Category Archives: Katty Kay

BBC Censorship: Katty Kay’s Nice Anti-Semite Edition

By | | , , ,
13 Comments

Yes, I know, Katty was talking about the Occupiers in New York, but her report was meant to give you the idea that they’re all mostly nice, civic-minded, and righteous. Mark Mardell is still convinced that the Tea Party movement is driven by crypto-racism. So by his logic, we can use the following to state unequivocally that the Occupier movement is driven by anti-Semitism. Check it out, and wake me up when the same BBC which spent two years telling you we’re all racists because we opposed Socialist policies report this:

How about it, BBC? Any thoughts? If you tell me this is an outlier and not worthy of smearing an entire movement, then the majority of BBC reporting on the Tea Party is discredited. An amusing report on the LA scene can be found here. Note that the majority of the crowd is hideously white. But that doesn’t imply anything about their motives, right, BBC?

And this kind of anti-Jew sentiment was on display in New York as well. Curiously, Katty Kay and Laura Trevalyan failed to spot it. Or did they?

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Katty Kay and Mark Mardell Love Far-Left Protests

By | | , , , , , ,
15 Comments

I know others have mentioned the BBC’s biased coverage of the Occupiers, but I think it’s important to look at them all together, so we can see the big picture, the larger context of the BBC’s reporting. We’ve all seen by now how the BBC loves the “Occupy Wall Street” protest, as well as the copy-cat protests in other cities. Any negative aspects played down, the protesters’ mixed messages spun favorably. Now the top BBC talent in the US has gone among them, and come back with glowing reports. It makes for a stark contrast with the way Mardell and Katty reported on the Tea Party protests.

First, the unbelievable dishonesty and bias of Katty Kay:
Occupy Wall Street: Grievances without violence

I’ll pause for a moment while everyone stops laughing, and give you a chance to clean the tea off your monitors and keyboards. You read that right: Katty says there’s no violence. And it gets worse. How does she open her report?

There is something endearing about a protester who camps out on Wall Street carrying a sign that reads “I love humanity, let’s figure this s**t out together”.

OK, he wasn’t quite as discreet with the swear word, but my editors will frown if I replace the asterisks with the actual letters.

But seriously, how angry can you really sound if you begin your revolutionary bank-bashing with the words love and humanity? It is somehow so very un-European.

Awww, how sweet, eh? Like all well-constructed pieces, the Narrative is set out very clearly in the opening section: these protesters are lovely, have the best of intentions.

It’s hard to imagine, for example, the hooded youths of the London riots pausing between rock throwing and shop-looting to utter poetic affection for their fellow human beings.

Their priority was Sony or Samsung (stolen plasma TVs that is), not sitting down with their political opponents to figure out the country’s economic problems.

Who’s sitting down with political opponents here? The Occupiers are screaming at their ideological enemies. If these people honestly wanted to sit down with political opponents and figure out the country’s problems, they’d be sitting outside political offices and government buildings, going to committee meetings open to the public, etc. That’s not what they’re doing at all. Katty just made that up out of thin air.

Let’s recall how Katty opened her first report about the Tea Party movement. She opened that video piece with a quote from the President, who is one of the Tea Party’s political opponents. The people on whom she’s reporting doesn’t even get the first word. The President called for unity, she intoned, but that call was drowned out by the Tea Partiers. Before we even learn what the Tea Partiers wanted, we’re told they disrupt, divide, oppose. Oh, and let’s not forget they are angry. And that was actually the least biased, least frowning, least scaremongering report about the Tea Party movement ever done on the BBC at the time.

Yet for some odd reason Katty starts her report on the Occupiers focusing on the love. She contrasts the Occupiers with the violence of the protesters in Greece and other places, and draws the conclusion that the US is just a nicer place, so protesters don’t get violent like they do in Europe.

No, the most extraordinary thing about the US protests so far is that they have been so mild.

It took Americans a long time to jump on the European protest wagon and now they’ve finally done so, it’s with exemplary order and calm. Given how rough the American economy is, that’s quite surprising.

You ain’t seen nothing yet, Katty. (UPDATE 9:23pm: All those nice people Katty met just got up and tried to occupy Wall St. again and and got violent with the police, throwing bottles and bags of garbage at them. Imagine! How’s that hopey-changey stuff working out for ya, Katty?)
They’ve only just begun. Wait until they realize they won’t get their way immediately. She gets in her usual far-Left ideology about “growing inequality” and how the evil rich are “gobbling up” wealth while others aren’t getting richer. This is far-Left ideology, no matter which side of the argument you’re on. And she has form. For example, recently she complained that the economic crash hasn’t lasted long enough to “turn people off Capitalism”. It’s right there, out in the open. This is what Katty believes, and she reports according to her personal political beliefs. It cannot be denied. Naturally, because she holds these beliefs, she’s surprised things haven’t gotten more violent.

So it’s interesting that – barring the one incident of pepper spray used against demonstrators on Brooklyn Bridge – the nice people camping out in Zuccotti Park have been well, so nice.

