Category Archives: BBC bias

The BBC has become the new priesthood according to Ed West.  

Here Ed West, the deputy editor of the Catholic Herald and commentator in the Telegraph, tell us he believes the BBC is biased against the Church and why the power of the BBC is damaging to Society (via Is the BBC biased? )

I love the BBC, I grew up with it. I love its comedy, its documentary making and all those great programmes. It’s a great British institution.

I feel it’s very much part of our culture and forms our national culture.

My problem with it and why I say it’s not a friend of the Church is simply that it does have a liberal bias, I don’t think most people there would even deny that.

But the main problem is the size of it, the power it has over British society.

It’s not just that it might view the Church sceptically, although it does, but that it’s almost a Church in itself.

It has the same moral authority that the Church once would have had, it’s almost setting the moral agenda in the way that the Church of England once did and once again people with personal views are considered outside of communion with Society.

The BBC supports equality and diversity, these sort of views that good liberal people are supposed to have.

The BBC considers it is intrinsically good to mock and be hostile to the Catholic Church but also to suburban, middle class people, Ulster Unionists, Israelis and various other groups, but there are other groups that automatically can’t be mocked such as the NHS or the UN for example and the Church very much falls into the former category.

It matters because the BBC has such an influence on wider society.

The general view amongst the British population who are asked what comes to mind when they think of the Catholic Church mostly have ideas based on sexuality.

The BBC is very effective at spreading certain ideas such as the Catholic Church is culpable for spreading HIV …..the BBC is a particularly powerful disseminator of this sort of idea of religion.

The BBC is once again attacking, undermining Christian beliefs and teachings.

It has consistently produced programmes that mock or demonise Christians, undermine the Church as an institution and denounces the Bible as a doctored, fraudulent piece of propaganda.

In ‘The Prophets’ on R4 it has examined five prophets. Here I look at one programme which examines ‘Isaiah’ who is a major prophet upon whose prophecies rests the basis of Christianity…the prediction of the ‘Messiah’.

Firstly you must realise that Isaiah isn’t a real person, probably, says the BBC….and if he isn’t real how can his prophecies be real? And if his prophecies are not real how can Jesus, the Messiah as predicted in those prophecies, be real?

In other words the whole basis of Christianity is set upon a lie.

Isaiah gave permission, gave rise to the idea of the Messiah…..

And the BBC tells us….listen to the tone of voice particularly here…..with such an expectation it is hardly a surprise that some group of Jews would say to themselves ‘this is the Man’.

‘Some group of Jews’ eh? Interesting phrase.

Not long ago Melvyn Bragg had a pop at the Prophets…telling us that the Bible is made up, doctored, written after the events ‘prophesised’ had occurred, to ‘confirm’ prophecies rather than to record them and that there was a ‘conscious fabrication of Christ’.

He had on Muslim Mona Saddiqui…who only spoke to praise Mohammed and the Koran…telling us the Koran couldn’t possibly be a fake…as Mohammed couldn’t write…therefore it must be the Word of God, a true miracle…..not only that but that we would all be Muslims if only Mohammed had been so prophesised as was Jesus in the Bible….nothing like a bit of Muslim propaganda on the BBC.

This is presumably why Bragg feels so readily able to criticise Christianity:

“Do I believe in the fundamental tenants of what makes Christianity, that there is a God who cares about every one of us? I’m afraid not. Resurrection? I’m afraid not. And so on.”

Ironically, if his own programmes about Christianity weren’t contradiction enough, in the same speech he states:

“What I really resent is their (atheists’) attack on the Christian ways and particularly the Christian history. Dismissing the ‘sky Gods’ – how dare they? That was the best people could do at that time.”

I guess that once inside the bowels of the BBC with all those eyes upon you your principles go out the window.

In contrast he BBC has stated that it refuses to examine Islam in the same manner because Muslims are a minority in this country who must be above criticism because they would feel victimised and alienated by such a process.

You can pretty much dismiss that argument. The reality is that when Islam is criticised various threats are made by the Muslim ’community’…..not restricted to violent extremists….Lord Ahmed’s threat to march on Parliament with ten thousand Muslims springs to mind, as does his alleged bounty on Obama and Bush….and the BBC is intimidated into silence.

