We have looked at the BBC’s ever growing commercial empire and massive influence in the media world that distorts the market for the genuinely commercial operators who haven’t got a tax payer funded safety net to cushion them in bad times and which allows the BBC to experiment and fail without penalty.

The Guardian is complaining bitterly about the BBC moving in on its territory in Australia…it shouldn’t worry if the BBC’s top Oz reporter is Jon Donnison…he’ll only be reporting on Gaza.

I don’t know the truth about this but it wouldn’t be the first time the BBC’s Panorama programme has cobbled together some very dodgy ‘evidence’ related to Murdoch and his businesses and using very suspect sources to beef up their story……

Sun reporter Mazher Mahmood has accused the BBC of giving “deeply misleading reasons” for postponing the broadcast if its Panorama Investigation Fake Sheikh: Exposed.

Mahmood failed last week in a bid to stop publication of recent images of himself (which he said would undermine his safety).

But last night the BBC pulled the programme less than hour before broadcast because it said it had received new information from Mahmood’s lawyers.

Mahmood said today that this new information was made available last week.

He also questioned the reliability of the testimony which he said the programme was based on.

Mahmood said in a statement: “The BBC Panorama programme ‘Fake Sheikh – Exposed’ has now been postponed twice. The reasons given by the BBC last night are deeply misleading and I am forced into making a statement to correct the impression they have given.

“The BBC approached me on 15th October and made a number of allegations against me relating to my career as an investigative journalist. As a result I instructed lawyers and they have provided detailed rebuttals and evidence showing that the allegations are unsustainable and wrong.

Must be something in the air…Is The BBC Biased notes that Muslim Aaqil Ahmed, in charge of the BBC’s religious programming, has decided to broaden the appeal of Songs of Praise and spread the joy around, broadcasting from many places of worship and denomination…but definitely will not be heading Mosqueward…until of course we hear of a lovely, joyous coming together of Christians and Muslims, evidence of the tolerance, mutual respect and friendship that exists between the two religions…and proof of that is that Christians are graciously allowed to visit a mosque…from which the BBC will broadcast the propaganda.

Noggin in the comments has coincidentally linked to the same fellow in a story from last year that will confirm much of what we have heard about the good Aaqil, his professional qualifications and his leanings.

Questions raised about the running of the BBC’s religious affairs department

These are trying times for Aaqil Ahmed, head of religion and ethics at the BBC.

As we revealed in the last Eye, some of his department’s commissions for Songs of Praise are now being scrutinised by the Beeb’s investigation unit, which has been told by Lord Patten that “if on investigation there is any suggestion that a criminal offence has been committed, the matter should be referred to the police.” Ahmed’s reaction to the story was to announce that he is launching a “witch hunt” (sic) to find our source.

Meanwhile, he has another hefty headache. The Ottomans, a three-part series in which Rageh Omar wanders through the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, is beset by problems and falling even further behind schedule. Although 18 weeks had been allotted for editing all three one-hour programmes, the first two have already taken 30 weeks, including delays for an expensive re-shoot in the Middle East. The main problem is Ahmed’s ignorance arrogance, which have resulted in hours wasted trying to persuade the contributors to give interviews backing his eccentric interpretations of religious history. At the last count he even omitted reference to the Crimean War.

As is his custom, Ahmed assigned the production not to experts in his department but to an old freelance chum, Faris Kermani, who made many programmes about Islam for C4 when Ahmed was head of religion at the channel and later followed him to the BBC to make The Life of Muhammad. The justification for engaging Kermani was that he could gain exclusive access to middle-eastern locations and contacts that were somehow out of the reach of the BBC. In the end, however, this was handled by department staff using a local fixer in the usual way.

As costs spiral out of control, the job of rescuing the production has gone back in-house, too, with the department’s main development executive – helped by a producer on attachment from BBC Bristol – striving to bring some order and intellectual rigour to the chaos.

Also good to hear a Labour MP this morning remind us, on the savage murder of Peter Kassig by ISIS, that Islam is a fine and peaceful religion.

I  note with interest the BBC insists on calling Peter Kassig by the Muslim name he chose to use under duress in an attempt to save his own life under threat from his Muslim captors….

US hostage Abdul-Rahman Kassig ‘killed by IS’

A video posted online claims to show that Islamic State militants have killed the captured US aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig.

 

Apparently this is ‘A photograph of Abdul-Rahman with his father, Ed, fishing on the Ohio River in Indiana in 2011’…no, no it’s not.  It’s a photo of Peter Kassig.

And that’s despite his captors giving him his real name in the video of his death…..

“This is Peter Edward Kassig, a U.S. citizen, of your country”

The Telegraph has the right idea…

Peter Kassig’s family call for restraint after beheading video

A little earlier listening to 5Live I was urged to keep listening as I would be treated to an investigation into the hidden child hunger epidemic sweeping the land.

Who knew?