Show me one single example of Katty – or any Beeboid – describing Tea Party protesters as “so nice”. Notice how she says there’s been just the one unfortunate incident. What about the hundreds of people arrested while trying to illegally storm the Brooklyn Bridge? What about all those nice protesters who tried to actually illegally occupy Wall St. itself? Does Katty know about this? Does she care? Or does she sweep that under the rug because it doesn’t help the Narrative she wants to tell?

Oh, but Katty knows that United Statesians can do violent protests when they want:

And it’s not that Americans can’t riot – they’ve done so with force in the past. Remember Vietnam, LA, the race riots in Detroit?

But those were in the 1960s. In recent decades protests in the US seem to have become more peaceful, even more subdued.

So why haven’t there been molotov cocktails and shootings yet? Katty will tell us by – you won’t believe this – using the Tea Party movement as an example.

That other political protest movement of recent times, the Tea Party, might get fired up by their deeply held convictions, but they certainly don’t riot.

Oh, gee, thanks a lot. We also don’t get arrested by the hundreds, or illegally occupy anything. To my knowledge, there has never been a single arrest as a result of Tea Party activity. If somebody does manage to find such an anomaly, it would be nothing compared to the hundreds of arrests of Occupiers around the country in the last few weeks. That’s right, Katty: hundreds of nice people arrested in Boston, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, San Diego, New Jersey, Des Moines. The only reason there haven’t been even more arrests in other cities is because the police have decided not to do any for the moment.

Why have all these people been arrested? Why are the police trying to clear them out in various cities? Because the protesters are breaking the law. Unlike the Tea Party, these people didn’t bother with mundane things like permits or working with the police or obeying the law or having consideration for their fellow citizens. Yet Katty thinks it’s the same thing.

The same quality of civic duty and lawfulness that foreigners find so distinctive about American life in general has dictated the mood of the economic protests as well.

Civic duty, my arse! Breaking the law and blocking traffic and storming government buildings is not civic duty or lawfulness. How can Katty be so dishonest? Hey, Katty: would say these people in Zuccotti Park are “nice” and civic-minded? Or did you miss the anti-Jew messages? I guess you’re also unaware that they’re calling for violence in LA. I guess I shouldn’t ask about the “Time to kill the wealthy” email that was sent to a bunch of NY lawmakers. (UPDATE: Or spitting on a member of the Coast Guard.)

Now let’s visit with Mark Mardell. He went to Nashville to see what the kids are up to. His enthusiasm is evident in the headline:

The start of something new?

Out of all the protesters in Nashville, Mardell managed to find a person of color. Unfortunately, he couldn’t even be bothered to find an African American, who are a significant portion of the population there, if only a small minority of protesters. The poor lad had been to New York, and got himself arrested trying to illegally occupy the Brooklyn Bridge. Mardell gives him sympathetic treatment. He spent seven hours in a cell (oh, the humanity), and his law-abiding immigrant parents weren’t pleased that he now has a criminal record. But the BBC’s top man in the US understands.

On the other hand, Hirak believes his arrest was part of something historic, something important.

A movement that isn’t just about Wall Street, but which he hopes will grow in Tennessee, where he goes to university.

“I am a very small part of it, but this is the opportunity finally for the people to speak out and participate in our democracy,” he says. “We’re finally going to get our voice back in our democracy. We are the 99%.”

Now let’s recall Mardell’s first blog post about the Tea Party movement. He asked if it was down to racism. He pretended to be impartially asking the question, throwing it out there for others to ponder. But we know now that he believes it is secretly driven by racism, and that all the noise about fiscal conservatism and government reform is a smokescreen to hide it.

The rest of his piece is sympathetic to the protesters and their cause. No casting aspersions, no suggesting that they’re mere puppets of Washington think tanks (like he said about the Tea Party to the BBC College of Journalism), and most curiously, no fretting about the anger. No, Mardell is hopeful, not concerned. This is the US protest movement he’s been waiting for, and it shows. You won’t see him mocking any of these protesters the way he did last month to his junior colleagues.

Naturally, when he gets to New York, Mardell also has to try to compare the Occupiers with the Tea Party movement. He makes sure to tell you that, unlike these people, those Tea Partiers like big corporations. But he forgot to mention that a major complaint is corporate welfare and bank bailouts. No, the easy route is to claim that the Tea Party is on the side of the evil rich, and the Occupiers are on the side of the poorest and most vulnerable.

Fortunately, Mardell understands that there really isn’t a fair comparison at all.

But other differences suggest it would be wrong to read across from one movement to another.

These are early days, but Occupy doesn’t seem to have drawn people into politics for the first time in the way that the Tea Party has.

Most of those I have spoken to here and in Nashville were already interested in radical politics.

I have yet to meet any one who turned up because their own economic situation made them want to change the world.

Which is what we’ve been saying here all along. These people had this ideology long before the economic crisis, long before the bank bailouts. Unlike the Tea Party movement, this was planned in advance. Unlike the Tea Party movement, which was spontaneously started by a St. Louis housewife as an anti-tax gathering, and eventually inspired millions of people to form peaceful, law-abiding protests. Funny how all the Beeboids leave this fact out. However, notice that Mardell doesn’t wonder about organization or influence from above. He also never enthused over how someone he met at a Tea Party event felt they were part of something historic. To him, it was all hatred and racism.

