Category Archives: BBC bias

The BBC, Guns, and Mental Illness

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There were two tragic shootings in the US this past week or so, and the BBC was keen to use them to promote their anti-gun agenda. Not only did they seek to exploit both events to further that agenda, but stooped to dishonesty, and in one case censorship, in the process. The fact that these occurred around the time the media was acknowledging the one-year anniversary of the sad Newtown massacre, what many of them felt certain was going to be the turning point for the anti-gun movement, only added to their urgency.

In honor of the one-year anniversary of the media seeking to exploit a tragedy to further a political agenda, Mark Mardell flew back from honoring his “secular saint” in Johannesburg to interview a mother of one of the little victims in Newtown.

(NB: Before I continue, let me warn you that this will be a very long post, the length of a magazine feature, as this is a complex issue and there’s a lot of ground – a lot of BBC coverage – to cover. If you’re one of those TL/DR types who believes all blog posts should be short and sweet, 500 words maximum, then please click away now. Also, it’s important to point out that my opinion and your opinion of gun control and of gun culture and gun laws in the US is irrelevant. This is about the BBC’s biased reporting on the issue. Whether or not one agrees with a given ideological perspective should neither deny the BBC’s right to report on something, nor give it carte blanche when it’s an issue with which one agrees. I’m going to repeat this more than once, because I don’t want discussion in the comments to degenerate into moaning about guns in the US. We should be able to discuss the bias on its face, with the evidence I’ve provided, whether we agree with the specifics of an ideological position or not.)

After painting the picture of a heartbroken town, using the tools of a professional wordsmith to evoke emotion and gently guide the reader towards the desired conclusion, Mardell presents the words of Nicole Hockley, mother of Dylon, one of the little victims of a mentally ill teenager who killed his own mother and stole her guns to use in a mass murder. It’s impossible not to be moved at least a little by her pain, the loss of love and the unimaginable potential of a young life. Her expression of the loss of the physical sensation of holding her child touches deeply. It’s why the media engages in this kind of reporting. They know it’s moving, they know people will feel deeply. Unfortunately, they know it can sometimes be used to manipulate, and in some cases it strays into exploitation. It’s also impossible not to detect Mardell’s disappointment that the woman seems to him not to have learned the correct lesson from the tragedy.

Mrs. Hockley knows something must change to prevent this kind of thing  from happening again, or at least make it so rare that nobody can make the case that, as Mardell has, it’s becoming as American as baseball. We’ll return to that highly biased bit of journalism later. Contrary to BBC reporting on the topic, nobody believes that nothing should change. Nobody wants these things to continue just so a few of us can keep our crazy arsenals. One of the lowest rhetorical tricks is to demonize one’s ideological opponent simply for disagreeing, denying the possibility that there might be a reasoned opinion on the other side worth discussing. With this trick, the debate is stifled before it begins, as Mardell demonstrates expertly:

President Barack Obama called for new gun laws after this act of mass murder. Congress has rebuffed every single one.

This makes it seems as if Congress (as usual with the BBC, it’s presented as a single, united body, which is dishonest), and by extension, the public who voted for them, opposed to any change, any improvement which might prevent further tragedies like this. For which laws did the President call? We aren’t told. Which laws doesn’t Congress want? We aren’t told. Does anyone in Congress have an alternative solution, or do they just want things to remain exactly as they are? We aren’t told. Informing you properly is not Mardell’s goal, of course. His purpose here is to make you believe that the US culture of gun ownership – in all its myriad forms, not the monolith nutter-with-an-arsenal portrait the BBC likes to present – is wrong, must be changed, and all right-thinking people seek a new momentum.

Nichole Hockley is disappointed but says she doesn’t back “gun control” and she doesn’t want, as some do, a ban on military-style rifles.

“Its not just about the gun at the end of the day. The gun is the weapon that was chosen to kill my son and others at Sandy Hook Elementary,” she said. “Certainly there are lots of common sense solutions required around gun safety – keep you guns locked up, make sure only people capable of having guns have them, report it if your gun is stolen.”

This reflects more of the consensus in the US than Mardell and his BBC colleagues are comfortable with. Contrary to the general BBC coverage of the issue, there are already plenty of laws controlling guns in the country. They vary from State to State (anathema to the BBC), yet we’re always given the impression that most of the country is one heated argument short of becoming the Wild West. (NB: Your opinion of whether or not people should own guns is irrelevant. The BBC’s reporting is biased, whether you agree with their ideology on the issue or not. Don’t appear to take the position that it’s okay for the BBC to be biased when you agree with them.) Fortunately, as the woman is being presented as an absolute moral authority, he must let her speak. No BBC censorship at this point.

But she says issues about mental health are just as important. There should be early intervention and programmes to stop people feeling isolated.

Now we get to the key element of this tragedy: mental illness. We aren’t properly reminded here, as the BBC expects we all know the details but anyone who remembers the story will know that a mentally ill young man killed his mother, stole her legally-owned weapons, and went on to commit mass murder against small children and their teachers. Here’s where the BBC begins to discuss the reality behind the tragedy, and to address the issues behind it.

Oh, hang on, no it isn’t. We’re back to gun control laws.

But she doesn’t see why Congress couldn’t have banned large ammunition magazines that can hold many bullets.

Connecticut has enacted such a ban on magazines of more than 10 rounds.

“The most lethal feature of a gun is the high-capacity magazine clips,” she said. “When you look at a lot of states there, hunters don’t have more than three or seven per clip because it is about being fair to the animals.

“I would like to see that same fairness given to humans,” she added.

