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Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. This is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may also be moderated. Any suggestions for stories that you might like covered would be appreciated! It’s your space, use it wisely.

The comments at Guido have picked up well on the bias in Paul Mason’s “analysis” of the economic crisis the UK faces, compounded in his blog here. It’s headlined “What the worst downturn in 60 years really looked like”, and you’ll not be surprised that he’s referring to the Thatcher recession in the early 80s. As one Guido fan notes, in his piece on Newsnight, he managed to analyse previous economic downturns by going from Barber (Tory) to Howe (Tory) but skipping Callaghan (Labour) when Britain had to get an emergency bailout from the IMF.

The real bias, though, is in the comparison of data from 2007 and 2008 to 1983. In 1983 the recession was in full swing, but now, as Darling pointed out, we’re facing the worst crisis for 60 years – much of the real pain is yet to come.

But, then, what do you expect from a supporter of the Trotskyist group Workers Power?

Labels: save gordon

Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. This is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may also be moderated. Any suggestions for stories that you might like covered would be appreciated! It’s your space, use it wisely.

Obviously the Beeb isn’t always the fastest with breaking news, but I really thought they might have had the edge with this story. Digby Jones, the trade minister in Brown’s Government of all talents, is to quit – as he told, er, the BBC. (What’s the expression about rodents and ships again?)

Twelve hours later, though, and still no sign of this on the BBC website’s politics page – or anywhere else for that matter. Oh well, perhaps it’s just not a very interestingstory.

Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. This is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may also be moderated. Any suggestions for stories that you might like covered would be appreciated! It’s your space, use it wisely.

The BBC Press Office says of Burn Up, its latest drama, made in conjunction with a Canadian company and featuring attractive Canadian locations*, that it is “a highly authored piece wholly of this unique moment in time.”

Don’t ask me.

Anyway, AA Gill of the Times says:

This gem of the scriptwriter’s craft was brought to us courtesy of Burn Up (Wednesday/Friday, BBC2), the hugely expensive and very Canadian and cavernously vacuous thriller about Kyoto and global warming that starred Adam from Spooks and Josh from The West Wing. Watching it was a bit like being manacled to the table at a Notting Hill dinner party, or being lectured by a vegan vitamin salesman.

The finger-wagging about global warming was relentless and unabating, all couched in the comfy velour of the edge-of-history and watershed gibberish. The goodies were witty, brilliant, sensitive, imaginative, attractive, sexy and great dancers – rather, I suspect, like the scriptwriters. The baddies were, well,they were all American. This was film-making from the Soviet school of political subtlety, a childishly black-and-white premise, delivered with a patronising blog of a script, which overwhelmed the plot, pace, anything resembling a character and, finally, the audience’s sympathy.

And Kevin O’Sullivan of the Mirror says:

The end of the world is nigh. Americans are baddies . The oil business is terribly awful. Invest in windmills… before it’s TOO LATE.

Preaching the kind of dreary ecoorthodoxy that soppy actors just love, BBC2’s lukewarm Burn Up was stupefying.

I was a little worried that the BBC might forget to insert the evil Christians into the first episode as made de rigeur by the first episodes of Spooks and Bonekickers. But Mike McNally was able to reassure me:

Battling Holly for Tom’s soul is oil lobbyist Mack, played by The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford. Mack is essentially JR Ewing without the good points, and in case the viewer should be in any doubt as to the extent of his moral bankruptcy, in one of Burn Up’s many gratuitously America-bashing scenes Mack is shown watching a faith healer at work on cable TV, and exclaiming, with tears in his eyes, “Praise the Lord!” It’s not bad enough that he’s a shill for the oil industry — he’s a Bible-bashing shill for the oil industry.

*I want to be positive where I can.

Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. This is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may also be moderated. Any suggestions for stories that you might like covered would be appreciated! It’s your space, use it wisely.

Sam Leith in the Telegraph responds to the arguments in favour of the TV licence put forward in a recent column by the BBC Director-General, Mark Thompson. Sam Leith writes:

On the one hand, we are told that the BBC deserves its funding because it is hugely popular; on the other, we are told that its programming would wither on the vine were its popularity to be tested in the marketplace. On the one hand, we are told that it has a “unique link” with its adoring viewers; on the other, we are assured that so strong and affectionate is that link that it needs to be maintained by the full majesty of the criminal law.

Well said, but I did not agree with the following:

Above all, I’m thinking about news reporting. [As a thing that the state-funded broadcaster ought to be doing – NS] This is something that is very, very expensive to do well – and it is something the BBC, however bedevilled by accusations of bias, at present does do excellently. The balkanisation of the commercial media means fewer and fewer organisations are able to invest in original reporting or proper verification: cheap, quick and sexy increasingly trumps fair, honest and scrupulous. A properly independent BBC, funded by all of us, could be exempt from that trend.

I think that the balkanisation of the commercial media is not a fact of nature, but partly a result of “crowding out” by the BBC. The payoff that other organisations might get from putting their money into original reporting is much reduced if they must compete with a broadcaster that can put your money into original reporting.

UPDATE: Re-reading the Director-General’s article, I was struck by this passage describing what the world would be like without the BBC:

The Albert Hall in August would be in darkness – there would be no BBC Proms, broadcast across television and radio. The Young Musician of the Year would remain undiscovered. Pop fans would be denied the Radio 1 Big Weekend, and Jools Holland on BBC 2. Musicians in the BBC orchestras could be busking on the street.

In his commendable desire to avoid sensationalism the D-G has put his case far too modestly. What would actually happen should the BBC be abolished is that, deprived of their proper object, the eyeballs of every single person who had ever watched a BBC programme would instantly explode.

The trouble with BBC bias lies not in finding it, but rather in avoiding it. Take the Today programme – please. I listened to it this morning for just twenty minutes from 7.05 t0 7.25 and was astounded by the series of propagandist items masquerading as news.

First up we had Islam, a BBC favourite. This time round we were treated to someone from the Muslim Council of Britain explaining how very important it was for government to fund a new board of Muslim thinkers, whilst not interfering with what they preach them in any way. But we can relax since these would be “moderate” Islamic preachers. Sure. No tough questions were asked of the MCB, as ever.

Next up we had the Government’s panic-driven decision to abandon its’ own already completely discredited fiscal rules served up to us as a necessary “relaxation” as we approach a new economic cycle. Gordon will have appreciated that one.

This was followed by an attack on the US exam marking company EDS. The BBC has been to the fore in the onslaught against this Aamerican organisation and its apparent failure to deliver results in a timely and accurate manner. At no point does the BBC see fit to examine the role of those in government who awarded the contract to EDS, how could it when it was so busy demonising the US outfit?

Next up, Nelson Mandela’s birthday. Yes, I thought we had got that one out of the way the other week when Saint Nelson moved amongst us but today is his official birthday and the BBC were keen to mark it. After this twenty minutes, I turned off.

Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. This is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may also be moderated. Any suggestions for stories that you might like covered would be appreciated! It’s your space, use it wisely.