Today the BBC announced that a report that someone, from 2009 to 2012, using a government computer, had altered the Hillsborough tragedy’s Wikipedia page  adding insults to it, was the BBC’s lead story.

Indeed it did seem to be so with a not inconsiderable amount of coverage for what might seem a small story in the scale of things…though naturally distressing to the families….. though the abuse was removed almost immediately from the page when posted.

The Liverpool Echo broke the story:

Exclusive: Shocking Hillsborough insults added on Wikipedia from Government computers

A series of sickening revisions to the site began on the 20th anniversary of the 1989 tragedy, when “Blame Liverpool fans” was anonymously added to the Hillsborough section of the encyclopedia site.

Computers on Whitehall’s secure intranet were used again in 2012 to change the phrase “You’ll never walk alone” to “You’ll never walk again” and later “You’ll never w*** alone.”

The words “nothing for the victims of the Heysel stadium disaster” were also added to a description of the Hillsborough memorial at the Reds’ stadium.

The BBC, as said, has been highlighting this all day.  This is its web page:

Hillsborough Wikipedia posts: Government pledges ‘urgent inquiries’

I have heard only a single mention of Heysel…in a text message read out on 5 Live suggesting we don’t forget it….that suggestion didn’t spark any interest in the presenter and was indeed instantly forgotten.  It was rare to hear a mention at all during the BBC’s coverage of Hillsborough recently.

Hillsborough seems to have caught the BBC’s imagination….no doubt who was in government at the time, the police mistakes and coverup, and Murdoch Sun’s infamous frontpage all contributing to it being so keen to keep this one running.

No headlines or lead story from the BBC about this…not hard to find the culprit…or which ‘government office’ seems to find it OK:

Or how about the BBC’s own involvement in a ‘disrespectful’ insult….remember ‘Ding Dong The Witch Is dead’ chart manipulation after Mrs Thatcher’s death?……..

“The BBC finds this campaign distasteful, but does not believe the record should be banned.

BBC director general Tony Hall said: “I understand the concerns about this campaign. I personally believe it is distasteful and inappropriate.

“However, I do believe it would be wrong to ban the song outright as free speech is an important principle and a ban would only give it more publicity.”

However even the Guardian thinks it may have gone too far in some of its coverage of Hillsborough:

Mix and Match of the Day turns tragedy to cliche

Adam Curtis did a brilliant piece on Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe on BBC4 last week about “Oh Dearism”, the trend for television news to show shocking events about which we can do nothing but feel helpless and sad, and to which the only possible reaction is “Oh dear”.

I wonder if anybody in BBC Sport saw it. I only ask because Saturday’s Football Focus and Match Of The Day used the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster to indulge in the kind of crass grief tourism that has become a media staple since Princess Diana’s death.

Had the coverage dealt with this issue, there might have been some point to it, but interviews with the parents of two teenage girls who died on the terraces were there merely to fill our eyes with pointless tears. It is a kind of pornography. Anybody who knows anybody who has lost a child to sudden death or can imagine what it might be like to lose one’s own knows how unspeakably sad it must be. But what can you do, other than say, “Oh dear?”

At Heysel in Belgium in 1985 (May 29) Liverpool fans caused 39 deaths and around 600 injuries…so just a reminder to put things in perspective:

Just a few days earlier on May 11 Bradford City’s stadium burst into flames…in the 5 minutes one stand took to burn to the ground 56 people died and 250 were injured despite the best efforts of police officers to rescue many stricken fans putting themselves at great risk to do so.

Bradford fire: forgotten tragedy of the Eighties

“All of a sudden, a sheet of flame went up to the roof and along the entire length of the stand. Within five minutes of it starting, the whole stand was burnt down. In fact, I think it was timed at 4min 35sec. The strong wind was fanning it from the end where the blaze had started.

“It didn’t receive much comment at the time, but the roof was bitumen, with slats, and as the flames ran along the top of the stand the bitumen started melting and falling on the people below. People were coming out of there with their hair and clothes singed and big drops of bitumen all over them.

