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, posts this update:

January 24th, 2007:

Hi All,

Spring time has hit Baghdad and the weather is fine.

Shit day yesterday: A girl I knew pretty well from the company we work for here was assasinated. She was Shia and lived with her mother in a real shitty Sunni area. The world is a sadder place without her. You can bet she was raped, pretty girl, and we heard that the militia were not even letting people get down that street to pick up the bodies. Scumbags were probably boobie trapping the bodies. (Sorry to be so morbid, but I did promise to tell it how it is).

Today was an angry day in town – predictably – Mr Bush gave his speech and the insurgency gave their answer – I heard a very good quote the other day – 90% of al-Qaeda’s war is fought in the media (and the BBC duly oblige!).

I come in off the streets and watch the crap being spewed about this place by BBC propagandistas and their panel of “experts” in amazement.

Thanks Tim. Keep us posted. (Click here for other updates from Tim).

I haven’t seen or heard any reply from Peter Barron, editor of Newsnight, to the questions I asked him the other day, even though many others have posed similar questions on his blog.

I’ve just posted a reminder for Peter on his blog:

Hello again Peter, I know you’re a busy chap, but from the questions and comments here it is plain that a lot of people are interested in answers to the questions that I posed above. They’re perfectly reasonable and straightforward questions – can you spare me, the ~1,600 daily readers of Biased BBC and the rest of the tellytaxpaying public a minute to give us some replies please? Thank you, Andrew (Biased BBC).

To save scrolling down, here’s my original comment:

Hello Peter. You say: “I don’t rule out the possibility that it was simply a misjudgement”, which rather implies that it wasn’t you who made that judgement. Was someone else editing Newsnight on Friday? If we accept that the running order was ‘simply a misjudgement’, it still doesn’t explain why Michael Crick et al made so much out of the ‘cripple’ email non-story (a story based on a private email sent four months ago from a private individual (not even a councillor) referring to someone else as a cripple – a non-story even without the Ruth Turner headlines). Also, can you explain how this email came to be leaked? It was a private email between two people, so unless either of them leaked it themselves (unlikely), how did it come to be leaked to the BBC? Left-wing council employees perhaps? If it was leaked in this way, do you really think that ‘public interest’ would justify such criminality? Looking forward to hearing from you further, Andrew (Biased BBC).

Perhaps one or other of the Beeboids that follow Biased BBC will be kind enough to give Peter a nudge for us. Thank you!

, according to Media Guardian’s Leigh Holmwood. Not surprisingly, just like this chap (Ned that is, not Justin), the Newsnight turkeys aren’t keen on the approach of Christmas:

All of the flagship BBC2 programme’s 15 correspondents, including political editor Martha Kearney and veteran journalist Michael Crick, wrote to Mr Barron last week as part of the campaign against the compulsory cuts.

The journalists, who are all faced with selection for compulsory redundancy, told Mr Barron they would not fill in draft CVs or meet with him as part of the process.

“We are writing to express our deep concern about your decision to press ahead with the compulsory redundancy process on Newsnight,” the letter said.

“We will not cooperate with it. We will not be filling out the draft CVs. Nor will any correspondent be meeting you or your team individually as part of the selection process.

Poor Mr. Barron. Perhaps a good place to start would be with whoever swallowed (or went along with) the NuLab spinners and their exclusive (oh yes!) ‘cripple’ email non-story. The Newsnight staffers whinge:

“We note that some £546,000 in bonuses was paid to senior management this year. In the context of this, losing two high-profile reporters to save a much smaller sum, with all the resultant stress, bad publicity and loss of goodwill seems to reflect perverse priorities within the BBC.

I have some sympathy with that argument, but a much better target for huge cost savings at the BBC is the £18m being paid to the tiresome Jonathan Woss over the next three years. It’s an obscene amount of money, especially for someone who does nothing that special. The BBC argue that Woss is at the ‘top of his game’ (presumably that game is exploiting the poor bloody tellytaxpayers) and that they need to be competitive (there’s a novel concept for the BBC).

Here’s a suggestion, pay Woss £1m per year – it’s still money that most people wouldn’t even dream of earning, and a lot more than he’s worth, and it’d save the BBC £15m over the next three years. Marvellous, and I won’t even charge you a consultancy fee for my advice.

“Ah, but” you say! Well, if Jonathan doesn’t think a million a year is worth it for all of his services to the BBC, simply start a new Saturday night reality show, here’s a name to conjure with, “How do you solve a pwoblem like Mawia?” – I’m sure that out of a population of 60 million people we’d be able to find plenty of new and talented people who’d be thrilled to work for a million a year. Another free idea, and a new Saturday night programme into the bargain!

