Category Archives: Uncategorized

Anyone read this ecowacko drivel from Roger Harradin? Who would have thought that John Gummer would end lionised by the BBC? All he had to do was embrace his inner Greenie. If you read this lengthy report is takes the usual pro- Environmentalist line that Harradin predictably spouts.

First the headline;

A Belfast interface worker has called on the authorities to keep protesters away from interface flashpoints.

Gosh..let’s read a little more..

Twenty-nine police officers were injured at the weekend in rioting at east Belfast’s Short Strand interface. It followed a loyalist protest over the decision to restrict the flying of the union flag at Belfast City Hall. Joe O’Donnell, director of the Belfast Interface Project, said keeping rival groups apart is vital, or years of cross-community work will be destroyed.

Joe sounds a caring kinda guy.

Hang on a mo though, is this “interface worker” Joe O’Donnell the SAME guy who held senior office in Sinn Fein?  Yup. What else? Is this “interface worker” in any related to the same  Joe O’Donnell who when elected as a Sinn Fein Deputy Mayor took part in this tribute to IRA killers? So, a senior Republican who supported the IRA is presented as an innocuous “interface worker”.  Welcome to the working week. BBC Northern Ireland – never knowingly balanced.

I’ve noticed the BBC giving Baroness Grey Thompson a soapbox to attack Coalition moves to reform Disability benefit. She was on Today again this morning and allowed a free run. It seems that having a disability means never having to be challenged on your views on Welfare. This is part of a broader campaign by a group called We are Spartacus – a group given a VERY sympathetic hearing here by the BBC. The one group one never hears much from is the taxpayer expected to fund all of this.  I suppose when the BBC is energetically pushing the meme of heartless and savage Tory cuts, why worry about balance?

Morning all! Monday comes and so does a new Open Thread for you to detail the bias! Enjoy!

Interesting the things that Donnison tweets…and yet which don’t  get reported on the BBC main news.

Contrast the casualty figures here…and consider that we are told the Israel/Palestine conflict is the world’s most dangerous  apparently…never mind the 5 million dead in the Congo…or the vicious Mexican drug wars……why does the BBC spend so much time reporting on the goings on in Israel relative to the rest of the world?

Jon Donnison ?@JonDonnison
Since 2000 (incl several wars & an Intifada) around 8000 people died in Israel/Pal conflict. In US in 2009 alone, 31000 were killed by guns.

Jon Donnison ?@JonDonnison
UNHCR 60,000 dead since March 2011 in #Syria. Figures much higher than estimates by opposition groups.

What else has Donnison tweeted?

The Arab Organisation for Human Rights is based in London…but the BBC have ignored it…despite Donnison obviously acknowledging it here….

Jon Donnison ?@JonDonnison
Damning report from Arab Organisation for Human Rights on torture and arrests by #Palestinian Authority. http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=297746 … #Palestine

The BBC did report previous Gaza torture but ignore the second report.

What else of interest that might have been ignored by the main news?

Jon Donnison ?@JonDonnison
missed this over Christmas period. RT @hrw #Gaza: Palestinian Rockets Unlawfully Targeted Israeli Civilians http://bit.ly/109mzUz

Palestinian armed groups in Gaza violated the laws of war during the November 2012 fighting by launching hundreds of rockets toward population centers in Israel.

About 1,500 rockets were fired at Israel between November 14 and 21, the Israel Defense Forces reported. At least 800 struck Israel, including 60 that hit populated areas.
“Palestinian armed groups made clear in their statements that harming civilians was their aim,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “There is simply no legal justification for launching rockets at populated areas.”

Under international humanitarian law, or the laws of war, civilians and civilian structures may not be subject to deliberate attacks or attacks that do not discriminate between civilians and military targets. Anyone who commits serious laws-of-war violations intentionally or recklessly is responsible for war crimes.

Human Rights Watch research in Gaza found that armed groups repeatedly fired rockets from densely populated areas, near homes, businesses, and a hotel, unnecessarily placing civilians in the vicinity at grave risk from Israeli counter-fire.

