The BBC has decided its image needs a bit of a burnish…so it decided to look through the archives, find times when it was mired in controversy and catching some flak.

It then does what the BBC does best….rewrite history….funnily enough with the BBC always coming out on top having been ‘proved’ right all along in the end.

Eight programmes of ‘Battle For The Airwaves’ presented by Nick Robinson…..The series examines the struggles between broadcasters and politicians…..the 1936 general strike, Churchill in the 1930’s, Suez, Labour in the 1970’s, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Iraq war and present day relations with politicians.

As Nick Robinson says:

‘Good old BBC Radio 4 have made every episode of my recent series Battle for the Airwaves available on iPlayer for the next year.’

Funny what they make available for the longest time on iPlayer.

I listened to ‘Churchill’ and the ‘Iraq War’ programmes….couldn’t listen to any more.

None of it was really the BBC’s fault…it was all really government pressure that kept Churchill and his anti-appeasement views off the BBC…and as for the Iraq War…well the BBC were ‘caught between a (bullying) government determined to prove that war was both necessary and just and its opponents who insisted it was premature, immoral and based on a lie…..and Greg Dyke only wanted to prove his independence against a bullying government.’ .

Apparently the ‘Public’ all knew ‘Hutton’ was a whitewash and loved the BBC ever more because of it.

Robinson signs off with the claim that the ‘Battle For The Airwaves’ over the Iraq War was the only one that cost a man’s life…that of David Kelly.

I might suggest otherwise….the BBC’s whole coverage of the Afghan and Iraq wars has cost the lives of many people…both allied forces and civilians.  The keeping of Churchill off the airwaves contributed to the appeasing of Hitler and the token opposition to his actions.  The BBC’s coverage of the Falklands just gives further encouragement to Argentina.  Its coverage of Northern Ireland gave the ‘oxygen of publicity’ to terrorists…as its constant excuses for Islamic terrorism does today.  Its position on Suez led to historic consequences as Britian was forced to withdraw with its tail between its legs by the Yanks.

Its coverage of Europe has given cover to politicians who want to move ever closer to European integration even as Europe ‘burns’ around us.

Its coverage of immigration has allowed politicians to do as they like destroying a society and a culture without account…..600,000 native Brits forced out of London alone.

Its coverage of the economy has allowed Labour to keep its head afloat with the ability to deny all responsibility for the economic disaster it engineered.

And of course its recent coverage of the Middle East has meant that Jews around the world face rising anti-Semitism and conflicts are prolonged without resolution as Israel is constantly held back from finishing the job by a barrage of negative media reports influencing politicians….Blair of course being forced out of government by his support for Israel in Lebanon.

Here’s an idea for another programme…’What would Britain be like if the BBC didn’t exist?’

In the case of Omar al-Mishrawi, as with the death of Muhammed al-Durrah, the BBC leapt to conclusions about who caused the death of a Palestinian child…blaming it on Israel without  proof.

The BBC knows full well the dramatic power of such images and the effect of such lucid and emotive language in its reports upon perceptions of Israeli actions that people will have when  Israel is painted in such a bad light…and yet they recklessly, deliberately, pack their reports with prejudicial images and words that are almost designed to incite anger against Israelis and foment further violence.

We don’t really need to know the contents of the Balen Report…we can see for ourselves that BBC reporting from the Middle East is so blatantly partisan, so dangerously anti-Israeli that it can only have the effect of encouraging ani-Semitism around the world.

The fact that the truth eventually comes out many months later is of no consequence…the damage has already been done.  The BBC knows this but carries on regardless filling the airwaves with its partisan reports.

Here is the truth of what caused Omar al-Mishrawi’s death Via Elders of Zion:

UN clears Israel of charge it killed baby in Gaza

Jerusalem had been blamed for death of BBC correspondent’s son during mini-war, but otherwise critical report finds shrapnel from Hamas misfire responsible

The UN report suggests the three members of the Mishrawi family were killed by a rocket fired by Palestinians and not by an Israeli airstrike.

“On 14 November, a woman[actually the aunt of the child], her 11-month-old infant, and an 18-year-old adult in al-Zaytoun were killed by what appeared to be a Palestinian rocket that fell short of Israel,” the report states.