That’s a great line, actually, better than just about anything put out by all the world-class, highly-trained, professional wordsmiths at the BBC. It’s so good it almost made me forget that she said the issue of mental illness was “just as important”. Mardell seems to have forgotten about it, because that’s the last we hear of it. The rest of the piece is about working to enforce more gun control laws. He even wheels out the traditional appeal to authority, this time in the form of the owner of a gun shop who denigrates some of the people who rushed to buy up certain unapproved weapons before laws banning them came into effect. Even the owner of a gun shop, you’re expected to feel, says that people who want to own these guns are idiots, and that it’s very dangerous. What more is there to say, right?

Wrong. There’s more – much, much more – to say about mental illness and the culture and laws surrounding it. Yet Mardell and the BBC swept it under the rug. Mardell simply doesn’t care that the woman – presented here as a voice you must listen to due to her absolute moral authority, remember – said that the issue of mental illness is of equal importance. That won’t do anything to push his or the BBC’s anti-gun agenda, so he ignored it entirely.

It’s likely that the journalist excuse for not spelling out the details of the mass murderer is that most people knew enough that it was unnecessary, and would have impeded the flow of the piece. I believe that one solitary sentence, not unlike the one I wrote above, would have sufficed, and would not have put a damper on the prose. It would, however, have detracted from the agenda. The victim’s mother said that it was just as important as what the BBC made into the main – and only – point of the story, so it’s hard to accept any excuse for leaving it out, practically denying the importance of the issue altogether.

Near the end of the article, after we hear the gun shop owner seemingly disparage many gun owners, Mardell amazing allows through one of the man’s sentiments, and perhaps the most important one of all on the issue of gun control:

He strongly believes that guns are not only a part of America’s constitution, they are also a part of its history and a bulwark against dictatorship – a frequently heard argument.

A frequently heard argument? Not from the BBC it isn’t. When was the last time you heard anyone from the BBC say this was part of the debate? It must be like racism and the Tea Party for Mardell. He’s admitted that he frequently hears people claiming legitimate opposition to Democrats’ and the President’s various Big-Government, redistributionist policies, and that he’s seen no overt evidence that it’s all due to racism, yet he remains convinced that it’s actually all due to racism – or crypto-racism – and pretty much all BBC reporting on opposition to any of the President’s policies is inspired by racism.

In the case of gun control laws, something that is apparently something Mardell hears frequently is never evident in his or his colleagues’ reporting on the issue. Right here, this tells us that he and the BBC just ignore a large portion of what they hear, because it doesn’t suit their agenda.

Getting back to the gun shop owner’s opinion, we get one more little mention of mental health issues, but it’s again subsumed by “common sense” gun control laws.

But he does insist that mental health is an issue and that people should be properly trained in using firearms.

Leaving it like this is sickening, as anyone who paid attention to the actual story will know that the mentally ill mass murderer was properly trained in using firearms, taken to training by his own mother. One can learn all sorts of hypothetical tactics from video games, but that doesn’t teach one how to actually hold, fire, and reload a weapon in meatspace. To claim, as many in the media did, that he learned it all from video games, is a lie, and is actually evidence of the naïvité endemic in the industry’s expert practitioners. So much for that point about proper training preventing this kind of tragedy, and so much for BBC honesty on the matter. Mardell should have pointed that out, but he didn’t, because he doesn’t give a damn. His real agenda is to promote the idea that the US needs to change.

There’s no doubt guns are one of the issues that are central to the wide political gulf in America.

Compromise seems unlikely but Ms Hockley insists what she calls “a conversation” is possible with the focus on the safety of children.

It’s not possible with anyone at the BBC, as their minds are already made up to take what for the majority of people in the US would be an extremist position. The BBC has never, and will never, discuss the fact that, due to the police taking twenty minutes to arrive on the scene, never mind getting in their and stopping a killer, Lanza could have used one of those hunting rifles with clips of only five rounds to kill just as many children and teachers. These were just about the most defenseless victims imaginable, and couldn’t have stopped him if they tried. Hell, he could almost have used a muzzle-loaded musket from the 1830s and done the same thing. Even an amateur can manage one round a minute, and it’s not like any of the little children or their young teachers would have known the difference or dared move when a lunatic with a gun was stalking them. In essence, none of the stricter gun control laws Mrs. Hockley nor most other not as extremist as BBC journalists are talking about would have prevented the tragedy. Only addressing the national culture on mental health issues will be able to even begin to deal with this. Yet Mardell swept it aside.

The second shooting tragedy this week was also covered by the BBC, and they had a difficult time using this one to push their agenda. Not that it stopped them from trying. And in this case, they stooped to censorship in order to aid it.

Gunman dead after Centennial, Colorado, school shooting

A student at a Colorado school shot and wounded two students, one seriously, before dying of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, police say.

If this hadn’t happened one day before the Newtown anniversary, would the BBC have even bother with it? Possibly, as it still would have been a good opportunity to send Jonny Dymond over to tell you that this occurred just a few miles away from the infamous Colombine mass murders.

“In the cold, outside their classrooms, waiting to be frisked, the students of another terrorized school,” Dymond intoned ominously, describing the scene with his voice carefully measured and modulated, placing emotive stress on “frisked”, in order to give the proper dark impression, like an actor giving a dramatic reading of a Gothic horror. Professional, world-class BBC journalism in action.

And thus begins the Narrative, one of too many schools cowering in fear of gun massacres. Whatever shall be done? More gun laws needed? Yes, of course. After all, this is the BBC, and that is their agenda.

Just like with , though, all the stricter gun control laws currently being revisited wouldn’t have prevented this tragedy.