The BBC’s stance on Islam is contradicted by their approach to reporting Buddhism…in which they happily denounce Buddhism as a ‘religion of violence’.

Just how many Buddhists are there in the UK? Are they not also going to be ‘victimised and alienated’ by the BBC‘s aggressive criticism of their religion? I imagine the BBC feels that there is little threat that any employee will be beheaded by the followers of this religion despite it being one that, the BBC tells us, is a ‘religion of violence’.

It is more than apparent that one religion gets far more favourable treatment from the BBC than any other.

Here we go, use this to detail the bias. Warning, I will be on BBC Sunday Morning Live tomorrow morning at 10am.

Some links that provide an interesting perspective on the BBC:

Thanks to George R for this link:

Why does the BBC sneer about Britain’s recovery but go crazy if Euroland’s corpse so much as twitches?

This from the Telegraph illustrates the lack of knowledge about student loans….something that the BBC has done little to dispel…..its journalists often encouraging the idea that the loans are a massive weight around the necks of any potential student…putting them off from applying to university ….disproven by recent record applications.

Here is Paul Mason’s take on student loans:

A whole generation of young people has seen economic promises cancelled:
they will work probably until their late sixties, come out of university with
lifetime-crippling debts.

Martin Lewis thinks different…as do students now as they realise they have been lied to by the likes of Paul Mason:

Martin Lewis: Time to stop calling student loans a loan

There is this from Janet Daley in the Telegraph:

The BBC says anyone who accuses it of bias – is biased

Well that’s is one way of countering the criticism that your news presentation is biased against arguments from Right-of-centre think tanks. You just smear the Right-of-centre think tank that points it out as being politically motivated and biased against you.

Of course Daley is right the BBC fixes the game in its favour.

It carries out numerous internal reviews of its own journalism….

They frequently state that yes, we have been biased, in the past, but that has been sorted…we are now as impartial and balanced in our reporting as it is possible to be….impartiality is in our DNA.

The Balen Report, which seems destined never to see the light of day as it probably reveals that BBC journalists have sided with the Palestinians and helped foster an atmosphere of anti-Semitism around the world.

Of course they did publish a report which remarkably found them to be biased in favour of Israel:

One important feature of this is the failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation. Although this asymmetry does not necessarily bear on the relative merits of the two sides, it is so marked and important that coverage should succeed in this if in nothing else.

Then there is its review of its science coverage…carried out by Professor Steve Jones who is practically an employee of the BBC and who admitted his career was saved by the BBC.

Strangely he thought the BBC wasn’t biased…or rather wasn’t biased enough against climate change sceptics.

Then there was the shelved investigation into Saville…something it seems that Mark Thompson is still somewhat sensitive about and reluctant to chat about.

And then there is the BBC’s use of accountancy firm KPMG to investigate BBC severance pay offs to senior executives….a firm with which the BBC has a close working relationship….being the BBC’s own auditors but also a company that provides consultancy for the BBC, and has even presented the business news on the BBC.

So possibly not all that independent and critical when it comes to reviewing BBC performance.

I’m sure many of you can think of many more examples of the BBC covering its own tracks and doing what it can to hide evidence of bias or wrong doing.

Greg Dyke admitted in an interview with Garry Richardson that the BBC ‘had all the money and if you have all the money you’ve got a lot of power.’

Shame there seems to be a lack of responsibiltiy and accountability that usually goes with power.

It’s a curious feature of the BBC that independent thought, creative, original, idiosyncratic reasoning and analysis is often crushed under the weight of the organisation with its overwhelming employment of people who think the same thoughts and cleave to the same values. Those of an independent frame of mind soon find it wise to keep their consensus breaking thoughts to themselves or find themselves marked out as a maverick, tolerated but closely watched and contained, any off message ideas or an attempt to encourage a bit of free association and joined up thinking is discouraged and colleagues of course ignore the inconvenient reports that jar with and contradict their own…and the one shining example that gives a tantalising glimpse of what the BBC could be is extinguished in a tidal wave of group think, group non-think.

