Category Archives: BBC bias

So, the Government announces an extra HALF A £££ BILLION for ‘struggling A&E”‘s in England.  Labour responds by saying this is not enough (when is it ever enough for the comrades?) and the BBC dutifully follow up by wheeling on  Dr Clifford Mann, president of the College of Emergency Medicine to inform the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that  he had “real concerns” about how the money would be allocated.

“It seems disingenuous, and in many ways demoralising to those that managed to apparently perform satisfactorily, to understand or realise that they will benefit from this not at all,” he said. “It is a short-term fix. It does not address the underlying cause – we have a shortage of doctors.”

It is almost as if the BBC mission is to have an instant rebuttal unit that dampens down each and every initiative from the Coalition. In truth, the meme is that NOTHING this Coalition does is any good (apart from Overseas Aid and Gay Marriage). Makes you wonder if the BBC has agenda?

Apologies to anyone who has covered this in the comments….I haven’t read them yet.

 The BBC seem to have lost all sense of journalistic direction and proportion with the latest manufactured UKIP ‘scandal’……it proves the BBC is way, way out of touch with ‘normal’ people who more than likely agree with UKIP….as indeed a majority of the emails and texts into 5Live today seemed to ….it’s not as if the UKIP MEP was a ‘purveyor of death and fear’ now was it?

Further to David’s post on UKIP the BBC has been highlighting this strongly all day…and it is all over their website.

Unlike the UKIP candidate who said he wanted to introduce sharia law and cut off people’s hands…the BBC didn’t mention that at all….as I noted in a previous post.

But what else is going on out there on the fringes of the political world?

 Tory Candidate Marcus Simpson Jailed for Smuggling Guns from Serbia

The judge told Simpson:

“It’s not an exaggeration to describe you as a purveyor of death and fear.”

That report was also in the Daily Mail print edition and presumably other papers…..so no excuses for the BBC to not report it….

…and yet…nothing from the BBC, the world’s finest news broadcaster with more journalists than any news organisation outside of China…as Mark Thompson told us..

This is the best the BBC could do…a link to the Daily Star:

Elsewhere on the web

The BBC seems to be running a series of attacks on UKIP. The latest one uses the old “bongo bongo” riff from many years ago and does everything possible to demonise UKIP’s Godfrey Bloom. The source for the attack is the BBC’s print arm, The Guardian. One can understand WHY the BBC loathes UKIP and I am sure that ahead of next year’s Euro elections, we will see much more of this sort of thing.

Well, Monday’s open thread is heaving at the seams so this is timely. Has the BBC shown overt bias, care to tell us about it? The floor is yours!

We’ve already shot Hilary Andersson’s Panorama programme full of holes, but I’d like to drive over the body all the same.

That was it? The BBC’s big song and dance about Tamerlan Tsarnaev and white supremacist literature, which it spent all yesterday gleefully reporting in its bulletins and news programmes, boiled down to roughly 20 seconds from the Panorama programme. Here’s the relevant segment (h/t to Craig from Is the BBC biased? for the transcript. Check out his take on the programme, too.)

“And we found out that Tamerlan’s interests here at home were not just Islamic. He subscribed to publications about government conspiracies, gun rights and white supremacy. He also read about mass shootings. Tamerlan was perhaps not so much the true radical jihadist as a deeply troubled young man who latched onto Islam.”

The actual evidence was on screen for 3 seconds. We weren’t even told what the literature was or how long Tamerlan had subscribed.

Andersson didn’t identify the literature shown but I can confirm that it was, as I said yesterday, the anti-Semitic weekly paper the American Free Press (AFP). Unlike the clip used in Andersson’s news report (which was deliberately blurred out by the BBC) the same footage in Panorama is clearer and the writing can be read.

