Category Archives: BBC bias

Here you go, a John Whittingdale approved OPEN Thread for your completion! Detail the bias here.

The feeding frenzy over Labour’s corpse is gaining momentum with the Unions demanding their pound of flesh and a lurch even more leftward than Red Ed promised to deliver whilst others in the party also say the problem with Labour’s election pitch was that it wasn’t Marxist enough, others want to disinter New Labour on whose grave Miliband junior danced…to the Union tune.

Labour was always badly riven by Miliband’s leadership but it wasn’t something the BBC dwelt on preferring to tell us that the Tories were in chaos and so divided about subjects such as Europe and immigration that the party was likely to blow apart.

Once again the BBC was spot on in its analysis.

So why drop a winning formula when you’re on a roll?  The BBC continues with its perspicacious political rune reading as Peston tunes in to the vibes….

GE2015 and the economy

If there was one policy associated with the Tories it was further deep spending and welfare cuts to generate a budget surplus.

If there was one policy associated with the Scottish National Party it was an end to deep spending and welfare cuts.

Which means that if the integrity of the United Kingdom is to be sustained, somehow a way has to be found – and presumably fairly fast – to reconcile the English vote for more austerity and the Scottish vote for an end to austerity.

Sorry what’s that?  The Scots voted for an end to austerity?  Did they heck.

Such an interpretation is a complete misreading of the politics that gave the SNP such a landslide win.

Here’s a chart which shows the number of MPs each party won over the years…note in 2005 the number of Scots MPs was reduced from 72 to 59…..

It is clear from that that Labour had held steady for years right up to the 2010 election and that the LibDems were in fact more successful than the SNP…..and then came 2015.  The SNP vote had nothing to do with austerity or independence.  If the Labour voters had wanted an end to austerity they could have voted for Labour…..but they didn’t, so there must have been another reason.

What changed in the last 5 years in Scotland?  For Labour there was a change of leadership and the hopeless Miliband put in place by the unions whilst the SNP possibly benefited from Salmond stepping aside and having the fresh leadership of Nicola Sturgeon who is still in her honeymoon period especially after her performance in the UK TV debates…though not doing so well in the ones in Scotland.  That honeymoon period will soon wear off once people start analysing what she really says….her claims to respect democracy when all the time looking to ride roughshod over the independence No vote and impose the SNP’s own party preference and her lies about not wanting independence and immediately the election is over starting her demands for it.

Scots did not vote for the end of austerity when they voted for the SNP.  What they saw was that Labour was dead in the water in the UK and that it was a wasted vote for a party that wouldn’t win as a whole.  A practical decision was made to vote then for the SNP more as a protest vote against Labour having taken them for granted with the only other choice being the Tories, not going to happen, or the LibDems who, as we know, were even less palatable across the whole of the UK.  The only choice left was the SNP.  How long the SNP’s dominance lasts depends on Labour resurrecting itself and taking the fight back to Scotland…..I doubt the SNP will be anywhere near as successful in 5 years time as reality sets in and more choices appear.

In the rest of the UK Labour voters went to UKIP…again nothing to do with austerity…they couldn’t bring themselves to vote Tory so they had a protest vote against Labour and its policies on immigration, Europe and the dismal, uninspiring leadership of Miliband.

So in Scotland Labour and Libdems voted SNP, in the UK they mostly voted UKIP…Tories being beyond the pale.

Peston is wrong in claiming that a wish to end austerity was the defining factor in the SNP vote…it’s a convenient narrative for a reporter who seems inclined to put the Labour side all too often……it is an interpretation designed to put pressure on the Tory government of course….the BBC claiming that Britain is now divided and that the Tories don’t have a mandate in Scotland. Unclear why that is so…..they weren’t exactly popular in Scotland over the last 5 years as the chart shows so why have things changed because Scottish Labour MPs have turned into SNP ones? Not quite sure how the SNP expects to be given favourable treatment in respect of austerity.  Do they expect to be given relatively more money than the rest of the UK so that they can dodge the cuts?  Not sure that would go down too well.

It does look like the BBC is giving the SNP’s line a helping hand in order to split the UK and encourage independence and cause the Tories as much trouble as possible….how often have we heard the BBC kick off a debate about devolution in Wales and the regions?  Destroying the UK is a project the Left have long worked towards with Europe being the ‘State’ of choice to rule over a divided and regionalised ‘Britain’.

Perhaps the BBC should be broken up and its powers and huge income devolved…perhaps devolved not to regions but to those with a different political persuasion than the liberal metropolitan elitism on display at the BBC so that all people are truly represented by a news service that doesn’t sneer and look down on them and generates hate against them.

From the Telegraph….

5Live wasn’t having a good day today...or actually it was the same old stuff we normally get from the BBC….leftist tosh presented as insightful comment.

First thing I heard, as posted before, was that the Swedes were to blame for an atheist blogger being hacked to death by Muslim fundamentalists, then we had comedian Sean Hughes invited on to tell us not only about his marvellous comedy but his political views on the election as well.

You may remember that the BBC relentlessly used ‘celebs’ to endorse the BBC’s own anti-Iraq war line…..bringing them on to talk about their latest film, book or groundbreaking piece of artwork only to ask them what were their views on the war in Iraq knowing full well that they’d chunter on about how evil it all was and give Bush a good bashing.

No doubt the same tactic is being employed with the likes of Hughes to spread the vibe about the new government and the election result, the BBC trying to establish the idea that ‘everyone’ hates the Tory government and their evil, nasty policies.