The gunman brought a shotgun to the school and was looking for a specific teacher when confronted by a classmate, the Arapahoe County sheriff said.

Nobody in the gun control crowd is talking about banning shotguns. In fact, Vice President Biden recommends owning one for home defense. Even some people in Britain, such as farmers, are allowed to own shotguns. No way are shotguns going to be part of the national debate the BBC dreams of, nor are they going to be restricted or limited in any way. So this isn’t at all a useful tragedy to exploit to further the gun control agenda. Yet the BBC wanted to do it anyway, and so we get Dymond’s dramatic performance.

In addition, the BBC assigned David Botti (just how many Beeboids are working in the US these days? It’s getting ridiculous.) to do a “bespoke” video magazine piece on how US schools are so scared of these mass murders that they’re locking down. The point of his piece is actually not whether or not schools are over-reacting to an existential threat. In reality, the agenda is to stoke emotions against gun ownership and encourage approved thoughts about stricter gun control laws. Think of the children!

As for the Arapahoe shooting, since the BBC had little success in finding a way to push their agenda with that story, they engaged in censorship so it wouldn’t detract from another Narrative: who engages in gun violence.

It’s a behavior we’ve heard all too often from the BBC. I’ve lost count of how many times a shooting gets reported, and BBC journalists and on-air talent start speculating that it must be a Right-winger or white supremacist (to most BBC journalists they’re one and the same), before the facts come out. For example, we heard it with the Toulouse shootings (eventually Gavin Hewitt had enough evidence shoved in his face to make him wonder if it was something else), we heard it with Norwegian shootings, we heard it with the Tucson shootings (some Beeboids tweeted that bias and even blood libel of Sarah Palin as well: see Mark Blank-Settle Jim Hawkins, Katty Kay, and Rachel Kennedy, on our “In Their Own Tweets” page), and we heard it with the Boston bombings. There’s no need for an editorial directive for this biased agenda to be institutional if they all think the same way already. In only one of those cases – Anders Breivik in Norway – did the perpetrator turn out to be driven by some sort of Right-wing ideology. And he was clearly mentally ill. The Tucson murderer, Jared Loughner, also turned out be mentally ill. Yet the BBC reflexively leapt to assume that all of them must have been, before waiting for facts. And in Loughner’s case, tried to sweep the mental illness issue under the rug in favor of pushing their gun control agenda.

In the Arapahoe case, we do know the ideology of the shooter, and we know why the BBC decided to censor it.

Arapahoe High gunman held strong political beliefs, classmates said

The teenage gunman who entered Arapahoe High School on Friday afternoon and shot two fellow students with a shotgun was outspoken about politics, was a gifted debater and might have been bullied for his beliefs, according to students who knew him.

Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson identified the gunman as Karl Pierson, an 18-year-old student.

“He had very strong beliefs about gun laws and stuff,” said junior Abbey Skoda, who was in a class with Pierson during her freshman year. “I also heard he was bullied a lot.”

The part about being bullied has a parallel in the Columbine tragedy, actually. In addition to the easy connection for the lazy journalist of the geographical proximity, somebody decided to tack on a gratuitous mention of the Adam Lanza’s obsession with mass murder stories like Columbine. It’s completely irrelevant to the story itself. The Arapahoe shooter didn’t seem to keep a scrapbook like Lanza did, nor are we hearing about any other shared obsessions. The BBC included that for Narrative purposes only.

As for the Arapahoe shooters beliefs:

In one Facebook post, Pierson attacks the philosophies of economist Adam Smith, who through his invisible-hand theory pushed the notion that the free market was self-regulating. In another post, he describes himself as “Keynesian.”

“I was wondering to all the neoclassicals and neoliberals, why isn’t the market correcting itself?” he wrote. “If the invisible hand is so strong, shouldn’t it be able to overpower regulations?”

Pierson also appears to mock Republicans on another Facebook post, writing “you republicans are so cute” and posting an image that reads: “The Republican Party: Health Care: Let ’em Die, Climate Change: Let ’em Die, Gun Violence: Let ’em Die, Women’s Rights: Let ’em Die, More War: Let ’em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?”

Carl Schmidt and Brendon Mendelson, both seniors at Arapahoe High, knew Pierson. They said he had political views that were “outside the mainstream,” but they did not elaborate.

And there you have it. He held similar political beliefs to most BBC journalists. This would have detracted from the anti-gun agenda, so they left it out. Unlike with other shootings where political motivations came from the other side, or at least when they assumed as much. Perhaps the cognitive dissonance was just too much for them.

(UPDATE Dec. 16: More info on the political beliefs of the Arapahoe shooter. This CNN report gives conflicting anecdotes from his fellow students:

Stutz, an offensive tackle on the football team, had known Pierson since the two shared a human behavior class when Stutz was a freshman and Pierson a sophomore. They worked on a class experiment together in which they went into the community and tried breaking unwritten rules, Stutz said.

“I did think he was a little weird, but I didn’t think he was, like, bad weird,” Stutz added. “He always kind of talked about how America was a communist country, how the government was, like, trying to take us over and stuff. I don’t know, just some weird stuff that I didn’t really pay close attention to, but nothing that alarmed me.

But then there’s this:

Senior Chris Davis, 18, was among many students Saturday trying to make sense of Pierson’s shooting rampage.

“He was a weird kid,” Davis said. “He’s a self-proclaimed communist, just wears Soviet shirts all the time.”

Pierson became easily aggravated, “always liked to be right” and didn’t like losing, Davis said.

“It seems realistic, now, that he did it,” Davis added.