That page is a book review which can be seen on the American Free Press website. It is dated 24 April, 2013 – 9 days after the Boston bombing and 5 days after Tamerlan’s death. It seems the BBC couldn’t even get hold of hard copies of the editions the older Tsarnaev was supposed to have read. Notice the name and date of the paper are still blurred at the top. [Update – Alan points out in the comments that while the online article Cosnpiracies Are Real is dated 24 April, it did appear in a print version of the AFP in March.]

Here’s the opening couple of sentences of the book review just to prove it’s definitely the AFP she’s looking at:

Conspiracies assume many different forms. In some instances an entire family is cursed, as Kennedy blood and tragedy have seeped across the decades from Dallas (JFK) to L.A. (RFK), Chappaquiddick (Teddy) and Martha’s Vineyard (JFK Jr)

The book is Conspireality by Viktor Thorn who writes regularly for the AFP.

As I mentioned yesterday the American Free Press promotes conspiracies and blames the Jews for just about everything, it sympathises with Muslim grievances, and its contributors appear on Iran’s Press TV to rant about worldwide Jewish control of the media. Who knows, maybe Press TV first turned Tamerlan on to the AFP. And let’s not forget that the AFP thinks the Tsarnaevs were probably framed.

So why didn’t Hilary Andersson point out any of that? Because it would complicate the message. The programme wanted to show that Tamerlan was only “a Muslim of convenience” and it used his apparent interest in unnamed right-wing white supremacist literature as proof of this. Pointing out the similarity in rhetoric of the Jew-hating AFP and jihadi literature would not have been helpful.

Andersson said the programme had been months in the making. How embarrassing.

The BBC encouraged the world to think that they had some stunning new information about the Boston  Bombers that would utterly change your opinion of their motivations and beliefs.

The BBC told us in letters bold that they had discovered the bombers, or Tamerlan alone, were ‘subscribing’ to white supremacist, right wing literature….from which the BBC concluded they were not jihadists but  angry young men attacking the government.

As we know that is not really the case…the material alluded to was in reality mainly left wing/Islamist conspiracy theory and anti-semitic literature.

We had news stories all day, stories that were sent around the world based upon the BBC’s highly misleading presentations, that the bombers were in all likelihood ‘white supremacist’ in some shape or form.

From the Daily Mail based on the BBC hype:

Was Boston Bomber a white supremacist? Investigation finds Tamerlan Tsarnaev was in possession of right-wing extremist literature in run-up to terror attack

But watch the Panorama programme and where is that evidence?  We get a few seconds of narration (19 mins in ) saying they subscribed to anti government and white supremacist material and a glimpse of a newspaper (without a title…DB says it is in fact an  anti semitic left wing rag)…and that conclusion…that they are deeply troubled young men who latched onto Islam….but Andersson does not tell us that that comment actually came from another Muslim who was trying to distance the bombers from the religion (Andersson does mention it in her web article though)….they were not true jihadists.

But listen to the rest of the programme and it is clear they had extensive interests in Islamic radicalism….so why does the BBC completely ignore the overwhelming evidence of jihadist inclinations and opt for a conclusion based upon a tiny amount of evidence of what they imply is right wing literature..but isn’t?

Why is it when they mention that there may be a link between the bomber and the murder of three Jews the BBC fails to mention the fact that the murdered men were Jewish?  Relevant or not when discussing Islamist jihadists?  Andersson mentions the date of the killing Sept 11, 2011…no mention of the significance….the 10 year anniversary of 9/11….again possibly relevant to a jihadist.

We were told Tamerlan became angry and disillusioned with the US when he was refused citizenship…his ‘dreams crushed’…but no reason was given as to why he was refused….could it have been his radical, Islamic views?  And he wasn’t just angry with the US but with Russia too….the Russians having warned the US that he was a potential threat….that is, an Islamic radical.

We are told his brother Jahar was warm and funny, intimidated by his older brother who ‘rammed hotheaded religion into him’…..despite the fact that even as he lay badly wounded in the boat Jahar wrote anti-American, pro -Islamic phrases on the side of that boat.

