Germany foils ‘massive’ bomb plot reports BBC Views Online

, informing us that: Germany, which has soldiers in Afghanistan but did not send troops to Iraq, has been largely spared terrorist attacks. Cause and effect you see. Apart from all the Islamist terror attacks and atrocities in countries that didn’t send troops to Iraq or Afghanistan… Thank you to Biased BBC reader champagne bottles for the link. Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

BBC Views Online profiles Bob Crow: worker’s friend?

, referring throughout to his ‘militancy’. Does this mean that, in common with many Londoners, the BBC regards Mr. Crow as some kind of terrorist? Or is it just further evidence of the BBC’s egregiousness in referring to real terrorists as ‘militants’? Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

What a relief!

The BBC has cancelled its planned Climate Relief day. Messrs Horrocks and Barron weighed in with criticism of the event and it’s been shelved. Barron (Newsnight Editor) came up with the very quotable, almost Paxmanesque, “It is absolutely not the BBC’s job to save the planet”. Well, that’s the spin, anyway. My guess is the BBC feel that because the science is not at all that settled, they don’t want … Continue reading

Open thread – for comments of general Biased BBC interest:

Please use this thread for BBC-related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts. Click through to read and contribute comments on this … Continue reading

Peter Barron, editor of Newsnight, has responded

to the question I asked yesterday (see post below) as follows: The piece you are referring to was made by the independent film-maker Jamie Campbell. The BBC has said it was not good practice to reorder the sequences, but that the overall sense of the piece was not significantly changed. I am convinced there was no intention to deceive the viewer and that the ordering of the two sequences was … Continue reading

Following the hoo-ha over Stephanie Flanders interview

of David Cameron (see posts below) she has written Bribery and wedding bells in the Sunday Times, explaining, among other things: I asked Cameron whether he had met anyone who would get married for £20 a week, because that’s the question everyone asked themselves when Iain Duncan Smith’s social justice policy group unveiled its married couple’s tax break a few months ago. …which is certainly not how it came across … Continue reading

Open thread – for comments of general Biased BBC interest:

Please use this thread for BBC-related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts. Click through to read and contribute comments on this … Continue reading

England, Marr’s England

I think it’s fair to say that Alfie at Waking Hereward was not impressed with the opening of Scot Andrew Marr’s Radio Four series Unmasking The English. (I thought it pretty poor stuff as well. Eighty years ago another Scottish media type wrote about the English rather more successfully. Archibald Gordon Macdonell found fame with his first novel, the autobiographical England, Their England. It’s still in print. The visit to … Continue reading

On Thursday, Newsnight Editor Peter Barron

asked when does artifice become deception about the tricks, sorry, techniques, used in making TV programmes, in advance of a segment on Thursday’s Newsnight. On Friday, Peter reported back that Noddy’s not dead at Newsnight, and neither is the much more dubious ‘reverse question’, where questions are re-recorded after an interview, but of course with no guarantee that the questions haven’t been changed, revised or differently emphasised from those in … Continue reading

Taleban free all Korean hostages

tootled BBC Views Online last week, except of course the headline is not quite right. Not all of the hostages were freed, unless you count the two poor souls who were murdered and dumped in ditches as having been ‘freed’ too. Those who clicked on the errant headline did find out, in paragraphs four and five, that: The Taleban seized the group of 23 last month as they travelled by … Continue reading