It can’t be both. Either the football player misunderstood what Pierson was saying, or the other kid was hallucinating and imagined the Communist t-shirts. Of course we also get the usual “He seemed so nice, can’t imagine him doing this” statements, which never illuminate any of these stories. Two minutes of an internet search ignoring non-Left sites which seized on only one of those quotes found this from the Left-leaning LA Times:

Joe Redmond, an 18-year-old senior who was good friends with Pierson and was also on the debate team, praised his former teammate’s debating prowess, saying Pierson was the best on the team.

“He and I talked politics and economics a lot. He was very good when he was on the team, and he knew what he was talking about,” Redmond said.

Pierson, he said, was a self-proclaimed socialist. “But he also wore a Communist Party T-shirt to confuse people,” Redmond said. Pierson also sometimes wore an Air Force Academy hoodie and apparently wanted to attend the school, Redmond said. His political leanings, friends say, were more antiauthoritarian than communist.

Antiauthoriatarian. So not so much like your typical Beeboid. Although reading further about his arrogance and viciousness against people who disagreed with him politically, he’s sounding more and more like one. Actually, if he’s a self-proclaimed socialist but doesn’t trust the government, he’s like the Occupiers I’ve talked to. And one with emotional problems at least. This just makes it even more curious that the BBC didn’t bother following up on his political beliefs, seeing as how they usually aren’t shy about doing so. Perhaps it just added nothing to the Narrative, so never mind.)

The BBC, in fact, has a long history of pushing a gun-control agenda. And we have proof that it’s not mere supposition, something I’m only inferring, reading something that isn’t there. Mark Mardell himself admitted it. Near the beginning of this piece, I mentioned his quip that mass shootings were becoming “as American as baseball”. It came from this report on that shooting on a Naval base a couple months back.

In his online report about the incident, he admitted the agenda.

I’m standing in front of a yellow police cordon, the flashing lights of emergency vehicles in the background. The locations change, but the question from the presenters in London is as predictable as it is understandable.

“Will this tragedy make a difference to the debate on gun control?” The short and blunt answer: “No.”

Certainly the murders at the Navy Yard will give fresh impetus to a very old debate.

That’s what they were looking for, and came up empty-handed. Mardell’s disappointment was palpable (I wrote about that incident here). In fact, just like with the recent shooting at that Arapahoe school, the murderer brought only a shotgun to the party. As I said earlier, that’s not going to add one iota of support to the gun control agenda. VP Biden says we can have one, British farmers can have one, banning large-capacity magazines will change nothing. Funny how no Beeboids were tweeting that Biden had blood on his hands for encouraging people to get themselves a shotgun. Oh, and that killer was….wait for it….mentally ill. So was at least one of the Columbine murderers, come to think of it. And the BBC quickly abandoned the story once they realized it. Mardell swept the mental illness issue aside after paying lip service to its existence.

Actually, I have to admit that’s not quite true. BBC journalist Debbie Siegelbaum (I repeat: just how many BBC journalists are there in the US?) reported that one possible reason the man was able to kill so many people is that the SWAT team was ordered to stand down. The BBC got the scoop (I don’t know which one of them got it), and the US media picked up on it immediately. Why or how a BBC journalist got this scoop, I have no idea. Right place, right time, perhaps. However it happened, this was – or should have been – an example of good investigative journalism, placing the facts of the story over any ideology or preconceived notions about the surrounding issues. It was then that the BBC quickly abandoned it. Why? This should have been major, worthy of following up.

Instead, the BBC chose ideology over journalism. No aspect of this incident was useful for the anti-gun agenda, so they simply moved on to bloodier pastures. They thought they found them this week. Because the BBC has so many journalists in the US, including BBC News America, a daily news broadcast produced in and targeted at the US audience, it’s deserving of scrutiny and concern. This is one of the ways that the BBC tries, as Jeremy Paxman put it, to “spread influence”. So let’s not pretend any longer that the BBC doesn’t try to do this, or that they don’t believe the BBC doesn’t have some sort of Divine Right to do it.

The BBC should be doing stories about how we need a national debate on mental health issues, rather than constantly seeking to push gun control buttons. Perhaps they’re simply intellectually incapable of making the leap. They’re certainly ideologically incapable of dealing with the entire issue reasonably or impartially. Or honestly.

More evidence of the BBC’s history of an anti-gun agenda can be found here, here, and here.

Money Must Grow On trees

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For all its squealing about budget limitations the BBC seems to have no problem finding the dosh for those little creature comforts for the staff:

The BBC is spending up to £500,000 on a major refit of its £1 billion new headquarters because staff have complained their state-of-the art surroundings ‘lack character’.

The high-spec London HQ was only opened in June – four years behind schedule and £55 million over budget.

But the Corporation has already decided to revamp two floors of New Broadcasting House to make them ‘more creative and vibrant’ – following a string of gripes from staff. Critics have branded the move a ‘ludicrous’ use of the licence fee.

We have decided to make these changes in response to strong feedback from television staff that the floors did not feel like creative spaces and lacked character. It was something people felt particularly strongly about when we moved in.’

 

So…it’s to help those creative juices flow is it?

Funny….the BBC also says this:

A BBC spokesman said the changes were cosmetic and that the revamp was confined to communal areas. He said the floors had originally been designed for World Service and news staff who had been relocated elsewhere.

He added: ‘The BBC must ensure it continues to produce fantastic television programmes for licence-fee-payers so some changes are being made to create the most effective working environment possible for staff.’