The tragedy lacked both the global reach of Heysel – a European Cup final, between Liverpool and Juventus – and the outrage and sense of injustice that came with the Hillsborough disaster. Bradford was commonly regarded as a product of widespread ignorance about general safety at football grounds, and the lethal combustibility of wooden seats (there was an echo here, in wider society, with the King’s Cross fire -itself blamed on the presence of wooden escalators on the London Underground).

With Bradford there was no stampede by drunk and belligerent fans (Heysel), and no policing or stewarding issues of the sort that keeps the Hillsborough Campaign in sad and grinding motion to this day. Put the three calamities side by side and you wonder how football ever emerged from the Eighties. With so many dead in four short years, our national game had become a killing field. The Popplewell and Taylor reports into Bradford and Hillsborough, respectively, were among the most important social documents of our times.

My thanks to David Keighley and Andrew Jubb for this most interesting report on BBC bias over at Civitas. Make sure you read it….

Yesterday, the BBC obligingly ran with the Labour line that Comrade Ed and the gang had taken the moral decision to move away from the long historical link to the Co op Bank. However it seems not all was as the BBC reported;

Have a read of this if you will!

“So is the BBC in crisis? The consensus seems to be, not yet – though it soon may well be. Steven Barnett predicts a gathering tide of anti-BBCism from Tory politicians and newspapers in the runup to the charter renewal. He writes: “If Britain wants to sustain a cultural institution which is still trusted and enjoyed by the vast majority of its own citizens while being praised and admired throughout the world, we must have the political will to make the resources available.” In other words, an inflation-linked licence fee must be restored (and wisely spent). That, rather than the history of the sexual predators it once employed, will be the BBC’s make or break.”

The weekend approaches and so a new one of this to take us off into the wild blue yonder!

A low key look by the BBC’s Gavin Hewitt at probably one of the most important and interesting questions in politics at the moment:

Europe braces for first EU-wide vote since 2008 crash

In many countries this will be a referendum on the European project.

Many voters will have the chance to support parties disenchanted with Brussels and all its powers. The last few years have seen the rise of anti-establishment parties both from the left and right, some nationalist, some extreme and most of them drawing their support from being Eurosceptic and anti-immigration.

So the battle will be fought less over the minutiae of policy but in broad strokes about Europe itself.

The elections matter and not just because of the growing power of the parliament. The vote touches on deeper questions about the health of democracy, such as whether the governing elites are perceived as on the side of the people or their own political ideas. Is there a decline in political trust between the governed and those in power?

Despite a couple of slights against UKIP and the Front National and some praise for the EU such as this….

The European Parliament, although often derided, is a much more important institution than it used to be. Only last week it was taking important steps towards banking union, voting on greater transparency for lobbyists and setting up a new European Fisheries Fund.

….the article raises that important question about the EU’s democratic legitimacy and how accountable it is to the voters.

However it only does so in a general way with fairly abstract suggestions of concerns about democracy or identity….or ‘the fears of the workers’.

The question is how much further down this line of inquiry will the BBC go? 

Here it raises those questions:

For the disillusioned this is not just a chance to cast an angry cross or tick against austerity. For many it goes much deeper. It is about insecurity and identity….ordinary workers are not just wary of further immigration but suspicious of an elite that does not address their fears.

…..but will it do the usual and dismiss them as just that, unjustified ‘fears’…. fuelled by extremist tub thumping politicians whipping up public anger and discontent?

Or, will it give credence to people’s concerns and accept them as legitimate rather than dismissing concerns about immigration as racist, or  people who might want to control the sovereignty of their own country are ‘little Englanders’ dreaming of a mythical lost past in a non-existent ‘golden age’ of Britishness?

Naturally no mention of the BBC as a large and important part of that ‘elite’ providing the propaganda that props up the privileged and unaccountable EU cabal.

The usually reliable Sheila Fogarty yesterday makes you doubt the BBC will ever change.

Talking about UKIP and its posters she asked (12:25) a UKIP spokeswoman if she didn’t see that there could be,  not saying there is, Fogarty assures us, a correlation between posters like that and racist attacks…and if not could she explain why she thought not.