For the last 3 or 4 years we have been force fed the idea that austerity is bad, not only bad but completely unnecessary, Ed Ball’s Plan B the credible alternative, the idea that stimulus is good, that the economy is suffering because of the Coalition’s economic policies, that it was ‘Casino Banks’ that destroyed the economy, that Capitalism has failed, that GDP growth should be so much higher, that high employment is a complete riddle…and that consumer spending will save us rather than exports.

None of that is true.

But those, if you have been listening to the BBC, are the messages that have been broadcast to us day in day out for years, variously subtle or blatant Labour press releases.

How do I know those things aren’t true? Ironically because the BBC told me.

Robert Peston and Stephanie Flanders both broke from the Party line and gave us a view of the dark underbelly of the Labour economic ‘miracle’.

What is most notable is that long before the banks went belly up Peston and Flanders knew Gordon Brown’s never ending boom was about to go ‘boom’.

In 2006 Peston, he tells us himself, was in a meeting with the head of the BBC’s Newsroom who asked him ‘So when would the great bust come?’

Peston says he replied, ‘Goodness only knows.’ and explains…‘ And because we could not put a time on it, there was no urgency to get it on the Ten O’clock News.

That was a mistake.’

The BBC knew there was going to be a ‘Great Bust’ but didn’t think it important to raise the matter.

Below are two examples, one from Peston in 2011 and one from Flanders in 2005, that give a more individual, incisive, true analysis of the economic situations of the times than we get from the ‘Institution’ of the BBC.

Peston telling us that the economy was reduced to a basket case and that there is no quick fix, no instant way of growing GDP, and that GDP will only grow slowly for many years…and that getting debt down is crucial….and so far, for all the talk of ‘austerity’ there has been in reality little reduction in spending.

Flanders predicts, in 2005, that Brown’s policies have put the economy into intensive care….caused by borrowing and high government spending…and that there is a high probability of a crash.

As stated such messages have been lost in the wholesale flannel and flattery pushed out to defend and promote Labour by ‘the Corporation‘, the BBC’s refusal to delve into 13 years of Labour’s mismanagement and the pushing of Labour’s latest policies…basically a continuation of Brown’s.

Ironically of course Flanders, though not Peston, has been at the forefront of these attempts to gull the Public, ignoring her own previous predictions and analysis.

Peston brought us The Party’s Over, broadcast on BBC Two at 1900 on 4 and 11 December 2011.

If excessive debt is the disease, what we’ve had since the end of 2008 is analgesic and sticking plaster, rather than cure.

We haven’t as yet found a way to get the debts down so that we can be confident that our economy’s foundations are solid and sound again.

What it means is that we must brace ourselves for many years of relatively low growth, perhaps 1% versus the 3% of the 16 boom years before the crash, because we no longer have the fuel of borrowing more and more every year.

Flanders brought us Testing the Miracle in 2005:

On running the rule over Gordon Brown’s economic record

‘These must be frustrating times for Gordon Brown. Now his foes have decided it is open season on the economy – which even a year ago had seemed beyond reproach.

When we look back, in a few years’ time, at Brown’s economy, will we still see an economic miracle? Or another old-fashioned spending binge that, sooner or later, had to run dry?

Saved by spending

The miracle, if there is one, is that we carried on growing. But looking around the country, you see it is a miracle built not on investing, or exporting, but on a miraculous capacity to spend.

The public spending prop

What is left of the miracle economy, if you strip out the cheap imports and the consumer spending? What is left is a lot of public spending. The only part of the economy that has grown faster than spending by all of us the past few years has been spending by the government.

In the north-east, one recent estimate puts the public sector of the economy at close to 60%.

Brown’s Miracle Economy

STEPHANIE FLANDERS: Tony Blair claims Gordon Brown is the best chancellor we’ve ever had. The man who called an end to boom and bust.

GORDON BROWN: There will be no unsustainable dashes for growth, no out of control booms, no risk taking with inflation, no quick fixes.

