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Stephen Pollard in the Evening Standard and Fiona Govan and Chris Hastings in the Telegraph have both written on the Kilroy-Silk affair.

Apologies for repeating myself, but I say again: the BBC’s offence in withdrawing ‘Kilroy’ was not that it exceeded its rights but that it was demonstrably biased and hypocritical given its tolerance of Paulin and many other commentators who have made less murderous but still vituperative blanket condemnations of Israel, the US or Britain.

The average viewer of ‘Kilroy’ doesn’t give a stuff about the issues that engage the average visitor to this blog, but does get annoyed when his or her favourite show is canned at the PC establishment’s say-so. Kilroy will become a hero to many. He’s not quite the hero I would have nominated for popular veneration, but it ain’t me that chooses. That the BBC is biased has been made clear to a previously apolitical segment of its audience.

UPDATE: A couple of Kilroy-related posts from Public Interest round-up this roundup nicely. To start with he lambasts the Guardian for claiming that Paulin’s case is different from Kilroy’s because, like, Paulin is a proper critic but Kilroy is merely a talkshow host.

Making up the rules as they go along, ain’t it? The Guardian’s own Aaro hosted a radio show on Radio 2 last week – called David Aaronovitch, no less – John Humphreys and Libby Purves of the Sunday Times and the Times regularly host shows on Radio 4, and they all opinionate like it’s going out of fashion. Come on Guardian! You can do better than that.

There’s more. You know I said how as the ‘Kilroy’ fans and our own wonderful selves were quite separate groups? Er, actually, not quite.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mark Steyn also comments. That Paulin meme gets around, doesn’t it?

for Beebwatcher of the week, then Scott Burgess would have won it on the basis of recent postings. He put together a pretty much purple patch of posts, giving the Beeb (and us) the special honour of sharing in his Daily Ablutions. So go and wash your ears out with this excellent addition to the Blogosphere, if you haven’t already followed Glenn Reynold’s recent tip that is. There’s plenty about the Kilroy-Silk affair, and a few nice lines on Andrew ‘ninety percent right’ Gilligan. This is my favourite post, where you will find out how the BBC [Licensers] are making unusual use of condoms, among other things. I look forward to other intimate ablutionary revelations about the Beeb from Scott in the future.

Tonight’s hourly Radio 4 news summaries are carrying a story from Iran about how a few hundred political candidates have been stopped from electoral participation by Iran’s Guardian Council. This Guardian Council is a part of the theocratic political system in Iran.

Fair enough. Except that the newsreader adds

“…the Guardian Council is dominated by right-wingers”.

So the Guardian Council believe in individual liberty and responsibility, free markets, and a smaller state? Somehow I don’t think so. I would advise the BBC that applying the terms left-wing and right-wing to the complex political system in Iran is misleading.

While I’m on this subject, BBC2 has recently run a tedious series starring arch-lefty Stephen Fry called ‘Absolute Power’. One of the episodes featured another bunch of ‘right-wingers’ – a group of Countryside Alliance types who wanted to start their own political party.

Within two seconds of them appearing on screen, I turned to my wife & said ‘they’ll either be Nazis or repressed homosexuals – or both’. Sure enough, it transpires they really are Nazis, complete with swastikas.

Thanks BBC as always for your sensitive portrayal of non-left views.

.

As you probably know, Robert Kilroy-Silk’s talk show has been taken off the air following outrage against an anti-Arab article he wrote for the Sunday Express.

You can see what I think about his article in this Samizdata post here. You can see more about the case in this BBC article here including a quote from Perry de Havilland, of Samizdata and Libertarian Alliance fame.

The CRE threatening the police to prosecute Mr Kilroy-Silk is an outrageous assault on his free speech rights. However the BBC cancelling his show is not a violation of his free speech. The BBC are not obliged to buy anyone’s show, particularly if they think it will bring them into disrepute.

That said, the BBC are obliged by charter to be even handed. So why, as an anonymous commenter to this blog asked, is Tom Paulin still regularly appearing? Paulin specifically said that Jewish settlers should be shot. If Robert Kilroy-Silk’s comments were incitement to racial hatred, Paulin’s were incitement to murder.

