It’s time for another one. This one lasts 16:15. I try to keep them down to 15 minutes, but I don’t have the benefit of all those BBC editors and producers.
As always, it’s meant to be a rebuttal to BBC coverage.
“Cutting on the bias” in wood or textiles means cutting diagonally against the grain so that it accentuates the lines. That’s what’s going on at the BBC’s special section on the US 2012 election. It hasn’t been updated in a couple of days, and here’s how it appears now:
White House propaganda, White House propaganda, and more of it, with a couple of fluff pieces thrown in. The top story at the moment is the BBC’s explanation of the President’s first ad attacking Romney for his association with Bain Capital. It’s become more balanced than it initially was, as people here pointed out earlier this week, and presumably after somebody at the BBC realized it. It’s still not entirely balanced as they’ve got the President’s ad embedded right at the top of the piece, while including only a link to Romney’s rebuttal. The link below that is to a second attack ad on Romney on the same topic. No links to anything from Romney.
The “Latest news” section is slightly out of date, but the bias is still obvious. Besides the news brief about Ron Paul ending his “active campaign”, the other featured reports are about Hollywood feting the President for His recent endorsement of homosexual marriage, a piece about Romney reacting contritely to that Washington Post hit piece – now proven to be less than accurate, although the BBC has never bothered to inform you of that – about him allegedly bullying a homosexual a few decades ago (another score for the White House campaign machine), and a piece lamenting Sen. Richard Lugar’s defeat in the Republican primary for Senate in Indiana. We’re told by “correspondents” that this will make the Senate more partisan than ever. Translation: the Democrat majority won’t get their way so easily. This is a biased position, of course, shown to be all the more ludicrous since the Senate just rejected the President’s own budget proposal 99-0. You can’t get more bi-partisan than that, which is why the BBC has so far censored that news.
The video features also reveal the biased grain in the BBC’s perspective on the US elections. The section on Battleground States isn’t all that bad in general, and I won’t try to read too much into a perceived emphasis on Democrat optimism. But there is a blatant lie in the section on Wisconsin. You have to click on the State in the Battleground feature to read the following:
Barack Obama will be hoping to hold on to the sizeable majority he won in 2008, and will be helped by the state’s strong union movement. The unions have been leading the opposition to new Republican Governor Scott Walker’s controversial bid to restrict workers’ collective bargaining rights. The proposals led to mass protests and a successful attempt to trigger a recall election for Mr Walker’s job.
The bit I’ve bolded is, quite simply, a lie. What Walker did was restrict the right of public sector unions’ rights on collective bargaining. The BBC admitted that part when they first began reporting on this story, yet here they deliberately mislead you to think it’s an attack on all workers, full stop. I simply don’t accept the excuse that this was simplified due to space constraints or because it’s an unimportant distinction. And of course, by “controversial”, the BBC means that the unions didn’t like it. Another issue of bias here is that the BBC gives you only the Democrat unions issue, and not the budget disaster Gov. Walker faced upon taking office, which just as much a concern for voters. The budget concern is why Walker sought to restrict public sector union power and their burden on the State. It’s not all union workers everywhere, only the public sector ones, which is why I maintain that it’s an important distinction. As most people here will know, their coverage of the Wisconsin situation has been extremely biased and at times dishonest. Plenty of background can be found here, here, here, here, and here. I don’t expect the BBC to update this section with the news that the union-backed candidate lost the Democrat primary for the recall, which kind of puts a damper on the whole issue, making the BBC’s take even less useful.
Next up is the piece by Justin Webb – Mark Mardell’s predecessor as North America editor, whose gushing reports about The Obamessiah during the 2008 election won him the coveted seat on Today – explaining why the Republicans aren’t ready to lead. My fisking of ol’ Justin’s piece is here.
Then you get Jonny Dymond’s biased piece telling you how the Republican Party is just for white men, freezing out Hispanics. It’s just one in a series of race-baiting pieces from Dymond, whose remit seems to be proving that Republicans and any opponents of the President are racist. See here, for example.
