Category Archives: Uncategorized

Hold on to your hats. Richard Black has now decided to move into overt political analysis, the logical extension, I suppose, of his eco-warrior brief. His worst nightmare is in prospect: that a red meat Republican climate denier might succeed the sainted Obama. Clearly, “red meat” has special abusive value in this context, because he points out with pride it was devised by his chum, the cannabis smuggler, Jonny Dymond. En route, he sings loud praises to the Environmental Protection Agency, the body that single-handedly is doing more damage to the US economy than a phalanx of Bin Ladens. And, using a quote from one of favourite organisations, the so-called Friends of the Earth, he produces his trump card to show how plain stupid the red meaters are, because he EPA, he tells us with glee, was actually set up by one of their own, none other than that (boo, hiss) ultimate nasty Republican, Richard Milhous Nixon.

Mr Black saves the best until last. He writes gloomily:

But the rest of the world has to recognise that whatever transpires, the US is unlikely to be pushing a radical green line any time soon. Then again, it has been this way since the hanging chads of Florida carried Mr Bush to the White House in 2001.

Quelle horreur! It’s all that lying, cheating, double-dealing Dubya’s fault. What an outro! Can’t you just hear the rest of the BBC newsroom cheering him on for being so smart…and getting so much anti-Republican venom in one story?

They simply can’t help themselves. I couldn’t stomach listening to the Stimulus Jr. speech to the bitter end, so bailed out and missed a major gaffe. What’s that, you ask? The Smartest Man In the Room made a gaffe? Never. Well, He did, and it’s a good one. This has been making the rounds of actual honest journalists who are not propagandists or die-hard Obamessiah fans, but I waited a full day because I knew the BBC wouldn’t have corrected it by now.

At 19:36 on the BBC’s liveblog of the speech, Beeboid Adam Blenford posted this at that point in the speech:

Switching back into a plea for unity, and invoking the memory of Abraham Lincoln: “A Republican president who mobilised government”.

He’s referring to this bit of the speech:

“We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party”.

Bzzzt! Wrong. Blenford, of course, had no idea. Sure, Lincoln was the first Republican to be elected President, but the Party itself was founded in 1854 by a Alvan Bovary, at an abolitionist meeting at a church in Wisconsin. Yes, that’s right: the Republican Party was basically founded to fight against slavery, in response to the looming Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would let new states decide if they were going to have slaves or not. Lincoln was a Whig at the time, and didn’t join until 1856, when he co-founded the Illinois branch. Sure, he did a great deal to help establish the Party, but did not found it.

This is the President of the US, folks. Now, it’s impossible to know if the Teleprompter of the United States had it wrong (which means the President is also ignorant and just read it out), or if the Community Organizer in Chief just winged it and told a lie so he could use Lincoln as a cudgel with which to beat intransigent Republicans in the House. But the President either got it wrong, or simply lied in front of Congress and the whole country, just to score a political point.

Blenford didn’t catch it, and Mark Mardell didn’t catch it, nor did Katty Kay. I don’t expect them to actually know anything about US history, as Mardell and the rest of the Beeboids covering the US display their ignorance time and time again. But the BBC then censored this mistake/lie in the transcript:

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a civil war he was also a leader who looked to the future – a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time the BBC has…um…touched up one of the President’s speeches in order to give the audience the desired impression. In fact, they did it with His very first speech as President. They edited the footage to make Him appear to have said stronger words about environmental issues.

The problem here is twofold. First of all, there’s the fact that the dozen or so BBC employees you’re supposed to trust about how to understand US issues are woefully ignorant of their patch. Worse, their colleagues in the editing suite and in the BBC News Online offices are dishonest, and edit and censor news to fit the impression they want you to have. This time they’re just censoring a transcript to protect the leader of a foreign country. How pathetic is that?

Even if the very young person being paid very low wages to put up the transcript can’t be expected to know the place he copied and pasted it from had it wrong, this has been all over the web for more than 24 hours, and surely somebody with integrity at the BBC would have caught it by now. If there was anyone with integrity at the BBC when it comes to the President.

BBC, you are liars and propagandists. There really needs to be a complete purge of personnel before this can be fixed.

I posted this over on my other blog, A Tangled Web, but thought I would put it here also. To be honest, I was sick to the stomach after the Liveblog last night and wanted to share my thoughts;

“UK readers will be only too aware of the BBC’s flagship weekly political debate programme – Question Time. US readers may not be so familiar but essentially it consists of an invited panel being asked questions by a selected audience. It has, shall we say, a certain reputation for being left-wing, and that is why I set up a Question Time LIVEBLOG over @ Biased BBC a few years ago – allowing readers a chance to have their say on it as it is broadcast live. Usually, this is good fun and whilst the programme is predictably dreary, massively pro-Labour and reliably leftist in all other zones, I get quite a kick out of the Biased BBC commentariat and their caustic wit! 

