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(Realplayer, 224Kbps) spent its first seven minutes covering the Conservatives proposals for dealing with the problem of illegal traveller camps built in contravention of planning laws, both on their own land, and, more often, on other people’s land, often in the green belt.

All the usual leftie hot-button words were used – racism, bigotry etc., with lengthy Going Live! reports from Vikki Young in Essex (with Michael Howard) and John Kay in Worcestershire.

Between 5’35” and 6’58” into the broadcast the following exchange took place:

Anna Ford: “Our Chief Political Correspondent, Mark Mardell, is at Westminster. Mark, why have the Conservatives decided to focus on this issue?”

Mark Mardell: “I’m sure the fact that the powerful Sun newspaper is running a vociferous campaign on this issue doesn’t put them off, but there’s something broader than that, I think a lot of the political parties realise that there’s a sense running through British politics for a number of years now of respectable outrage at, uh, uh, uh, an injustice. Now, we’ve seen this with single mothers on benefit, we’ve seen it with asylum seekers, but the feeling that respectable people who feel that they’ve played by the rules see others really taking the mickey out of society and getting away with it and that’s what the Conservatives are tapping into here, and it also allows them to say ‘we’re listening to you, uh, uh, the Labour government is not'”.

Anna Ford: “Now some people are being extremely critical of the Conservatives policy aren’t they?

Mark Mardell: “One Labour MP has, in the last few minutes, said this policy has, [pause] the whiff of the gas chamber about it. Now those are very serious words indeed, and of course Michael Howard has made it clear that, uh, there is no hint of racism behind what he’s doing as far as he’s concerned, but more broadly than that, as I think we’ve heard already in the programme, the other parties, uh, feel that, er, the Tories have brought this upon their own head or upon society’s head, in that they, in 1994, er, er, abolished the, uh, need for councils to provide these sites and they say the problem is simply there aren’t enough sites legally available.”

Anna Ford: “Mark, thank you”.

My jaw dropped at the emboldened words. How about yours?

Michael Howard’s Grandmother was murdered at Auschwitz, as the BBC well know. To say such a thing about him without a shred of evidence is deeply offensive in a number of ways to a wide range of decent people.

It doesn’t surprise me that a Labour MP is stupid enough to say such a thing – but that Mark Mardell should repeat such offensive tittle-tattle without the decency of at least attributing it to the moron concerned shows, at best, a distinct lack of judgment on his part.

That apart, whilst smearing Howard and the Conservatives with talk of gas chambers, Mardell has a cheek to suggest the problem is all the Conservatives fault for changing the law in 1994. Well hello Mark, but T. Blair esq. has been in power since 1997, so if there’s a problem with illegal traveller camps now he’s had some time to do something about it himself.

On a related note, I’d like to see more detailed coverage of this issue, rather than simple political point-scoring all round. For instance, in Vikki Young’s report she mentions that there are 5,964 caravans on council sites, 4,813 on private sites, 1,855 on land without planning permission and 2,377 on other people’s land, again without planning permission. We aren’t told the origins of the travellers, where they come from and go to, how they make a living and pay taxes, how many of them there are in the UK each year (are there more now than before? if so, why?), how many vacant pitches there are (are travellers being fussy about their location?) and so on. At the moment the broadcast media are reporting this issue as if UK has a responsibility to provide legal pitches to roaming herds of nomadic travellers wherever and whenever they happen to pitch up in the UK, regardless of the available space or the concerns of local residents, which is not something I recall any public debate on.

Update: According to several B-BBC commenters, the above remark has now been attributed to Kevin McNamara – an old-time leftie retread who’s standing down at the next election.

Recently, a rather odious Conservative MP, Jonathan Sayeed, now expelled from the party, has been mentioned several times on BBC News Online, with headlines such as Sayeed to stand down as Tory MP and Tour row MP loses Tory party whip. BBC News Online’s coverage of old Seedy has been fulsome and detailed, leaving no doubt that Sayeed was, to use their term, a Tory.

Compare and contrast this with the sparse coverage of Chris Pond MP, quietly mentioned in passing on BBC News Online’s UK and Politics index pages (no picture or feature box or prominent billing for him), leading to their story MP cautioned for criminal damage.

Nowhere in the headline or even in the story is it mentioned that Chris Pond is a Labour MP. Nor is it mentioned in the headline that Pond is a government minister, no less, at the Department of Work and Pensions.

