually thinks then he should perhaps consider it a resignation speech and walk the plank.

Alternatively the speech could be a sign that he has given up the arduous task of thinking for himself and has merely resigned himself to the groupthink inherent in working for the BBC…..living in the Bubble in total denial about what the BBC does, completely divorced from reality, detached from the real world….for instance the small quote at the head of this post is one Harding thinks worthy of highlighting on the webpage….and yet it is totally at odds with how most people see the BBC and indeed the experience of anyone who has the temerity to actually complain to the BBC and receives a swift kick to the crown jewels.

The speech is long and packed full of Harding’s thoughts on many subjects based around the BBC’s election coverage….most of which are highly questionable claims by Harding.  As I say there is a lot of information to wade through but this quote stands out as the most egregious claim from Harding, one that demonstrates how the BBC just doesn’t understand what is going on…

‘I think we delivered against our own editorial ambitions. Forgive me, but I think we put on the television event of the campaign – arguably, the event of the campaign – namely the Question Time in Leeds. It was one of a series of events at the BBC, which, like no other news organisation, gave voice to the voter.’

The Leeds Question Time where Miliband got his backside handed to him on a plate…certainly that was a major event of the campaign but it had absolutely nothing to do with the BBC other than they were in the lucky position to be filming it. Harding’s claim also neglects the fact that most Question Time audiences are jam packed with left wing activists and more often than not the BBC fails to give that prized ‘voice’ to the real voters.

The Leeds audience was the star of the show and not the BBC.  What we heard when Miliband was hung, drawn and quartered on the deficit by that audience was what the BBC has failed, deliberately failed many would say, to do.  The BBC has spent the last 5 years effectively dodging giving Labour a hard time about its economic record in office and the real causes of the economic crash.

To now claim that the BBC was central to a major election event putting a Labour politician’s feet to the fire is laughable.

Anyway, back to the main body of the speech now that we’ve cherry picked the most outrageous, well there is more, a lot more outrageous, stuff.

Harding starts with this….‘A few weeks on from polling day, what can we say of the BBC’s coverage of the General Election of 2015?  Let’s start, not by patting ourselves on the back, but by taking a look at our election coverage with a critical eye.’

Already he’s in denial…the speech is one huge puff piece for the BBC and an attack on the politicians….as for that ‘critical eye’.…do I even have to say anything?

Harding blames the pollsters for misleading everyone…‘A serious critique of the coverage must address the problem with the pollsters. ‘

Well yes they got it wrong, but it wasn’t the polls that steered the BBC’s coverage which for 5 years has been blatantly critical of the Coalition and supportive of Labour’s policies, it wasn’t the polls that made the BBC put Labour policy announcements as headline news day in day out whilst Tory policy news headlines quickly disappeared to be replaced by ‘Labour says Tory policies are rubbish’ which gives the lie to another Harding claim…’Also, we have to ask ourselves whether we did enough to hold in check the political machines of each party.’  The BBC put itself at the service of the Labour Party.

He tells us that ‘And, of course, the polls were central to the politicians’ campaigns, too, so it would have been impossible to ignore them. ‘  As I understand it both the Tories and Labour’s own internal polls gave an entirely different picture to that presented by the polling companies.

Harding gets one thing right…‘We and all other media organisations allowed the poll numbers to infect our thinking: there was too much ‘coalitionology’ as a result.’  The BBC gave the impression that we were heading for a Labour led government in some sort of coalition with the SNP….to the BBC it was a done deal and spent endless hours discussing the ‘likely’ scenarios.

Here Harding again demonstrates how out of touch he is with how people see the BBC and what it is really like…the first sentence is interesting though…..very unBBC..

‘To be clear, I’m not one of the people who subscribes to the view that if you’re getting criticised from all sides you must be getting it broadly right. In fact, part of my job is to listen and assess the merit of each complaint, each request, each argument. And the fact is that a fiercely fought election generated a lot of strong feelings: Labour was angry about the focus on the SNP, the Tories regularly questioned our running orders and editorial decisions, the Lib Dems felt they weren’t getting sufficient airtime, the Greens complained about being treated like a protest movement not a party, UKIP railed against what they saw as an establishment shut-out, the DUP felt Northern Ireland parties were being treated as second class citizens, the SNP questioned what they saw as metropolitan London bias at the BBC. And the list goes on.’