However there is a serious side to this. 10 years, after 9/11, the edition of Question Time that was broadcast that week became infamous. The Towers lay burning, thousands were dead (reduced to ash) and I think most people were in a state of shock. On the panel of Question Time that week was the then American ambassador Philip Lader. He was reduced to tears by the unbelievable hostility of the “selected” BBC audience which baited him, blamed America and essentially suggested that the US got what it deserved. The BBC seemed surprised by the reaction from people across the UK and apologised for the atrocious programme. 

Last night, the BBC ran a 9/11 special edition of Question Time, ten years on. As usual, we hosted the live discussion. After 20 minutes, I was thinking of leaving the debate, after 40mins, I did. Quite simply, this was ANOTHER opportunity for the “invited” BBC audience to vent their spleen against the Great and Little Satan. America was berated, Israel was berated, Islam was exonerated and Muslims were defined as the real victims since, as Tariq Ali stated, “their lands are occupied”. In short, the programme made me sick. 

There is plenty to be said about 9/11, but I would have thought most decent human beings would sympathise with all those innocents who had their precious lives taken, so horrendously, so unimaginably. America was the VICTIM of a vicious terror attack by militant Islamists who shouted how great Allah was as those planes detonated into those offices. Since 9/11, there have been 17,000+ additional acts of Jihad. America made mistakes before 9/11 and it has made mistakes after 9/11. Perhaps we can all agree on that but in the final analysis, it was America that was attacked and it is America that has every right to defend itself. 

Bonnie Greer, Tariq Ali and all those others US haters in the Question Time audience last night made me feel ashamed to be British. When it comes to the BBC’s Question Time – my response is NOT IN MY NAME.”

Tony Newbery, of Harmless Sky, who is quietly doing brilliant work about BBC bias, tipped me off last night about an item on Today’s business news yesterday morning. It is a gem. First, the Guardian had already led on the story (one BBC box firmly ticked!); second, it involved a dodgy capitalist (who as a bonus was daring to exploit fossil fuel); and third it allowed the use of an “expert” who actually is a militant greenie anti-capitalist.

The story was that Tony Hayward, former chief executive of BP, has formed a company called Valleras and has secured £1.3bn of backing from a range of sources including the Rothschilds. It has very enterprisingly launched a reverse take-over of a Turkish company called Genel which has the rights to extract oil in Kurdistan, estimated to be the world’s sixth largest (and hitherto unexploited) oil field.

My instinct is to say…fantastic! Thank goodness someone in Britain has not thrown in the towel under the deluge of EU regulation and is showing a flash of the spirit that built an empire. But not, of course, the BBC. You could hear the disdain in presenter Adam Shaw’s voice that the new company might soon join the FTSE 100, especially as it was run by an executive who – as was rammed home with relish – had been associated with the gulf oil spill.

But the most questionable part of the whole exercise was that the woman chosen by the programme to react to the news – and introduced on air as only a “San Francisco based oil industry analyst” was Antonia Juhasz, who in fact is a hellcat hell-bent on destroying the oil industry. That’s not difficult to prove, because Exhibit A is her book called The Tyranny of Oil: the World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do To Stop It. With such neutral credentials, Mr Shaw asked the said Ms Juhasz several times what she thought of Mr Hayward’s return to frontline oil exploration. It doesn’t take much imgination to work out what was expected of her, and she duly delivered; essentially it boiled down to that Mr Hayward was a nasty, vicious crook who should not be allowed near an oil well and must be held to account for the “catastrophe” and “disaster” of the gulf oil spill. Mr Shaw uttered not one peep of disagreement.

Of course, the BBC and Mr Shaw got exactly what they wanted. But a very serious point of journalistic conduct is raised here, in that without a shadow of a doubt, the deliberate omission of Ms Juhasz’s highly partisan standpoint was blatantly dishonest, even by the BBC’s gutter standards.

What did we do to deserve the Cameron government? Autonomous Mind explains the supine sell-out over the EU here. And now the so-called culture minister tells us that the BBC is the “best broadcaster in the world” in response to some genuinely probing questions from a backbencher who is at least partly aware. On which planet does Ed Vaizey live? He seemed reassured, too, that Lord Patten is to hold “impartiality” seminars. With his fat EU pension and his rabid views on climate change, that’s a bit like Ribbentrop promising to get Hitler to educate the Reich on the pros and cons of the Jewish question. I await the results of the latest phase of indoctrination with bated breath. Or perhaps not.