Jon Donnison ?@JonDonnison
Damning report from Arab Organisation for Human Rights on torture and arrests by #Palestinian Authority. http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=297746 … #Palestine

Bbc….gaza tortuire
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19803902

Jon Donnison ?@JonDonnison
Haaretz: #Hamas defeated #IDF in social media virtual warfare during #Gaza conflict, Israeli study shows http://htz.li/TylOQR

The BBC are praised for training Palestinian journalists…from what I saw it would seem the Palestinians had little to learn from the BBC in terms of presenting their case…whereas the BBC journalists had rings run around them and were gulled into presenting Palestinian propaganda as news….though of course they perhaps were already primed mentally to accept whatever was given to them…..the tears of a Palestinian child in  photograph saying so much more than words ever can etc….

Politicians from across the Arab world congratulated BBC Arabic on reaching its 75th anniversary on Thursday and recognised the role it had played in their region.
They praised it as a ‘much-needed outlet’ for news and views that had been suppressed by some state media and for training a generation of Arab and Palestinian journalists in impartial newsgathering.

Mustafa Barghouthi, Palestinian democracy activist and Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, believed the BBC gave too much space to the Israeli voice, but he said its training of Arab and Palestinian journalists – some of whom had become ‘icons of the Arab media’ – had been among the BBC’s ‘most important achievements’.

But you’d be wrong.  Could it be that the first report below about the high cost of wind farms reveals Labour to have made an enormous, expensive error…maybe an ‘omnishambles’…and that the green agenda is going to cost everyone an absolute fortune with no guarantee that we will see any elecricity at the end of it all…..two of the BBC’s pet projects…the Labour Party and the Green agenda…..both failing miserably.

From a different perspective the BBC should be showing interest in this story…they chase down ‘tax avoiding’ companies with great relish…and yet those companies bring in thousands of jobs……just as do the companies that get government tax breaks in ‘enterprise zones’…or as in this case massive subsidies to persuade them to bring jobs here……what’s the difference between these green companies and Starbucks?  The BBC seems quite happy to accept the tax avoidance or subsidy of some companies but not others.

Here we are told of the high cost of wind but not by the BBC…..

Households will see their electricity bills soar to cover the £17 billion cost of bringing energy from offshore wind farms, MPs are expected to warn this week.

Labour announced in 2010 that to meet its target of producing 15 per cent of Britain’s energy from renewable sources within a decade, a huge drive to build wind farms around the coast was being launched.
As part of the project, bids were invited from companies for licences to lay cables and set up transmission routes from the offshore wind farms to the National Grid on the mainland.

But when the first six licences granted were examined in detail by the Committee last October, one MP described them as ‘a licence to print money’. For while consumers could see their bills rise by about seven per cent – about £33 a year on average – the transmission companies’ revenue is not only guaranteed but protected against inflation.

And how about this….yet another politican with vested interests in stoking the climate change ‘crisis’…..and even if Gummer gave up his corporate positions,  when he leaves the Committe on Climate Change he will without fail be back in the boardroom of those companies…benefitting from the legislation that he helped put in place.

The BBC have no interest in this it seems..nor in Tim Yeo.

Golden windfall of UK’s Green guru: Firm owned by ex-Tory Minister John Gummer connects up wind turbine power – and it paid him £1,750 PER HOUR
As Committee on Climate Change chief, Lord Deben issued a report last month claiming generating power from natural gas would in the long run prove much more expensive than wind farms – despite the multi-billion pound subsidies wind receives from consumers and taxpayers.
His committee advises the Government on energy levies and subsidies under the 2008 Climate Change Act. Thanks in part to its recommendations, the number of onshore wind farms like that at Dalswinton is set at least to double by 2020 – a potentially lucrative source of business.
Graham Stringer, Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, said the whole field of energy and environmental policy seemed to be dominated by individuals who had commercial interests – for example, Tim Yeo, the Select Committee chairman, is a director of several renewable energy firms.
‘They all seem to have major interests in renewables and declaring them is not enough,’ said Mr Stringer. ‘Some of these people, such as Lord Deben, have more influence over policy than Ministers: either they should not have those jobs, or they should resign from those interests.
‘If Lord Deben is found to have misled the Select Committee, he should be sacked or forced to resign.’