Harding lists the complaints from the various Parties….and dismisses them…..yet reading them you realise every one rings true.

Then we get to the real gist of Harding’s own über whinge…

‘But there’s criticism of the BBC’s newsrooms that is unfair and unfounded. Take, for example, the fabled left-wing bias. I find this increasingly hard to take seriously. In the light of the Conservative victory, what’s the argument? That the BBC’s subtle, sophisticated left-wing message was so very subtle, so very sophisticated that it simply passed the British people by?’

So the BBC can’t be biased to the left because the Tory Party won the election…..childishly daft reasoning, if reason it can be said to be.  The Tories are in power despite the BBC throwing everything at them including the kitchen sink…..not a city sink estate has been left untrawled for single mothers, destitute and broken by Tory welfare reforms, not a hospital A&E department has been allowed to go to work without a BBC number cruncher counting the daily ‘catastrophic crises’, not a foodbank has gone unvisited so that we learn of the desperate plight of those left behind by the Coalition’s heartless policies that leave the poor to starve.

The reality is that the Tories are in power because, as the Leeds audience showed, in the real world Labour was recognised as the party that would heap yet more economic misery and ruin upon us, led by a man whose incompetence knew no bounds and who inspired absolutely no confidence in people….I suspect Miliband was possibly the real reason Scots voted for the SNP in droves and nothing to do with their policies.

The BBC utterly failed to report Miliband’s disconnect with the voters.  It was the BBC that held Miliband up as a new kind of politician who was shaping the political narrative about a new world order, a new form of politics, a new form of society, a new form of economic system.  Unfortunately Miliband was none of those things. There was no real substance to his politics, each policy announcement was carefully weighted and crafted to please the crowd and catch the next news headline, the BBC being very obliging on this, but as soon as they were put under the slightest scrutiny, not something the BBC was prone to do, they melted away like the lightweight airhead policies they were.

The BBC entirely misjudged the mood of the country and Labour’s politics believing them to be at the forefront of the ‘inequality’ Zeitgeist apparently sweeping the world.

Harding goes on to tell a complete lie by connecting two of Nigel Farage’s statements and reporting one as a consequence of the other…

‘I’ve been asked whether politicians made the link between the BBC’s election coverage and the future funding of the BBC? Mostly, not. But, along the way, there were people from all parties who made the connection between their dissatisfaction with the election coverage and the fact that the next government will set the licence fee and the terms of the Royal Charter. Some did so explicitly. Nigel Farage, for example, said he was unhappy at UKIP’s treatment on the BBC and proposed cutting the licence fee by two thirds.

Fargae made no such statement about cutting the BBC funding due to its biased audiences in the debates.

Here is what Farage said about restructuring the BBC…

“I would like to see the BBC cut back to the bone to be purely a public service broadcaster with its international reach and I think it could do that with a licence fee that is a third of what it currently is.”

Even the BBC’s own report on his statement makes no claim that it is linked to BBC bias despite noting that he thought one BBC audience had been biased.

So no Farage did not ‘explicitly’, or even implicitly, threaten the BBC with a cut in licence fee funding in retaliation for its bias.  Harding is mistaken.

Finally I’ll end on this from Harding...’In the months ahead and the political contests to come, politicians may not always like our news judgments. But we’re not here for them, we’re here for the public.’

That’s just not true.  The ‘Public and their views are the absolute last concern of the BBC.  The BBC was there for the Labour Party year in year out for the last 5 years and in everything the BBC has done over those years it has sought to challenge the Public mood, the Public’s own values and beliefs whether on immigration, climate, the EU or Islam.  The BBC has a world view that is at odds with the majority of the people of this country and represents not ‘The Public’ but a very small group of likeminded people, the liberal, metropolitan elite, who want to maintain their grip on power that the Media bestows upon them and is happy to abuse that power to keep themselves in those positions of influence.

That’s why they hate the internet and the Blogger.  The internet democratises information and stops uncomfortable truths from disappearing and history being rewritten.