So the default position is that UKIP generates racist attacks….and UKIP must defend/explain itself.

Fogarty had previously had on some ‘Brits’ to talk about their ‘fears’ on immigration. It was the usual BBC trick of only asking white working class people to comment and therefore limiting the concerns about immigration to a small ‘suspect’ group….and they are ‘suspect’ in the BBC’s eyes…often portrayed as prejudiced and racist due to their ignorance and, well, horrible whiteness..all white people are inherently racist.  Thus such concerns can be dismissed as the result of prejudice and ignorance.

The one immigrant they brought in was a Romanian, of course, who ran a building business apparently..and ‘had never claimed benefits in her life’…..Of course we just have to take such claims on trust….and judging by the BBC’s past record that’s not a good idea.

Trouble is….she is far from typical…how that one immigrant can be presented to us as typical and representative of the 4 millon who have come here in the last decade is hard to imagine.

Where are the unemployed, where are the unskilled, where are the workers undercutting British workers, where are the criminals who fill our prisons, where are the people crowding the schools and NHS, where are those who do claim benefits?

The BBC didn’t see fit to make an example of those immigrants.

Fogarty didn’t let us down, or rather she did…asking later ‘are the people who complain about immigration are necessarily right?’

The BBC is always on hand to ‘prove’ just how wrong you are on immigration.

A couple of Tweets from Roger that shed new light on ‘science’ and certainty:

So Roger thinks ‘expert groups’ may be lying to us about just how certain they are about their projections…due to the politics…and Roger himself objects to claims of ‘certainty’ or over confidence in ‘the numbers’….though not when economist Stern tells us we are all going to die in 100 months or so….. but when ‘maverick’ Professor Tol (the green’s new hate figure) Tweets some ‘green’ figures about the costs of global warming suddenly certainty is a questionable virtue.

So the next time the climate lobby tell us global warming may not be scientifically proven beyond all doubt but the risks of not doing anything are just too great to ignore it…..think on…..they’re probably lying.

Here you go, a new Open Thread to see us on through the week of relentless bias!

Sorry about the title but I think I can’t really take much more of his low brow, lightweight,  twaddle….considering the job he is supposed to do.

Thanks to Dave S who pointed out this from Robinson:

UKIP immigration policy – the wife test

On a day when Nigel Farage launched a nationwide poster campaign warning that millions of Europeans were waiting to take your job, I asked him why he employed a German as his secretary….to my amazement the UKIP leader told me “nobody else could do that job”.

But is that because she is German?

Robinson take a cheap shot at Farage:

NR: No British person could work for you as your secretary?

NF: Not at the moment.

NR: You don’t think anyone’s capable of doing that job?

NF: What, of marrying me?

NR: No. Of doing the job of your secretary.

NF: I don’t know anyone who would work those hours, no.

NR: So that’s it. It’s clear – UKIP do not believe that any British person is capable of being the secretary of their leader?

NF: That’s nonsense and you know it.

NR: You just said it!

The problem with Robinson’s line of questioning and his conclusion, that Farage says no British person could be his secretary, is its complete facetiousness.

What Farage is saying is that no one but his wife could do the job because of the hours worked….his wife just happens to be German…married to that well known xenophobe Nigel Farage.

What Farage  is not saying is that no British person could do that job….so when Robinson concludes….

NR: So that’s it. It’s clear – UKIP do not believe that any British person is capable of being the secretary of their leader?

NF: That’s nonsense and you know it.

NR: You just said it!

…he is, the BBC’s top political journo mind you, making shit up.

When asking Farage how many immigrants could be a fair number to let in Robinson reports this:

So, what numbers would be acceptable? Mr Farage was reluctant to say but eventually suggested that between 30,000 and 50,000 immigrants a year might be the right figure (compared with well over 100,000 net migration now).

Another little trick….’net’ migration or not?  Is Farage saying 50,000 net or gross?  Big difference.  Sure the BBC’s top political journo isn’t trying to pull the wool over our eyes…again?

