Category Archives: Uncategorized

claims Man killed by his own car. Wrong. Man killed with his own car. Or, more fully, Car thieves murder car owner, both still less than View’s Online’s maximum headline length.

Imagine if the BBC created a page entitled The Struggle Against Aids. Imagine if then they included copious stories about linkages between Aids and homosexuality. Imagine if then they took an opportunity to frame a story about rising Aids cases alongside one about indecent and criminal homosexual behaviour, and alongside someone influential’s unmediated and copiously quoted opinion that Aids was linked to homosexual bad behavour. Well, that’s just imagination, isn’t it?

But in the case of Iraq this morning we had this, this and this. Deaths. Abuse. Calls for the US to leave Iraq. Where’s the link between them? What warrants them being interwoven as a headline block? Nothing in particular, unless you’re prejudiced. Stinking biased. An information fascist. That kind of thing.

, a story about violence and threats of violence against the family of five female cousins, now aged 14 to 22, who were ordered nine years ago by ‘village elders’ to be married to the boys of another family in settlement of a dispute.

Whilst BBC Views Online goes into some detail about the tragic circumstances of these unfortunate girls (sadly not uncommon in their part of the world) and their “religious marriage ceremony, called a sharai nikah”, the BBC have, for some unknown reason, managed to omit a crucial word or two of useful background information. Either of these words would have done. They begin with ‘m’ and ‘i’.

Update: Marc of USS Neverdock comments that the BBC’s omission’s from this report go much further than omitting the ‘m’ and/or ‘i’ words. According to the Telegraph, Blood debt women offered up for rape:

A village council in Pakistan has decreed that five young women should be abducted, raped or killed for refusing to honour childhood “marriages”.

The women, who are cousins, were married in absentia by a mullah in their Punjabi village to illiterate sons of their family’s enemies in 1996, when they were aged from six to 13.

The marriages were part of a compensation agreement ordered by the village council and reached at gunpoint after the father of one of the girls shot dead a family rival.

…

In addition to the sentence on the women, the village council has sentenced to death Jehan Khan Niazi, the father of three of the women, and the fathers of the other two for failing to honour the supposed bond with men whose identities they are not even certain of.

The women have said they will commit suicide if their fathers obey the council.

– the reality therefore is so much more awful than the BBC’s namby-pamby token coverage. Worse, a scandalous story like this doesn’t even get a look in on the BBC’s television news – they’re too busy following every last minute of George Best’s dying days. It’s sad to see a character like Best on his death bed, and it is worth a mention in passing, but it doesn’t (yet at least) merit full-length coverage high up in the running order (like on this evening’s Six O’Clock News) when there are stories like this one or the ongoing famine in Niger that are so much more deserving of our attention.

, presenter Deborah Mackenzie introduced a report on Her Majesty’s trip to Malta with:

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth…

What a damn cheek! Almost everyone in the UK refers to Her Majesty as ‘The Queen’, but no, not the other worldly BBC News 24, even though it’s the BBC’s domestic 24 hour rolling news channel, targetted at and paid for by the BBC’s UK telly-taxpayers (as distinct from BBC World, or for that matter, News 24’s own ‘The World Today’ programme).

P.S. Is it just me, or is that moustached twat who pops up frequently on News 24 to exclaim:

This week on Talking Movies…

exceedingly irritating? Still, I suppose he does at least jolt me into changing channel as fast as I can before I get too brainwashed to resist!

• Adloyada has an important post on what she has said in comments to the BBC’s Israel/Palestine impartiality review. The deadline for submissions is tomorrow.

  One of the BBC pages she cites is this page of statistics about the Intifada. As Adloyada observes, the BBC breaks down the statistics of Israelis killed by Palestinians into civilian and military but all the Palestinians killed by Israelis are placed in one large group. Says the BBC, “There are no figures to show the proportion of Palestinians who were combatants and those who were civilians.” Why, then, are the Israeli dead so divided in the BBC figures? The fact that the Israeli dead are divided into two groups and the Palestinian dead are undivided has two effects. Firstly it means that you see a long line of icons representing Palestinian victims and mentally contrast it with the fact that none of the several lines of icons representing Israelis are remotely as long.

  Secondly, pretty well everyone regards it as less bad to kill soldiers than civilians. So most readers, even those sympathetic to Israel, will discount somewhat the group representing Israeli soldiers. There is no equivalent group of Palestinian combatants to be discounted. That absence is, of course, a consequence of the fact that the Palestinian way of waging war is to wear no uniform. Given that the BBC does see fit to add a little reminder to an article about the Israeli disengagement from Gaza to the effect that that Israeli settlements there were in violation of international law I would have thought that this repeated Palestinian breach of a far more fundamental international law was also worth a mention.

  An even more severe criticism is that the BBC’s statement that “There are no figures” to show the proportion of Palestinian combatants to non-combatants is not true. What the BBC means is “our source provided no figures and we did not care to look further.” Astonishingly, B’Tselem, the “Human Rights Group” (see what Adloyada says about them) who provided this data to the BBC described all Palestinians killed in the Intifada who were not wearing PA uniforms as being “civilians” – in other words even members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad killed while carrying out suicide bomb attacks were described as “civilians.”

  It seems this was too much to stomach even for the BBC, hence their disingenuous statement that there were “no figures.” Of course there were figures: Adloyada links to one analysis telling a very different story to B’Tselem’s, in the Middle East Quarterly. Or the BBC could have checked out the statements made by Hamas, Al-Asqua Martyrs’ Brigade and Islamic Jihad themselves claiming responsibility for suicide bombings. Surely this task would not have been beyond the BBC, seeing as we are always being told what a world leader among news organizations it is.