The BBC tells us that they were not your stereotypical jihadist bomber…really?  They pretty much fit the pattern of those here in the UK.  Aren’t they all just ‘misguided criminals’ as John Simpson called the 7/7 bombers?

The BBC tuts as it tell us the US public have already found them guilty….the BBC of course has pronounced them innocent…oh they might have done the deed but they were turned into angry young men by US foreign policy or the crushing of dreams.

However the parting comments lays to rest the BBC conclusion of ‘angry young men’…..Jahar, the younger, allegedly ‘intimidated’ brother, was, we are told by someone who knew him well, a ‘good, well balanced kid…he showed no ‘cracks.’

In other words he knew exactly what he was doing and fully participated in events willingly and with full knowledge of what he was doing and the reasons why.  His calm actions in the days immediately after the bombing all play into that conclusion….and his final words written on the boat confirm that.

Hilary Andersson’s final words say far more than she intended as she spoke of America having to face up to a new threat…‘The Enemy Within’.

The BBC never changes:

Just whose side was John Simpson on?:

The first British response to IRA violence was the worst. The IRA was identified as an enemy which had to be destroyed.

In 1972, the British Army fired into the crowd at a big demonstration in the city of Derry, killing 14 innocent people.

There were undercover killings of IRA volunteers later, and a team of three IRA people were summarily executed when they were caught on an operation in Gibraltar.

All these things did was to convince many people in Northern Ireland that the British Government operated on the same low moral level as the IRA itself.

DB has done an excellent job in the previous post, I’m just going to add to that….

 The BBC messed up. It badly, very badly wanted the Boston bombers to be white right wingers. They went so far as to claim, completely without evidence, that this was indeed the most likely scenario.

They were wrong.

But they are now attempting to rewrite history…not only to cover up the corruption of their own journalistic ethics but to hide the true catalyst that incited the Boston bombs…Islam.

 The BBC’s Panorama programme claims to have connected the bombers to white supremacist’s supposed ideology…..and just about every news outlet, website and blog has picked up on this story and regurgitated it without thought or criticism….that is the power of the BBC to distort and manipulate the news and people’s views of the world.

As said the BBC is rewriting history and trying to change perceptions using what is essentially a fabricated story…a complete invention with regards to the meaning of this material and the causes of the bomber’s radicalisation.

The BBC’s Hilary Andersson reported this morning on Today  (08:04)that:

‘The BBC’s discovery of the bomber’s interest in radical right wing ideas indicates he was not perhaps so much a radical jihadist but an angry young man who latched onto Islam.’

Let’s look at that last phrase for a start:

‘…an angry young man who latched onto Islam’

Was that Andersson’s own phrase…did she come to that conclusion by looking at the ‘BBC’s discoveries’ of his reading material?

No….in her own web article she tells us exactly where that phrase came from:

‘A spokesperson for Tamerlan’s mosque in Cambridge, Nicole Mossalam, said Tamerlan only prayed there occasionally. She portrayed him as an angry young man who latched onto Islam.’

In other words Andersson is peddling Muslim propaganda as her own conclusions.

Let’s now look at that White supremacist right wing literature…..

Here’s how Andersson starts off:

One of the brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston bombings was in possession of right-wing American literature in the run-up to the attack, BBC Panorama has learnt.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev subscribed to publications espousing white supremacy and government conspiracy theories.

Note that ‘in the run up to the attack’  thereby closely associating the attack with this literature….but just how long had he had it…did he suddenly start reading it and become radicalised?  Because that is exactly what Andersson is suggesting by writing in that manner.

She goes on to tell us:

The programme discovered that Tamerlan Tsarnaev possessed articles which argued that both 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were government conspiracies.