Before :

Correspondence from Frank Fisher :

{Feedback Type:} I would like to… Make a complaint

{Summary:} You have published a Polly Toynbee opinion piece in your News section – it is not factual, it is opinion

{Complaint:} Separate news from opinion, make clear that the views expressed in the article are opinions, suggest that other views regarding ‘equality’ exist, for example cite the debunking fo the Spirit Level arguments in “The Spirit Level Delusion”.

I shouldn’t have to tell you this. Putting a byline on a piece doesn’t make it clear to people that it’s stepping outside your usual zone. It sits *within* your usual page and menu structure and appears for all the world to be a factual article, rather than the routine Pollyanna ravings of the country’s leading champagne socialist.

Remedy it please.

Reply :

Subject: RE: Complaint Reply Required

Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2011 11:56:13 +0100

From: newsonline.complaints@bbc.co.uk

To: frank@frankfisher.org

Dear Mr. Fisher,

The piece was not clearly-enough labelled as a personal viewpoint. It has now been changed. We will also be running pieces in the near future from commentators from different parts of the political spectrum.

Regards,

BBC News website

After :

“We will also be running pieces in the near future from commentators from different parts of the political spectrum.”

Hmm. Notice “different”, not “all”. I guess that means Iain Dale and maybe Michael Gove for the far-right view, plus half a dozen Greens.

Listening to the trailers for their 9/11 coverage its like deja vu all over again – they’ve learned nothing and forgotten nothing. While I don’t think we’ll get quite so much “they had it coming” this time round, we’re already getting the “why didn’t Bush sit down and negotiate” splashed all over the news. Given that Bin Laden’s demands included the restoration of the Caliphate and the return of Al-Andalus i.e. Spain, Bush might have had a few problems doing a deal.

I can’t imagine what Michael “Private Peaceful” Morpurgo’s view (one of the 5 literary types writing their “9/11 letters“) of the War on Terror will be, can you?

The BBC’s a bit like one of those small sects that occasionally announce the end of the world or the imminent socialist revolution – you almost have to admire the dogged disconnection from reality which, for example, gave Ms Toynbee, former BBC social affairs correspondent and one of the chief architects of the decline in social mobility over the last 40 years, a R4 programme last week bemoaning the decline in social mobility. But we’re not forced to pay for the small sects.

The so-called ‘Palmer report’ has finally been published.

Publication was held back for various reasons. The BBC says because of fears that issuing it sooner would jeopardise reconciliation between former allies Turkey and Israel – “which didn’t happen”. It seems, as well, that both Turkey and Israel had contributed to the delay by intervening with various demands and objections. The likelihood of a reconciliation seems somewhat far-fetched.

The conclusions boiled down to: a) Israel’s blockade was legal, but: b) they used excessive force on the Mavi Marmara.

The BBC’s headlines, needless to say, presented these two the other way round. They said the report stated that Israel used excessive force ‘when they boarded a ship taking “supplies” to Gaza.’

They didn’t say what the supplies were, perhaps because there weren’t any.

The next time round they modified the wording, along with, of all people, Barbara Plett’s more accurate terminology, that the flotilla was intended to ‘break the blockade’.

However the headline has currently reverted to “aid”. They’re saying the flotilla was taking aid! Everybody knows that 1) Gaza may need various kinds of help, but taking ‘aid’ isn’t one of them, and 2) the Mavi Marmara was taking a mob of activists and useful idiots on a publicity stunt devised simply to demonstrate their Israel-hating politics.

Israel takes issue with the “excessive and unreasonable” part of the report. Before saying ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they” it’s worth asking what else they could have done under the circumstances.

Turkey, of course, also takes issue. With everything else in the report.

That raises questions about the usefulness of commissioning these reports in the first place.

So, talking of Israel-hating politics, that brings us to the next headline, the disruption of the Israel Philharmonic orchestra’s performance at the Albert Hall. The triumph of the so-called pro Palestinian activists was that radio 3 had abandoned the live broadcast. Only they could believe that doing so was any help to the poor Palestinians.

The BBC initially reported that the performance was disrupted by pro Palestinian protesters shouting and booing the orchestra. So excited was the BBC scriptwriter that he/she forgot to notice that the booing came from the audience and was directed at the protesters. They’ve been featuring an interview with Deborah Fink, without mentioning the unpredictable, volatile outbursts which show her to be demonstrably unhinged. Many of us will be familiar with Deborah Fink’s other-worldly performance on a similar occasion, courtesy of Youtube.

The BBC is reflecting, creating, reflecting, creating the public’s hostility to Israel in a downward spiral, whose momentum seems unstoppable.