After that you can do similar programmes to find and nurture new British talent in place of all the hugely expensive moronic has-beens that seem to populate the BBC just now. Even Gordon Brown might smile at the creation of new jobs and the uncovering of new talent.

I’ll concede though that we do need to retain the services of Terry Wogan for the purposes of the Eurovision song contest – a genuine national institution, gently exposing and mocking the dishonesty of sundry Johnny-foreigners as they incestuously vote for one another year after year irrespective of the music. Well worth it!

Turning back to Newsnight:

Presenters such as Jeremy Paxman and Kirsty Wark are not affected.

That’s a pity – Kirsty Nark should have been dispensed with long ago – the business with Jack McConnell was so blatant and embarrassing that I’m surprised even she has the brass neck to maintain her pretense of impartiality at Newsnight. She and her husband have done quite well filling their boots at tellytaxpayers expense, so she’d be quite comfortably off even without the Newsnight gig.

Mercifully for you Beeboids:

BBC News had proposed cutting 108 posts. However, the number of compulsory redundancies has been brought down to about 10.

So life’s not as tough at the BBC trough as it might have been, more’s the pity, for those of us keen to see more exposure to reality at BBC News.

, has sent us several updates recently:

January 9th, 2007:

Have been busy since the end of Eid, so little time for blogging.

I will get a decent post in later, so you can all hear the true perspective of what’s happening here in Baghdad. Not just the Beeb’s left wing propaganda.

Oh by the way, there may be a few new bloggers from here soon, as I’ve told all the expats here about this blogsite – BBC 24 is only really put on in this villa so we can all have a really good shout at the TV.

January 17th, 2007:

Very bloody day yesterday, dozens killed at Baghdad University by murdering Al-Qaeda bastards.

There is a girls school close to us here, and daily, well dressed, smiling and giggling school girls with loose headscarfs, smart uniforms and trendy footwear head there clutching their books, chatting like teenage girls anywhere in the world.

We stay well clear of the school area itself, as the same scumbags are targeting this place and sadly it’s only a matter of time before we might be clearing their body parts off our vehicles one morning.

Second point: A mortar round landed in close vicinity to our villas yesterday (not necessarily targetted at us). My friend an ex Brit SF mate, picked up a piece of the shrapnel – the mortar shrapnel was Iranian and still had (new) green paint on it.

Unlike other parts of the world where the BBC is quick to show locals holding what they say are US missile parts in front of the usual wedding that is being held in the local baby milk factory, the Beeb are not rushing to point out that a lot of the ordnance and technology doing all the killing over here is Iranian.

The BBC showing you only what we want to, it’s what we do…

January 19th, 2007:

I’ve been seeing some [cobblers] on the BBC, about how the US military are not arming the Iraqis to fight the insurgency.

Well, I can’t currently speak for other areas of Iraq, but I do drive around Baghdad (covertly) on a daily basis and the Iraqi Police and Army have all AKs and PKMs or Dushkas and are well armoured, Baghdad being where the worst insurgancy activity is taking place.

Also, schrapnel from the mortar that landed near to our villa the other day was Iranian and new (Still had it’s green paint on it – had not been weathered, or old war stock, very new).

Sorry not been on for a while, more soon from your myth busting reporter in Mesopatamia.

Thank you for your updates Tim – interesting and welcome as ever – and more relevant to the real world than the BBC’s reports, stuck in the Green Zone as they usually are.

The idea of you rufty-tufty types shouting at al-Beeb on your telly is most amusing – just like what goes on in my house, but without the guns. Probably just as well, otherwise my telly would have been blasted to kingdom come a long time ago!

Stay safe all of you who are out there, including the Beeboids.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

, reports Owen Gibson in today’s Media Guardian:

Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, used a rare public speech last night to accuse the BBC of “a kind of cultural Marxism” that is harming political debate and failing to represent the views of millions of licence fee payers. He said the BBC’s tendency towards institutionally biased left-leaning views, part of what he dubbed “the subsidariat” of newspapers and broadcasters that do not turn in a profit, was a factor in feeding political apathy.

Delivering the Hugh Cudlipp lecture, Dacre said the BBC was not only expansionist, but guilty of subscribing to a singular world view. “BBC journalism is reflected through a left-wing prism that affects everything – the choice of stories, the way they are angled, the choice of the interviews, the interviewees and, most pertinently, the way those interviewees are treated,” he said.