  UPDATE: Here is more about the statistics of the intifada, including a link to a paper by Don Radlauer of the Institute for Counter Terrorism that provides exactly the sort of figures that the BBC said were not available.

• Right for Scotland reports how John Simpson’s use of the phrase “misguided criminals” to describe the July 7 bombers won a poll for most politically correct phrase of the year. Then the BBC told the Daily Record that the claim that he’d used these words was “nonsense”. Too busy commissioning artwork to search, I guess. (Hat tip: Dumbjon)
• This they call news? Commenter Jack says, “This is the type of thing I’d expect to see in an email doing the rounds, not on this world news site supposedly representing Britain.”

that BBC licence-payers have just coughed up for, and the BBC’s attempts, reported in the Sunday Times, to justify the expenditure:

The BBC was embarrassed last night by e-mails that showed it “invented” a justification for spending £60,000 of licence payers’ money commissioning a Tracey Emin sculpture.

Emin’s Roman Standard sculpture of a bird on a post was bought by the BBC at a time when Mark Thompson, its director-general, was announcing big cost cuts.

Internal e-mails revealed serious doubts within the organisation about spending so much on a sculpture that had no links to the corporation.

An e-mail dated February 22 from senior BBC publicist Janet Morrow to Vanda Rumney, head of communications, gave warning that the commission could create a “sticky situation on the public art front which could blow up”.

Morrow noted that the sculpture “is not connected to a BBC building, nor is it linked in any way to a BBC broadcast or BBC activity — the BBC has purely used licence fee money to create a public sculpture”.

She then said she had “invented” a “plausible line” to justify the commission.

reminded me of the murder in Birmingham last year of the last police officer to die on duty in the UK. Alone among news organisations, the BBC’s pathetic choice of lead story that night was the appointment of Mark Thompson as the BBC’s Director General. Tossers.

Yesterday’s edition of The Times reports that London bomb victim lied about rape history.

Garri Holness, who lost part of a leg in the July 7th Islamist terror attacks in London, formerly known as Gary Linton, is revealed as a convicted rapist, guilty, along with six others, of a brutally violent gang sex attack on two sixteen year old schoolgirls in 1985.

Recalling the prominence afforded to Holness recently by a number of BBC programmes, I looked for their coverage of this story. After searching for it, I found Rape past of London bomb victim.

Not surprisingly (to readers of Biased BBC at least), the story had long since been removed from BBC Views Online’s index pages. When it was featured though, it didn’t make News Online’s front page (home to plenty of trivia at the best of times), and was, instead, hidden in the England section, itself below the UK section. Another case of blink and you’ll miss it, but you can’t (quite) say that they haven’t covered it.

Also not surprisingly, The Times report of the story, though not that much longer than the BBC’s, is sharper and more detailed than the BBC’s passive effort, including such facts as:

• Holness’ gang history as ‘Star’ of the ‘Young Raiders’;

   

• The £50,000 that Holness deems inadequate compensation for his injury, in contrast to the £13,500 compensation for victims of rape (elsewhere, News Online quotes Holness saying “I am going to need financial security for the rest of my life” – losing a leg is bad, but Holness, a musician, apparently reckons it’s a meal ticket for life);

   

• Holness lied to the Daily Mail, claiming that he had been cleared on appeal;

And last, but not least:

• Holness was paid £700 by the BBC to appear in six programmes charting his recovery.

None of which, it seems, the BBC deems worthy of bringing to telly-taxpayers attention, and certainly not for any length of time.

P.S. See also today’s update to my post from Monday, below.

, BBC News Online reports that:

Former Humberside Police Authority chairman Colin Inglis has been charged with 14 counts of indecent assault in relation to allegations of child abuse.

News Online goes on to say:

Following the launch of the North Yorkshire Police investigation last September Mr Inglis was suspended from the police authority and the Labour Party.

He was replaced as leader of Hull City Council in May this year.

This story was also reported on the BBC’s Six O’Clock News this evening, though Inglis’ party affilition and former tenure as Hull City Council leader weren’t mentioned, which is odd, since “Tories” (as the BBC unfailingly calls Conservatives) subject to legal proceedings are almost always linked to their party.

Update, 19NOV05:

Catching up with the news after a hectic few days, by way of contrast, The Times’ coverage of this story last Tuesday, Police chairman charged with 14 counts of child sex abuse, begins:

A LABOUR politician who supervised Britain’s worst-performing police force was charged yesterday with 14 counts of child abuse.

No doubt about Inglis’ political affiliation there then! The Times also reports:

The politician, who is openly gay, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, blaming the allegation on a homophobic conspiracy. He cited “dark forces” as the reason for his fall from political power.

– yet more facts that the BBC completely omitted from their coverage of this story. Would any of our BBC readers care to offer their adoring telly-taxpayers an explanation for keeping the public in the dark?

continues with John Simpson’s thesis that the Jordanian bombing proves the Iraq war was wrong!!, and with this pictureof a suicide-dressed kiddy above a caption which says:

‘Palestinian children learn at a young age about the struggle for freedom. To some, the Palestinian martyrs are heroes. Here a child poses for a photograph at a rally organised by militants.’

This from a series about the making of a film about suicide murderers (not sure if it was billed that way, exactly). One to add to the list for Natalie’s post below. (hat tip LGF)