Sounds pretty serious and news worthy to me.

You may often come to the conclusion that BBC presenters are ignorant of the subjects on which they are interviewing  and have undue reliance on, or respect for, the interviewee ‘expert’ and subsequently fail to challenge him or her on  their statements…either out of lack of subject knowledge, too much deference or all too often a set of beliefs which are in line with those being stated and so the presenter is disinclined to question them.

It seems that at least one person in the BBC itself has noticed this propensity for sitting back and accepting any old guff as insightful and knowledgeable comment.

 
William Dalrymple, it should be noted, is an English writer gone ‘native’ in India..one who has an affinity for the Muslim world view…and is inclined to make excuses for the Muslim terrorist….and as he himself says he is…‘an anti-colonial Scot, who has written fiercely critically of the Raj for a quarter of a century. ‘  No wonder perhaps that the BBC asks for his opinion on events so frequently.

This is a letter from a BBC employee to Ariel Magazine concerning an interview with Dalrymple…
‘Historian William Dalrymple was interviewed on Saturday, December 29 on the India rape story.
Twice he made derogatory, inflammatory comments about ‘Jatts’ – the community of North-west region (Punjab) – leaving the listener with an impression it’s this community that is a problem (if not to blame).
At no time was he challenged. Presumably, none of the PM team had heard of Jatts, so had no idea to whom the historian was referring – hence took his ‘expert’ view.
Like me, the majority of Jatts are Sikhs, not Hindus. They’re a minority community in India, mostly farmers, regularly caricatured in Bollywood films as uncouth country bumpkins.
Mr Dalrymple played on this prejudice at what is a highly emotive time in India. We have yet to know more about the accused – who they are, where they come from – but for him to use his interview to demean the Jatts was irresponsible and dangerously misleading.
More importantly, it was also lazy journalism on the part of Saturday PM. It may have been a quiet period during the festive season, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get a guest who was ‘best fit’ for this sensitive story. Mr Dalrymple was not.
All the team needed to do was to contact the WS Hindi team (London or Delhi) who’d have given good guidance and even suggested the right guest – one or two of the correspondents specialise in women-related issues and guested on World News on the story. All that rich resource at PM’s fingertips – unused. What a waste.
Guess WS Language teams still have a job to register on the radar of ‘big’ national programmes, be they radio or TV. ‘One BBC’ still has a way to go.’
Jat Dhillon, senior producer, BBC Global India TV and World News

I see that the police trade union has been busy using the BBC  for a little scaremongering and shakedownism!

“The number of young police officers in England and Wales has fallen by nearly 50% in two years. There were 9,088 officers aged under 26 in 2009-10 but only 4,758 in 2011-12, figures obtained by the BBC show. In Cleveland, North Wales and Staffordshire the fall in the number of officers aged under 26 was more than 70% over the period. Overall police numbers hit a nine-year low in 2012, due to tighter budget constraints slowing recruitment.”

Oh no..those savage and cruel Coalition cuts. Vote Labour – the policeman’s friend. Looks like the BBC is keen to do all it can to prove how awful cuts are for these highly paid police officers

I was sorry to hear of Andrew Marr’s stroke and wish him a full and speedy recovery. I may not agree with his politics but I hope he gets well soon. However I did  tune in to his programme this morning to watch James Landale interviewing Labour leader Ed Miliband and what a difference it made! I felt Landale was to the point, dogged and took no nonsense. Miliband look rattled to me and this is how all politicians should be treated and it was SUCH a refreshing contrast to Marr’s pally-wally act with the likes of Miliband. Thoughts?