Moore on Marr

Charles Moore here expertly casts his eye over Andrew Marr’s BBC series The Making of Modern Britain. It pretty much sums up almost all that is wrong with the BBC today. In a nutshell, Marr ludicrously condemns anything to do with the political right and praises unreservedly the forces of “progress” – especially the trade unions. It’s goodies versus baddies and we know who the villains are in Marr’s universe.

MORE NUTT

Briefly, for those who believe Professor Nutt is a genuine scientist who was martyred for uttering objective truths about drug use, I recommend this article by Melanie Phillips. Hat tip to Marky.

There isn’t the space on this blog to analyse why he so richly deserved the sack, but from what I’ve seen so far of the BBC’s continued coverage this morning , you won’t see it there. And for the record, though I am not a scientist, I do sit on a body which contains many experts on drugs (working in both academic fields and rehabilitation) who have markedly different views from Professor Nutt and his fellow government cronies. What they have been saying has been a huge matter of concern to my committee for years. But its views are consistently ignored by the BBC.

NUTT OUT (PART2)

The BBC is rousing itself today into a highly-predictable frenzy of indignation over the aftermath of Professor David Nutt’s justified sacking as head of the government drugs advisory committee.

As a Biased BBC reader has pointed out, the pro-cocaine culture at the BBC is both illegal and has demonstrable victims. Now the BBC journalists are whipping this story up as if it were entirely a matter of academic freedom, when in reality, Professor Nutt and his associates are wet liberals who are as wrong in their analysis of drug-taking and its impact as our chums at the Met Office are about so-called “climate change”.

The real scandal here is that for years, the corrupt government of Blair and Brown has stacked so-called advisory committees with their own cronies and poodles. When their pigeons come home to roost, they don’t like it. Chances of the BBC investigating that? Zero.

Blowing the Whistle

Did anyone else read Nick Cohen’s disturbing piece about whistleblower Derek Pasquill. He is bringing a case of unfair dismissal (hopeless) against the FCO.

It isn’t true to say that the BBC hasn’t reported this subject, they have. But they focus on the ethics of whistleblowing itself rather than what was ‘blown.’
Things more scandalous than several duck houses and home-flippings put together.

Putting aside the fact that many people are skeptical about whether there can be truly moderate Muslims, if there really are, it would undoubtedly be a good thing. After all, Muslims have fitted into U.S. society without all the difficulties we have here.

Our government recognises the necessity of befriending the Muslims it deliberately brought here. But rather than encouraging and supporting moderates they have chosen to appease and support the likes of the extreme MCB.

It seems Jack “I-come-from-immigrants” Straw was complicit in all this. Sitting there on the QT panel telling us all about that, he looked half deflated; likely to shrivel up altogether at any moment.

Hazel Blears was beginning to get it. She made a stand, then she was sacrificed in the expenses row.

Instead of debating the morality of whistleblowing, shouldn’t the BBC be debating the morality of appeasing, funding and fêting extreme Islamists?

Party Posturing (Part 2)

Credit where credit is due. Following Today’s attempted ambush of William Hague yesterday over the alleged Nazi sympathies of Michael Kaminski, the leader of Poland’s Law and Justice Party who are the Conservative party’s new European allies, the programme invited on this morning Michael Shudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi, to clarify whether or not – as David Miliband alleged yesterday – he believed Mr Kaminski was anti-semitic. Very cooly and precisely, Mr Shudrich said that, although Mr Kaminski had in his youth belonged to a neo-Nazi party, he had long since moved on and was now strongly pro-Isreal and “anti anti-semitic”in his beliefs. Not only that, again despite what Mr Miliband disgracefully alleged, the Law and Justice Party was not right-extremist (ie racist), but a respectable centre-right party.

So the programme definitely went out of its way – by tracking Mr Shudrich down to be interviewed – to demonstrate that David Miliband’s claims were preposterous.

However, and there is always a big ‘however’ when the BBC finds something that supports a view to the right of centre, Nick Robinson came in on the act at the end to say that – despite the clarification over Poland -problems still were in store over the new Conservative grouping in the European Parliament, because there were big (unspecified) questions about the Latvians, another member of the new group. The menacing innuendo in his claims was so strong that he virtually nullified all that had been said by the chief rabbi.

Evening Standard on the BBC, pt 2

“At heart, the BBC is a nine-to-five, public sector type of place, run by people who have never really worked anywhere else.”…

Those at the top spend their whole time talking to each other, so they are genuinely surprised by outside criticism…

Like most highly bureaucratic organisations which feel under threat, the BBC’s core instinct is to expand as a matter of self-preservation.
It cannot see a piece of new or old media territory without seeking to dominate it.

From part two of Stephen Robinson’s look at the BBC in the Evening Standard. (Part one linked here.)

Robinson makes one claim which may raise some eyebrows:

…few could now argue that politicians of the Left are given an easier ride in interviews than those of the Right: Andrew Marr’s recent grillings of Gordon Brown and David Cameron were equally tough.

Analysis of both interviews by Beeb Bias Craig suggests that Marr actually interrupted Cameron twice as often he did Brown (more than two interruptions per minute versus one per minute).