FLANDERS: But now the critics say Gordon Brown’s luck is about to turn.

Geoff Ford, Chairman, Ford Component Manufacturing Ltd

FLANDERS: He [Ford] worries that high public spending is distorting the labour market, turning the old job for life culture of shipbuilding into the new job for life culture of the town hall. The local council has a workforce of more than 7,000.

FORD: Because the public sector and local government are able to offer such attractive packages, they are creaming off the best of the talent, and that therefore deprives the rest of the labour market, and I do believe that the significant growth in public sector employment actually stifles the entrepreneurial spirit because of it’s different focus, there’s no risk, there’s no real risk, and there is a disincentive to stick your neck out.

Peston used his 2011 article and research as the basis for his recent book ‘How Do We Fix This Mess?’ in which he looks at the causes of the crash and the possible fixes.

First here is Robert Peston’s cap doffing to his bosses in the book:

I would like to thank the BBC just for being the BBC: more than ever, it is a privilege to work for a news organisation which is sincerely and wholly committed to trying to understand and explain the world in an unbiased way.

However everything he writes here contradicts that statement for the BBC presented a very different perspective on the financial crisis and its causes to that which he recalls.

I’ll let you read and apply his analysis to events and the future…just ask yourself who is to blame, was it just the banks, or was it even the banks…and should we be getting the growth that Labour and the BBC insist we should, and would be having under the miraculous Plan B?:

How do we fix this mess? I don’t know. But don’t stop reading now. Perhaps if we have a clearer understanding of what went wrong, we’ll have a better idea of what needs to be done.

We will be right in the middle of the jungle, observing how bankers, regulators, politicians – and, oh yes, most of us – were by turns greedy, gullible lazy and short-sighted, and how we wilfully refused to see how our improving living standards were not being earned in a sustainable way.

We failed to rise to the challenge of globalisation.

We did not work harder and smarter.

Instead we borrowed.

And now as a nation, we have to pay back much of the debt, which inevitably makes us feel poorer, and will continue to do so for years to come.

The clean up will take years. And there is no quick fix.

We have allowed others, our governments and the so-called authorities, to take us from boom to bust.

I confess, during much of the journey, I had little idea we had taken a wrong turning….but as we headed for the swamp I succeeded in spotting the looming disaster and shouted out a warning: I was largely ignored and was even asked to shut up.

I am not going to pretend there is a road to Shangri-La, where we will suddenly find ourselves becoming richer and richer again.

We tried that road in the late 1990’s and early years of this century, and it was the road to ruin.

Boom and bust will be with us forever.

It was our foolish conviction that the smooth road to sunny uplands would go on forever which got us into such trouble.

The Future’s Overdrawn

Whether we own up to it or not, we can’t go on forever living on China’s credit.

What became clear in 2008 is that we will have to find a way of paying much of that debt back.

That will take at least a decade.

And when we repay debt, we’re spending less. Which means economic activity slows down, growth grinds to a halt.

It is reasonable to assume that growth will be as little as 1% in the coming 10 years….which wouldn’t look so bad after a contraction of 6.3% in output during the 2008-09 recession.

Cuts in public spending, including in benefits and tax credits, were almost certainly inevitable and have indeed followed.

Since 2008, the UK’s aggregate debt has been shuffled, not repaid.

The government kept spending to prevent recession turning into an extreme slump while tax revenues were shrinking.

When essential public services start to be financed through borrowing rather than tax, it is immensely difficult to cut the borrowing.

Peston also looks at Osborne’s cut in the tax rate for high earners…cynically raised as a last gasp piece of politicking by Gordon Brown…from 50p in the pound to 45p.

Peston tells us the cut was done at the instigation of business leaders who said they couldn’t recruit and retain talent because of competition from abroad.

In other words globalisation, the free movement of workers, has meant that tax rates have to be competitive globally….in a similar way that corporation tax is competitively ‘priced’ to attract businesses to invest in concerned countries.