 

Hang on….the areas are ‘communal areas’ and were originally for the World Service…..so not their actual work spaces then…and just where did all these creative types hang out before they were moved to these floors at Salford before the World Service vacated? Must have been a tremendously inspirational space that was fully compliant with the needs of the creative community, one which empowered and enabled them to bedazzle us with the twists and turns in the plot lines of yet more cooking, antiques and house programmes as well as remakes of the Clangers, The Wombles, and infinite reincarnations of Doctor Who, Top Gear and HIGNFY.

 

A ‘living standards crisis’?

Not at the BBC obviously.

 

 

 

The Colour Of Money…It’s Green

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The BBC’s Roger Harrabin was keen to highlight this:

‘No case’ to water down CO2 targets, chancellor told

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) says there is no legal, environmental or economic case for lowering the fourth UK “carbon budget”, set in 2011.

It says the budget (running from 2023-2027) should be tightened if the EU agrees strict targets on emissions.

 

 

But of course he has never once examined the vested interests, both financial and ideological, that the members of the climate change committee hold…unlike the Daily Mail which does its journalism properly…..

Web of ‘green’ politicians, tycoons and power brokers who help each other benefit from billions raised on your bills

Other industries would stand accused of damning conflicts of interest but when it comes to global warming, anything goes…

The Mail on Sunday today reveals the extraordinary web of political and financial interests creating dozens of eco-millionaires from green levies on household energy bills.

A three-month investigation shows that some of the most outspoken campaigners who demand that consumers pay the colossal price of shifting to renewable energy are also getting rich from their efforts.

How half of key Climate Change Committee is in the pay of green business

No institution plays a greater role in dictating green energy policy than the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) – the body set up by Ed Miliband when he was Labour Energy Secretary through his 2008 Climate Change Act.

The Mail on Sunday’s investigation has established that four of its nine members have recently had or still have financial interests in firms that benefit from its rulings.

 

 

This site has looked at such a web of intrigue before…..

Harrabin’s Not For Wavering

Bob Ward & Climate Fraud

 

Massive corruption at the heart of the environmental and climate change industry…including those in the Media who cover up such corruption whilst attacking the climate sceptics?

 

You be the judge.

 

 

And Merton Doesn’t Even Blush

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Amazing hypocrisy from the HIGHNFY crew on MP’s pay (11 mins)….all things considered:

 

At the start, Deayton got paid £3,750 a segment, £750 more than was paid to the less experienced Hislop and Merton.

By the time he was fired, he was earning £50,000 a show. While Merton and Hislop receive less than that amount now, it is not considerably less.

Fourteen years ago they got £12,000 a show and while no one will confirm the current stipend, £40,000 per show is not far off the mark for the duo described by Boris as ‘the demigods of the tart rejoinder’.

 

 

 

Nelson Mandela….’Prepared to use terrorism’

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In his autobiography Mr Mandela makes it clear they were prepared to go further and engage in guerrilla warfare and even terrorism. 

 

Margaret Thatcher helped to avert a ‘devastating racial war’ by opposing tougher sanctions against South Africa’, F. W. de Klerk  (who in 1993 won the Nobel peace prize jointly with Mr Mandela) says.

 

 

 

The BBC et al have been delighting in smearing Mrs Thatcher because she thought the ANC were terrorists….which they were….curious how the Labour Party leader’s brother doesn’t ever get a mention …after all it was David Miliband who said that not only did the ANC use terrorism but that it was justifiable:

 

Foreign Secretary David Miliband was accused last night of condoning terrorism after declaring that there were circumstances in which it was ‘justifiable’.

His remarks – made in support of the ANC’s armed struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

Mr Miliband was speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives programme, in which he chose to pay tribute to the South African anti-apartheid activist Joe Slovo – a friend of Mr Miliband’s father, the academic Ralph Miliband.

Mr Slovo, who shared Miliband senior’s belief in Marxist ideology, was one of the leaders of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed military wing of the ANC.

Asked by presenter Matthew Parris whether there were any circumstances in which terrorism was justified, Mr Miliband said: ‘Yes, there are circumstances in which it is justifiable, and yes, there are circumstances in which it is effective.’

He added: ‘The importance for me is that the South African example proved something remarkable: the apartheid regime looked like a regime that would last forever, and it was blown down.

It is hard to argue that, on its own, a political struggle would have delivered. The striking at the heart of a regime’s claim on a monopoly of power, which the ANC’s armed wing represented, was very significant.’

 

Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) logo

 

 

From the BBC itself:

In his autobiography Mr Mandela makes it clear they were prepared to go further and engage in guerrilla warfare and even terrorism.

 

And just how important was Mandela really?  The BBC here tells us he and the ANC were washed up when he was jailed….and was he responsible for the ‘rainbow nation’.…it was in fact ANC policy rather than Mandela’s personal one.   The BBC glorifies Mandela as someone who was ‘prepared to die’…Biko really did die for his cause.    Mandela didn’t break Apartheid…or make the peace… on his own….

Mr Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for organising sabotage at what became known as the Rivonia trial. He was sent to Robben Island jail.

His story could have ended there.

He and the ANC had been effectively neutered, Western governments continued to support South Africa’s apartheid regime and change seemed as far away as ever. But the rise of the militant Black Consciousness Movement during the 1970s and the death in custody of one of the movement’s founders, student activist Steve Biko, rekindled interest in Mr Mandela and the ANC

 

 

 

 

 

FRIDAY OPEN THREAD…

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Well, I could not bring myself to watch BBC Question Time from South Africa last night – first time in ages that I found myself in such a position. The BBC Mandelathon continues entering the second week now and it’s really all become far too much. I was on the BBC Moral Maze programme the other evening and it was all about the template Mandela set for ‘forgiveness”- never once did it enter BBC minds that Mandela should himself have been on his knees seeking forgiveness for the terrorism he once commanded! Anyhoo — the floor is yours….