"Institutional Terror"

Lengthy article by Stephen Robinson in the Evening Standard: Fear and loathing inside the BBC. Some snippets:

Bennett is Head of Vision, which is another way of saying she oversees the other executives who oversee television and the BBC’s internet output, for which she is rewarded with a salary package of £536,000.
She is one of the 47 BBC executives who is paid more than the £197,000 earned a year by the British Prime Minister.
“She was standing surrounded by a bunch of her acolytes as she held forth. They weren’t quite bowing in her presence but they were certainly fawning over her. It was ridiculous. And I thought, what does she actually do for the BBC? What is the point of her?”…

There is an institutional terror of talking publicly about the fears that have dominated the conscious hours of everyone who works there…

“Where on earth are these dozens of executives on more that £200,000 supposed to be going?,” asks one BBC reporter. “They are literally unemployable outside the BBC.”…

Vine and Jeremy Paxman are said by BBC colleagues to be locked into an ultra-competitive contest about their respective salaries…

One veteran BBC presenter, a household name who does not want to be identified, says the central problem with the corporation now is its size. “We have become so big, so dominant, that there’s nothing institutional left for us to aim at,” he says…

One of the oddest things about talking to BBC people is that they will spend half an hour sounding off about the horrors of the institution, of its bureaucratic culture, of the shameful way its senior executives reward themselves ludicrous amounts of public money.
And then those journalists will say: “I hope you’re not writing a Right-wing newspaper attack on the BBC.”…

An on-air reporter says it is the second-rate programme-making staff who get shunted up the management ladder.
“It’s insane,” he says. “We have one of the largest media organisations in the world run by jobbing journalists who couldn’t hack it.
“In any private organisation they would eventually be fired, but in the BBC they just keep on climbing up the ladder.”…

“The warning here is Gorbachev. Once you start trying to reform an organisation such as the BBC, it collapses, just like the old Soviet Union,” says one well-known presenter. “Who, as director-general, is going to say, let’s make this place smaller, let’s reduce all the salaries, including mine?”

“just like the old Soviet Union”. Heh.

They’re only Republicans…

This comment was left on the blog of Radio 4’s PM programme (click image for larger version):

I responded in kind:

As I expected my message was removed very quickly (within ten minutes):

The comment from “alanparker” hoping for the death of “racist Republicans” Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin is still there.

Update. Somebody at the Beeb must be reading this blog – the “alanparker” comment has now been removed. Funny how it didn’t occur to the moderators to remove it at the same time as they took mine down.

Log Lines

The BBC and the Times have today both covered the news that old ships logs are being transcribed as a resource for climatologists. No prizes for guessing which media outlet thought the following could be of interest to its readers, and which chose to ignore it:

However, some of the logs suggest that there has been little or no change in sea temperatures elsewhere in the Arctic. Climate change sceptics are likely to seize on these records as evidence that man-made greenhouse gases are having less impact than many scientists have claimed.

Rush Schools Katty

Chicago’s first round exit from the 2016 Olympic voting on Friday was greeted with a certain amount of glee by Rush Limbaugh. Echoing the song of praise to Obama made famous by a group of New Jersey school kids, Limbaugh told his radio audience:

Our president, “Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm, mmm, mmm. Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm, mmm, mmm,” had been running around the world for nine months telling everybody how much our country sucks. He’s been running around the world apologizing for the United States of America. Why would anybody award the Olympics to such a crappy place as the United States?

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe yesterday the BBC’s Katty Kay, clearly missing the reference, was not impressed:

After, you know, listening to that Rush Limbaugh clip again and I don’t think I want to hear it, really, for a fourth or fifth time, is that it’s not Barack Obama, it’s Barack Hussein Obama, Barack Hussein Obama. There’s something insidious going on there, too, in the repetition of his middle name.

Limbaugh responded on his show yesterday:

RUSH: Just unbelievable. This is a member in good standing of the State-Controlled Media and she thinks I’m out there, “Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm.” She does not realize that a bunch of school kids in New Jersey and across the country are being forced to learn songs and poems in praise of the dear leader such as…

SCHOOLKIDS: He said that all must lend a hand to make this country strong again. Mmm, mmm, mmm, Barack Hussein Obama. He said we must be fair today, equal work means equal pay. Mmm, mmm, mmm, Barack Hussein Obama. He said we all must take a stand, to make sure everyone gets a chance. Mmm, mmm, mmm, Barack Hussein Obama.

RUSH: All right, that’s enough, that’s enough. Now, I must acknowledge that Katty Kay certainly does not watch Fox News, which is the only place the video aired. We aired the audio here, but she’s clueless. She has no idea of the story, zip, zero, nada. Katty Kay, BBC America, has no idea that schoolchildren across America are being propagandized and indoctrinated to support personally the dear leader, Barack Hussein Obama. So when I mock this and have fun with it, she thinks I am being derisive of insidious, insidious, insidious, I don’t want to hear Limbaugh again, I heard it four or five times, I don’t want to hear it again. Hey, Katty, try this.

SCHOOLKIDS PARODY: Rush Hudson Limbaugh. Mmm, mmm, mmm. Rush Hudson Limbaugh. Mmm, mmm, mmm. (Battle Hymn of the Republic tune) My ears have heard Rush Limbaugh on my parents’ radio. He tells me that the left is wrong and stuff I need to know. We turn it off when he is done ’cause there is no other show. Rush, keep broadcasting on. Glory, glory hallelujah. Glory, Clinton couldn’t fool ya. Barack Obama can’t ignore ya. Rush, keep broadcasting on. In 1951 he was born in Missouri. Now he’s on the radio conducting EIB. On the air to set us free from sea to shining sea, he keeps broadcasting on. Glory, glory hallelujah. Glory, Clinton couldn’t fool ya. Barack Obama can’t ignore ya. Rush, keep broadcasting on. Rush keep broadcasting on!

Marvellous.

At least Kay was wearing modest attire for her appearance on Morning Joe. She nearly got them out for the lads on the Chris Matthews Show the previous morning:

Update: Video of Limbaugh’s response to Kay, including the Rush Hudson Limbaugh song.

(A belated h/t to B-BBC reader Jack Bauer who was way ahead of us on this)