Hughes is well known as being anti-Tory so the BBC were on safe ground asking him…especially as I’m sure they read his Twitter feed when researching him for the programme…

Then we had the BBC delving into Channel 4’s ‘Benefits Street’….apparently all is forgiven, it’s not a callous, exploitative programme revelling in the misery of the poor, it’s not poverty porn…it is though, essential social comment in these straitened times when welfare is being cut and the effects of such immoral policies must be aired, the poor and disenfranchised must have a voice!

The BBC doesn’t do itself any favours with the continuous anti-Tory narrative that also insults the people who voted for them…and UKIP.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

When an atheist critic of religious fundamentalism was hacked to death in Bangladesh you may have thought that the killers were the ‘masked men’ with machetes who were the guilty party…not so….the BBC can reveal that he died because Sweden refused him a visa to visit there in April.

So nothing to do with the Religion of Peace….and indeed on 5Live there was in fact no discussion of the issues that caused his death….he’d still be alive if Sweden had let him visit…it’s the Swede’s fault he’s dead.

Of course the same BBC were delighted when Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Geert Wilders were refused entry to Britain on trumped up charges…..how can criticising religious extremism be considered dangerous and against the interests of this country?

I can’t possibly imagine the BBC’s headlines should any of them end up being similarly assaulted by a Muslim fanatic.

But let’s ask why the Swede’s might have refused an atheist blogger who upsets Msulim sensibilities a visa….could it possibly be due to the large number of Muslims in Sweden and the very pro-Muslim attitude of the Swedish government that turns its back on large scale  anti-Semitism by Muslims in their country? Could it be that rather than defend free speech, liberalism and a civilised world the Swedes would rather side with the fanatics for a quiet life…at least for now?

Incredible really that Europe, the birthplace of the Liberal, democratic ethic which gives people around the world a better life, should surrender those values and its culture so easily.

What hope is there for people who seek sanctuary and a safe place where they can think and speak freely when one of the few remaining places in the world to supposedly uphold those values and protect those who wish to live by them capitulates to aggressive, religiously inspired activists who exploit those rights in order to destroy the societies that are shaped by them and should defend them to the last?

Where will people who seek protection from those religious fanatics be able to go if the fanatics hold sway in the places where refuge is sought?  The world is getting smaller for people who love freedom, democracy and individualism.

It is an irony that the BBC expresses any dismay at the Swedes when its own narrative is to defend those same fanatics.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The BBC’s very own turbulent trendy priest, Giles Fraser, was a happy boy on Thursday morning.  He’d been following the BBC and was excited to know that come Friday the nice Mr Miliband would be padding his way to the Palace to be annointed Prime Minister…Hollyrood Palace presumably.

Fraser was sorely tested come Friday morning and the unpalatable truth dawned….the British Public weren’t fools….Fraser is disgusted by the voter’s shameless greed…..

‘Right now I feel ashamed to be English. Ashamed to belong to a country that has clearly identified itself as insular, self-absorbed and apparently caring so little for the most vulnerable people among us. Why did a million people visiting food banks make such a minimal difference? Did we just vote for our own narrow concerns and sod the rest? Maybe that’s why the pollsters got it so badly wrong: we are not so much a nation of shy voters as of ashamed voters, people who want to present to the nice polling man as socially inclusive, but who, in the privacy of the booth, tick the box of our own self-interest.’

But it is not just the shameful self-interest of the great unwashed that Fraser denounces from his fiery pulpit, he knows who is to blame for the temptations put in the way of wavering, morally uncertain people….

‘We try and control the gods of Rothermere and Murdoch with our electoral intercessions. But maybe they are just too powerful, too remote.’

The Satanic forces of darkness…the Mail and Murdoch.

Bizarrely Fraser goes on to argue that elections are empty and worthless in reality and change nothing….so why is he so disappointed that Labour didn’t get in?

I was also amused to see this from Fraser….which pretty much sums up the problems with the Church…

The idea is that people tend to join churches not because of any specific belief but as a marker of belonging. And the rituals of the church are more an expression of this belonging then they are an ideological statement of faith.

Many ‘Priests’ like Fraser of course don’t themselves subscribe to Christian values, often not even believing in God…using the Church as a vehicle for their own left wing politics, sanctifying them with the implied question ‘What would Jesus do?’

Strangely the Guardian has a similar problem with the Mail and Murdoch as Fraser….’Yes, rightwing newspaper coverage did cause Ed Miliband’s downfall’

Well you could, I suppose, argue that Miliband and his policies were the cause of his downfall….and never mind the BBC claims that it was the BBC that put Cameron back in the driving seat.

The Guardian, as always has its own agenda…here is the rather sinister final paragraph from that article….

‘The press’s role in the 2015 election requires more investigation. As so often, the coverage over six weeks tells us little more than we could have anticipated before the campaign began. Agenda-setting over a longer period is far more important’

The Press, unlike the BBC, is not required to be impartial and indeed such an ability to take sides is part and parcel of this country’s prized liberty of free speech.

It looks like the Guardian is once again on the warpath against parts of the Press, the Right Wing, that don’t have the same values as the Guardian….funny how it is okay for the Guardian to be profoundly biased in its own reporting, and it was virulently anti-Tory, but for the Right Wing Press to be similarly disposed is morally criminal.

No doubt the Guardian will be teaming up wth the BBC and Labour once again, as it did with Leveson, to try and curtail the freedom’s of the Press and force them to deliver a pro-Labour message…sinister or what?

The Guardian and the BBC…..defenders of tolerance, liberalism, free speech and free thought?

Think again…if you’re allowed to.

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.