Here’s what Mardell and Katty have censored from their glowing reports about the Occupiers: Union organizers and Union members joining in. Even the far-Left Mother Jones says it’s driven by Big Labor. That’s not a grass-roots movement at all. Will Mardell admit it? No.

Laura Trevalyan has been more honest in her coverage. She does report about the defecating on police cars, the ugly behavior, and the complaints about the property destruction and illegal behavior in Zuccotti Park. Unfortunately, she thinks that occupying private property and preventing the city from cleaning up after a month of filthy occupation is “a victory”. Only at the BBC is breaking the law celebrated in such a fashion. She made a live report saying the same thing on the News Channel earlier today.

You want to know what a real victory is for a political movement is? Changing politics. The first Tea Party victory was affecting a town council vote in a little town in Rhode Island. Real victories include affecting local elections in places like Tucson and Miami, not to mention electing Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Oh, and taking over the House of Representatives last November. Those are actual, respectable victories for a political movement: law-abiding and civic-minded. Not occupying and vandalizing private property and preventing the city from cleaning it up. Ah, the twisted morality of the BBC.

There was one bit of dishonesty in Trevalyan’s report as well.

In the Colorado city of Denver on Friday, riot police arrested demonstrators as they removed their tents in Lincoln Park near the state Capitol.

This makes it seem as if the police just went in and started arresting innocent people who were actually packing up to leave peacefully. Wrong. Those arrested refused to leave an area they had been occupying illegally.

Why can’t the BBC be honest about breaking the law? Why can’t the BBC be honest about these Occupiers? I think we know why. The difference between their treatment of these protests and the Tea Party movement is staggering.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

The Bias Of Katty Kay Revealed On MSNBC

By | | , , , ,
5 Comments

A couple days ago, BBC Washington correspondent and anchor of what’s left of BBC World News America, Katty Kay participated in a panel discussion on Chris “Thrill Up My Leg” Matthews’ show on MSNBC. Unlike the BBC, MSNBC has no Charter & Agreement requiring them to provide balance and remain impartial, and the panel is even more weighted to the Left: John Heilmann from New York Magazine, Katty, Helene Cooper from the New York Times, and Time Magazine’s Richard Stengel. The host himself is now infamous for his over-emotional statement on air of devotion to the President, and has spent much of the time since His election viciously attacking any opponent.

Before we get to the video, I have to say that it’s certainly not Katty’s fault that this is a far-Left echo-chamber, or that Matthews has a specific partisan agenda to push and assembled this panel accordingly. But she is responsible for her own words and behavior. Therein lies the danger of being a talking head on these panels. It’s all opinion-mongering, and there’s no escaping that the whole point of appearances like this is to give opinions on stories. Sometimes that’s not a big deal, like when a pundit is asked to predict how things might turn out, or explain a couple of angles a politician might take on something. But that’s not what’s going on this time.

Since she’s not actually on the BBC here, and is not performing any BBC-related duty, defenders of the indefensible can claim that she has no obligation to be impartial. All I can do is present this from the BBC’s own rulebook, and let people judge for themselves:

BBC News and Current affairs staff, BBC correspondents on non-staff contracts and freelances known primarily as presenters or reporters on BBC news and current affairs programmes, must remain impartial when speaking publicly or taking part in similar events, such as a public discussion or debate.

Now to the video:

Notice how Matthews misses Perry’s joke and claims this is embracing extremism. The first words out of the New York Magazine guy’s mouth are, “The Republican Party right now is a very ideological party.” And the Democrat Party isn’t? Matthews goes on to disparage Perry, and we can see the tone from the outset. Angry, extremist, mean, ideological. Matthews really piles on, blatantly misrepresenting the message of the movement: “We don’t believe in evolution. We don’t believe in Climate Change.” He says this is the language of the Tea Party. Nods of agreement all round, and no protest at all from Katty Kay. She agrees with the characterization that this is what the Tea Party movement is about. If she thought differently, she would have said something.

This has not and has never been the language of the Tea Party movement. The last two and a half years have been about fiscal responsibility. Katty actually later acknowledges this fact, but only after she says that the movement is all social conservatives. Once again I have to state emphatically for any lurking defenders of the indefensible waiting for a gotcha moment: Of course there are plenty of social conservatives in the movement, and of course these issues concern them. Yes, social conservatives have also tried to jump on the bandwagon and co-opt the movement’s energy for their own ends. But the inspiration, the driving force, the raison d’être of the Tea Party movement is fiscal conservatism and nothing else. Remember – and I sympathize with those who get their information on US issues from the BBC who were kept in the dark about this for months – the whole thing started as an anti-tax movement and grew into an anti-ObamaCare and anti-Socialism/Big-Government movement. Nothing else mattered. No social issues inspired this, none of the hundreds of spontaneous protests around the country were about social issues. It’s simply false to portray the movement and the millions of people supportive of it as social conservatives first and foremost. Yet the BBC Washington correspondent plays right along. For her to go along with it and abet Matthews’ smear is biased behavior, and, I believe, a breach of the BBC’s impartiality guidelines for correspondents.