Ironic really that’ open borders’ and the end of the nation state, that Nirvana for the Left, has led to the very things it claims to hate……an über rich highly mobile class, and businesses that can upsticks and move factories and jobs to anywhere in the world….dumping too expensive British workers onto the scrap heap….compounded by the mass immigration of cheap labour into Britain that pushed down wages and made life on benefits more attractive than working for a minimum wage.

Effectively not much of what Peston says in his article and expanded upon in the book is accepted by the BBC……Peston blames Labour as much as the banks, after all Canada, Gernmany and Australia all rode out the crash…becaue they didn’t spend, spend spend before it,  and Peston tells us that growth will be slow and low for years…not what the BBC leads us to expect.

The BBC’s narrative is entirely differnet with Labour almost unmentioned, untouchable, whilst the banks take the full blame…the economy is dragging along the bottom with growth stagnating…if only we had a plan to stimulate the economy with massive government spending all would be well.

The truth is out there somewhere….just not on the BBC…unless you’re quick and spot the maverick free thinkers before they are ‘whipped’ into line again.

The BBC tells us that:

‘What appears to be the beginnings of good news on the economy is good news for the coalition too, and so tricky for Labour.’

Never mind the BBC can help you out in those ‘tricky moments’, that’s what it’s here for, serving the Public good.

The BBC are sceptical about the green shoots of economic recovery….employment is up but they are the wrong sort of jobs, exports are up but again they are the wrong sort of exports, consumer spending is up but again we are spending on the wrong things….the recovery is all a bit of a mirage, a fantasy based on wishful thinking and government spin….and a ‘million’ Zero Hour Contracts.　

Yes the BBC has decided that the figure of one million, though just as much guess work as any other figure, is the one to use…..mainly because they have decided that Zero Hour Contracts aren’t real jobs so that proves all along they were right and that employment is really going down not up. So there.

Today the BBC started off teasing us with some good news about the economy but then it whipped away all that hope and poured cold water over all that nonsense…….bringing on economist John Philpotts to rain on our parade, finishing off with a boot to the groin from Labour:

“Despite some good news in the latest jobs figures there are worrying signs about the underlying state of the UK jobs market,” said John Philpott, from the think tank, The Jobs Economist.

“The rise in employment is almost matched by an increase in the size of the workforce, which means the unemployment rate is unchanged at 7.8%.

The headline jobs figures may continue to be broadly positive but one only has to dig a little deeper into the statistics to see that millions of people are still being hit by a combination of lack of jobs and a ceaseless sharp fall in the real value of their pay. This doesn’t look or feel like an economic recovery to write home about.

Labour’s shadow employment minister, Stephen Timms, said the reality was that for ordinary families things were getting “harder not easier”, highlighting the rise in part-time workers.

“Ministers just sound out of touch when they ignore the fact that the number of people who are working part-time because they cannot find a full-time job is at record levels,” he said.

Firstly…note that ‘ increase in the size of the workforce’…what exactly does that mean? That rise is of course the importation of cheap foreign labour which has forced wages lower and priced British workers out of the jobs market.

But who is John Philpotts? The BBC says he is from an ‘independent think tank’.

Well, not so much a think tank but a one man band with a blog.

As for independent…..reading his stuff you may possibly come to the conclusion that he is in fact ‘left leaning’….supporting the unions, government spending and public control of services, Plan B and Ed Miliband’s immortal ‘predistribution’ plan…whilst insisting that Osborne’s Plan A isn’t working.

Independent? Not so much.

He has been a regular on the BBC, one notable occasion recently telling us that employment figures were mostly government spin….as he reveals in this Guardian article:

We need employment statistics that confront political spin

Honest political discourse requires a warts and all picture of the underlying complexity of these figures – the ONS could help

Here he is in his blog giving the game away as to his true affiliations:

Unions have a progressive part to play

Despite having the ability to directly challenge the impact of fiscal austerity in the workplace, union influence is nowadays felt mainly in its contribution to debate on economic and social policy, as demonstrated this morning in outgoing TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber’s well-constructed Olympic themed critique of a Plan A that shows no sign of working.

It is no coincidence that the slump in union membership has accompanied a steady fall in the share of national income received in wages relative to profits.