To see what the BBC omitted from their coverage you have to locate the original report in The Mail on Sunday, Minister arrested for attack on young mother, where we find that, apparently unnoticed by the BBC:

Neighbours in the modern mews development where the incident took place said yesterday that they had at first understood from the police that Mr Pond would be prosecuted. But, after the decision was referred to both the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney General, the MP escaped with a police caution.

The fact that such senior Government law officers were consulted raises questions over whether the decision not to prosecute was made in order to save Mr Pond’s Ministerial career which would almost certainly have been ended by an ensuing court case.

Another interesting snippet unmentioned by the BBC is the fact that “Mr Pond, 52, has repeatedly spoken out on the need to crack down on ‘nightmare neighbours'”. Indeed.

As with much BBC bias, either of these stories, Sayeed or Pond, taken in isolation, would be fine. It is when you put them together and compare the detailed coverage of ‘Tory’ Sayeed with the bland coverage of ‘MP’ Pond that the BBC’s ‘angle’ becomes apparent. If Pond were a Conservative Minister in a Conservative government in the run up to a general election you could bet that the BBC, along with much of Fleet Street, would be much more interested in his story, leading bulletins with it and generally baying for his head. Lucky for Pond that he’s not a ‘Tory’.

Update: More in Today’s Times: Parking row MP escapes court action.

was the headline in a news summary by Philip Hayter on BBC News 24 just now, followed by a brief mention of the Conservatives plans to reform the law to protect homeowners and the environment from the blight of illegal traveller encampments.

This surprised me – the last thing the Conservatives would want to do is go anywhere near starting a race row, particularly knowing how the shrill harpies of the left screech on and on at the merest hint of race being an issue – so who has suggested the issue involves race, and, more importantly, why does that become the BBC headline to the story rather than proper coverage of the substantive issue itself?

The issue is that it appears that anyone from anywhere in the EU with a caravan and an attitude can settle wherever they like in the UK, in complete contravention of the planning laws, using their ‘human rights’ to disregard everyone else’s human rights.

Turning to BBC News Online, the story is a little clearer – although their angle on the story is the same – Tories deny Gypsy race row claim. It turns out that:

Planning minister Keith Hill said the Tories were “tapping into the biggest vein of bigotry – prejudice against Gypsies and travellers”

So, there we have it, a not particularly bright leftie minister (who, one is left to assume, is Labour, since the BBC fail to name his party) has neatly demonstrated the old truism that goes:

Q. What’s a racist?

A. Anyone winning an argument with a leftie.

…and that then becomes the BBC’s focus on the whole story. Trebles all round in the newsroom.

Further down the story (timestamped 11:52, 20MAR05), in a classic piece of BBC News Online sloppy journalism, we find:

The Conservatives have already said they intend to review the Act and scrap it if it cannot be rewritten to their satisfaction.

They claim it is putting the interests of criminal “chancres” before hard-working members of the public.

While ‘chancre‘ might well be appropriate, I suspect ‘chancer’ is what was actually said – as has turned out to be the case, following a stealth edit between 3 and 3.30pm – a mere three hours after the story went online!

to Andrew Bowman’s earlier post about CBS reporting of the meeting between President Bush and the McCartney sisters, I received an email from Fausta Wertz of the Bad Hair Blog, pointing out this post.

Shamefully, this morning’s BBCA newscast, after reporting on the above, invited a former SF/IRA public relations man. His position was that the women were puppets of political opponents, nearly the same exact words Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator told the same BBC earlier this week. The BBC reporter had previously concluded his report by saying, “When it comes to Northern Ireland, there’s no longer much to celebrate.”

To the contrary. It’s time to celebrate the courage of six women.

To be fair to the BBC, it seems to me at least possible that their intention in running the Sinn Fein guy was to give him rope to hang himself with, metaphorically speaking. Hard to tell. Very hard to tell. The record of the BBC in regard to Northern Ireland is uneven. Good reporting has often been combined with determined efforts to shoehorn the conflict into a colonials-versus-natives template.

, the BBC ‘will cut 1,500 extra jobs’. This is one set of redundancies (sorry, ‘cuts’, as the News Online hacks call it) that’ll be given the full treatment whenever possible by BBC News staff. On with the reform!

This evening’s CBS Evening News with Dan Blather, sorry, Bob Schieffer, as repeated on Sky News in the UK, covered the meeting of Robert McCartney’s magnificent sisters and partner with George Bush at the White House today, as well as the exclusion of Gerry Adams (the well known member of the IRA’s seven-man ruling Army Council, along with Martin McGuinness). The refreshing thing was that, unlike the BBC, CBS told it straight: Robert McCartney was described as a “Northern Ireland Catholic killed by the IRA” and Gerry Adams was described as “the head of the IRA’s political wing”. Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political pretence, wasn’t mentioned.