Since a few genius pundits have been comparing Perry to Reagan, the discussion shifts to that idea. But things are different today than they were in 1980. “There seems to be a meanness of spirit,” Katty opines. Yes, she’s making a distinction between Reagan’s campaign and the rougher tone of today, but she’s also acting as if it’s only the Right which is acting this way. When did Katty ever frown at the President for saying “Punch back twice as hard”, or instructing His supporters to argue with opponents and “get in their face”, or for crying, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”? Never, and she wouldn’t dream of doing so. In fact, she’s pretending here that it never happened. I suppose that’s to be expected, seeing as how the BBC has censored this news, not allowing you to know about it. This is a BBC Washington Correspondent revealing what she thinks about the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party, and it’s exactly as biased as we’ve all been saying about her work for the BBC.

At one point, Katty states that Perry’s joke was actually him being mean, and that the public doesn’t like that sort of thing. Clearly she misses the point, just like the rest of these Leftoids. From nearly the very beginning of the movement, the Mainstream Media and Leftoid blogosphere have tried to characterize Tea Party people as being angry and mean. People here may recall just how many BBC reports on the movement (just click on anything in the Tag Cloud on the right side of this page with “Tea Party” in it, and you’ll see what I mean) focused on “boiling anger”, etc. So this is nothing new. Then there was the racist angle, thankfully absent from this particular discussion. The thing is, many in the movement have taken the approach of humor with it.

For example, the host of one Tea Party event I attended was a black man, who greeted the crowd by saying, “Hello all you racist rednecks!”. Perry is doing the same thing here. And the Leftoids on the panel simply don’t get the joke, as they’re the very people who actually are making the smear which Perry’s playing on. The crowd in the video obviously gets it, but the BBC Washington correspondent very obviously doesn’t.

There’s also the inevitable mention of Katty’s arch-nemesis, Sarah Palin, who is never far from her thoughts. It’s much harder now for Palin to enter the race, apparently. Glad that’s straightened out.

I’ve made a quite a few posts and comments on this blog highlighting the bias of Katty Kay’s reporting and interviewing manner on the BBC. Her personal opinion revealed here in her capacity as a pundit reflects my charges exactly.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Katty Kay Tweets Her Bias Again

By | | , , , , , ,
13 Comments

I was having a look at Katty Kay’s Twitter page, wondering if she had said anything about Sarah Palin lately. Not only is Palin on tour (as we know from Mark Mardell’s sneering the other day), but she said something yesterday about Paul Revere which raised a few eyebrows. It turns out Palin was actually correct and, as usual, a few Leftoid media dopes made fools of themselves laughing at her so-called ignorance.

Katty, the most hyper-partisan of all BBC employees working the US beat (yes, she’s worse than Mardell) now that Katie Connolly has done the honest thing and gone to work for a Democrat strategy group, didn’t say anything about Palin’s Revere remark, but still she did not disappoint anyone looking for her to reveal her personal political bias. Tweeting from her iPad, Katty sent her readers two links to hit pieces on Palin, both from the JournoList-infested Politico.

This Politico article is full of adjectives like “cartoon-ish”, “circus”, and “spectacle”. Oh, and the actual title is “Sarah Palin takes the media for a ride”. Katty editorialized that down to a sexist pejorative. Nice one, Katty. Notice also that the response from her reader makes it clear which side she’s on, as nobody would ask such a question if they thought Katty was either impartial or not far Left and a Palin hater. Katty does have form attacking Sarah Palin on air. The other tweet is equally amusing.

This Politico article is about how some in the GOP establishment aren’t pleased. Which is exactly what Palin’s supporters want, but of course Katty thinks it’s a bad sign for her. Partisan blindness. We can see where the Beeboids go to inform their opinions on US issues. The vicious atmosphere of Katty’s Twitter feed and her followers is again revealed in the reply. If Katty wasn’t openly partisan and anti-Palin, her reader wouldn’t feel free to make such a reply.

Further down on her Twitter page, Katty also retweets a Palin attack piece by none other than Andrew Sullivan (not going to give him a link – look him up if you want), notorious for his own version of a “birther” conspiracy (he still thinks Palin faked giving birth to Trig, while her daughter is the real mother). There is no greater hater of Sarah Palin than Sullivan, and Katty not only follows him but thinks his musings are important enough to share on her BBC-labeled Twitter account. This fact alone tells you all you need to know about Katty Kay.

If that’s not enough to get a scolding email from Helen Boaden, Katty also makes a tweet which combines her personal business interest – “Womenomics” – with her BBC profile.

This is clearly a violation of BBC protocol. Yet Katty often uses her position at the BBC as a platform to advocate for her personal pet issues (see here and here), including the women in business angle. It’s also worth reminding everyone that Katty’s partner in Womenomics is Claire Shipman, whose husband is the current White House Press Secretary.

There’s another tweet on the page about an article discussing how women are oppressed in oil-rich Muslim countries. It’s not US news, just something she’s personally interested in, and uses her BBC credentials as a platform to promote it. She even ironically tweets about “women who take a stand” having their morals questioned. That’s pretty rich coming from someone who called Sarah Palin a tease for doing just that.