Is that really right wing…the conspriracy theories about 9/11 are mostly left wing and Islamic….‘It was the Jews’

 What about 9/11? Definitely those damn Yehudis. I mean, why else were 4,000 Jews in New York told to stay home from work on the morning of 11 September 2001?

Another quote from Andersson:

Another in his possession was about “the rape of our gun rights”.

In his possession…but what was the context….in which publication was this material published?  Was it in a gun magazine?  Something that came as a package?  So maybe not actually of interest to him as an article.

Andersson tells us that there was…

Reading material he had about white supremacy commented that “Hitler had a point”.

Really? 

A point about what exactly?  Anti-Black racism in the US?  Isn’t that what we mostly associate white supremacists with over the Pond?  So the Boston Bombers were targeting black people?

Does Andersson not want to mention ‘the Jews’ in case we start to get the real picture?

‘It pains me to have to admit this but anti-Semitism isn’t just tolerated in some sections of the British Muslim community; it’s routine and commonplace. Any Muslims reading this article – if they are honest with themselves – will know instantly what I am referring to. It’s our dirty little secret.’

No Muslim of course wants to wipe out the Jews do they?  Let’s see what the BBC favourite Muslim scholar, moderate and respected throughout the Muslim world (and one of the ‘experts’recommended by the BBC’s John Bowker should you wish to learn more about the true Islam and ‘What Muslims Believe’) has to say about Jews and Hitler:

January 30, 2009: 

‘Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.’

So perhaps the Tsarnaev brothers were reading material that suggested ‘Hitler had a point’ because they agreed with it…it tied in with their own Islamic beliefs.

But then Andersson gets to the truth:

There was also material about US drones killing civilians, and about the plight of those still imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.

The Tsarnaev brothers, ethnic Chechens, spent their early years moving around a troubled region of Russia torn by a violent Islamic insurgency.

The brothers’ friends told us Tamerlan turned against the country and became passionate about Islam after becoming frustrated when his boxing career faltered because he did not have American citizenship.

“He (Tamerlan) just didn’t like America. He felt like America was just basically attacking all Middle Eastern countries…you know trying to take their oil.”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Tamerlan’s younger brother who has been charged with the bombings, scrawled a note shortly before his capture stating “We Muslims are one body. You hurt one you hurt us all.”

The brothers had been reading militant Islamic websites before the bombings.

The FBI has been investigating the brothers, and possible connections Tamerlan might have had in the troubled Russian republic of Dagestan which he visited last year.

The House Intelligence Committee in Washington is being briefed on his connections.

The committee chairman, Mike Rogers said he believes the brothers’ mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, was involved in his radicalisation.

“He had family members encouraging, we know that for sure,” he said.

So despite all the evidence that points clearly towards the bombings being carried out in the name of Islam the BBC has ‘latched onto’ , to coin a phrase, some literature which it claims is right wing supremacist but is in fact perfectly in line with Muslim thinking.

 Thanks to George R for this:

‘The whole of Boston was jihad. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said the bombing was “violence designed to terrorize the perceived enemies of Islam”and “when you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims. Tamerlan Tsarnaev declared, “I will dedicate my life to Jihad’’. “In telephone conversations he was caught on  wiretap discussing jihad with mom (their mom was on the Islamic terrorism watch list as well). Tamerlan Tsarnaev vowed to die for Islam. US officials investigating the case said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s answers led them to believe he and his brother were “motivated by a radical brand of Islam.” Both Dzhokhar and Tamerlan had both become devout Muslims. And Dzhokhar uploaded a number of videos promoting jihad in Syria.’

The BBC prefers to play down the Islamic connections and headlines, literally, the white supremacist angle which they have in fact invented.

Andersson’s article and ‘Today’ piece must be one of the most corporate self serving corrupt pieces we have seen for a long time….covering up the BBC’s own failures and prejudices as well as hiding the real cause of the bombings.

