Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Beeb journalist is reporting about Iraqi kidnappings. It’s bad news. Naturally he gets over-excited while interviewing people:

‘On the wall behind him the faces of the handful of kidnappers they’ve captured stare out. Black and white images of the men who terrorise their fellow citizens.

“What I want is for the government to apply the law that deals with kidnapping. They should hang criminals to keep the peace.”

Most Iraqis are the same. People here – children and adults, civilians and the police – all tell you that for now security is more important than democracy.’

THAT’S NOT WHAT HE SAID, NOW, IS IT?

He said he supported the death penalty as part of following the laws of his land (according to the testimony the BBC have presented us with), not that he was prepared to sacrifice democracy for security. Of course the Beeb think that democracy and the death penalty are incompatible, but that’s just their opinion. Maybe a cross-section of Iraqis would say that they prefer security to democracy, but that didn’t appear to be their answer when they faced insecure elections and the terrorists asked the questions.

This evening BBC News Online’s news ticker flashed up: “Prisoner found hanged in his cell at a privately-run Warwickshire jail”, which linked to Prisoner found hanged in his cell, which reads:

A prisoner has been found hanged in his cell at a Warwickshire jail.

Michael Bailey, 23, was serving a four-year sentence at the privately-run HMP Rye Hill for supplying drugs.

He arrived at the prison in December after being convicted at Birmingham Crown Court.

There will be an investigation by the prison and probation service ombudsman Stephen Shaw, a Prison Service spokeswoman said.

She added: “Every death in custody is a tragedy and we offer our sincere condolences to the family and friends of Mr Bailey.”

On the face of the evidence thus presented, the private ownership of the prison is irrelevant to the story. So why mention it? If the ownership of the prison is germane, then by all means explain why it matters, but until then it should be left out – unless of course the BBC intends to point out the ownership of every prison and other public service when reporting incidents within those services, complete with the implication that the incident is in some way related to the ownership of the service.

In a similar vein of public good, private bad, we’ve recently had a rash of right-on BBC hidden camera Inside Story exposés, including The Secret Policeman, the BNP, a privately run prison, privately run immigration detention centres and transport, privately run airport security, Yes Car Credit, etc. etc.

While almost all of these have been interesting and informative, they also tend to breathlessly emphasise the private ownership of privately run services, as if that is the sole or main cause of any lax management, inefficiency or abuse that is uncovered. Perish the thought that a publicly owned and run service could ever be lax, inefficient or abusive!

I look forward, in the interests of justice and fearless investigative journalism, to future exposés. Here are a few suggestions for the BBC to turn it’s fly-on-the-wall attention to:

• Local Government – an investigation into inefficiency, fraud, maladministration and corruption in local government – at least two full programmes worth here: 1) Housing benefit administration – how much fraud really goes on? 2) Planning officers and committees – how easy is it for corrupt officers and developers to subvert the planning process against the interests of local residents?

   

• The Police service and the Home Office – investigating the effect of government targets and bureaucracy in the fight against crime;

   

• The Immigration Service – how effective and efficient is the immigration service? Why does it take so long to process immigration cases? Are the rules always followed? How easily can the system be abused?

   

• The NHS and the Dept. of Health – investigating the effect of government targets and bureaucracy in the health service;

   

• The Far Left – an inside view of the kaleidoscopic splinter world of Britain’s far left activists, exposing, for example, the involvement of the SWP in the establishment and operation of the Stop the War Coalition. Does the hard left still plan and theorise about how best to foment revolution in the UK, do they engage in entryism and agitation, and so forth;

   

• The Fire Service – just what do firemen get up to when they’re on duty but not on call? How much moonlighting (second jobs) goes on, and how does it affect their ability to perform their public duties?

   

• HM Customs & Excise – an exposé of the zeal with which Customs & Excise meet their collection targets even where it involves bankrupting otherwise viable businesses (employers) with short-term cash-flow problems, at greater cost to the state than delaying or temporarily foregoing tax collection;

   

• Religious worship & teaching – what’s really being said in private in Britain’s churches, mosques, temples and synagogues? Do they all honestly promote community cohesion? Or are there instances of hate-speech and indoctrination?

   

• The Passport Office – how easy is it to get a British passport, even if you’re not entitled to one? How much does it cost? How scrupulous are background checks? Do they check the validity of counter-signatures properly? etc.

   

• Animal Rights terrorism – an inside view of the harassment and terrorism of legal businesses and their employees by animal rights extremists, and the loopy logic they use to justify their activities.

While we’re at it, we could also have a secret fly-on-the-wall film of the day-to-day goings on at BBC news – both in newsrooms and out and about, including: 1) the selection, prominence and fact checking of stories; and 2) the tricks that journalists and camera operators get up to present participants favourably or unfavourably.

