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 be moderated.
, the third biggest story in the world for UK tellytaxpayers, according to BBC Views Online, was Channel 4 accused of ‘distortion’.
The third most important story in the world on 08AUG2007?
The story first appeared, according to Newssniffer, at 10.50am, with the headline No charges over mosque programme, becoming Channel 4 accused of ‘distortion and C4 ‘distorted’ mosque programme as it went through the BBC Views Online spin cycle, making it to the third most important story position at lunchtime, remaining on the Views Online front page in one form or another until after 7am the next morning.
What is strange is the enthusiasm and high priority BBC Views Online gave this story – they didn’t, for instance, report on the high-profile Undercover Mosque programme at all when it was first broadcast – too busy, not enough space, not important enough: all the usual BBC flannel for avoiding covering news that Beeboids don’t want to report.
And yet, when a politically correct bunch of West Midlands plods, abetted by the Can’t Prosecute Service, stick their oar in, without, it should be noted, any complaints from the public, BBC Views Online rushed to tell the world all about it with great fanfare and import, complete with lengthy quotes of shock, innocence and hurt feelings from those who were condemned out of their own mouths on the undercover film.
In the meantime, Private Eye (see Biased BBC here) and BBC Newsnight have amply demonstrated just what a crock of the proverbial the criticism of Undercover Mosque was.
Yesterday, BBC Views Online did a reasonable job of reporting Mosque programme claims rejected, but here’s another strange thing, this news wasn’t important enough to merit the BBC Views Online front page treatment. No, it was reported for a while on the Entertainment page, way down at the bottom, in the More from Entertainment, TV and Radio section – not exactly setting the record straight after Views Online’s silence of January and the front page fanfare of August!
Kevin Sutcliffe, Channel 4’s deputy head of news and current affairs said that the actions of West Midlands Police:
gave legitimacy to people preaching a message of hate to British citizens… and damaged the reputations of those involved in producing and broadcasting the programme
Given BBC Views Online’s slanted coverage of the Undercover Mosque story from the beginning I suspect that WMP aren’t alone in giving “legitimacy to people preaching a message of hate to British citizens”.
P.S.: An anonymous wag drew attention yesterday to what one Beeboid, a certain ‘John Reith’, said back in August:
Given the ringing endorsement ‘Undercover Mosques’ received on this blog and how many contributors chided the BBC for not having made the programme themselves, I’d be interested to know what you’ve got to say now that it has emerged that parts of the film are said by the authorities to be about as reliable as an RDF showreel.
Presumably this isn’t one of those cases then where those “involved in the real business of broadcast journalism (making TV and radio) get a bit narked“ about being judged on the basis of “small but significant shortcomings of the News Website“ then!
Addendum: David Henshaw, executive producer of Undercover Mosque asks Why did police want to censor me?:
Context? No one from the West Midlands Police, the CPS or Green Lane Mosque has yet given us the correct context for the notion that women are born deficient, that homosexuals should be thrown off a mountain or that young girls who refuse to wear the hijab should be hit.
So what was the police’s intervention about? Why did the police and the CPS feel entitled to act as television critics and, in effect, as potential censors of what we could watch? Clues to the motive, I think, lie in the slightly sinister phrase “community cohesion”.
Anil Patani, the Assistant Chief Constable who reported the programme to Ofcom, is in charge of “cohesion” in the West Midlands force. He said he was worried that those featured in the programme “had been misrepresented”.
His chief was worried that our alleged “distorted editing” would create an unfair perception of sections of the Muslim community in the West Midlands. Feelings of public reassurance and safety would be undermined. (The feelings of gays and women, apparently, were not so high on the agenda.)
Thank you to Biased BBC reader Lurker in a Burqua for the link.
, James Woudhuysen, Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University, asks What’s Auntie for, exactly?
