Morning all. Time to start the week with a brand new Open Thread. I bet you are all looking forward to “Woman’s Hour” on BBC Radio 4 this week. Doreen Lawrence will be hosting one such episode and it’s inspiring to see the BBC create the space for her. You rarely see her on the BBC…..

    The BBC once reported on Wikipedia edits by interested parties….and …em…failed to mention its own activities in that area. Hence this mea culpa: Words like glass, house and stones spring to mind, because we weren’t exactly sharp about the other obvious question that springs to mind… What about people inside the BBC? This was an irritating oversight. Some of you have written to complain, others have given the … Continue reading →

  The BBC have put this on their frontpage about a local council candidate for UKIP: UKIP candidate William Henwood defends Lenny Henry tweet “I think if black people come to this country and don’t like mixing with white people why are they here? If he (Henry) wants a lot of blacks around go and live in a black country.”   Along with this: UKIP candidate’s Lenny Henry tweets spark … Continue reading →

  Syria: the children killed by Assad’s chlorine gas bombs Syrian civilians die slow, painful death from chemical weapons used in violation of convention regime signed in September It took much of the afternoon for Mahmud Hashash to die, writhing, gasping for breath and spluttering blood as the chlorine gas corrupted his six-year-old lungs. The doctors did all they could to save him. Using a nebuliser and oxygen pump they … Continue reading →

  Nothing has changed….UKIP during the 2009 Euro elections was being smeared as racist:   Dear Mr. Thomas, Complaint UKIP broadcast on the Today programme at 7.32am on May 30, 2009 The interview, by the standards of others broadcast during the European Parliamentary elections, as unfairly and relentlessly negative towards the party and gave undue prominence to claims that its policies were racist. John Humphrys suggested that they would “scrap … Continue reading →

  Mark Bolland ran the Press Complaints Commission from 1992 to 1996.  He has some damning views on Leveson, that celebrity led witch hunt backed by the BBC: Politicians destroyed the PCC to take revenge on the media, says the man who helped to create it Today we are all supposed to be “Leveson compliant”. I am not sure why, when large chunks of what The Economist rightly condemned as … Continue reading →

    It is remarkable that a document, Meeting the needs of Muslim pupils in state schools (save to open), written by someone now central to the claims about a ‘Muslim Trojan Horse’ plot to Islamise schools is now ignored by the BBC….the document proves that this person had the intent to Islamise schools….and yet the BBC instead prefers to suggest another document professing the same Islamising agenda is fake … Continue reading →

  Just a reminder of what a small world it is, a very incestuous world where Politics and the Media mix and are increasingly hard to tell apart.   Sue Inglish is the BBC’s  Head of Political Programmes, Analysis and Research Sue Inglish has managerial and editorial responsibility for the BBC’s political programmes, and news analysis and research. She is responsible for 200 staff producing political news and programmes on … Continue reading →

    This is from BBC journo Nick Jones who is keen to see the licence fee retained and ‘to explore the factors that led executives to detach themselves from the ethos of a public service financed by a compulsory licence fee,‘ but has some other interesting thoughts on the BBC:   How did the BBC end up being controlled by so many selfish and incompetent executives? For me the … Continue reading →

    A perspective on Israeli military action that you won’t hear from Al Beeb (From Tom Gross): Video dispatch 21: Al-Jazeera: Why can’t Arab armies be more humane like Israel’s? “Why don’t they learn from the Israeli army which tries, through great efforts, to avoid shelling areas populated by civilians in Lebanon and Palestine? I attach a remarkable new video from Al-Jazeera (the Arabic version of al-Jazeera) in which … Continue reading →