The three people killed were Jihad al-Mishrawi’s son Omar, his sister-in-law, Hiba Aadel Fadel al-Mishrawi, and his brother Ahmad.

Here’s a flavour of the BBC’s coverage:

The BBC’s Jon Donnison reported of Omar that “He only knew how to smile,”  but he was now only “A hideous tiny corpse. Omar’s smiling face virtually burnt off, that fine hair appearing to be melted on to his scalp.”

“Most likely is that Omar died in one of the more than 20 bombings across Gaza that the Israeli military says made up its initial wave of attacks. Omar was not a terrorist.”

@BBCPaulAdams
Paul Adams Spare a thought for Omar, 11-month son of our BBC Arabic Service colleague in Gaza, killed in today’s Israeli air strike.

“BBC journalists tweeted that those killed in an Israeli airstrike included the sister-in-law and 11-month-old son of a BBC Arabic Service journalist, and that the journalist’s brother was seriously wounded,” Human Rights Watch stated in a November 15 press release.

From The Washington Post :
‘An Israeli round hit Misharawi’s four-room home in Gaza Wednesday, killing his son, according to BBC Middle East bureau chief Paul Danahar, who arrived in Gaza earlier Thursday. Misharawi’s sister-in-law was also killed, and his brother wounded. Misharawi told Danahar that, when the round landed, there was no fighting in his residential neighborhood.

“We’re all one team in Gaza,” Danahar told me, saying that Misharawi is a BBC video and photo editor. After spending a “few hours” with his grieving colleague, he wrote on Twitter, ”Questioned asked here is: if Israel can kill a man riding on a moving motorbike (as they did last month) how did Jihad’s son get killed.”’

From BBCWatch:

On the Wednesday before last, soon after Gaza’s latest war erupted with Israel’s killing of Hamas’ military commander Ahmed al Jabari, Jihad burst out of the edit suite, screaming. He sprinted down the stairs, his face ripped with anguish. He’d just had a call from a friend to tell him the Israeli military had bombed his house and that his eleven month-old baby boy Omar was dead.

I guess nothing much has changed in the way the BBC reports events from there.

The photograph comes from a small blog (The author says…..‘If you do read this (and to date) it has been viewed 41 times – though whether by 41 people I don’t know…)….but its sentiment expressed in the title could very well be the BBC’s attitude towards Eurosceptics.

Six days ago that blog reported this:

Monday, March 4, 2013

Forget UKIP, many economists in Germany now want an alternative to the euro freaks, too

‘A drum roll please for ‘Alternative für Deutschland’, a soon-to-be-established party in Germany whose would-be founders and supporters are terminally f***** **f with the whole euro crisis, Merkel’s measures to solve it and cross-party support in the Bundestag for those measures.’

A new Euro sceptic party, Alternative For Germany, has been formed…..it formally announces its creation tomorrow.

Coverage has been widespread across Europe, even the Indian press reported the story.

Not the BBC website.

The BBC seems to have studiously ignored this new party despite it being described a ‘nasty shock for Merkel’.

Here’s Der Spiegel:

Germany’s New Anti-Euro Party
03/08/2013 | By Charles Hawley
Anti-euro political parties in Europe in recent years have so far tended to be either well to the right of center or, as evidenced by the recent vote in Italy, anything but staid. But in Germany, change may be afoot. A new party is forming this spring, intent on abandoning European efforts to prop up the common currency. And its founders are a collection of some of the country’s top economists and academics.

Or the Telegraph

Or the Irish Times

Or the Indian press

Any reason why the BBC says so little about Euro sceptics…even a party formed from  some of Germany’s ‘top economists and academics’?

No doubt it will merit a quick appraisal tomorrow and then disappear from the web pages as rapidly as the BBC’s coverage of the German green energy policy disasters do.

The world’s biggest news organisation…beaten by a blog that has had 41, now at least 42 including me, viewers.  I wonder how much he pays himself?

The BBC, the Greens and the Veggies join forces to damn meat eaters.

Their latest was a bit of nonsense about bacon sandwiches needing to have ‘gun licenses’ or some such daftness.