Another overtly partisan BBC employee in the US who is not fit for purpose.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Ignorant US People Astonish Katty Kay

By | | , , , , , , , , ,
7 Comments

Check out Katty Kay – taking over for Matt Frei as alpha Beeboid at BBC World News America since he left for Channel 4 – telling Mayor Bloomberg of New York that she is “astonished” to learn that more and more people in the US are turning away from Warmism.

“What is it with the American public opinion that seems to fly in the face of all the scientific evidence?”

Calm down, dear. Substitute any other political issue and the Beeboids are usually equally astonished by American public opinion. But never mind.

First of all, it’s not that the people don’t believe the climate changes. That’s BS Number One from the Warmists. Of course the climate changes; we all know that and it’s not in dispute. The question is whether or not it’s caused mostly by human activity. The science on that is being debated all the time, yet the BBC acts as if it’s not, and only whackos don’t get it.

The reason I call this BS #1 is that the very euphemism the Warmists have forced into the discussion – “Climate Change” – is disingenuous. What they all really mean is Anthropogenic Global Warming. The “science” of AGW, invented by people whose careers and fortune depend on it becoming fact, is what Katty is talking about, and not about whether or not the earth’s climate changes or was in a warming trend for a while. But because the Warmists have already won the argument – if you’re using their terminology, they’ve already won the argument, even if you’re still talking – Katty and the BBC can get away with saying that people like me don’t believe in “Global Warming” when in fact it’s that we don’t believe that building one more clean coal plant will sink the Maldives. The recent record cold temperatures around the US probably don’t help. But that’s only weather, yeah.

The reason they switched terms is because “Global Warming” can mean all things to all people. There is no cause or effect implied. Yet we know the BBC and all Warmists believe the cause is human activity, as the topic of this discussion between Kay and Bloomberg proves. As the term itself is dishonest, this BBC segment is dishonest and Katty and Mayor Mikey are dishonest for using the term.

Mayor Bloomberg, of course, is a committed Warmist and an über-Nanny Statist. Don’t even get me started on the behavior he’s banned against the wishes of New Yorkers. Hell, even the fact that he’s mayor right now is undemocratic, because he went against the voters – and his own promise – and twisted enough arms to change the term limit rules so he could buy a third election run for mayor a third time (and I speak as someone who happily voted for him the first time, knowing full well that he was a RINO Nanny). So this guy is the perfect example of an elite ruling class forcing his own personal wishes on a helpless public. No wonder the BBC wanted to talk to him. As soon as Bloomberg says “reduce consumption”, you know where he and the BBC stand. All your personal freedoms are belong to us.

I’m not going to bother getting into more details of Katty’s interview with the mayor, because it’s beyond the point. The BBC – as admitted by Jeremy Paxman in the sidebar – long ago took sides in the debate, and actively works to pursue a specific political agenda. Carbon emission regulations, coal plant permits, government subsidy/investment in various technologies, and the regulations for the entire automotive industry are all political issues. Even if we’re talking about seat belts in cars or helmets for motorcycles, creating a law about any of it is a political issue. No matter which side one is on, it’s done in the legislature by – in theory – democratically elected representatives, and these laws can be changed or repealed entirely by the next batch of democratically elected representatives if that’s what the voters want.

It doesn’t matter which side of the Warmism debate one is on. Legislation is political, full stop. The BBC always takes sides in this specific political issue, and deliberately chooses disingenuous language to support it. And as seen here, they do political advocacy posing as news and information.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

New White House Press Secretary

By | | ,
10 Comments

The BBC reports:

The US vice president’s communications director Jay Carney has been named as the next White House press secretary, to replace Robert Gibbs.

With unusual modesty the BBC doesn’t report that Jay Carney is married to ABC correspondent Claire Shipman, co-author of a blog and book with BBC US correspondent Katty Kay.

How many negative stories have you seen or heard about Joe Biden on the BBC while Carney has been his director of communications for the past two years?

Not many, I bet.

Just sayin’, is all.

Update 10.30pm: Mention of Shipman now added to BBC report, the Kay link not so much.

Update January 28, 3.50pm: Katie Connolly has added a glowing profile of Jay Carney, and Katty gets a mention in the penultimate paragraph (h/t Craig):

Mr Carney’s wife is also a celebrated journalist, ABC correspondent Claire Shipman. Ms Shipman is the co-author of Womenomics, an examination of the economic contributions of working women, with the BBC’s Katty Kay.

The Connolly article includes this insight:

Journalists who once sniggered over gaffes made by the garrulous Mr Biden have, at Mr Carney’s encouragement, focused more on his contributions to the Obama administration.

