Category Archives: BBC bias

A fresh week and election fever is in the air. Can we rely on the BBC to provide the Nation with a balanced coverage of this most important of campaigns? Or might their left wing bias shine through? The floor is yours!

The BBC are taking the chance to try and smear Thatcher by association…

Margaret Thatcher ‘told of Cyril Smith abuse claims’

 

Oddly they refrain from revealing an essential fact, should you be looking to ‘politicise’ Cyril Smith’s abuse.  Here the BBC reports that….

The dossier on the decision to confer a knighthood on Smith, a former Rochdale MP for both for the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats who died in 2010, runs to 19 pages.

It includes one undated letter marked secret, from Lord Shackleton, a member of the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee.

This was sent to Mrs Thatcher – who died in 2013 – and included a warning of “the risk that such an award could give rise to adverse criticism”.

Lord Shackleton wrote that police had investigated Smith in 1970 for “indecent assault against teenage boys” between 1961 and 1966, but the director of public prosecutions (DPP) had decided “there was no reasonable prospect of conviction”.

He went on to say that the case was reported in the Rochdale Alternative Press and Private Eye.

“One may regret this kind of press reporting but it could be revived if an award to Mr Smith were made,” he added.

Lord Shackleton said it would be “slightly unfortunate” if this “episode” stopped Smith receiving the honour.

However, he added: “We felt it right to warn the honours system would be at some risk if the award were to be made and announced.”

 

‘Lord Shackleton’?  That’ll be the ‘Tory’ Lord Shackleton you’d probably assume.

The BBC would be glad to let you think that.

But Lord Shackleton was a Labour peer.

Why would the BBC let you think he was a Tory?  Could it be that it wants to imply that Thatcher was involved in some sort of cover up conspiracy but not the awkward fact that the man advising her was a Labour peer?

Juast another day at the biased BBC.

From the washington Post…

Justice Department clears Ferguson police officer in civil rights probe

 

From the BBC…

Ferguson police racially biased says US Justice Department

 

It once again looks like the BBC is reluctant to shine a light upon its own dark corners.  We know of the puzzling expenditure of £300,000 to cover up the Balen Report and what is presumably its excoriating criticism of the BBC’s anti-Israel reporting but what else lies hidden in the shadows at Aunty Beeb?

The Mail reports that the BBC has shelved a interview critical of the BBC Trust’s Chair, Rona Fairhead…

Anger after BBC scraps interview that called for its chief to quit over her £513,000 second job with scandal-hit HSBC 

The BBC was last night accused of suppressing an interview that called for corporation boss Rona Fairhead to resign over her £10,000-a-day second job at scandal-hit HSBC bank.

It’s a new blow to Mrs Fairhead, chairman of the BBC Trust and a non-executive director of HSBC, who is facing growing calls to quit one of her high-profile jobs over claims of a conflict of interest.

She is due to be questioned by MPs tomorrow after The Mail on Sunday revealed that she was paid £513,000 for just 50 days work at the troubled bank last year, vastly exceeding her £110,000 salary for what is supposed to be her main job overseeing the BBC.

You may also remember that the BBC tried to cover up the Savile affair and the fallout from that and the subsequent exposure is apparently that the open and accountable BBC is demoting or effectively sacking its own journalists who dared to rock the boat as Nick Cohen in the Guardian reports (H/T Guest Who)

‘Turns out my brother’s accountant is a bit of a travel agent on the side….he sent my brother and his family on holiday to a nice little island off the shore of Switzerland….I asked ‘Tax Haven?’…He said ‘SSSSHHHH!!!’

 

How Jeremy Vine’s 10-year-old daughter helps him avoid tax payments

Jeremy Vine’s brother Tim tells us…

As king of the one-liners, does money make a rich seam of material?

I haven’t got a lot of money jokes if I’m honest, but any topic can be good because you can write a joke about anything.

 

Bet he’s got a few up his sleeve now!

Some fine advice for his brother on Twitter?…..

Learn how to count properly and you’ll be fine #EncourageEveryoneIn4Words

0 replies . 170 retweets 203 favourites

And oh yes…

Does money make you happy?

If you have a basic amount of money, heaping more on top doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to anyone’s happiness. For people who have real poverty, it’s very sad – and money can solve that – but the idea that money is like some sort of happiness drug isn’t true.