All intended to bend our ear and save the planet from the evils of live stock farming.

I wonder how they will react to the below:

We all know that livestock destroys the planet and turns lush, green landscapes into desert.

That may not be true.

WUWT has a write up on a TED talk by Dr. Allan Savory in Los Angeles this past week.

In Africa they burn 1 billion hectares of grassland a year to ‘manage’ it….the BBC do not dwell on such facts….it is you, the greedy Westerner, on the way to Tescos in your car, who has killed many Ethiopians by your pollution…..(If you think that is a joke…not…the BBC really made that claim)

Burning 1 hectare releases the pollution that 6000 cars do.

Burmning 1 billion hectares must therefore pollute the earth as much as the equivalent car use of 6 trillion cars.

The solution, the ‘only’ solution, to ever increasingly desertification…is completely counterintuitive and goes against the ‘consensus’….

…the mass herding of livestock…..to replictae the enormous natural herds of animals that used to roam the lands…such as buffalo in the USA.

What is an added bonus is that such a policy, if successful, would take the atmospheric CO2 level back to that of the pre-industrial age….if half the presently desertified land was reclaimed.

Here is the video….Dr Allan Savory clearly accepts CO2 as a main driver of climate change……but that is almost irrelevant…

This really goes against the grain of BBC narrative….livestock farming is bad…that the third world is the ‘innocent’ victim of industrial nation’s pollution and that the ‘only’ solution is to close down Western, and seemingly only Western, industry.

The third world has massively increased its population…it burns enormous amounts of wood/fuel in its cooking and in highly inefficent industrial processes, and deforests enormous areas…and turns productive land to desert….and releases huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere…via rice growing….methane which is far more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2.

It’s not all one way the blame game…unless you work for the BBC and have an agenda.

Using the term ‘shot’ as an attention grabbing headline and in particular ‘shot in the head’ in the first paragraph, is an attempt to manipulate the way a reader views this report……’shot’   gives the impression of extreme violence intended to kill……when the fact is the man was hit by a rubber bullet in a violent ‘protest’ as the BBC later points out.

But the heading and first paragraph have already done the damage by misrepresenting the facts and suggesting the Israelis were using metal bullets and not the entirely different, though still dangerous, rubber bullet.

Shot Palestinian Mohammed Asfour dies in hospital
A Palestinian shot in the head by Israeli soldiers during a confrontation with stone-throwers has died of his wounds, hospital officials say.
Mohammed Asfour, 22 was hit by a rubber bullet during the protest in the West Bank village of Aboud on 22 February.

The BBC must be on form…these threads fill up ever quicker….let’s have more of it and keep them on their toes!

The Egyptians started flooding Palestinian border tunnels with sewage last month.

Here’s the link on the BBC:

…………………………………………

Ahhh…it’s not there is it?

Why might that be?:

On twitter, BBC correspondent Jon Donnison is downplaying the importance of the Egyptian actions:
Jon Donnison ‏@JonDonnison
Having further checked out #Gaza #Egypt tunnel flooding story, still think its being overplayed. Tunnels operating pretty much as normal.
https://twitter.com/JonDonnison/stat…41827425435649

Never mind the Palestinians should be pleased then….or maybe not:

One tunnel owner who identified himself as Abu Suliman said only 50 tunnels are functioning, as opposed to about 550 working at full capacity following Israel’s last military operation on Gaza in November 2012.

Some 2,000 men and boys work in the tunnel trade in the Gaza Strip. But over the past three months, more than 80 percent have lost the only work and benefits available in besieged Gaza, which remains stuck in an Israeli blockade.

That occurred after the government of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi ordered the destruction of the underground transportation network. As part of that effort, the military began dumping raw sewage into the passageways.

During Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s time, Amer recalls, soldiers fired tear-gas into the tunnels. Although some friends were killed by the gas, Amer says he fears the sewage water more.

Funny how Donnison is quite unconcerned about the working conditions and treatment of the tunnellers by their Palestinian bosses:

‘Worker abuse is also rampant, with tunnel owners underpaying and overworking the vulnerable labour force. The average excavator works 12 hours a day.