If you still aren’t convinced that Republicans/conservatives are awful, then you can move on to former Obamessiah activist Matt Danzico’s “bespoke” magazine piece about yet another one of those studies showing conservatives are inspired by negatives while liberals are inspired by positives. The study’s goal was to prove a biological and cognitive difference between liberals and conservatives. I won’t bother to address how this leads us down a path to eugenics, but suffice to say that it’s always liberals these days who want to use “science” to prove that they’re superior. Danzico, of course, slightly misrepresents the findings. Another way of describing the findings can be found in the University of Nebraska’s own school paper: conservatives tend to be more realistic while liberals tend to be more idealistic. I find it amusing that a student journalist spins the study less than an adult professional journalist.
And finally, there’s Adam Blenford’s piece worrying that too many people in the US aren’t registered to vote. Setting up the article by using a Republican as an example of a dedicated voter betrays the bias, if one understands that voter “disenfranchisement” is the primary motivation behind ACORN and Left-wing activists who encourage absentee ballots (Blenford uses the youth vote, another Left-wing target demographic, as his example there), same-day registration, and who attack laws requiring ID to vote, all methods behind voter fraud. Some people here may remember Newsnight hiring Left-wing activist and “investigative journalist” to do a special report telling you that only white Republicans engage in voter fraud, and specifically to disenfranchise black people. He also defended ACORN against charges of voter fraud by saying that, even though they do it, it doesn’t affect elections. If that’s not enough to convince you, just do an internet search with the term “voter disenfranchisement 2012” and see who’s worrying about it and what issues are the focus. It’s obvious.
While not every single report is riddled with bias, much of it is, and nearly every single piece on the BBC’s US Election 2012 page is written from a Left-wing perspective one way or another. There’s no memo handed down to make this happen, no directive from on high. It’s due to the BBC hiring what seem to be exclusively Left-wing staff. If they all think that way, there’s no need for an organized institutional bias: it will happen naturally.
The other day, DB posted about the BBC’s dutiful promotion of White House propaganda about Mitt Romney’s earnings from investment in Bain Capital. They put up the President’s campaign video, and helpfully explained how awful Romney was for earning money off of a failed company and sending poor innocent workers to the unemployment line. The campaign meant to attack Romney’s business record, attempting to tarnish his track record of successfully turning businesses around, and hoping to undermine the growing mood of trusting him more than the President on fixing the economy. In short, it was an attack ad. And, as DB pointed out, it was misleading. The BBC still reported on it without question, and only belatedly (after someone called them on it, presumably) added a mere link to a Romney video hosted elsewhere.
This isn’t the first negative campaign piece from the President, who was supposed to be above it all. There was the attempt to hurt Romney with that silly dog story, which of course backfired. There was the charge against Romney and the Republicans for supposedly waging a “War on Women”. The President tried to frighten everyone by telling them that the Republican budget would be “radical”, and harm the middle class, the elderly, and ruin everything while helping only the wealthy. And of course there’s all the class war rhetoric, culminating in the ill-fated “Buffet Rule”. Most recently, we had the relentless coverage of what turned out to be a less than truthful account of Romney as a homophobic bully.
Now that the President is trailing Romney in voter trust on five different issues, the BBC, perhaps inspired by a piece in the New York Times last week, worrying about attack ads from Romney while at the same time encouraging the President to “push Romney’s face down in the dirt”, is rushing to His defense.
Pity the poor President, they tell you, because He’s the financial underdog in this race. Sure, He’s raised more money than last month, but the awful Republicans are making these nasty attack ads. Worse, the poor President doesn’t have the same wealthy Super PAC to help Him.
Making the announcement, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said large sums were being spent by special interest groups against the president.
So you’re already prepared not to raise an eyebrow when reading this:
At the end of March, the Democratic Party reported about $124m of cash reserves, while Republicans had about $43m in the bank.