 

 

Poor old Mohammed Emwazi, there he was off to enjoy a bit of sun and safari in Tanzania when he was rudely renditioned by Daniel Craig who force fed him alcoholic beverages and savoury pork scratchings in the aircraft toilets to discredit him in the eyes of his fellow Muslims and then shipped him home to a secret location where MI5 tortured him with rolled up copies of the Magna Carta.

No Muslim should have to suffer such persecution and stigmatization…he was instantly radicalised and transformed into Muslim superhero ‘Jihadi Junkie’ by his immense suffering and immediately told all to the important human rights group ‘Cagegoogoo’ who wrote a protest song about it…top of the pops in Pakistan apparently.

The lesson we learn from all this is that this is how hideously Muslims are treated in the UK by the security services who quite unfairly pick on the Muslim community (which exists when it suits and doesn’t exist when it doesn’t suit) making them feel under siege as they are persecuted and demonised whilst ‘Fascists’ roam the streets untouched…..well apart from the fact that the government wrote to Muslim groups telling them how they intended to destroy the EDL, not forgetting Spencer and Geller banned from the UK and Wilders similarly restricted for a time and so on.

The BBC lapped up every detail of Emwazi’s life and reported it all with relish…especially when Cage revealed a recording of the Jihadi Junkie claiming harrassment by MI5 had radicalised him….of course a cynic might ask why MI5 already had an interest in him…or were they just ‘profiling’  a poor old innocent Muslim lad?

Curiously the BBC isn’t in the slightest bit interested that the revelation that Emwazi’s claim that MI5 practically renditioned him from Tanzania and this led to him being radicalised is bunk….he was drunk on the flight to Tanzania and was deported by Tanzanian authorities.

Why the lack of BBC interest all of a sudden?  It obviously does not suit their narrative about persecuted Muslims and it reveals the BBC’s anti-‘War on Terror’ collaborators, Cage, to be an unreliable witness….making the BBC’s stance on the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, very questionable.

Craig at ‘Is the BBC biased?’ has done a tremendous job transcribing a Newswatch exchange where the BBC’s news editor Paul Royall explains the reasons for the BBC’s intense interest in the Jihadi Junkie…

I think what was happening over the past week is finding out the background and the details and the causes behind Mohammed Enwazi. And I actually think what happened in terms of naming Mohammed Enwazi is actually a demystifying of the story and actually helps us and the audience understand why people end up doing these horrific things and helps our understanding of so-called Islamic State, and what is actually a really difficult, hard story and thing that is going on around the whole at the moment.

…it’s important to understand the background to Mohammed Enwazi, to understand how he became radicalised and the story behind him.

Does he not think that explaining that Cage and the Jihadi Junkie are absolute liars engaged in a war of words against democracy would help to demystify things a bit?

Seen this BBC headline?

“Jerusalem car rams into pedestrians, injuring Israeli police”

Now then, what exactly is “a Jerusalem car?” I THINK the BBC are using this tortuous construction to get around the fact that a Palestinian has driven a car into innocent Israeli pedestrians. The headline is a confection.

Don’t know if you watched the Andrew Neil hosted This Week last night? Mr Neil continues to be the exception that proves the rule regarding BBC bias. He is scrupulously even handed and should be what all BBC journalism aspires to. Instead, he is the aberration but nonetheless always worth watching. Last evening he interviewed Asim Qureshi, the “research director” at “human rights” organisation CAGE. Asim is a vile piece of work, in the view of many, and Neil allowed him to dig a grave for himself with consummate ease. However what struck me as the MOST telling comment was when Michael Portillo wondered out loud WHY the BBC had allowed Qureshi show a free reign across its airwaves for the past week? In the case of This Week it is clear he was there to be dissected – and a good thing – but on the majority of BBC programmes he has been able to get away with his deplorable and appalling excuse making for Jihad. Thoughts?

On time and for your attention – a brand new Open Thread for the weekend. This is where you detail the bias. I also wanted to thank those who came along for the BBC Question Time live chat last. The system seemed to work ok and so I hope many more will click the link, register, and join in the fun and games next week.

Jeremy Bowen has been accused of being anti-Semitic after tweeting that Israel Prime Minister, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when he  addressed the US Congress ‘once again plays the Holocaust card ‘.

Bowen is upset that people find his words offensive..

Have been reading some recent tweets sent my way. Suggestions I'm an anti semite, or a denier of the Holocaust, are untrue and offensive.