Robinson states that ‘As for immigration – the key issue of his election campaign – Mr Farage is calling for a “sensible, open immigration policy” in which Britain would “re-claim control of her borders”.’

In other words Farage is not demanding zero immigration but ‘a sensible, managed immigration system’.

In other words Robinson is trying to use the fact he employs his ‘German’ wife against him and claim it is evidence of hypocrisy is highly misleading by Robinson.

Here Robinson tries to write off Farage as someone not to be taken seriously (though the intensive attempts to malign and undermine him might indicate he is a serious threat to ‘their’ world):

His point, apparently, was that only his wife Kirsten – who as he often reminds us is German – would be prepared to work unsociable hours, seven days a week, helping him at “midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock”.

As so often, the UKIP leader was trying to make me and all those listening smile along with him. He’s an amusing and likeable guy and often I’ve done just that, but on this occasion I was determined to press on.

Farage explained exactly why he employs his wife and why it would be difficult for anyone else to do the job other than his wife…Robinson decides that’s a joke….but being the professional, hardnosed reporter that he is he determines to press on and get the real story.

Thank God for BBC investigative journalism  at  its best bringing us the dirt they don’t want us to see!

Robinson’s conclusion is that:

Mr Farage’s decision to employ his wife at public expense highlights two important questions he and his party now face – about what their immigration policy means in practice and their attitude to public money.

Really?  In what way does employing his German wife highlight anything about his immigration policy except in Robinson’s own little concoction of a story trying to nail Farage for something, anything…..it’ll be passive smoking from Farage’s cigarettes poisoning next door’s ‘immigrant’ children next.

And what does this mean?

You employ a German woman to work in your office. She happens to be your wife. She happens to spend many hundreds of thousands of British taxpayers’ money. How do you justify that?

Perhaps Robinson might like to explain that fabrication.

We’ve also had Robinson’s sycophantic interview with Miliband.

We’ve had Robinson’s less than informative report on the Farage-Clegg debate….Farage v Clegg – the verdict.

Is there any point to Nick Robinson?    I suppose we learn a lot from the BBC’s decision to employ him at public expense which highlights two important questions he and the BBC must now face – what do any of Robinson’s reports actually tell us in practice, if anything, about the world of politics, and the BBC’s attitude to public money as they squander it on him.

There’s a bee in my bonnet. Let’s talk about the racism of the white wolf who cried Islamophobia.

I’m tired of a certain faction of Western liberals, especially white guys, Westsplaining about how anti-Muslim bigotry and Western colonialism and imperialism and international geopolitics provide *essential context* for understanding the sources of Muslim problems, which don’t come from a vacuum, how there are striking *parallels* between liberal critique of Islam and right-wing anti-Muslim bigotry.

Hey guy, I had no idea that you had such an adept understanding of what it’s like to live in a Muslim culture under the influence of the effects Western colonialism and international geopolitics. Please, tell me more, Westsplain to me, oh white man, how imperialism is responsible for me being forced to wear hijab for 15 years, suffering honor violence, and living a dangerous double life until my escape. Please condescendingly explain to me in the terms of your own culture where my oppression *really* comes from.

Look, I’m not denying that imperialism and geopolitics certainly help this ish along, often significantly. I’m not denying that anti-Muslim bigotry is a pervasive and significant problem. But those things are not an *explanation*. They are contributing factors at best that neither sufficiently explain nor excuse the blatant transgressions of Muslims and the horrible conditions in Muslim-majority countries. There is also an ironic lack of focus on Arab imperialism and the manner in which Islam has been reified, propagated, and been used to justify horrors in the Middle East and South Asia *far preceding* the West dipping its fingers into that mess. Sorry to strip you of credit for this, really, but it’s not the West that created the dehumanizing elements of Muslim cultures. There is also ironic lack of focus on the booming (essentially) slave trade disguised as a migrant worker system exploiting Africans and South and Southeast Asians that is utterly normalized in the Gulf and Levant. This isn’t some big bad monster wrought by the damning hand of Western imperialism and anti-Muslim bigotry. It has well transcended reasonable standards of the acceptable under those constraints, and the prevalence of normalized oppressive sentiment is not some fringe side effect of the injustices of white men. Growing up in Hezbollah culture, it was plain to see how Western-driven war and occupation helped fuel the return to fundamentalist Shia Islam, but it hardly exonerates us South Lebanese and Lebanese-Palestinian mashups from responsibility for the decisions we’ve made since then, for our violence and bigotry, for the culture of control and oppression and we’ve rooted ourselves into in response to these problems. Surely it doesn’t come from a vacuum, but you might have to live and be socialized in a Muslim country under the effects of such imperialism to recognize how fully much of it comes from ourselves, how essentialized scripture and deeply-rooted honor-shame codes fuel Islamism and the grave and rote dehumanization built into our cultures.