The BBC does not give a voice to the People, only very select, approved people, it does have that ‘fabled left wing bias’, it isn’t ‘alive to its critics’ as Harding proves in his speech, it is defiantly unself-critical and is utterly and implausibly living in the very rarified atmosphere of its own little elitist bubble.

It is an irony that an organisation like the BBC with its enormous resources for news gathering and analysis could so badly misunderstand the world.  The reason for that is because it is institutionally left wing and any recruits soon learn to toe the line….the famous groupthink that Harding denies exists.  Never mind making efforts to employ disabled weather presenters, how about employing a lot more ‘right wing’ minded journalists…..so many that group think towards the left becomes unnecessary as people with right wing views do not feel isolated and under pressure to conform, left and right balancing each other and working as checks on each others work….after all that is the supposed essence of the BBC, providing a balanced, impartial news service not becoming some sort of social service providng jobs for life’s waifs and strays.

The BBC is very selective in how it treats Christians. If they are arguing for “gay marriage’ – the BBC sees them as heroes. And now, if they are demanding that God be called “she” as much as “he’ then the BBC rallies around the cause. The fact that Christ starts the prayer he taught his disciples as “Our Father who art in heaven…” seems a slight detail. I like the bit a the end of the article which casually states…

‘There has been no comparable movement in Islam, which is less open to this kind of reinterpretation. Christianity and Judaism, however, seem to be in the process of a major continuing realignment.”

Of course the BBC will sometimes run with the Conservative narrative if it happens to synch with the BBC’s visceral contempt for private industry. Today they are merrily spinning this story…

The government has announced measures to clamp down on “rip-off” staffing agencies used by the NHS to plug gaps in nursing and doctor rotas. It will set a maximum hourly rate for temps and cap the amount trusts that are struggling financially can spend. The agencies’ body says they are being scapegoated “for the NHS’s own mismanagement of workforce planning”.

The agencies are dead right. No one FORCES the NHS to use their services and as usual when the NHS is questioned it is ALWAYS someone else fault. The BBC like to run this as it paints private enterprise as vultures feeding off our brave and noble NHS. The same NHS which shows a lamentable control of budgets.

No sooner had Cameron announced his intention to double free provision for three and four-year-olds in England than the BBC ran this angle on it..

“Childcare changes threatened by underfunding, providers say”

I suppose with Labour in its death throes the BBC feels an obligation  to use its multi-billion pound media soapbox (extorted from the License payer) to attack the Conservatives but I don’t see why I should fund this outrageous bias.

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

‘Under the Conservative and then Labour governments, radical preachers toured Britain trying to rally and isolate Muslim youth. They said that to be a Muslim you had to sympathise with your Muslim ‘brothers’ anywhere in the world. What you should not do was to feel any of that gratitude or desire to assimilate which had existed in their parents’ generation.

Everywhere, this madness was allowed to spread. Religiously segregated areas were accepted, separate values were allowed to thrive and, eventually, even separate rules of law tolerated and encouraged. All the time, we pretended to ourselves that this was simply ‘diversity’.

Many Muslims came to this country precisely to leave their religion’s medievalists behind. It would be a tragedy if we stood by while their children — British children to whom we have a duty of care — were indoctrinated by a reconstituted version of that medievalism here.’

Douglas Murray in the Spectator

The Islamist advance  upon our society continues unabated, storming ahead ever faster as people in the Media, politics, academia and the Institutions cower before the Islamic blitz, the ‘soft jihad’ launched against them in a battle of ideologies that the Islamists are winning as they either silence the media or force them to adopt the Islamist narrative….the BBC itself ‘groomed’ and recruited to the cause.

The BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet has won the Sandford St Martin trustees’ award for her work in raising the profile of religion in the media.

The BBC director of news and current affairs, James Harding, said: “This award recognises the profound influence of religion on the world we live in and Lyse has fearlessly brought us greater understanding of religion from some of the most perilous places on the planet.”

Anyone who has any experience of the BBC’s approach to reporting anything about Islam the religion, or anything connected to it, knows that ‘fearless’ is not a word that would commonly be associated with their reporting.  To suggest that the BBC brings a greater understanding of Islam to the British people is laughable….the BBC knows that such understanding would lead to extreme and justifiable concerns about a religion that is so intolerant that it preaches unbelievers should be killed.

