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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

writes Damian Thompson of the Telegraph on the cash-stricken BBC’s latest use for tellytax cash: Project Director, Palestinian Territories ‘Support for the Palestinian Media Sector…’ …to increase the level of networking and dialogue between media professionals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As Damian notes, the BBC seems strangely reluctant to “network and dialogue” on the contents of the Balen Report, commissioned by the BBC into its Middle Eastern … Continue reading →

, even if you’re a religious bigot: It means Germans are still under pressure from their past and Jews receive special treatment because of that. Tauseef Zahid, London This fails the ‘Switch Around Sniff Test’ – switch around the groups named and see how it smells, though perhaps the BBC is right to show that there are people with views like Tauseef Zahid in London. Thank you to Biased BBC … Continue reading →

draws our attention to BBC accused of insulting war hero in The Times. The BBC’s own Radio Times has this to say: It purports to be a serious look at British war films, yet only British Film Forever would come up with the following throwaway remark about Reach for the Sky, the biopic of legless Second World War hero Douglas Bader: “Viewers of this film might’ve thought they were having … Continue reading →

Blair may have gone but the Blair Broadcasting Corporation is still spinning: The Scottish Executive is to be rebranded as the Scottish Government, it has been confirmed. No – it’s already been rebranded, as we can see from the photo and as we can read about in the very same article: A new Scottish government sign has been put in place outside its Victoria Quay building in Leith, replacing the … Continue reading →

, so the second most important Entertainment story, in their view, is the stunning revelation that Theron ‘wants US soldiers home’ – a masterpiece of investigative reporting. Quite coincidentally, she’s also plugging her latest film that just happens to be about an American soldier who goes missing after serving in Iraq. Meanwhile, just for balance, we have this tacked on to the end of the same article: Meanwhile, director Ken … Continue reading →