And the BBC has been more obedient than most.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Sometimes The BBC Doesn’t Censor News From The US – When It’s An Approved Thought

By | | , , , , , ,
32 Comments

Most people here will be well aware that the BBC censored news of the beginnings of the Tea Party movement in the US for about two months before the reality of nationwide, simultaneous protests on April 15, involving hundreds of thousands of people, forced them to report it. I first mentioned the issue on an open thread here back on Feb. 19, 2009, even before anyone started calling them “tea parties”. They were anti-tax protests first and always. And even when the BBC at last reported it, Kevin Connolly worked to discredit the participants by hinting at dark forces behind it, suggesting that this was not, in fact, an independent, spontaneous grassroots movement. Connolly went further than that, and highlighted the skin color of the majority of participants, implying a racist element behind the motivation of the people involved.

And then, of course, he insulted all of us with a sexual innuendo, which remains on the BBC website to this day.

After that, the BBC again ignored the growing movement, and refused to acknowledge its success in affecting local issues and elections, until Scott Brown surprised them. At that point, the BBC occasionally acknowledged the existence of the Tea Party movement, but – with the lone exception of one video report by Katty Kay – their reports were uniformly negative, suggested racism, and tried to portray extreme fringe elements as representative of the entire movement. You all heard about Christine O’Donnell nearly every day for weeks and weeks, yet during the campaign the BBC censored any mention of Col. Allen West until a few days before the election. Even Katty’s report from January focused on “anger”, and the majority of BBC reports at the time were full of quips about “boiling anger” and whatnot. Anger is okay when it’s against things the Beeboids don’t like, but not when it’s against their beloved Obamessiah.

The BBC’s censorship and subsequent attempts to minimize the impact of the Tea Party movement in the minds of their audience got so bad that it led to Emily Maitlis declaring during the BBC’s coverage on the night of the recent mid-term elections that the Tea Party movement had “come out of nowhere”. Only to those who trusted the BBC for their news on US issues, dear. The link to Katty Kay’s report from Jan. 2010 refers to the Tea Party movement as “new” (fourth one down), even though it was nearly a year old by then and had had some political success. I’m sure most here will remember just how biased and negative their reporting was during the weeks before the election. They spent more time looking for racists under the bed than covering the issues at hand.

In stark contrast, the BBC wasted no time at all in enthusiastically reporting an alleged grassroots anti-Tea Party movement calling itself the “Coffee Party”. Contrary to the BBC’s portrayal as an innocent group of people, it was in fact started by a former New York Times hack and dedicated campaigner for The Obamessiah’s Presidential bid, who used her media connections to gain support and hype. Hardly the grassroots darlings the BBC wanted you to believe they were. The article also quoted one of her own colleagues in support, even though that colleague was well aware of the Coffee Party’s partisan makeup. Of course, Kate Zernicke was quoted because she had written a partisan hit book about the Tea Party movement.

Still, the BBC reported the existence of the movement within days of its launch. However, as the movement was not in fact a genuine grassroots movement and was merely yet another partisan group competing for the attention of loyal Democrats and far-Left activists, it was more or less stillborn, and went nowhere. The BBC’s utter silence on the Coffee Party after that initial glowing report is testament to how useless it was, for if there was even one tiny success the BBC surely would have reported it with equal vigor.

Now there’s another non-partisan group, calling themselves “No Labels”. There was a forum held in New York City on Monday, presenting itself as a non-partisan group of people dedicated to reaching across the aisle and “working together”. The BBC, of course, sent Katty Kay to cover it, and set about informing you immediately, declaring the group’s desire to reduce partisanship for the common good. Once again their editorial double standard is revealed.

Funny how this notion that we should stop the partisanship and work together for the common good is exactly what St. Jon Stewart wanted with his “Rally to Restore Smugness”, for which the BBC gave prominent and favorable coverage when it happened (but remained completely silent after it clearly didn’t have the effect they’d hoped). And funny how suddenly everyone wants to work together now that the Democrat President is in trouble. Where were all these people a few years ago? No, it’s only good to work together when it benefits the Left, which is why the BBC immediately reported this as a true movement for bi-partisan happiness.

Here’s what the BBC doesn’t want you to know:

The BBC website article says the founder is Mark McKinnon, “Republican consultant”. In fact, it was founded by political consultants from both sides, including former finance director of the Democratic National Committee Nancy Jacobson, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s failed Presidential bid. Oh, and that Republican guy worked for Bush and on McCain’s campaign, but dropped out of working on campaigns in 2008 because he didn’t “want to work against an Obama Presidency”.

So the truth is that both founders want to support the Democrat way. The BBC censored not only McKinnon’s support for Him, but also censored the fact that someone besides a Republican founded and came up with the idea for the group.

Without these key pieces of information, the BBC audience has no idea that this might be anything other than an actual bi-partisan group. Something else the BBC decided you didn’t need to know was that the discussion panels were moderated by MSNBC talking heads. MSNBC is a dedicated opponent of the Tea Party movement and its prime-time stars are as hyper-partisan as it gets. But hiding this information allows the BBC to present the “No Labels” event as something other than what it actually is. And nowhere does a single one of the many astute BBC correspondents in the US dare suggest that this sudden desire for bi-partisanship has anything to do with supporting a Democrat President. Oh, and they also misrepresented Mayor Bloomberg’s political leanings. He’s a life-long Democrat who switched to Republican for his first run for mayor (no bribing of Democrat Brooklyn and Queens leaders required), and then declared himself Independent recently when he went back on his promise and against the will of the people and ran for a third term. He’s only non-partisan in that he stands for himself and his own desire to create a legacy for himself more than for any political party.