The BBC boasts of its accurate and trustworthy journalism...’ “In times of crisis and in countries lacking media freedom, people around the world turn to the BBC for trusted and accurate information,” said Fran Unsworth, director of the BBC World Service group.’

Let’s have a look at just how trustworthy and accurate some of that is in regard to religious issues that the BBC so  ‘fearlessly’ explores……

We’ve had a Muslim presenter on the Today programme telling us that the Protestant DUP have views that are ‘deeply unpleasant and backward’.…would the BBC allow such sentiments to be expressed about Islam? Probably not as the presenter, when she joined the Today programme, said that she intended to use the programme as a platform to improve people’s perceptions of Islam and we know that the BBC has held secret talks with Muslim activists to shape the news so that Islam and Muslims are presented in a favourable light.

Then on Friday we had John Humphrys on the Today programme (08:49) doing the Jihadist’s work for them as he declared that a questionnaire sent out by Waltham Council to primary schools as part of its programme to build an integrated community was racist…..saying ‘It was racist wasn’t it?’  So little doubt he believed that.

Humphrys was shocked that such a questionnaire could be sent to primary school children and that they could be ‘tested on how extreme they were’ as he claimed.

This us what the council intended…

What is the BRIT project?

Being and Belonging’ is a free education resource for primary schools designed to equip teaching staff with the means to discuss the complex issues of multiple identities and social exclusion. It encourages children to reflect on themselves, the communities in which they live and any challenges or grievances they may be experiencing.

Whilst these topics may feel far removed from your day to day classroom conversations, the consequences of social exclusion are far reaching and are apparent in today’s society in many forms. Whilst action itself is often limited to a small minority of individuals, the effects are felt by everyone in the community – including our children and young people.

Education is seen as key by various stakeholders in tackling these social problems and we believe this package goes some way in addressing this within your school setting.

Waltham is in East London and one of those celebrated diverse and multi-cultural communities and clearly there are issues that need addressing especially in areas that are less well off than others.  The council’s actions seem reasonably sensible and inline with action recommended by others.

Of course Humphrys never mentions why he thinks the questionnaire is racist…..it is because many of the pupils are Muslim…..note to Humphrys…Islam is not a race….it’s an ideology that has some serious problems….were the BBC and Ofsted ‘racist’ when they raised a similar issue with schools?…..if not why  is Waltham ‘racist’?….

Pupils at private Muslim school in east London did not know difference between Sharia and British law, Ofsted says http://bbc.in/1F7fync 

In 1999 the BBC  had no concerns about ‘racism’ when  examining the attitudes of white pupils…..not Christian, or Jewish or Buddhist but ‘White’….so clearly based upon race…..

Schools serving predominantly white communities are not responding adequately to the problems of racism, claim researchers.

In the week that the Stephen Lawrence inquiry report called for a greater awareness of ethnic diversity in schools, researchers from the Children’s Legal Centre charity at the University of Essex have claimed that teachers are failing to recognise the extent of racism in schools.

The researchers carried out a confidential survey of 15 secondary schools in East Anglia, all with a majority of white pupils, to see how racism was addressed in lessons and how it was tackled as a problem among pupils.

In conclusion the researchers say the schools “did not adequately prepare pupils for life in a multicultural society”.

In the report’s recommendations, they call for “guidance and support” for teachers to help them prevent racism in schools. This could involve the Commission for Racial Equality setting up a code for good practice in anti-racist education.

Other proposals call for training for teachers in multicultural awareness, the inspection by the Office for Standards in Education of school anti-racist policies and the involvement of representatives from local ethnic minority communities.

There is also a call for a European Union-wide project to encourage schools with a small number of ethnic minority pupils to do more to counter racism.

You can see there is a direct parallel between that 1999 survey and its intentions and Waltham’s, race or religion aside…..so why is Waltham ‘racist’?  Does it not also have to  “adequately prepare pupils for life in a multicultural society”?

Maybe if we had a look at who is making those claims of racism things will become a little clearer as to what is driving this ‘protest’.