Media Distortion

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Artifacts.

Some of the things we see in the microscope are not a part of the original structure of the living specimen but are artifacts. An artifact is a product of man’s workmanship. Workmanship may bring to mind the craftsmanship of the Eskimo’s polar bear carved out of walrus tusk or the graceful gazelle of African ebony. Man’s workmanship also includes the embedding, sectioning, and staining of tissues for microscope observations. The effects of these manipulations often produce distortions and color changes which are not characteristic of the tissues when alive. In order to interpret what we see and to understand the structure of living tissues, we need to know what artifacts are and what makes them.

 

 

The ‘reactive howls of ‘outrage’ from some politicians and commentators.’

The Media, and not just the BBC, by its very fact of observing, for example, politicians in action, can introduce ‘artifacts’ into events as said politicians react not only to those events but react in a way that is influenced by them trying to either generate favourable comment or avoid unfavourable comment in the Media…..either way they act in a manner that they wouldn’t naturally do if they were unobserved…for better or worse.

 

Recent events have given us some perfect illustrations of this.

MP’s pay is one such example….all three leaders of the main political parties have been trying to out compete each other to make it quite clear that ‘in the present economic climate‘ such a  pay rise is ‘inappropriate’…….

That is despite it being made quite clear that the plan is ‘cost neutral’ and will cost the tax payer nothing.

Why do the politicians all posture and  prostrate themselves before the Media?  Because they believe they will be torn apart if they so much as suggest that perhaps the cost neutral ‘payrise’ is in fact appropriate.

The irony is that the BBC has been very even handed, if possibly more inclined towards the payrise…giving a lot of coverage to explanation of the ins and outs of this.

 

 

Another example is this:

Lack of a proper national policy to get UK children to do more exercise amounts to mass “child neglect”, the British Journal of Sports Medicine says.

Charities and other august bodies know that they have a ready audience in the Media for any sensationalist claims…the more sensationalist the better….and this distorts the news agenda which favours such tripe.

And yet only a day or so later we hear that 1.5 million more people are taking part in sport as a result of the ‘Olympic legacy’…no doubt many of them children.

Not only that but obesity is actually going down.

And apart from that I don’t think sport in school has anything to do with obesity or fitness…or it is marginal…..these doctors are demanding 1 hour a day of sport in school….I must have had at most 2 hours a week…and yet managed to be more Laurel than Hardy.

[And..if fat is genetic the spooks would have whisked some of these miraculously fat people off to Area 51 for examination…because if you can get fat on a Ryvita then your genes will save the world from starvation as you can convert minute amounts of food into large amounts of stored energy in the shape of fat. Ab Flab!]

 

 

The last example of how the presence of the Media distorts reactions is again genetics…but not concerning fat…concerning IQ.

Boris Johnson was monstered last week when he suggested that a high IQ gave you an advantage in life:

“I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.”

 

Naturally the usual suspects all came out against such apparent ‘elitism’…Clegg saying it was ‘unpleasant, careless elitism….that treated people as if they were dogs’.  Even Cameron had to distance himself from Boris….Labour MPs also clamoured to denounce him…saying it was an insult and shameful.

 

However today we have this:

Exam grades ‘more nature than nurture’

Genetic influence explains almost 60% of the variation in GCSE exam results, twin studies suggest.

Scientists studied academic performance in more than 11,000 identical and non-identical 16-year-old twins in the UK.

The team from King’s College London found that on average, genes explained 58% of differences between GCSE scores in core subjects such as maths.

Differences in grades due to environment, such as schools and families, accounted for about 36%.

The remaining differences in GCSE scores in maths, English and science are explained by environmental factors unique to each person, say the researchers.

 

 

 

So….what Boris said was in fact the case….as most people probably believe…..which is the point of this post…the politicians react in a way that is more tuned to how the Media will react than to what the Public actually thinks…..the Tory Party famously changing its core beliefs and values  under Cameron in the hope that the BBC will stop calling them the ‘Nasty Party’.

The public, as the head of IPSA said, are quite capable of thinking for themselves:

“This shows us something important: this is an issue where the public has a more nuanced, and split, opinion than the reactive howls of ‘outrage’ from some commentators and politicians.”

So when will politicians get brave enough to say what they really think rather than shaping it to fit in with the Media’s values and let the Public judge?

 

What is also amusing is Richard Bacon’s reaction along with that of his guests (9 mins in )..including a teacher, to this story.

We were told that genetics played a ‘huge part’ in how pupils performed academically in school.

Bacon said ‘Brass tacks…if your parents are stupid then you will be stupid..that’s what it is saying.’

He said this was ‘Really interesting stuff.’

He brought on a teacher who said that this was only ’emphasisng what teachers knew already….every pupil is different…it is a very interesting piece of research.’

 

What a remarkably different reaction to that given to Boris….could it be that, regardless of the truth of Boris’ statement,  because he is firstly a Tory and secondly an Old Etonian, the Media, commentators and craven fellow politicians, either saying what they believe is ‘acceptable’ to the Media or taking an opportunistic chance to attack Boris, all denounce Boris and thereby distort not only perceptions of reality but the political process as a whole.

Paxman recently complained about politics and its apparent detachment from ordinary life….well who creates that detachment?…the Media which forces politicians to react in an artificial and absurd manner saying things that bare little relation to life or indeed what the majority of the Public probably think…Boris accepted….all to please that very same Media which is in fact the most out of touch group of people in the country…and yet who are setting the political agenda more often than not.

 

‘Do you find our industry slightly ludicrous?’