Getting into his stride on the second page, the Prof. writes:
Recently:
- Science ran a piece on how changes to the stratosphere will affect surface climate. It concluded [PDF] that predicting the dynamics was “a substantial task”, and one not yet undertaken by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
- Nature had an essay on the dynamics of ocean mixing, which in the long term could offset slowing of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation brought about by more rain and more melting at the North Pole. It argued that “much remains to be discovered” [PDF – subscription required].
- The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published on the “irreducible” imprecision of computer models of atmosphere and oceans.
Each of these uncertainties has a texture as chocolatey as the BBC Trust’s beloved Wagon Wheel. Yet the BBC insists on the old dry Seesaw approach. It repeatedly puts reporters in front of fast-dripping glaciers or spreading deserts and gets them to express their personal shock, awe, loss, and disgust. Then, back in the studio, a gnarled “sceptic” may occasionally be wheeled on to show that the Beeb still gives a voice to Creatures from Another Planet.
What we need from the BBC is leadership, and – as far as is possible – dispassionate enquiry, objective facts, and dispassionate presentation of those facts. Instead, we get dumbed-down moral absolutes, far-out footage, and a sprinkling of “balance”. Nobody at the BBC says this is the strategy; but BBC News, in particular, applies it with the utmost vigour.
Do read the rest, and the comments too. As Biased BBC reader 1327, who spotted the Reg article says, it is “interesting (and heartening) that the bread and butter topics of this blog now seem to becoming mainstream”. Beeboids take note.
page trumpets Does Islam have a sense of humour? – a happy story, illustrated with a glossy library picture of burka clad girls (with one peeking out to smile at the camera), where:
Keen comedy fan Tosifa Mustafa nails a widely-held stereotype, before dismissing it in the same breath. It’s “just not the case,” she says.
Protests over cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad combined with images of Muslims criticising frivolous aspects of Western culture have left the impression for some that Islam and comedy are incompatible.
And as with most stereotypes, there is a kernel of truth. In some Islamic societies entertainment – music, film and comedy – are forbidden.
Gotta love the understatement and juxtaposition of the last two paragraphs. “Protests over cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad” is just a bit milder than the reality, as BBC Views Online well knows. Murderous threats on the streets of London, murder, death threats, people in hiding, uncontained anger and aggression and widespread destruction of property just about covers it – just a bit more than the “kernel of truth” our fearless Views Online Beeboids think they can get away with…
Update: Biased BBC reader Pounce points out that the BBC have somehow managed to miss out some relevant background to their cheery report on the muslim comedians of the Allah Made Me Funny show: University ban on Muslim comedy attacked:
MUSLIM comedians have been banned from performing at a Scottish university in a move described as “ridiculous and undemocratic”.
Glasgow Caledonian University backed out of hosting Allah Made Me Funny: The Official Muslim Comedy Tour this month after complaints from its Muslim students’ association…
A spokeswoman for Glasgow Caledonian University said: “The university’s responsibility is to listen to and respect the views of all students on campus.
“When the Muslim Students’ Association expressed reservations about the show, it was decided the booking would not go ahead.”
Or not, as the case may be.
For Griff Rhys Jones, it was a high point of his television career. He had scaled the tallest mountain in Britain, the cameras rolling all the while, and last night he learnt that he had won a coveted Scottish Bafta award for the resultant series, Mountain.
But even as the series was receiving the plaudits of the critics, doubts were beginning to surface in the climbing world. Mountain had won the category of Best Factual Entertainment Programme — but one mountaineering expert commented last night: “Entertainment, certainly — but factual?”
Did Rhys Jones actually get to the top of Ben Nevis? Or was this another of the BBC’s minor deceptions, along with all the other controversies such as fake phone-ins, the naming of the Blue Peter cat and the trailer that wrongly claimed to show the Queen storming out of a photo shoot?
The BBC does seem to be making a habit of this sort of thing.
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 be moderated.
:
Sky and ITN ran clips of the footage without the audio, the BBC’s footage contains the sound of children crying, even though the babies have respirators in their mouths.
A spokeswoman for the Oxford hospital said: “There was no audio on our clip.”