John Humphrys doesn’t tell us who the complainants are, and indeed doesn’t tell us that it is the fact that the pupils are Muslim that is at the heart of the problem, but it doesn’t take any work at all to find out that it is the usual suspects from the ranks of the Islamist media storm troopers that are behind this….step forward one Mo Ansar….

Buxton Primary School, East London. Flushing out 7 yr old extremists. We DON’T want to get these wrong @rustyrockets!

 

And look who Ansar gets his information from….

Abu Hudhayfah….a very active Islamist who favours the BBC’s goto Islamist group…Cage....

And Asghar Bukhari...who is he?  He heads MPACUK….a very unpleasant Islamist group that encourages Muslims to become Mujahadeen and tells them that Islam demands they go on Jihad….. ‘for the Prophet (peace be upon him) said, “He who dies without having fought in the way of Allah or without having felt it to be his duty, will die having a trait of hypocrisy” ‘….and another Cage advocate…that’s him on the right with his mates from Cage….

   Asghar Bukhari ‏@AsgharBukhari May 22

Even the term #WesternValues to me is white supremacy dressed up as something moral #MuslimFreedom

And of course the Islamic Human Rights Commission expressed its outrage about the survey….the IHRC that is well known to be extremist and an Iranian front.

Other Muslim organisations also expressed their horror……

UK Muslim Pupils Survey Rejected as ‘Racist’

A ‘counter extremism’ survey by an East London borough council directed at Muslim young students has sparked criticism from British Muslims, accusing the local council of trying to profile Muslim children.

The questionnaire was “clearly racist and Islamophobic” and accused the local council of trying to profile Muslim children, Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, told The Telegraph.

 

Curiously just a week before the same publication had no qualms at all about a survey that said British school pupils were Islamophobic….

What else has the BBC been misrepresenting?  The bombs that went off in Boston were another headache for the BBC….the obvious suspicion was that this was an Islamist attack but the BBC in a fit of wishful thinking declared that all the evidence pointed to it being a white supremacist attack…..as we all know now it was two Muslims who carried out the attacks but that doesn’t stop the BBC from trying to downplay the role of Islam in the attack.

Last week they invited on Masha Gessen to discuss her new book about the bombers...the BBC introduced her as  ‘Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist, author and activist.’

Gessen pronounced that the bombings had nothing to do with Islam, nothing to do with radicalisation, there is no such thing as radicalisation and no large international organisation (like Islam?) that attracts recruits….they killed because they were disenfranchised immigrants locked out of the American dream after being driven from their Russian homelands.

Apparently the terrorism was a rational decision by people who didn’t like US policies….but no mention of what policies and why they felt so particularly aggrieved.  Terrorism is a crime and not a war we also hear.

What the BBC doesn’t tell us is that Gessen’s whole narrative is really an attempt, not to downplay Islam’s part in the terrorism, but to implicate the Russian leader, Putin, as the catalyst for the bombers’ actions.  She is an ‘activist’ alright….an ardent anti-Putin one.

Gessen hates Putin and is trying to link him to, and blame him for, the rise of ‘Islamist’ terrorism….

   masha gessen ‏@mashagessen May 28

In which Putin = poison http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/putins-russia-dont-walk-dont-eat-and-dont-drink … via @newyorker

Then we have the Muhammed cartoon competition in the US.  The Today programme invited on Simon Schama to give us his two pennithworth (08:49)  about freedom of speech in the US.

So we must have great repsect for Islam’s great figure and its teachings…..Never mind that Muhammed himself destroyed all other religions’ idols and iconography, just as ISIS does today.

Why should a non-Muslim respect the ‘dignity’ and alleged sacred nature of religious symbols when Muhammed himself set the example of how to behave and the Koran teaches Muslims not to make friends with unwashed, dirty, ignorant non-Muslims and indeed such non-Muslims can be killed with impunity?

So we have had a story fed to us by Islamist activists courtesy of John Humphrys, we have had the Boston bomber’s history conveniently rewritten as an anti-Putin saga which had nothing to do with Islam and we’re left with the knowledge that if you don’t love and respect Islam you’re a detestable and loathsome bigot.

The BBC at its best bringing us that ‘trusted and accurate’ information we all crave.