It must have been very well hidden as I have always been led to believe that the problem was one of an epidemic of child obesity….sweeping the land….from the Telegraph…

Schoolchildren refused second helpings at lunch in obesity crackdown

Schoolchildren are being refused second helpings at lunchtime, it has emerged, as councils launch a crackdown on child obesity.

Education chiefs in parts of Wales have stopped kitchen staff giving out an extra portion to teach children sensible eating habits.

Some local authorities are also preventing pupils from having extra puddings because of their high sugar content.

Cardiff Council has started giving children slices of dry bread if they are still hungry after lunch.

Rise in child obesity-related hospital admissions

The UK has the highest rate of child obesity in Western Europe, which is estimated to cost the NHS about £4.2bn a year.

 

The paradox is of course that we are told that ‘poverty’ is the cause of the hunger epidemic, and ‘poverty’ is the cause of the obesity epidemic….and the very same class of children, the poor, are victims of both these epidemics.

Poverty driven by government policies on welfare of course.

Guess there must be an election coming.

The BBC had better be careful, if they keep churning out these scare stories, as they have been doing daily, they’ll run out before the election and will have to start looking for real news stories instead of feeding us press releases from charities, NGO’s, think tanks and the Labour Party.

As there are nearly 200,000 charities in the UK I am guessing the BBC thinks that won’t happen.

Was it Friday on the Today programme that I heard McDonalds was responsible for the breakdown of society, its cohesion and communal life?

Don’t know about fat kids, but certainly a lot of fatheads around.

The BBC’s coverage of the FIFA world cup scandal has been woeful.

FIFA released a report that exonerated Russia and Qatar from accusations of corruption in the bidding process for the World Cup…however England and Australia were singled out for special attention.

The BBC failed completely to question FIFA’s decision and concentrated almost solely on England’s claimed abuses.

Now that might seem extraordinary considering the background to the story and the well known and substantial claims of corruption against Russia and Qatar.

TalkSport told us that the report was a farce, a disgrace and a whitewash….that Russia had managed to ‘lose’ all the data on its computers relating to the bid and that no emails or phone records were examined by FIFA.

In contrast the BBC took the report at face value.  Listening to their news bulletins it was all England, even their specialist sports reporters on 5Live, the ‘home of football’ apparently, failed to question the claims.

We had Peter Allen telling us England’s behaviour was ‘shocking news’ and he emphatically declared that ‘this was an independent inquiry’.

An ‘independent inquiry’?  This was FIFA investigating FIFA and finding itself not guilty and conveniently, the two countries who are going to hold World Cups are also innnocent, and therefore the bidding process won’t have to be reopened.

Very convenient.

However that all changed at 12:10 when the man who investigated the bids, Michael Garcia, but who didn’t provide the conclusions released to the world by FIFA, stated that the FIFA report “contains numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations”.

The BBC tells us that ‘Garcia’s statement, issued less than four hours after the report was published, has reopened the debate about the validity of the bidding process for both the 2018 and 2022 competitions. ‘

‘Reopened the debate’?  Well, no it didn’t, or rather everyone else was already asking serious questions about the credibility of the report….everyone except the BBC.

Once again the BBC fails to do any work for itself and relies on press releases by organisations that can’t be trusted….and adds insult to injury by taking a distinct pleasure in laying into the England bid operation whose Chief Operating Officer, Simon Johnson, on the BBC, told us that it was ‘sad that the headlines are all about England.‘…when the real story is elsewhere…..the story “shouldn’t be about the conduct of England’s bid, it should be about the pre-ordained exoneration of Qatar… and this smells of a politically motivated whitewash”

Perhaps the below might explain the BBC’s haste to condemn the England bid, trying to excuse and justify their own actions in order to claim that the bid’s failure had nothing to do with their  badly timed stunt …from the Daily Mail 2010….

WILL BRITAIN’S MEDIA BE BLAMED FOR LOSING VOTES?

Yesterday the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) proclaimed that there was far too much hype by government ministers in favour of Fracking…the BBC was happy to oblige in giving them plenty of sympathetic coverage.

Jim Naughtie told us that the UKERC was completely independent and had no axe to grind.

That’ll be the UKERC, along with the pro-climate change propaganda organisation, the Grantham Institute, and the UEA’s CRU, that told the government in 2008, in the shape of Ed Miliband, to cut CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050.

The UK government announced yesterday that it will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050.

The Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Ed Miliband, stated last night that the assessment was based on an independent scientific report from Lord Turner’s committee on climate change.

The decision comes just nine days after Lord Turner’s committee, which includes Professor Jim Skea, research director at the UK Energy Research Centre and Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College, published its interim advice to government recommending more stringent cuts.

This is not business as usual

The speed of the decision is not a surprise to Turner’s panel. Skea says, ‘The Prime Minister indicated at the Labour Party Conference that he was willing to respond quickly once we made a recommendation.’