Correspondents say the Obama campaign could see a further burst of donations after his recent endorsement of same-sex marriage.
I bet “correspondents” aren’t even remotely cynical in that analysis, or suspicious of any motives for that endorsement other than sheer honesty and integrity, either.
Although Mr Romney’s direct campaign funding has lagged behind the Obama campaign, Republican super political action committees (super PACs) are spending millions of dollars backing his candidacy.
In a sign of the gathering super PAC offensive, one group, Crossroads GPS, backed by Karl Rove, former adviser to President George W Bush, said it would spend $25m on anti-Obama ads.
He’s the underdog, a victim, I tell you!
About $57m has been spent on negative advertising against the president since October, Mr Messina said in the Obama campaign video.
Are you pitying Him yet? Ire raised enough against the vicious Republican machine? No? Maybe the closing line will help.
Meanwhile, a super PAC supporting the president, Priorities USA, has struggled to match that level of funding, raising just $10m by the end of March.
And that’s it. Not a single mention of the attack ads His own PAC has been making. Like the one they released Tuesday, showing the poor former workers of that plant Bain closed, the same one with which the campaign and the BBC have tried to tar Romney by indirect association the other day. The workers likened it to being attacked by “a vampire”. Oh, and apparently Romney’s opponents used this exact same tactic against him in his failed 1994 campaign for Senate. The BBC won’t bother to tell you that, unless they can find a way to praise Him for the brilliant strategy.
Ads from the President’s Super-PAC are also going to be aired in several states over the next few days. Vice President Biden is out there now doing the class war thing as well, telling the people in swing-state Ohio that Romney is bad because he was a venture capitalist. But He’s the underdog, and only it’s all the Republican’s fault for going negative, right?
The thing is, campaign cash is only half the story. The other half – and perhaps the more important one – is the media being in the tank for Him. Again. Think it’s sour grapes from one of His enemies who imagines bias in every report, and finds conspiracies under every media hack’s bed? Think again:
Then there’s that Newsweek cover. Plus, Hollywood is in the tank for Him again as well. Tom Hanks has narrated a 17-minute propaganda campaign film, all of Hollywood is re-energized for Him on the heels of His half-assed endorsement of homosexual marriage, and there will be a film about His heroic killing of Osama Bin Laden coming out in October. Even the BBC thought you should know about that one.
Despite the White House campaign’s attempt to portray Him as the underdog, and no matter how many times the BBC worries about all those negative Republican ads, no amount of money from any Super-PAC or the evil Koch brothers or Fox News can compete with the full power of the entire mainstream media, from the New York Times and the Washington Post to CNN and MSNBC and ABC and NBC and the LA Times and Time and so many local papers, plus all of Hollywood and much of daytime television.
Yet the BBC dutifully pushes that Narrative anyway, like a foreign branch of the White House press office.
Note to defenders of the indefensible: This is meant as a rebuttal to BBC reporting on US issues. I don’t pretend I’m making some lofty, impartial report, but I am presenting facts and information about these issues you don’t get from the BBC. My opinions may be clear, but I’m also not playing games about it. Everyone can decide for themselves what to think about all of it, and call me out on stuff I get wrong.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate for President in Egypt has launched his campaign. A leading Egyptian cleric, Safwat Higazi, gave a keynote address. I give you the following highlights (translated by Memri):
Ceremony leader : Mursi will liberate Gaza tomorrow. Crowds : Mursi will liberate Gaza tomorrow. Ceremony leader : I am an Egyptian and proud of it. Crowds : I am an Egyptian and proud of it. Ceremony leader : Mursi will liberate Gaza tomorrow. Crowds : Mursi will liberate Gaza tomorrow. Ceremony leader : Mursi will liberate Gaza tomorrow. Crowds : Mursi will liberate Gaza tomorrow. Ceremony leader : Say: “Allah Akbar.” Crowds : Allah Akbar. Ceremony leader : Say: “Allah Akbar.” Crowds : Allah Akbar. Ceremony leader : Say: “Allah Akbar.”
