Category Archives: bizarro Beeb

You may think that headline is overwrought, but it’s literally true. Today’s BBC front page http://www.bbc.co.uk currently has up, effectively as quote of the day, without any comment, and indeed with a slight implication of approval, the words of a prominent Nazi.

I don’t know how to record it for posterity, but the quote is towards the bottom left of the front page (as seen from Britain, anyway; the international version of the site may be different).

It comes as part of a “QI FACT OF THE DAY”, just after the information that Arthur Conan Doyle and WB Yeats believed in fairies. Placed thus, it reads to me as a kind of riposte to them:

“Unfortunately this earth is not a fairy-land, but a struggle for life, perfectly natural and therefore extremely harsh. MARTIN BORMANN”

Which is all very well, but the job of saying the stern words of sense in response to credulity could have been given to someone more savoury. Martin Bormann was Hitler’s Private Secretary and head of the Party Chancellery. He was condemned to death in absentia at Nuremberg.

OK, you don’t have to explain it to me. Whoever put this up has no idea who Bormann was but there were lots of those German philosopher blokes weren’t there? The BBC are not Nazis but numpties.

Update: Hat tip to Happysnapper who kindly provided this screenshot. I would also like to pass on Millie Tant’s comment:

It’s extremely crass of the BBC to quote a Nazi – and doubly crass: a murderer talking about the struggle for life. Yeah.

The Bormann quote is still there on the main page at 18.48 GMT.

I cannot justly call this bias, but this headline from the British Broadcasting Corporation is a tad strange:

Obama tackles UK PM on Lockerbie

The BBC obviously thinks that there is a substantial audience out there that knows who Obama is, that knows what Lockerbie refers to, but that would not recognise the name of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Come to think of it, who am I to argue?

Robin Horbury made this comment a few days ago:

BBC drama once led the world. Today, it is little more than political correctness and pantomime agitprop.

Did anyone see the latest BBC1 example, Hunter? (Sunday and last night 9pm). The plot was that a group of Pro-Lifers (natural BBC villains because they don’t support sexual free-for-all)were so incensed that they decided to start killing children unless the BBC showed footage of a post-24 week abortion.

It was license for some horrendous images of the Pro-Lifers abducting and injecting innocent children with various lethal drugs – sequences that were so graphic that they would not have been shown on terrestrial television a few years back. And of course to portray the villains as heartless, callous, evil scum.

I have combed the internet to see if Pro-Life groups have ever done anything remotely like this. I found a few nastly examples of intimidation and violence in the US where staff of clinics have been targeted.

But – tell me if I’m wrong – there’s not one example anywhere in the world of a Pro-Lifer killing children, under any circumstances.

So Hunter looks to me to have been an example of a BBC coterie sitting down somewhere and deciding how they could find new ways tovillify a group that the corporation hates. Any passing resemblance to something called reality was abandoned in favour of the political need.

I personally do not support a lot of what Pro-Lifers want. But I do support their right to say and camapign for their goals – and not to be attacked in this wholly ridiculous way by the BBC.

The other ludicrous element of the plot was that the Pro-Lifers believed that exposure on BBC news bulletins would change attitudes. Of course, that was yet another reflection of the puffed up self-importance of BBC types.

A commenter called Tom replied,

I seem to remember the first of BBC’s Spooks (or the first I ever saw) had a similar plot – pro-lifers as terrorists.

They’re clearly into recycling their rubbish.