 

 

 

Ruff Trade

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Nothing to do with  BBC bias….just thought you might like to see something I spotted whilst passing through Herefordshire today….the ‘Missing Pet Search Team’ on manoeuvres:

 

 

Just an unfortunate coincidence for sure.

 

 

Making It Up

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Does this make any sense at all?…….

BBC Trust stands by ‘robust’ Pollard Review despite criticism

Nick Pollard’s review of Newsnight’s dropped investigation into Jimmy Savile has been defended by the BBC Trust after criticism from a Conservative MP.

Rob Wilson provided the Trust with a recorded conversation in which Mr Pollard appeared to admit omitting a key letter from his report.

The Trust said it was a “mistake” not to include the letter’s claims about former director general Mark Thompson’s knowledge of Newsnight’s report.

[Pollard] failed to make reference to the letter, which was sent by Ms Boaden’s lawyers, and later admitted in a taped telephone call with a journalist that this may have been a “mistake”.

The recording, which was obtained by Mr Wilson, MP for Reading East, was made public via the Guido Fawkes political blog on Wednesday.

It was suggested the recording raised questions about the validity of the conclusions of the report.

In response, the trust said: “The Trustees noted that Nick Pollard feels he had made a mistake in the drafting of one aspect of the report – the failure to make reference to the letter from the solicitors of then Director of News Helen Boaden.”

However, the trust said it was “satisfied” that Mr Pollard “properly weighed all the evidence that was available to him and that the conclusions of his report are robust”.

 

 

So….

The Trust agrees ‘it was a “mistake” not to include the letter’s claims‘

Mr Pollard appeared to admit omitting a key letter from his report.

However despite omitting key evidence and the Trust saying this was a mistake…the Trust was “satisfied” that Mr Pollard “properly weighed all the evidence that was available to him and that the conclusions of his report are robust”.

 

In summary…..The Trust said omitting the letter was a mistake…Pollard admits it was a mistake…..and yet the Trust concludes he weighed ALL the evidence and his conclusions are robust?  Shurely shome mistake?

 

How does that work?

 

Rob Wilson thinks it doesn’t and smells of a cover up:

Wilson said: “Instead of immediately challenging Nick Pollard to get to the truth in September about what the most powerful man in the BBC at the time knew about Savile, Lord Patten seems content to resort to vague legal threats on behalf of other people to close the matter down.”

 

‘Helen Boaden’s position is ‘I did tell him about it”

Tape is available on Guido

 

listen to ‘The Tape Patten Does Not Want You to Hear’ on Audioboo

 

 

 

Thanks to Number 7 for the link:

 

Pollard: I’m pretty sure that we did ask Mark Thompson about this and he said ‘no, I wasn’t told what the inquiry was all about’. I don’t know whether the Mark Thompson transcript is out yet but I think the gist of that is in there.

Journalist: I’ve seen that one, yes. You did press him, it looks like, and you did say – or rather maybe it was mcclean – hang on a second can we just get this straight?

Pollard: Yeah. Just putting that aside for a moment and this is off the record. It’s all off the record, this is purely for background. I think we’ve talked about this before. It is clear that it is Helen Boaden’s view that she told him about the nature of the investigation.

Journalist: How do you reach that conclusion?

Pollard: Because she sent us a letter to tell us that.

Journalist: Sorry, when did she send you that letter?

Pollard: Just before the report was published.

Journalist: You mean in December or this month?

Pollard: Back in December. And I think the truth is that I sort of overlooked that. I didn’t see there was a particular significance in it. Partly because Mark Thompson had said ‘No she didn’t tell me about it. It was an open question. She might have done or she didn’t.’

Clearly whatever Helen Boaden’s recollection was he was going to say “That’s not my recollection and she didn’t tell me about it.”

But I think it is clear and Helen Boaden’s position is, if she was asked, she would say I did tell him about it.

So that’s the position, between you and I. It’s a slightly awkward position for me because it’s something that actually if I’d thought about it immediately before publication and I’d picked up on the significance of it I think I’d have probably put it in the report.

But quite clearly Mark Thompson would have said ‘Well whatever she says I think in this case she’s wrong and her recollection is wrong.’

So it’s quite a tricky position this, I think, and again this is strictly at the moment solely between you and I for no purposes other than me discussing it with you.

Helen Boaden is pretty relaxed about all this. I’ve talked to her about that. I’ve said to her I know you’ve sent us that letter.

It was one of these right to reply letters that most of the witnesses had if we had any criticism to make of them.

There was no criticism being made of Helen Boaden that she didn’t tell Mark Thompson, so it was a sort of peripheral issue, but she happened to mention in this letter ‘I did tell him’.

And I think that is what she has told anybody at the BBC who has asked, that whatever Mark Thompson says, she did tell him. Not that she gave him chapter and verse but she said…

Journalist: …She said the words ‘sex abuse’

Pollard: Yeah, I think she said Newsnight were doing an investigation of Jimmy Savile and it was about abuse of kids or whatever.

Whether or not there was any reference to BBC premises I don’t think she says.

Now the slight oddity of this position is that the letter, these right of reply letters, which I think are known as Salmon letters, they are not being published

I think probably that’s right that they are not being published because each one of them is from a lawyer on behalf of a client.

So the position is that it is Helen Boaden’s position that she did tell Mark Thompson about it but it’s not in the record anywhere.

So that’s how things stand. You’ve been very straight and very square with me and I just wanted to let you know what the position is.

Now, you could say it doesn’t particularly reflect well on me that I overlooked this in the report.

It’s not in the report that Helen Boaden says on the record “I did tell Mark Thompson about it.”