I’m sure Biased BBC readers will be able to suggest many sensible additions to the list of public services and institutions that could do with the astringent glare of national exposure. Investigating public services is a public service in itself – unlike the private sector, where you can walk away and get a better deal elsewhere, most government services are a monopoly – you pay what you’re told to and you get what you’re given. It’s time for more Lights, Camera, Action!

* from Animal Farm, by George Orwell – a concise satire of the Soviet Revolution and Stalinism – very relevant to politics in general. Full text online in various places, including here at Project Gutenberg of Australia.

On Wednesday March 16th BBC News Online featured a story Italy ‘hopes’ for Iraq withdrawal, that begins:

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has confirmed that he “hopes” to begin pulling out Italian troops from Iraq as soon as possible.

Mr Berlusconi told the US president of his plans to begin withdrawing troops this September in a telephone call.

Mr Berlusconi said the decision to remove his troops would depend on Iraq’s security situation.

On Friday March 18th, The Times featured a story Italian troops to stay, after all, that begins:

TO BITING criticism from the Italian Opposition and the press, Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, backtracked yesterday over his announcement that Italian troops would start withdrawing from Iraq in September, claiming that this had only ever been a “hope” rather than a commitment.

On Tuesday night Signor Berlusconi had caused consternation in London and Washington by declaring on state television that Italy would begin a “progressive withdrawal” of its 3,000-strong contingent from Iraq starting in September, provided local security conditions allowed this.

The Times story adds:

Yesterday, however, Italian newspapers carried a “clarification” from Signor Berlusconi’s office stating that after a “long and cordial” conversation with President Bush the Italian leader wished to make it clear that there was “no fixed date” for withdrawal, which could only take place “in consultation with our allies”.

Signor Berlusconi said that the media had misinterpreted his words and built “castles in the air”.

The difference in emphasis between the two reports is interesting. Whilst there are clear differences in the timings of the two reports, they both refer to essentially the same events, yet the BBC version emphasises the confirmation of hopes for withdrawal as soon as possible, whereas The Times notes that this “had only ever been a ‘hope’ rather than a commitment”. Perhaps the BBC is in the process of belatedly writing up Mr. Berlusconi’s clarification, to avoid any misleading impressions becoming established fact, as demonstrated in a BBC report from Saturday March 19th, Iraq rally hears troops out call:

Scottish Socialist Party national convener Colin Fox said the announcement that 3,000 Italian troops are to leave Iraq showed that the “illegal occupation” was unravelling.

Clearly the Italian troops are not leaving Iraq yet, and there is no firm plan or date for them to do so – so the BBC quote above is misleading. At the very least it needs more quotemarks to make it clear that it is the far-left speaking rather than the BBC (for those of us who hope and believe that there is a difference between the two!).

P.S. The satire-mongers among us may enjoy the cartoons described by The Times: ‘La Repubblica retaliated with a front-page cartoon showing the Prime Minister declaring: “I never said what I said, and if I did say it, I misrepresented myself”. The cartoon in Corriere della Sera had Signor Berlusconi dictating a statement reading: “I have agreed with Bush on an immediate withdrawal – that is, the immediate withdrawal of what I said on television”‘.

According to The Grauniad: “Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general, is gaining a reputation as something of a rottweiler as he slashes into the corporation’s staffing structure. Yesterday this image took on a physical manifestation when allegations emerged that, when he was editor of the Nine O’Clock News, Mr Thompson sank his teeth into the arm of a colleague…”

Sounds like more of a gnasher than a slasher then. We wait with interest to see how the BBC gets its teeth into this story!

Update: News Online’s Entertainment page has a link, BBC bites back over Mark Thompson “horseplay”, to their story about old BiteMark: BBC playing down biting incident.

of this article by Paul Reynolds at BBConline I couldn’t find a needle of criticism or even meaningful analysis of the UN. Maybe you’ll be luckier. All I found was Reynolds regurgitating Mr Annan’s lofty sayings and emphasising how important they were at a time when there is a lot of ‘hostility’ in the US:

‘In the United States, there is still hostility to the UN and Mr Annan’s own position has been weakened by the oil-for food programme, in which his own son has been the subject of inquiry.’

Here’s Reynolds’ laughable version of powerful ‘for and against’ arguments in the US (hint, it’s not the arguments that are powerful, just the pedigree of the arguers, as is usual with Reynolds. Almost as laughable is the title ‘High Level group’ conferred on one advisory panel Annan has drawn on):

‘The former American UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a Democrat, who negotiated an end to the Bosnian war, said: “Without us the UN will fail. And if it fails, we will be among the many losers.”