The BBC Trust will no doubt recommend she be promoted…..though she obviously had better steer clear of this story from ‘ABC’:

‘Mounting Evidence’ Boston Bombers Involved in 2011 Triple Murder’

Wonder if that makes it into tonight’s Panorama.

David V has already blogged about the BBC report (and upcoming Panorama programme) on Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev reading “right-wing extremist literature… espousing white supremacy and government conspiracy theories”, but I thought this was worth a further post.

In the video report for the story the BBC’s Hilary Andersson is shown looking at publications Tsarnaev is said to have read. The narration is as follows:

Andersson: “When these ethnic Chechen brothers Tarmerlan and Dzhokhar were caught on camera near the bomb site it was soon put down to the work of jihadists. They had been reading militant Islamic websites and had links to the troubled Islamic republic of Dagestan.

But now the BBC has found out that Tamerlan, the older brother was also reading right-wing American literature months before the bombings.Articles about government conspiracies, gun rights, white supremacy, and about the minds of mass killers.”

For some reason the BBC has blurred the footage of the literature that Andersson is reading so that only a couple of headlines can be made out. Here’s a screengrab:

The video, and the online article, go on to quote – unchallenged – the view of a member of Tamerlan’s local mosque that he was merely “a Muslim of convenience”. Andersson is clearly trying to play up the white supremacist angle (the type of people the BBC pointed fingers at in the first place) and downplay the Muslim angle.

Why, then, is the BBC be so reluctant to identify the publications that Andersson is seen reading? The clue could be in the top-right corner of the above picture where the blurry words “Close Gitmo” can be seen in part of a headline.

“Close Gitmo Now” is the headline for an article in the American Free Press (AFP) published on April 10, 2013 (five days before the bombing). I’ll be amazed if it’s not copies of this publication that Andersson is seen perusing in her report.

The AFP is a vehemently anti-Semitic weekly paper which peddles all manner of conspiracy theory, usually linked in some way to the neocon New World Order that’s run by the Jews. The recent IRS scandal? The Jews were behind it, of course. And the above “Close Gitmo Now” article describes the 9/11 attacks as “false flag”. It’s that level of nuttiness.

What doesn’t quite fit Andersson’s narrative, and perhaps explains the reluctance to identify the publication, is that while the AFP is very anti-Jewish, it is also sympathetic to Muslim grievances. In one article which blames pro-Israeli propaganda for inciting Anders Breivik’s horrific murderous spree, the writer says Europeans should fear Jews, not Muslims:

“These Europeans ignore the fact that the Muslims they proclaim to be enemies of Christianity actually revere Jesus Christ as a beloved prophet, as did Mohammad himself. At the same time, they ignore the ugly hostility toward Christianity that is an article of faith in Israel…”

I’m sure the Christians whose churches have been bombed across the Muslim world feel very reassured by that.

AFP contributors such as Mark Dankof are regulars on Iran’s Press TV. Wikepedia offers this take:

In a May 2011 article Dankof protested the British government attempting to shut down Press TV, blaming it on “media outlets and correspondents with provable connections to the American Jewish lobby; Israeli intelligence; and Neo-Conservatives thirsting for a War of Civilizations with Iran specifically, and the Islamic world generally.” In a May 2011 article, Dankof also quoted from and wrote that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately reflect the state of the world. He lauded PressTV as one of the few exceptions to the Jewish control of the media.

As I said in the comments under the earlier blogpost, I imagine quite a few young Muslims read the American Free Press. It spouts the same bullshit that Islamists do, and that is what will have appealed to Tamerlan.

Just for good measure, the AFP even says that the Tsarnaevs were probably framed for the Boston bombing.

It’ll be interesting to see if the full Panorama programme highlights any of the above information, because the teaser items certainly haven’t.

And so the new week starts and I see the BBC are on the attack using “zero hours” as a means to try and undermine growth in the employment figures. Another whole week for them to suggest that Ed Balls calls it right!! Anyway, here you go, a new open thread to help balance their bias!