Dacre said while he approved of some of what the BBC did, he believed it was out of step with large swaths of public opinion.

Couldn’t agree more with that. Do read the rest.

Courtesy of Rottypup and the Grauniad, here’s the full speech. You can also listen to Dacre on Radio 4’s Toady programme this morning.

Hat tip to commenter SiN.

, the BBC’s long-running children’s programme Blue Peter showed graphic footage last Thursday of the Halal slaughter of a goat in Oman, to “show the celebrations that mark the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Adha”.

Biased BBC commenter Chuffer writes:

Astonishing bit on Blue Peter this evening, about 17:05, 18JAN07 – a long feature on the joys and general loveliness of the Religion of Plumbers in Oman, especially for the youngsters. Bless. At the end of Ramadan, a goat is killed. And as two men hold it down, and one slashes its throat, the Blue Peter muppet turns to camera and says “At least it’s done humanely….”

It would have been bad enough to show the humane stunning and killing of animals in a UK abbatoir, let alone the Halal slaughter of an animal having its carotid arteries cut and then being hung up to slowly bleed to death.

Fun for children on today’s multi-culti Blue Peter

Whatever happened to the Blue Peter that we knew and loved when we were children? The worst I remember was the sensitive coverage of those being helped by each year’s Blue Peter Annual Appeal and the occasional vandalism of the blessed Blue Peter Garden – which presumably nowadays wouldn’t be greeted with shock, but rather as an opportunity to explore the needs of frustrated inner-city yobs.

According to The Sun:

BBC bosses were forced to apologise last night after Blue Peter screened footage of a goat being slaughtered for a Muslim sacrifice.

Young viewers of the kids’ favourite — famed for its pet cats and dogs — watched in horror as the animal was held down and its throat slit. The bloody footage then showed the goat hanging dead from a tree.

About 140 shocked viewers phoned the Beeb to complain about the programme, shown on Thursday afternoon. Furious parents accused the BBC of damaging the family-friendly reputation of Blue Peter, whose catchphrase “And Here’s One I Made Earlier” is known to generations.

Michael Alligham, 50, of Herts, who watched with his four-year-old daughter, said: “She sat there goggle-eyed. I tried to make light of it, but she knew. “One man was kneeling on the goat’s head, one holding its leg down, then they slit its throat.”

Blue Peter screened the footage, filmed in the Middle Eastern country of Oman, to show the celebrations that mark the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Adha. Last night editor Richard Marson apologised to viewers.

But he insisted: “We felt it was important to show the link between the food people eat and where it actually comes from.”

Strangely though, having searched through BBC Views Online’s search engine, the Blue Peter Homepage and the BBC’s Press Office, I can find no references to this apology from the editor of Blue Peter – has it passed you by Beeboids? There’s still time to get an article up on BBC Views Online’s Entertainment page, the place where you normally need no excuse to toot the BBC’s horn!

Hat tip to commenters Chuffer and will.

, today’s Daily Mail reports
Minister’s fling with BBC girl who booked him for Newsnight, by Paul Revoir and Gordon Rayner. Some excerpts:

It has emerged tha the BBC has held an inquiry into the role of Newsnight producer Thea Rogers, who booked Mr Purnell to appear on the show – and who just happened to be in the middle of a fling with him at the time.

Mr Purnell, 36, also faces questions over whether he broke ministerial rules by using his chauffeur-driven government car to whisk his glamorous 25-year-old girlfriend off for a romantic meal immediately after the programme…

The ambitious Miss Rogers, who worked for Labour during the 2005 election campaign and is said to be on first name terms with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, did not tell her Newsnight bosses that she was dating Mr Purnell at the time she was asked to book him as a guest on the show last October.

It is also understood that she may have helped brief Paxman on the line of questioning he should take in the interview. As a result, the BBC has held an internal inquiry into her role – which has cleared her of any wrongdoing.

Sources at Newsnight insisted last night that it was “absurd” to suggest that Miss Rogers’s relationship with the minister had any bearing on his treatment on the show…

“Because he’s worked in the BBC, where he was head of corporate planning before he became an MP, and because she has worked for the Labour Party, they have a lot in common”…

Then Miss Rogers, known during her Oxford days as “trout lips” because of her pronounced pout, was told by her bosses to book Mr Purnell for an interview on the show.

After Mr Purnell’s appearance – which, unusually, was pre-recorded – viewers immediately complained he had not been grilled hard enough.