Allah Akbar. Safwat Higazi : Our capital shall not be Cairo, Mecca, or Medina. It shall be Jerusalem, Allah willing. Our cry shall be: “Millions of martyrs march toward Jerusalem.” Millions of martyrs march toward Jerusalem. Crowds : Millions of martyrs march toward Jerusalem. Crowds : Millions of martyrs march toward Jerusalem. Safwat Higazi : Millions of martyrs march toward Jerusalem. Crowds : Millions of martyrs march toward Jerusalem. Ceremony leader : Banish the sleep from the eyes of all Jews.
This is completely as expected, of course. But not if you trust the BBC for your information on such matters. So far, the BBC is spending lots of time fretting about what Netanyahu will get up to next with the new changes in his government, but not a single word about this. Two weeks ago, Beeboid Yolande Knell reported this without question in her rather gentle profile of the candidate, Mohammed Mursi, portraying him as a not-so-bad Muslim Brotherhood candidate who hoped to “win over” ultra-conservative Muslims to his more even-keeled approach:
On the sensitive subject of Israel, Mr Mursi, says that he will keep the 1979 peace treaty but will not meet Israeli officials. He has promised to prioritise the Palestinian issue.
She wisely added this little disclaimer, though that’s no excuse for taking an obvious liar at his word about the peace treaty without comment.
He has said: “Egypt’s next president can’t be like his predecessor, he can’t be a follower who executes policies put to him from outside”.
Not a word about the MB’s desire to destroy Israel in Jon Leyne’s report from the other day about some local violence hurting their election chances, either.
Commentators believe the clashes have weakened Islamist groups, bolstered the popularity of the army, and strengthened the hand of the candidates from the secular side of Egyptian politics, including those with links to the former regime of Hosni Mubarak.
Yeah, maybe. But what do “commentators” believe about how well the “Kill the Jews” platform play with the Egyptian public? If Leyne continues to hang out with mostly liberal bloggers and happy youths, don’t expect the BBC to report that honestly.
It’s irrelevant whether or not one supports Israel or hates it or thinks this blog is full of “Israel Firsters” who wrongly cry that any legitimate criticism of Israel is really anti-Semitism. The BBC should quit sanitizing this stuff, and quit hiding the truth. Reporting that the MB candidate is dedicated to the destruction of Israel isn’t something to shy away from for fear of being accused of demonizing them due to influence by the Jewish Lobby.
The latest edition of my report is up on EyeTube now (no embed possible at the moment). It clocks in at 15:23. Some stuff the BBC covered badly, and some they haven’t covered at all. Sources are below, and my thanks to all those who took the time to listen to the previous editions.
UPDATE: The BBC just posted a news brief about it after all. But the association of the criminals with the Occupy Movement is censored. Instead, they quote a DoJ mouthpiece saying the plot had nothing to do with the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death. LOL! We all know what this was going to celebrate, and the BBC won’t admit it.
Today is May Day, a prominent day in Communist history. Some non-Left blogs last year started calling this “Victims of Communism Day”, in remembrance of the tens of millions of victims of Communists in pursuit of their goals.
Today the BBC has done a quick hype of their darling Occupiers, who are using May Day to cause violence and disrupt civilized society. Of course, that’s not how the BBC tells it. The news brief is full of hype and positive vibes about these people.
Federal authorities on Tuesday morning announced that five people were arrested in Cleveland for allegedly conspiring to use explosives to blow up a local bridge.
Steven M. Dettelbach, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, and Stephen D. Anthony, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Cleveland office, discussed the arrests and subsequent charges related to what they referred to as a “national security case.”
A news conference was held Tuesday morning at the Cleveland FBI headquarters at 1501 Lakeside Avenue.