But the scale of the changes will be challenging. ‘We have said in our letter to the government that this is not business as usual. The very obvious priority is decarbonising the electricity industry. Buildings and transport are also up there as priorities.’

 

So, far from being neutral in the debate on CO2, climate and fossil fuel use, the UKERC is deeply involved in agitating against coal and gas…and set us on the road to a ruinous and suicidal extermination of industry.

Bishop Hill takes a look….

Public relations, not research

Nov 12, 2014 Energy: gas Greens

The BBC is spreading its influence…

Local papers cautious as BBC courts them with free content

They are traditionally the bitterest of rivals but now a BBC olive branch to regional newspapers has been given a cautious welcome by an industry whose sales have been in dizzying decline. James Harding, the BBC’s director of news and current affairs, has looked to build bridges with beleaguered editors with the offer of free licence fee-funded content and the prospect of the corporation picking up the tab for local court reporting.

Largely through pilots and proposals at this stage, the BBC will look to ease the financial burden on local newspapers by sharing more of its content, as it did with video footage of this year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

Nigel Pickover, editor of the Archant-owned Norwich Evening News and Eastern Daily Press, said he hoped the BBC would go beyond words to take action.

“The BBC’s licence fee means the corporation gets a soft comfort blanket of subsidy to compete with local newspaper organisations, which themselves have to fight and scrap for revenues at every turn,” he said.

“This, in turn, protects the journalism which, ironically, the BBC and others often rely on for their daily agendas.”

A reflection of the tension often felt between local papers and the BBC’s own local outlets, which span TV, radio and online, Pickover said it was clearly in the BBC’s interests to see thriving local news businesses as “many corporation outlets would be lost without us”.

Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors, said there had been a “good and positive” exchange of views between the BBC and local and regional editors. “There have been lots of times when we have talked in the past and it has come to nothing. It’s obviously not something that can happen overnight,” he said.

“The BBC, with its resources from, in effect, the taxation of the public through the licence fee, that can create an uneven playing field. But there is a genuine attempt here on the part of the BBC to meet the concern of local papers.

“Where difficulties can arise in a partnership is if you have a big and powerful partner, it is usually the big and powerful partner that benefits the most. But both sides of the partnership have to see the benefits.”

 

 

Incredible really what the publicly funded BBC gets up to in the commercial sphere, never mind the political sphere with BBC Worldwide and its Media Action arm.

Here are a couple of examples of what the BBC provides to the world…..

What is BBC Worldwide Showcase?

BBC Worldwide Showcase is a unique annual sales festival hosted by BBC Worldwide.

Our flagship four-day festival attracts more than 600 of the world’s top TV and digital executives to Britain, and is the nation’s biggest television export market.

Beloved by buyers for its special atmosphere, each year BBC Worldwide Showcase unveils a spectacular array of new shows – accompanied by our catalogue of over 50,000 hours of first-class content.

 

 

And the BBC’s facilities and expertise used to provide ‘Studios and Post Production’ to other companies.

Creating and preserving award-winning content

We work with media companies to create and manage award-winning content across all genres for a wide range of platforms and broadcasters, including ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, as well as the BBC.

 

You could argue that this is the best use of the BBC’s resources and in providing them enables other media businesses to piggyback off them and grow.

or you could say this is a mega sized corporation dominating the business and smothering development of companies in their own right, killing off independent competitors.

And of course this makes the BBC the most dominant player in the market with huge power and influence to make or break other companies or competitors…..and if it is providing news content then we are also treated to the prospect of the BBC world view being disseminated through other outlets unable to compete with the BBC and unable to provide their own content and interpretation of news and events.

Things seem a bit pear-shaped so here’s an open thread to keep things moving.

Overdue but here you go. Detail the bias. It’s been a busy week for the BBC as they have pushed pro EU propaganda as fact, coped with their hero Obama becoming toxic, and endured Weird Ed being mocked by one and all! Detail the bias here please.

The Brand wagon is still rolling strongly, promoting his book and revolution.

Apparently the BBC still think he has important things to say and that he ‘has the ear of the youth’…the worthy Giles Fraser not being the audience winner they had obviously hoped for….I’m sure yesterday’s Radio One’s Breakfast show audience were thrilled to once again have Brand shoved down their throats….never mind R1’s audience apparently being an average age of 32…

Back in 2008 Allison Pearson in the Mail declared……

The age of the over-sexed, overpaid moron should be declared over.

As someone who treasures the BBC and the great contribution it can make to the life of our country, I hope it turns out to be on the side of Us not Them.

 

I imagine she feels somewhat disappointed 6 years on that the BBC is very definitely on Their side.

You have to laugh…..the multi-millionaire Brand is worried that anti-Austerity protests will make him late for his trip to the theatre….but you know what….he’s there with ’em on the barricades…….in spirit…..

Russell Brand has said he can see why “there is so much frustration” among protesters who took part in an anti-austerity march in London.