That’s just a fact of life. If somebody went to Helen Boaden and said ‘I just want to check, did you or didn’t you tell Mark Boaden [sic], I think she’d say ‘Actually, yes I did.’ But there’s not an obvious way of me making that public, shall we say.

Journalist: I was thinking there is one possibility. I don’t know if you read the Sunday Times on Sunday I wrote a piece in there which made clear that a member of the Commons media select committee has written to Helen Boaden. There has been no reply yet, but I wonder whether you feel it would be in your gift to independently contact that member of Parliament and say look, this is territory which was actually raised on a voluntary basis by Helen Boaden and she did actually confim that.

Pollard: I think the slight danger is that it’s a little unpredictable what might happen then. I’ll have a think about that. There’s not an obvious other route to this. It’s absolutely in Helen Boaden’s gift to say at any time either ‘I did tell Mark Thompson’ or ‘Not only did I tell Mark Thompson but I told the Pollard Review as well.’

Journalist: One assumes now the transcripts have been published she’s going to seize that opportunity.

Pollard: Well if she thinks it’s important, and she may not do, to be honest.

Journalist: Except that she’s got to respond to this MP so I’d guess she’d say to the MP ‘Thanks for your letter. By the way I have written to Pollard about this already.’ I assume that’s what she’ll do. That’s what I’d do. And I anyway I don’t think anyone for a second believed that Helen Boaden wouldn’t have been asked what the investigation was about and wouldn’t have told him what it was about anyway.

Pollard: No, I think that’s right and common sense suggests that. Certainly I’d say listening to the Ben Webster tape, most people would come to the conclusion that that was a guy [Thompson] trying his damndest not to say yes of course I knew about it.

Journalist: Because he’d already stupidly committed himself to a denial.

Pollard: Well that’s exactly it. He’s painted himself into the corner. So I don’t quite know about that. I don’t think it’s the most important thing to do with this entire process but…

Journalist: Well you say that but actually I’ve always thought the head of the organisation having heard about that would have been able to either take steps or…

The fact remains the BBC broadcast tribute programmes to Savile knowing they’d heard allegations that month that he was a paedophile.

Furthermore if Thompson knew that he’d have had the wit to say hang on I think this could potentially explode in our faces. What else did this investigation consist of?

And at that point Meirion Jones would have said ‘we also heard about Glitter and Starr’ and Thompson would have said ‘Well they’re still alive. We’re going to have to tell the police about this.’

And so this is why I’ve always pursued it. That’s apart from the moral element of it, Nick, which was always…if you or I heard of abuse taking place in our office I’d bet the farm on either of us saying we can’t leave this one hanging.

Pollard: I agree with that. I wouldn’t put myself in the position of defending Mark Thompson or in that sort of similar way, George Entwistle who was told about it and didn’t react..

I suppose what you don’t know is how you might react if someone said ‘Look we heard a pretty lurid allegation against a presenter who just died but this was 30 years ago but you might be relieved to hear we did an investigation and the editor of the programme tells me there was nothing in it.’

We know that is very very far from being the whole story because there was something in it and the editor’s decision was wrong but you know what I mean, if you were a busy exec further up the chain and you were told ‘The bad news is we got a pretty nasty allegation about someone. The good news is there that there wasn’t anything in it for you.’ OK, that’s not an explanation. It’s an element of how it came to be brushed under the carpet.

Journalist: I also think it’s a fascinating insight that the instinct of Thompson according to Helen Boaden’s version which you’ve just told me was to lie about this. Was to say I never heard anything about it. That tells you an awful lot about the man.

Pollard: Yes. Well…yeah…yeah

Journalist: I may be sounding rather black and white about this, but I was always told you don’t lie.

Pollard: I think that’s right. There’s no doubt he painted himself into a corner…and actually if he’d said ‘I wasn’t told about it and rightly or wrongly when I was told the whole thing had been dropped I came to the conclusion that meant there was nothing in it. As it turns out that was wrong and perhaps I should have double, treble checked’. It’s not a happy position but it’s a better position, isn’t it?

I think in a way this is your story. You’ve made the running on this. I think what this does is it puts you in a position where you know for sure that Helen Boaden did tell the Pollard Inquiry that she told Mark Thompson the nature of the allegations. I think it puts you in a position where you can’t say in print how you know this but you’re pretty watertight on the fact that that’s the case. Because it seems to me reading between the lines that you could have heard this either of two sources – Helen Boaden could have told you or I could have told you.

Journalist: Or her lawyer could have told me.

Pollard: Absolutely. I’m including that in the Boaden side of things. You’ll gather I’m in a slightly uneasy position about this. I think you would say it was a mistake of mine not to have picked up on this and included it in the report.

Journalist: Well of course I pick up on that but frankly that is irrelevant. What is relevant is the end result. She has gone on the record very happily, willingly, on a voluntary basis to tell you and others involved in your inquiry that she did tell Mark Thompson.

She obviously wanted to make that clear to you. She obviously wanted to do that for a reason.

Whether or not you had the time or opportunity to include that in your report is frankly irrelevant.

You are nothing more than the messenger. You can’t have included every single element of what you were told in your report. We see from the volume of transcripts it wouldn’t have been possible for you to do that. I understand you were under some time pressure. I’m not interested in pointing the finger at you. I am interested in establishing if Mark Thompson did know through his own second in command Helen Boaden this was a sex abuse allegation and what you’ve told me is this very important information that she did tell him. Do you know when she told him?

Pollard: No. From recollection I don’t think the letter says. I’ll have a look. Presumably after December 20. If there’s an indication I’ll ping you a date….