— Jeremy Bowen (@BowenBBC) March 4, 2015

The BBC defends him…

A BBC spokesperson said: “Jeremy was using Twitter and journalism shorthand whilst live-tweeting PM Netanyahu’s speech. The context of his comment is that a major part of PM Netanyahu’s critique of the proposed Iran deal was based on the spectre of another holocaust. Jeremy’s tweet was designed to reflect that context. He absolutely refutes any suggestion of antisemitism.”

‘Journalistic shorthand’?  So the BBC is once again excusing bad or malign journalism by telling us that their professional journalists are unable to produce coherent and intelligent comment when streaming comment ‘live’ just as they excused Tim Wilcox’s suggestion in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings that Jews in Europe should expect to be attacked because of Israel’s actions.

It’s not as if Bowen is sat in the audience with his iPhone…he’s sat in the journalist’s ‘edit room’ with all the equipment necessary to double check what is said in the speech…

Having looked at Bowen’s Twitter stream it is apparent that such failings are not the result of working ‘live’ but a determined attempt to attack Netanyahu.   Bowen’s comments are entirely negative and overly critical, if not just plain wrong, of Netanyahu’s speech.

During a Netanyahu speech at AIPAC a day earlier Bowen Tweets this….

Bowen goes down the ‘Jewish Lobby’ route…not as if every other interest group doesn’t have ‘lobby’s’ but you might think so from BBC comment….

Back to Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and you can see Bowen eager to criticise the speech…..

Trouble is that Netanyahu didn’t say that…he said that only if Iran increases the number of centrifuges enormously it could make nuclear weapon fuel in weeks once the agreement expires…as confirmed by Kerry…..with the present number of centrifuges such a scenario would take longer…but even then Israel assesses that would be less than a year…as said in the speech…

Iran’s nuclear program would be left largely intact, Iran’s break-out time would be very short — about a year by U.S. assessment, even shorter by Israel’s.

Then we get to the bit Bowen Tweeted about….

Iran’s Supreme Leader says that openly. He says, Iran plans to have 190,000 centrifuges, not 6,000 or even the 19,000 that Iran has today, but 10 times that amount — 190,000 centrifuges enriching uranium. With this massive capacity, Iran could make the fuel for an entire nuclear arsenal and this in a matter of weeks, once it makes that decision.

My long-time friend, John Kerry, Secretary of State, confirmed last week that Iran could legitimately possess that massive centrifuge capacity when the deal expires.

 

Bowen then tries to suggest Iran’s brand of Islamic terrorism and expansionism is totally different to the ‘Islamists’….

As Iran’s proxy armies are rampaging across the Middle East and Iran has indicated its desire to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ and works closely with Hamas some might think Netanyahu has a point about the dangers of Iran.

And finally back to the so-called ‘Holocaust card’.  Did Netanyahu ‘play’ that card?

He certainly mentioned it…firstly in the context that Iran poses not a problem just to Israel but to the world…just as the Nazis were not just a problem for the Jews….

Iran’s regime is not merely a Jewish problem, any more than the Nazi regime was merely a Jewish problem. The 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis were but a fraction of the 60 million people killed in World War II.  So, too, Iran’s regime poses a grave threat, not only to Israel, but also the peace of the entire world.

Later in the speech, the bit Bowen thinks is ‘playing the Holocaust card’, he says this……

My friend, standing up to Iran is not easy. Standing up to dark and murderous regimes never is. With us today is Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

Elie, your life and work inspires to give meaning to the words, “never again.”

And I wish I could promise you, Elie, that the lessons of history have been learned. I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Not to sacrifice the future for the present; not to ignore aggression in the hopes of gaining an illusory peace.

 

Israel is all about the Holocaust, it was created as a safe haven for Jews in recognition of the threats that they face as an often persecuted minority, threats that once again Jews are having to face in Europe, threats that the BBC tries to downplay or excuse as ‘acceptable’ because of Israel’s defensive actions.

The BBC itself constantly issues ‘warnings from history’ about the threat of the ‘Far Right’ goose-stepping its way across Europe again, strange that Bowen thinks Israel shouldn’t be allowed to raise the spectre of a similar danger, not just to the Jews, but to the world posed, this time, by Iran.

It does look like Bowen has been caught ‘playing the ‘playing the Holocaust card’ card’ ….a card played by the critics of Israel and Jews….The Jewish Chronicle saying…

Mr Bowen did what only the antisemitic extremists used to do, reduce the invocation of the Holocaust to a common sense indicator of ‘Zionist’ bad faith and something to disdain.

Bowen’s ‘once again’ damns him completely.

Carelessness, bad journalism or bad will?  You decide.