Katty actually talks to Joe Scarborough, but does not mention his MSNBC association. One positive point here: she allows him to speak of his disappointment that the President is more partisan than we were made to believe. He admits that he initially bought into the Hope and Change™, so not much of a Republican these days. Oh, but that point is deducted right away because this is followed by a statement by the President about His desire to work together. Whew! A narrow escape, there. The BBC almost let a tiny criticism of Him slip through unchallenged.

Naturally, Katty Kay takes time in the accompanying video report to remind everyone of the “angry, energetic extremes of the Tea Party movement” (guess whose name appears on the signs her editor chose to put in at that moment), and that “the point” here is to be lovely and work together. She’s clearly advocating for a cause here. None of the “activists” she speaks to are identified, yet they all share the dream of working together to advance the President’s agenda, “for the good of the country”. Why aren’t any of them named and affiliations displayed on screen, I wonder?

But guess what? The Tea Party movement is also made up of not only Republicans but a healthy percentage of Democrats, and Independents. As many as four in ten, as it happens. Tea Party groups even backed a few Democrats in the election. The BBC never told you about any of that, did they? No, because the Tea Party movement stands for fiscal conservatism, and against the President’s and Democrat leadership’s massive tax and spending policies, policies which the BBC supports.

The BBC censors news they don’t like, and then works to discredit the people involved when reality forces them to report it, while eagerly and immediately announcing it when people hold approved thoughts. All at your expense.

Don’t trust the BBC on US issues.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

BBC Mid-Term Election Epilogue

By | | , , , , , ,
11 Comments

Check out this election wrap-up by Matt Frei and Katty Kay, who co-anchored the BBC’s coverage of the second-most important election in human history. Their bias is there for all to see. Frei’s personal bias and unwavering support for the President gets even more outrageous in his blog post.

Their first point is about all the money spent on the campaign. I completely agree – as do most people in the US – that it’s gotten ridiculous, but Matty and Katty reveal their political bias here. The only names mentioned in association with high spending are Republican multi-millionaires who spent their own cash, both of whom lost their races. Katty calls this “divine retribution”, although Matty quickly corrects her editorializing. But two things are missing from their comments.

Ted Koppel actually pointed out to Katty on Tuesday night when she was whining about this issue that her comparison to British elections are completely unfair because the campaigns are of drastically different lengths. British general elections go for a few weeks, while the US production can start as early as anyone likes and seems to go on for 18 months at least these days. I don’t like it any more than Katty does, but that’s how it is. Then there are the dramatic differences in both geography and media outlets. Several states are larger than the entire area of the UK. Statewide candidates (for Governor and Senator) have a huge amount of ground to cover, and in some states have a large number of local media outlets to hit and local newspapers in which to buy a seemingly endless stream of full-page ads. This would cost far more money that the UK spends even if the election campaigns lasted the same amount of time. So they’re making a completely false analogy.

Secondly, notice that Matty and Katty do not mention the tens of millions George Soros spent on his pet organizations, nor the fact that Comedy Central donated several hours of free air time and got sponsors to spend a huge amount of cash on St. Jon Stewart’s “March to Restore Smugness”. Which seems to have been an epic fail on a much larger scale than any individual race. But the BBC has been totally silent on that, as it confuses the Narrative.

When Matty and Katty fret about gridlock, notice that Katty is concerned only that there will be no progress on her pet issues towards the Left. When she talks about making progress on the issues of energy and climate change, she is of course not concerned about progess in a non-Left direction.

Both Beeboids speak with great sympathy for the President, which really goes beyond analysis betrays their personal emotions. At one point, Frei tells the same lie he puts forth in his blog post, that the President is always admitting His mistakes and taking responsibility. In fact, his blog post opens with this:

President Obama is no stranger to contrition. At the beginning of his term, he didn’t shy away from saying that he had messed up, screwed up, made mistakes and so on. But he was apologising about the small stuff from a position of supreme confidence. The buck stops with me, he was fond of saying serenely, confident that the buck wouldn’t give him too much trouble.

Oh, really? Let’s remind ourselves of certain things the BBC censored from their reporting.

When it became glaringly obvious that the public was not happy with what ObamaCare was going to do to the country, the President took the same line of defense that the BBC and the EU mandarins took when the Irish voted against Lisbon: they just don’t understand it well enough. When the President accepted blame for people being upset, He said that it was His fault for not explaining it well enough. This isn’t the same thing as admitting an actual mistake. We heard the same thing from Him during His audience with St. Jon Stewart two weeks ago.

As recently as Sunday, the President was singing the same song:

“Making an argument that people can understand,” Mr. Obama continued, “I think that we haven’t always been successful at that. And I take personal responsibility for that. And it’s something that I’ve got to examine carefully … as I go forward.”

This is not the talk of a man capable of contrition, nor of one who will feel “chastened” by the election results.