This may be of little concern to ardent neo-liberals who believe that allowing labour markets to clear is good for jobs and a higher profit share good for investment. But those of us concerned about the impact of this for low skilled workers and the public finances in an economy where levels of business investment disappoint in time of boom as well as slump, take a different view.

The consequences have been highlighted in recent days with the emergence of the wonkish concept of ‘predistribution’ into UK political debate. It’s very costly to maintain a large proportion of the workforce by means of what is in effect ‘in work welfare’ support. Better, if possible, to ensure workers earn enough not to need such hand-outs. This, as we will doubtless hear in the coming months, can be achieved in a number of ways. A progressive role for trade unions is one of them.

In all his articles he takes a good look at events…as he wishes to make a career out of his analysis he has to inject some measure of realism into his comment…however he seems to always end on a negative for the government and their policies.

But there are snippets of interest that cut across the BBC’s narrative and give the lie to it:

On the 14^th August he tells us that nearly all the new jobs are ‘quality jobs’….permanent posts….

Moreover, while job security might have increased a little (the quarter saw a big drop of 70,000 in temporary employment, suggesting that permanent posts account for all the net new jobs created between April and June)

Here on the 17^th July he tells us that part time jobs are decreasing and full time, permanent jobs are rising:

The best news of all is a strong quarterly rise in full-time employment of 28,000 and increased working hours (the number of people in part-time employment fell by 12,000). Alongside a fall in temporary employment (down 15,000) and self-employment (down 28,000), fewer redundancies (down 19,000) and more job vacancies (up 24,000), this suggests that confidence is returning to the jobs market with employers cutting back on contract workers in favour of permanent staff.

On the 12^th June he tells us that wages are kept down due to imported labour…and reduced power of the Trade Unions:

The broad conclusion to be drawn from all this analysis – which chimes with my own view as expressed in previous blogs – is that a combination of increased outsider power in the labour market, caused by an expanded supply of labour, and reduced insider power, resulting from the diminished influence of trade unions in the workplace, has altered the UK’s trade-off between real wages and employment.

In fact, the IFS finds, it was mainly larger firms who cut jobs whereas small firms were more likely to keep workers on at lower pay in order to limit the impact of a fall in productivity on unit labour costs.

However as to the Trade Union claim….he contradicts that by revealing that most unions are in the Public Sector and that much of the fall in wages has been for workers in the small and medium sized companies where there are few if any union members any way….so reduced union power is not the cause of the fall in wages.

The BBC continues on its merry way trying to undermine confidence in the recovery, keeping up the Labour narrative, hoping for the economy to collapse and for Labour to romp home in the next election, and still bringing in ‘ringers’ like John Philpotts to pad out their position.

Will the corridors of the BBC be littered with champagne bottles and drunken BBC socialists in 2015?

So far it looks likely only if they want to drown their sorrows.

Yes, it’s certainly time for a new one of these. Here you go, detail the bias as you see it!

Strange bias by the equally strange Roger Harrabin here on the issue of whether there is such a thing as “road tax’. In essence, it strikes me as a polemic in pro-cyclist anti-motorist pedantry. The BBC hates motorists and loves cyclists.

Its going to be interesting watching how the BBC deal with the building tsunami of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants into the UK. This morning, the BBC reports that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians working in the UK rose by a quarter in three months. As we can all anticipate, this surge will grow and grow as restrictions come to an end. Always advocates of irrevocable demographic change, I suggest the BBC will seek to present this as a failure of Coalition policy (which it’s not really, it is simply a consequence of our membership of the EU) and imply that somehow Labour will be tougher!

Well, as some of us predicted, post Mubarak Egypt is a mess and all sensible people will be appalled at the loss of life on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere. However the BBC is clearly aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, doing all it can to push the MB narrative at all times. Report after report from the BBC paints the MB as ‘victims” and I hear the BBC declare this morning that the interim government is there by virtue of a coup. It’s interesting the BBC says this because even Obama won’t quite go that for. The reality is that the BBC has been cheerleading for the MB for years now – quite remarkable given the venom that this bunch of Islamic extremists represent.