Sue Bebbington complained to the programme’s website: “I was disappointed that the pensions minister got off so lightly in this evening’s programme”.

“It was a great pity that Mr Paxman did not use his skills to question this further, not just to make the minister’s appearance rather less of an easy ride, but also to highlight the insecurity of occupational pensions schemes”.

Daily Mail: Minister’s fling with BBC girl who booked him for Newsnight

A BBC spokesman told the Daily Mail that:

The BBC is satisfied that our employee has done absolutely nothing untoward and that Newsnight’s journalism has not been compromised in any way.

Well that’s alright then. I’m tempted to paraphrase Lord Hewart’s famous quotation, “that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done”, but I’m sure you get the idea.

Do read the whole thing. See also Talk about Newsnight, 25OCT2006 for other viewer complaints about Newsnight’s pensions coverage that day.

Hat tip to commenter SiN.

“For me it’s always been a programme in the best traditions of the late 1970s alternative movement” – Newsnight editor Peter Barron remembers. (Hat tip: Tuscan Tony in the comments at Guido’s).

, has replied to Guido’s email (see post below):

On Newsnight we don’t necessarily stick to linear running orders which reflect the relative significance of stories in the same way that news bulletins tend to. The loans for peerages story was of course more significant, but there were other factors at play. We had committed Michael Crick to following David Cameron’s efforts to relaunch his campaign in the North. While covering that he came across the “cripple” email story, which was an exclusive and highly pertinent to the Conservatives’ attempts to portray themselves as a compassionate party of government. It followed and mirrored the biggest controversy and talking point of the week which concerned the use of un-PC language in Big Brother. The loans story had been reported in some detail on the 10 O’clock News and on Newsnight we considered that our version could not be substantially different given the information we had at that point. We therefore decided to lead off on our own original story and to run the loans story prominently in second place. You could actually argue that in terms of global significance it was our third story – about China and star wars – which was the most important of the three.

What a load of blather, especially this bit:

While covering that [Michael Crick] came across the “cripple” email story, which was an exclusive and highly pertinent to the Conservatives’ attempts to portray themselves as a compassionate party of government

Came across? He means he was given a ready spun a line by the Labour Party – and not even a good line – the whole ‘cripple’ email story was a crock of the proverbial and should never have got anywhere near being on any part of the BBC, let alone the lead item on Newsnight, even if there was no other news whatsoever to report.

As for being “an exclusive” Peter, did you ever stop to ask yourself just why it was ‘an exclusive’? If not, I’ve got a few exclusive stories that you can cover too!

Crick and the rest of the Newsnight team should have seen the ‘cripple’ story for what it was and omitted it from their piece altogether – it wasn’t news, and it would strain to be even half-way credible in even the most self-righteous and indignant of Labour Party propaganda leaflets!

Update:

Peter Barron, the editor of Newsnight, has subsequently blogged about the running order of Newsnight on Friday, saying “I don’t rule out the possibility that it was simply a misjudgement”. This rather implies that it wasn’t him personally that was running the show on Friday evening. I wonder who it was. Moreover, if we accept that the running order was ‘simply a misjudgement’, it still doesn’t explain why Michael Crick et al made so much out of the ‘cripple’ email non-story (a non-story even on the quietest of news days), or indeed how this email, between just two people, came to be ‘leaked’ in the first place – which is a story in its own right. Would you care to address these points please Peter?

While we’re at it, would the editors of the Six and the Ten care to comment please on their respective running orders on Friday, either on the BBC editors blog or on the comment thread here or by email to biasedbbc@gmail.com. Thank you.

Update 2:

I’ve posted the following comment on Peter Barron’s blog:

Hello Peter. You say: “I don’t rule out the possibility that it was simply a misjudgement”, which rather implies that it wasn’t you who made that judgement. Was someone else editing Newsnight on Friday? If we accept that the running order was ‘simply a misjudgement’, it still doesn’t explain why Michael Crick et al made so much out of the ‘cripple’ email non-story (a story based on a private email sent four months ago from a private individual (not even a councillor) referring to someone else as a cripple – a non-story even without the Ruth Turner headlines). Also, can you explain how this email came to be leaked? It was a private email between two people, so unless either of them leaked it themselves (unlikely), how did it come to be leaked to the BBC? Left-wing council employees perhaps? If it was leaked in this way, do you really think that ‘public interest’ would justify such criminality? Looking forward to hearing from you further, Andrew (Biased BBC).

Will let you know if and when he replies.