UPDATE: Fiat iustitia, ruat caelum… I have criticised the BBC before now for not including both sides of the story in the external links offered with their reports. I must do so now, painful though it be. The BBC only includes two links to the report linked to above, one to the Sunday Express and one to the Libertarian Alliance (of which I have the honour to be a member)… would it have been so hard to also include one to F.A.I.R. or the Muslim Council of Britain, just for balance?

, LGF are running a Robert Fisk Idiotarian of the Year Award, and the good news is that the BBC have made the cut for nominations! The bad news is that they are trailing rather shamefully in the voting. There is still time though, and if you feel like it you can go along and vote here if you haven’t already. Thanks to ‘Opinions are like’ for pointing this out. I also like this little poem I found at LGF by Humbert Wolfe which applies almost as neatly to the BBC as to Robert Fisk:

You cannot hope

to bribe or twist,

Thank God! the British journalist.

But, seeing what

the man will do

unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Update. Tim Blair is rounding up the Kilroy-Silk affair which Natalie discusses above- giving yet more reasons to vote for the Beeb at LGF, where time is running out and, although gaining ground, we haven’t yet put the BBC in any kind of respectable finishing place.

regarding this piece about Gadaffi and WMD. This is what he said:

“This biased opinion piece is just that – biased opinion. The obvious interpretation that Libya acted in response to the Iraq example

rather than sanctions which have long been in place is ignored.

Do publish biased opinion if you think that’s your role (I don’t) but do not present it as disinterested analysis. Your social and political biases have lost the BBC its reputation which was not rightly yours to throw away. This is copied to the “biased BBC” blog which I trust you read.”

this website has an idea for a way to legally make it uneconomic for the TV licence to continue.

Meanwhile Biased-BBC blogger Toby Blyth has his own new blog at Bilious Young Fogey.

Specialist pharmacist Anthony Cox has a disturbing article on his site about how the BBC has fed the public hysteria and confusion over MMR, and what the consequences may be for Britain’s population. It’s one thing to be miffed about the BBC wasting licence fee money on extravagant trips for executives and reporting a stridently left-wing agenda, and it’s yet another to realise that — as a licence payer — your money is financing such dangerous misinformation. I have also written elsewhere on what this case, and the Today programme debacle with Andrew Gilligan’s inaccurate reporting on the Iraq dossier, tells us about what really motivates the BBC — and the deadly outcome it all may have.

Comparing and contrasting the BBC’s rotten behaviour on this issue with their rotten behaviour on the issue of WMDs — and the consequence of death in the latter, with the possible consequence of death in the former– brings to mind specks and planks. In both cases, the BBC’s employees have acted recklessly and purely out of self-interest. In both cases, they claim to have the public interest at heart, but in the case of MMR they have actually misled the public and caused greater confusion. I would say that also applies to the BBC’s behaviour in the case of WMDs and Dr David Kelly, and we will hear from Lord Hutton on that soon enough, but at the very least the BBC has itself admitted to getting things very wrong (while assuring those in its employ who got it wrong that their jobs are safe), and a good man died in the course of their follies.

None of this would be forgivable even if the British public wasn’t forced to finance it, but it’s made that bit more distasteful by the fact that we are.

, and a good point to make, about that Andrew Marr report on TB’s trip to Basra. Maybe, he suggests, the soldiers were huffy with Blair because of things like this– which might be filed under that broad BBBC section ‘news the BBC couldn’t care much less about broadcasting’ (and yes, I know army men don’t always love a sailor, but I’d imagine they wouldn’t be impressed, for various reasons).

Whenever I write for this site it’s almost invariably to point out BBC stupidity rather than straightforward bias. And here I am doing it again, pointing out this article by Andy Hamilton, about a series of his being dropped for poor viewing figures. Seeing as one of the justifications for the the existence of BBC1 is that it is supposed to be ‘above all that’, and that Andy Hamilton is in the top five most significant comedy writers working in British television right now, I think it more than amusing that he writes so savagely about our favourite broadcaster.