“The BBC must have put it over.”
“I thought they weren’t supposed to do things like that.”
A BBC spokesman said the corporation should have left the footage alone.
He said: “We received the film without sound and on reflection we should have kept it that way.”
The sound of babies crying has now been removed from the story for its viewing on the Six O’Clock News.
This latest demonstration of the BBC’s attachment to manufacturing ‘the truth’, fake but accurate style, was briefly mentioned at the end of last night’s Newsnight, though wasn’t newsworthy enough to rate a mention, nor even an apology on the BBC’s Six or Ten O’Clock news broadcasts. Strange that. Would anyone care to bet on the likelihood of an apology on today’s One O’Clock news broadcast? Anyone?
Thank you to Biased BBC reader Bernard W. for the link.
, has submitted comments to the BBC in response to their current, doubtless passing, interest of sorts, in the arguments against reducing Western Civilization to subsistence farming as a means to avoid the fiery fate predicted by legions of global warming doom mongers.
Just in case his comments, for some predictable reason, don’t make it past the BBC’s censors, he’s posted them on his blog, BBC Black Propaganda #1 and BBC Black Propaganda #2 – interesting rebuttals worth a read.
Update (4pm): Coming up on 24 hours ago I submitted a comment in response to Steve Herrman, Editor of the BBC News website, and his post on the BBC Editors Blog, Climate Sceptics, yesterday. Lots of comments have appeared since then, but for some strange reason, mine, a perfectly reasonable, germane and on-topic comment, hasn’t. This is what I said:
Jeremy Paxman summed up the BBC approach quite succinctly:
“People who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that [global warming] is the consequence of our own behaviour. I assume that this is why the BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago”,
Jeremy Paxman, Media Guardian, January 31st, 2007.
Scary stuff indeed! Perhaps Mr. Herrman or one of his minions would care to explain why this comment isn’t fit for publication on the BBC Editors Blog.
, the BBC is getting a reputation of its own for prevaricating over Freedom of Information requests to the BBC by and on behalf of the tellytaxpaying public.
Not content with its infamy (and sheer hypocrisy) for spending hundreds of thousands of tellytaxpayer pounds on legal action to withhold the Balen Report from the scrutiny of the public who paid for it, the BBC’s now doing its utmost to cover up whether or not its presenters are being paid for their work on Children in Need, the BBC’s annual charity telethon.
The Belfast Telegraph reports, Do they get paid for Pudsey?, that:
The corporation was forced to disclose within the past year that Sir Terry Wogan received an “honorarium” for anchoring the network-wide sections of the annual charity extravanganza.
But it has turned down a similar Freedom of Information (FoI) request from this newspaper relating to presenters on the Northern Ireland wing of the show.
Read the rest of the article for more details on the BBC’s machinations. Hat tip to Tony Sharp for posting Accountability BBC style on his blog, The Waendal Journal.
announces Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (aka ‘The Yazzmonster’):
“It is personal guys. Several BBC broadcasters tell me they are not interested in ‘Guardian and Independent’ points of view. We are passé, irrelevant, annoying, elitist, too middle class and soft. Fashion moves on, the culture is now noisy and intolerant and the Beeb follows, is too feeble to stand up to ugly populism.
Many of us have-beens are no longer invited on to the robust debates on programmes where intelligent political debate should take place. Belligerence is sought- bring on the alpha right wingers like William Shawcross and bombastic Jeff Randall. Soon a Jeremy Clarkson mascot will replace Pudsy. Have a box of pins ready.
It is serious too guys – it will shape the nation over the next ten years. They diss the only consistently left of centre papers in the country – and so ditch the European Union, internationalism, multilateralism, fair immigration policies, equality, regulation, redistribution, legitimate (as opposed to illegal) wars”.
So what do we think? Does Yazza, as always, have her finger on the pulse? Is it time to close down the blog? Or should we hand it over to the leftoids so that they can take over? It’s a difficult one.