Sorry, but the West can’t take credit for this too.

And the supreme irony here? The blatant condescension of this PoV. It really is such a white-centric thing to try to explain the Muslim issue in those terms, to essentialize our problems in terms of your culture’s imperialism. It is also–and I’m not holding my breath for anyone to realize this anytime soon–buying into the same anti-brown racism to continually draw analogies between liberal critiques of Islam and right-wing anti-Muslim bigotries, to present eg the often-racist ignorant spewings of Dawkins and his ilk as the FACE of liberal and atheist discourse regarding the matter so you can self-righteously jump to condemn the obviously condemnable just as you raise it to the level of being representative of the entire liberal and atheist community, ironically completely drowning out and excluding the voices of Ex-Muslims and progressive Muslims, especially women, from the categories of ‘Western’ and ‘liberal’ and ‘atheist discourse’, othering us and contributing to our silence and marginalization. We don’t want Dawkins and Harris to be the driving voices of liberal discourse regarding Islam either. Stop excluding us. Stop alienating us. Stop reducing us to the norms of our home cultures, as if we’re incapable of engaging with them or transcending them, and stop creating a binary between us and our values and liberalism and its values.

Stop making our issues about you and your imperialism. By focusing so long and hard on your condemnation of anti-Muslim bigotry and white savior complexes, you are silencing us. You are othering us. You are explaining things about the very people whose marginalization you decry over and above their own voices and lived experiences. Cut that shit out.

And this is what I hear from you when you continually raise the flag of anti-imperialism above all other concerns regarding the Muslim issues. I hear that you do not think well enough of us as Muslims and Arabs and Persians and Kurds and Turks and South Asians and Africans to grapple with these imperialistic and geopolitical forces without being expected to refrain from falling into dehumanization and violence because of them.

That, because of imperialism, it is okay to hold us to standards that deplete to even the sub-human.

That we cannot or should not be responsible, strong, or aware enough to resist becoming aggressors ourselves because we have been aggressed against.

That Western imperialism is a greater driving force than anything we make, say, or do.

That you do not believe that Muslims and Ex-Muslims and people from Muslim-majority countries speaking on the matter–whether in affirming or critiquing ways–are powerful enough voices to speak to their own experiences, or to be taken as key or representative.

That it is okay for you to refuse to acknowledge our oppression as specifically non-white in source in order to avoid enabling the ‘save the brown women narrative’, because you somehow can’t see anything other than such a white-centric result being possible, as if we do not fucking exist as powerful critiquers of our own cultures, as if acknowledging the oppressive matters of fact of our existence suddenly renders us weak or incapable of engaging with it, as if your refusal to acknowledge our victimhood is anything more noble than a silencing mechanism, because you yourself somehow subscribe to some strange essentializing view that a victimized brown woman is a silent and passive one.

I hear you implying, too, that you have any real experiential knowledge from which to assess the horrors of Western imperialism vs the horrors of Islamist control and misogyny and decide which to decry. That in your transcending fear of enabling the right-wing bigotry that leads to further imperialist force, you can and will make judgments as to what is best for us regarding which of the damning powers contributing to our shitty lives should be enabled or discouraged, that you can and will make judgments as to which of the damning powers holding us down and controlling us is more or less serious or grave.

That, friend, is what is fucking racist.

-Marwa