But another UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, in a terse statement, said that “only the officers and functionaries of the UN” could “restore confidence in the United Nations”.’

However, I could find some useful stuff from Claudia Rosett. She knows how to needle:

‘in much the same way that despots faced with popular unrest like to announce giant patriotic dam-building projects involving the pouring of huge amounts of cement, Mr. Annan is presenting his new improved save-the-world reform plan, conveniently timed to serve as a distraction from the oil-for-fraud, sex-for-food, theft, waste, abuse and incompetence stories that for the past two years have bubbling up around the same U.N. he already reformed for us back in 1997.’

But here’s where she’s sure to get Reynolds and co’s sacred goat:

‘The grand failure of the U.N. is that its system, its officials and most visibly its current secretary-general are still stuck in the central-planning mindset that was the hallmark of dictators and failed utopian dreams of the previous century.’

Ouch.

According to The Scotsman:

Negligent prison staff ‘contributed to death of inmate’

Over on the BBC there’s a subtle difference:

Private prison blame over suicide

, I chanced up their story about Private Johnson Beharry, VC, UK soldier wins highest honour. In it they include the line:

Private Johnson Beharry, 25, becomes the first person to receive the award for more than 20 years.

Would it really have been too much to mention, even in passing, that the last two VCs were awarded during the Falklands War in 1982, perhaps even going so far as to remember their posthumous recipients, Colonel H. Jones, VC, and Sgt. Ian McKay, VC? It’s not like there’s any shortage of related material on the web, for instance,
this or
this or
this or
this.

This isn’t an issue of bias, but to include this small but noteworthy detail (even as a link) would be part of the BBC’s mission to educate, entertain and inform, and might even provoke curious youngsters to go and find out a bit more about British history. But then again, maybe that’s why the BBC didn’t mention it. Or perhaps the CBBC hacks were too lazy to look it up, or worse, have low expectations of their audience’s ability and interests.

The reason I originally went to the CBBC Newsround site was to find out what they said about the Hair-braiding sparks school row story. Newsround’s TV coverage on Tuesday evening included viewer’s feedback on the story, although neither the recap of the story nor any of the selected feeback mentioned the race discrimination aspect of the story.

Even though it is obliquely mentioned in their web coverage, why omit the relevant detail, the nub of the story, from their TV coverage? It is the race discrimination aspect of this story that makes it a story – it wouldn’t be much of an issue were the policy applied consistently to all pupils at the school (although Shabina Begum may beg to differ!).

Further to this, while they say that “Olivia has been given the chance to work in a unit at the school”, they omit to explain that it is the chance to work separately from her friends and fellow pupils. Hardly an adequate solution.

A reader of Tim Blair’s pointed out a discontinuity between a BBC link and the story it linked to.

The BBC’s link to a John Simpson column:

Not quite Vietnam – the war in Iraq defies all predictions

And what Simpson actually wrote:

“The situation in Iraq is nothing like the Vietnam War, and it will not be.”

Simpson has other views besides, not all of them happy reading, but balanced and reasonable.

Tim Blair’s first link, the one that says “not quite Vietnam”, appears to have moved. It now appears, oddly, on the politics page rather than the main page. But the wording is the same.

As you can see from Andrew Bowman’s post further down, Kevin McNamara, a left-wing Labour MP, has distinguished himself by saying that Michael Howard’s views about gypsy encampments and the planning laws have “a whiff of the gas chamber about them.” For various reasons I am not Michael Howard’s biggest fan, but I do think that saying that to a man whose grandmother was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is… well, in the light of Ken Livingstone’s recent remarks, shall we settle on newsworthy?

The news has reached Australia.

At the time of writing, four minutes to midnight, it hasn’t yet reached the BBC website.

The BBC’s Britain’s Streets of Vice series is being repeated on BBC1, starting tonight with Sex in the City, described by Radio Times as follows:

Sally Magnusson tells the story of a young prostitute struggling with her addiction to crack cocaine and heroin, one of more than 5,000 women thought to be working on the streets and risking violence, disease and a criminal record

It’s on at 11.05pm – it’s on so late because of the adult nature of the material and topic – not that that stopped the BBC showing it (and the rest of the series) at 9.15am in the morning three weeks ago, just as toddlers and children off school sat down to watch. The next episode will be on late at night next Tuesday. Make sure your kiddies are safely tucked in bed, just in case they find these programmes as ‘challenging’ as Alison Sharman, BBC Daytime Controller, bragged.

For the full story, see my previous post: All right my darling? Looking for business? What, at 9.15 in the morning? Are you kidding?