Advocate Hazem Hanyia, of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, conducted a study on the tunnels and found that working conditions do not meet minimum safety standards and violate Palestinian labour laws.

Amer says some tunnel owners create imaginary problems three or four hours into a shift in order to kick workers out and not pay them for a full day’s work.

“We never knew there is something called labour rights in this work,” says Amer. “It feels like an animal farm, and the tunnel owner comes and collects how much he needs, and he would not mind if we die.” ‘

Shame the Israelis didn’t think of the sewage ploy….they could have had a lovely little write up by Donnison…I’m sure he would have obliged.

Climate sceptics have been debating the science and the policies of climate change…and Al Jazeera filmed it showing that Sceptics do have valid questions and are perfectly capable of questioning the science and climate policies in a credible manner and should have a place in any discussion about climate change on the BBC:

‘This series of events is a unique chance to be part of the audience of televised events on one of the world’s most influential independent broadcasters.’

Kiss Your World Goodbye

Is climate change fact…. or fiction?

Join Mehdi Hasan this Friday as he challenges the world’s leading climate sceptic, atmospheric physicist and MIT Professor Richard Lindzen.  Also joining the discussion is Professor Myles Allen (Oxford)

 “One can see no (global) warming since 1997” said Lindzen.  “Even if everyone cut emissions in the whole world, it wouldn’t make a lot of difference.”

Agree or disagree?

This event will be televised later on Al-Jazeera English

When you consider the outcome as revealed by Bishop Hill you might think the BBC would not be too keen to report this or engage further with sceptics:

‘There was in fact a great deal of agreement on many aspects of the debate – for example, everyone agreed that Hasan’s “97% of scientists” line was irrelevant (and as Barry Woods explained later isn’t true anyway). Perhaps more importantly, everyone also seemd to agree that current policy choices are foolish, the main differences being over whether emissions reductions are required.’

Nothing from Labour either so far…..no ‘Grannies and children will die if Cable cuts the NHS’? 

This is all so far: Shadow financial secretary to the Treasury Chris Leslie has responded for Labour. He said that Cable “may at last be seeing sense”.

Wonder what Cable talked about when he had a little chat with Labour recently?

Senior Liberal Democrats in secret talks with Labour

‘……nothing less than treachery to the Government of which he is a part.’

BBC are keen to highlight this Conservative cock up on ‘Today’:

‘Business minister Michael Fallon and Chris Leslie, shadow treasury minister, debate how damaging David Cameron’s “misrepresentation” of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s views may be for the government.’
Listen to the discussion
 

What does Cable say about that:

Did austerity kill growth?
‘The data does not support the conclusion that deficit reduction has had dramatic effects on the economy. There has been only modest reduction in the budget deficit.’
 
 
It looks like the BBC are very selective about which parts of Cable’s article they examine.
Talk about ‘Serious damage will be done to industry……in his department they had reached the point where further savings would do enormous damage to science and universities. ‘  and it is reported….talk about cutting NHS or schools and it is downplayed and the consequences of any cuts are left unsaid.

If you want to find ice it all depends where you look.

If you want to find a report revealing that the Antarctic ice has increased from 25.34 million Cu Km to 27 million Cu Km it would be no good looking for a ‘headline’ story on the environment page……you would have to look at this coded message from the BBC on the 8th:

@BBCAmos via Twitter

Ever wondered how much ice there was in Antarctica? 26m cu km. http://t.co/WRXqTXvsR3 http://t.co/ZbVIFr7j3U

Which kind of gives nothing away does it?

However if you wanted to know that Arctic ice was disappearing you could look at this report from the 7th still given a headline on the environment page today:

Canadian glaciers face ‘big losses’

Obvious what that’s about.

Ice increases…story downplayed.  Ice decreases….story prominently displayed.

Both reports by Jonathan Amos…..who, ‘just to put things in context’ he says, reveals that if that great quantity of ice were to melt sea levels would rise by 58m……so it’s bad news that ice is accumulating in the Antarctic…..coz when it melts we’re doomed!….yes, no, really…..I give up.

Hide the decline, hide the incline…..just hide it dude!

Trust the BBC.