Fox 8′s Stacey Frey reports that the suspects have been identified as Brandon Baxter, 20; Anthony Hayne, 35; Joshua Stafford, 23; Connor Stevens, 20; and Douglas Wright, 26. Baxter, Hayne and Wright were arrested Monday night by members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force on charges of conspiracy and attempted use of explosive materials to damage physical property affecting interstate commerce.
A criminal complaint filed Tuesday morning states that Baxter, Hayne and Wright are self-proclaimed anarchists who formed a small group that considered a series of plots over several months.
This must be more of that love for humanity and sense of civic duty Katty Kay was telling us about, and which Paul Mason is celebrating on Newsnight. I pretty much saw this coming after spending a few hours among these darlings of the BBC.
What I mean is that these people can keep doing this for a very long time. And eventually, they’re going to realize that it isn’t working. Will they fess up and become a ready-made cadre of Obamessiah activists? I don’t know. If not, the emotions will have driven many of them into a frenzied state over time. Fighting the man, speaking truth to power, getting arrested over and over again, and watching a seemingly endless stream of video clips of their comrades fighting with police, getting pepper-sprayed and bundled into police vans will not yield a happy result. Like we heard from a couple people, they all seriously think that obstructing traffic and infringing on other people’s space and property is their right. Freedom of speech and right to peaceable assembly and all that. What they tragically fail to understand is that, unlike many blacks in the South before the Civil Rights movement, they can exercise their right to vote without fear, and all this glorious civil disobedience is unnecessary extremist nonsense. The Tea Party movement has proven that they don’t need to do any of this. I found only a couple of people who even remotely grasped this point. So I think the violent confrontation – always started by the nasty fascist police infringing on their rights, bien sur – will become a kind of ouroburossian (if that’s not a word, it is now) reality. They’ll continuously create situations which they’ll interpret as justifying their cause, projecting onto it false equivalences with everything from Wat Tyler to the German Peasant Rebellion to Gandhi to MLK and the Civil Rights movement. That’s when you’ll really start to see the stuff the BBC told you would never happen over here.
Here’s a new edition of my little coverage of US issues. My thanks to all those who listened to the first one, and for the kind words about it. I hope people find this one interesting as well. Apologies for this one being a litter longer, clocking in at a bit over 16 minutes. Just too many details to include. Links to everything I talk about are listed below, so everyone can decide for themselves.
(UPDATE: See my comment below) I was going to comment about this in the open thread, but in the light of today’s noise about the housing benefit shuffle in Newham causing “social cleansing” and allegedly inspiring right-wing extremism, I thought it was worth a full post. I’m talking about the BBC’s revelation that immigration from Mexico into the US is being reversed.
The rate of Mexican immigration to the US has stalled or maybe even gone into reverse, an analysis shows, ending a four-decade-long trend.
Not may, it has. The Pew figures (NB: pdf file automatic download) quoted by the BBC pretty much show that. The reason I’m bringing it up is because of the illegal factor. It’s important to remember that the BBC has generally taken the activists’ line and used their language in reporting on the issue in the US. Remember Mark Mardell’s jaunt to the Arizona border (page 4 of the open thread) and the other reports trying to tell you it was all about racism against people with brown skin and a Mexican accent? Then there are the other reports siding with illegals and playing the race game. The fact that these people are in the US illegally is somehow not their fault, but the fault of unfair laws which magically make them illegal ex post facto or something. The real objection wasn’t, of course, about immigration of non-whites, but about illegal immigration.
Activists – mostly Hispanic – always play that qualifier down, if not wipe it from the discussion entirely. And the BBC played right along. So it must have come as something of a shock to the BBC News Online producer who had to skim through the Pew report and discover that last year there were more illegal Mexicans in the US than legal ones: 6.1 million to 5.8 million. So why didn’t the BBC ever discuss that disparity last year when they were freaking out about the Arizona law and all those other states trying to stem the tide of illegals? The rest of us knew the problem was about illegals, and said so at the time. Yet the BBC tried to play it as racism anyway. When Mark Mardell tries to whip up a little anger by shoving in your face Pat Buchanan’s racialist diatribe about losing “white America” to the Mexicans, it’s all part of this Narrative. Forget about the illegal issue and focus on race. It ends the debate before it begins. But the BBC approves when Hispanics vote for their own kind based solely on ethnicity.