While I’m off the topic of the BBC, I take my hat off to Private Johnson Beharry, age 25, of the 1st Battalion The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment and to all his brave colleagues. Private Beharry is the first winner of the Victoria Cross, the United Kingdom’s highest military honour, since the Falklands War in 1982, and the first to live to tell the tale since 1965. An inspiring example to us all.

Update: The Times, 21MAR05: I’ll soon be fit enough to serve again – perhaps in Afghanistan, says new VC

reporting from Beirut on yesterday’s record demonstration opposing the presence of Syrian forces in Lebanon. Her report was also shown on BBC News 24.

BBC News Online also covered the protest. In ‘Record’ protest held in Beirut, they reported:

Nearly one million people gathered for an opposition rally in Beirut, officials say – a month after the death of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The demonstration surpassed recent pro-Syrian rallies and is thought to be the biggest in Lebanese history.

The BBC’s Kim Ghattas in Beirut says the crowds turned the city centre into a sea of red, white and green – the colours of Lebanon’s national flag.

Now, here’s where it gets confusing – towards the end of Plett’s report she says:

With Syria on the move, the demonstrations have shifted focus – to forming the opposition into an organised political force and it’s challenging not only Syria, but a major player in Lebanon, the Islamic resistance movement, Hezbollah. Last week it [Hezbollah] demonstrated in support of Syria with similar numbers and a similar political purpose.

Did you spot the confusing bit? By all (other) accounts (e.g. The Times: “Beirut witnessed its biggest anti-Syrian rally in a month of street protests yesterday“), yesterday’s demonstration in Beirut was far and away the largest in the country’s history, and yet Plett baldly states that “Last week [Hezbollah] demonstrated in support of Syria with similar numbers”. Having played down the size of yesterday’s demonstration (without even touching on the apparently dubious composition of much of last week’s pro-Syria crowd), Plett then said “What’s important here is numbers…” – but not, it seems, if you’re a BBC reporter on a mission – or maybe it was just Babs’ vision being obscured by those tears again.

by Nicholas Vance over at Last Night’s BBC News about a Steven Sackur report on the first anniversary of the Madrid bombings. A taster:

Mr Sackur would do well to avoid making sweeping generalisations about Muslim opposition to terror, just as he would never dream of making sweeping generalisations about Muslim support for terror. Further, absolute statements opposing terrorism are often far less impressive once one understands how terms like “civilian” and “defensive struggle” may be defined in Islamic discourse.

Well worth reading it all.

– BBC News Online reports on the final appearance of Dan Rather as anchor of CBS Evening News, US news anchor Rather signs off, noting that:

…his retirement has been marred by criticism he received over a recent report questioning President George W Bush’s military service record.

And that’s all they say about the circumstances of Blather’s retirement – conveniently omitting to mention a) Rather’s use of plainly forged documents; b) Rather stubbornly sticking by the story, attempting to prop it up for many days (including the infamous “fake but accurate” claims) in the face of mounting evidence before finally bowing, but never quite fully admitting, to the inevitable truth; c) the context of the scandal during the US Presidential Elections; or d) the direct link between the scandal and Rather’s subsequent tarnished retirement.

BBC1’s lamentable Breakfast show didn’t do much better either, with Dermot Inconsequential describing Rather’s retirement as coming:

…after a report which mistakenly questioned President Bush’s military service.

They then showed a ‘package’ that mentioned that Rather’s retirement comes after a report “which mistakenly used forged documents”, but that in itself is an innaccurate glossing over of the truth, suggesting as it does that the whole Rathergate scandal amounted to a mere mistake (‘whoops, silly me!’) – if that’s all it was then it was a rather prolonged and painfully realised mistake.

For the history buffs among us, my estimable colleague Scott Campbell’s lengthy Faking it USA is “a real-time history of the week blogs changed the world (or, at least, tried to get an old hack the sack)”.

I came across an interesting blog by an anonymous magistrate, The Law West of Ealing Broadway. His comments on the BBC’s criminal tellytax prosecutions, A Job We Should Not Be Doing At All, are especially interesting. One of his commenters also links to this rather amusing Charter Renewal error page. While we’re slightly off-topic, those interested in the practical aspects of conscientious objection to the BBC, by means of civil disobedience, can find lots of information at Sunday Times’ journalist Jonathan Miller’s Abolish the TV Licence campaign.