In fact, any time there has been a mistake with His Administration, His first instinct is to blame someone else. Problems with the clean-up effort for the BP oil spill? Distract by blaming Bush for it in the first place. People unhappy with the Stimulus? Blame Republicans for not letting Him spend even more money. Caught up in a controversy over a criminal act by the Governor in His home state? Lie and say He hasn’t been involved. Air Force One causes an outcry by buzzing lower Manhattan near Ground Zero just to please a few wealthy donors? Blame somebody else. Can’t get every single bit of legislation rammed through Congress fast enough? Don’t admit it’s a mistake to be so impetuous at a crucial time: blame Fox News instead.

Where’s the contrition? Where’s the willingness to admit mistakes? It doesn’t exist. Matt Frei still has such huge respect for Him that he just imagines it does.

As for Matty and Katty fretting over gridlock in Washington, Katty does just barely admit that the President “doesn’t find it very easy to reach out to the other side”. Where were you in 2008, Katty? Oh, that’s right – back then the BBC was telling us that He was going to be bi-partisan and end the awful politics of Washington.

Instead, immediately after the taking office, the President was in a meeting with Republican leadership about His Stimulus Plans for Us. When Republicans complained about it, He dismissed them by saying, “I won”. This is not the attitude of someone willing to work together with anyone. But the BBC censored that news.

I guess Katty Kay should have encouraged her colleagues to take her own advice and not placed the President on a pedestal, as doing so makes it very difficult to report when He gets things wrong.

She didn’t say it in this clip, but on Tuesday night Katty couldn’t shut up about the one person not holding or running for any office: Sarah Palin. Here’s a little something from Katty herself which reveals her struggle with Palin Derangement Syndrome:

‘Katty, tell me they think Palin’s crazy’

In the blog post itself, Matt Frei still gets it wrong about the President’s efforts in closing Guantanamo Bay.

On day one, President Obama signed the bill to shut down Guantanamo Bay, using his left hand. “Get used to it!” he said. “I am a lefty.”

Wrong. It wasn’t a bill, but an Executive Order. Frei actually was closer to the truth in his Diary post from the time, when he said that the President expressed his “intention to close” Guantanamo within one year “with a flick of a pen”. Of course, we all know how well that’s working out for Him.

Frei also claims that, during the transition period before taking office, the President assembled His team “in a flash”. Also not true. Even the Washington Post was worried about how long it was taking Him, more than a month after He took office. I may make a mistake or misremember something I should have checked, but I’m not paid 100 grand a year to do this, nor do I have any research staff to help me.

This is the bias anchoring BBC World News America every night of the week, from the people whom you are expected to trust for news on US issues.

Today Is Also a Referendum On the Media.

By | | , , , , , , ,
19 Comments

Today, Nov. 2, the US is holding mid-term elections to choose who is going to represent them in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and selected State capitals. Judging from the wild-eyed Katty Kay in the video DB posted below, it’s also clearly the second-most important election in human history.

The main question on so many people’s minds since even before the BBC dared ask it is: Why are all these people motivated against the President and His Plan For Us?

BBC North America editor Mark Mardell believes that this is going to be a verdict on the President. He coyly poses it as a question, of course, but we all know what he’s thinking as this is the line he and all of his colleagues have been pushing for some time now. As we saw from the President’s audience with St. Jon Stewart, they wonder what more He could have done, why don’t we appreciate what He’s done for us, why the masses don’t understand how He’s already saved us. And of course, why do they hate the black man?

While the President should accept the brunt of the criticism (He may have been anointed elected with a mandate for “Change”, but it was obviously taken too far, and at the wrong time, not to mention the endless string of foreign policy errors), the Tea Party movement is as much a rebellion against Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, and the mainstream US media and assorted comedians and Hollywood types as it is against the President Himself.

We’ve all been through the economic arguments of why ObamaCare was the wrong massive debt increase at the wrong time, but Pelosi and Reid were more responsible for it than the President was. Contrary to what the BBC and their fellow travelers keep telling you, there are economists besides JournoLista Paul Krugman or David Blanchflower, and hundreds of them believe that both ObamaCare and all the excessive, debt-increasing spending plans of the Democrats are the wrong policy at the worst possible time. They’re also the ones who are going to let the Bush tax cuts expire at exactly the wrong time. So the Democrat-led Congress is on trial today as well.

Not only that, but the Republican Party is also being served notice today. Everyone talks about how the Tea Party movement is attacking the President and Democrats, but we’ve drawn blood from the Republican establishment first. In Alaska and Florida, for example, the incumbent Republicans lost the nomination when the people got fed up, and have unfortunately chosen to run as spoilers against the Tea Party-backed nominee instead. Many of the vox pops we hear from Tea Parties say that the excessive spending and debt began under Bush, and they’re just as sick of the Republican establishment who went along with it.

But in addition to the President and the political parties, there’s another element against which so many people are rebelling: the media. This includes edgy comedians and Hollywood dopes.
Watch this video and mark how much the statements you hear match what comes out of the mouths of Beeboids. Then you’ll know why we’re so angry, and what we’re really voting against today.

When Bill Maher says that we’re too stupid to be governed, he’s got it backwards. In reality, we’re too smart. If enough of us are, today’s election will reflect that.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.