It must also come as a shock to those who rely on the BBC for the news on US issues to learn that the first black President has in fact been deporting record numbers of illegals with brown skin back to Mexico. How can that be racism, BBC? Is He a puppet or something on this issue? I’d love to know how they square this with their belief in Him. I remember when Mardell was actually for a moment trying to defend the President (page 8 of the open thread) against charges that He wasn’t protecting the border properly. Obviously He wasn’t, since there were more illegals than legals last year. Mardell is silent, of course.
It’s important to make this distinction when reporting on the US issue of immigration law, because, as the Newham article doesn’t show, the problem in Britain is about mostly quite legal immigration. There’s a huge difference in the cause and effect in the UK from what’s been happening in the US. Which is why it’s wrong for the BBC to conflate the two situations and play racialist games.
If xenophobia is (I’m speaking hypothetically for the moment) a primary factor in British objection to seemingly unlimited legal immigration of third-world Mohammedans, this still has nothing to do with US objection to illegal immigration of Mexicans. There is a world of difference between the two. Why has the BBC been unable to make this distinction? I say it’s because they’re viscerally opposed to restrictions on immigration simply out of reflexive fealty to the abstract notions of diversity and multiculturalism, as well as a reflexive opposition to any nominally conservative policy.
I’ve previously mentioned how the BBC hired German immigrant Franz Strasser (middle of page 4 of the open thread) to tour the country reporting on immigration in the US in all its various colors. The reason I criticized every single report in that series was because he and his editor dishonestly censored the word “illegal” (middle of page 7) out of the whole picture. Even when he was doing reports from two different “Sanctuary Cities” (middle of page 4 of that same thread), which deliberately flouted US immigration law to harbor illegals. He acted as if this didn’t exist. The whole series was conceived and design to whitewash (see what I did there) the illegal issue so that you’d all think any objection to immigration had to be based in racism. Now here are hard figures to show that there really has been a problem with illegal immigration.
The BBC article about the Pew study notes that “immigration” is going to be a big issue in this election year, but still cannot bring themselves to add the “illegal” qualifier, which is actually what it’s all about. The situation is not the same, yet they still pretend it is.
Now that illegal immigration is down, even seeing a negative trend, one has to suspect that the policies have been working. Too bad Britain doesn’t even have the level of sovereignty that Arizona does. Oh, and I guess this means that Global Warming won’t be driving all of them into the US after all.
Still, it’s nice to see the BBC at last revealing even the tiniest bit of truth about what’s been going on over here. But it’s a shame that they don’t make an effort to correct the false impression they’ve been creating about the concern over illegal immigration in the US.
I’m trying something a bit new and different here. After asking David Vance and the All Seeing Eye, I’m starting a real rebuttal to the BBC’s lame output about US issues. I can’t compete with the “bespoke” video magazine pieces, but I can provide a bit more information and analysis of real US issues that get spun by the BBC or simply censored out of existence. There’s much more to what’s going on over here than what affects the President or the latest racial issue or celebrity gossip, and there seems to be a vacuum which needs filling. So this is my humble attempt.
It’s not possible to provide a proper rebuttal in fifteen minutes, but consider this an opening salvo. If enough people agree, I’d like to expand this from just me providing some info to a live audio or video discussion, where everyone here can call in or whatever, beginning next week. But more on that later.
I’m also going to try and provide sources for everything I talk about, so everyone here can decide for themselves what’s going on. The BBC may not be held accountable for their actions, but the inhabitants of this blog deserve better. Hey, if you don’t want to listen to the audio, just check out these links instead.
Hmmm. Embed not working. Link to audio file on EyeTube below:
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