Did laugh this morning listening to Rachel Burden on 5Live (07:53) interviewing David Cameron.  Cameron was reeling off statistics about how Tory councils save you money and suggested any expert would back his figures up. Rachel Burden, presumably unequiped with the necessary facts to contest his claims, thought fast and resorted to the slipperiest of get outs I’ve heard in a long time: ‘You can ask … Continue reading →

‘Hacked Off’….Andrew Gilligan says that they have engineered a ‘coup…..one of perhaps the most important constitutional change yet of the 21st century.’ A ‘coup’….’constitutional change’?  Shouldn’t the BBC be asking who Hacked Off is, and is it fit and proper that they had such influence over such an important and consequential piece of politically contrived ‘legislation’? I don’t know what you think about Hacked Off’s successful campaign to create that … Continue reading →

  This is a bit off the usual beaten track for this blog, nothing to do with ‘bias’, but I think we can spare a little space for such an astonishing story…one that shows the BBC at its best treating what might be seen as a sensationalist Tabloid ‘freak’ story with sensitivity…I guess this is one of those stories that by exposing people to not just the condition but also … Continue reading →

  Another quandary for the BBC….they’ve had the problem of Thatcher’s success to cope with as mentioned in the last post, they’ve had the inconvenient fact that unemployment has been going down…’the great puzzle’….and now they are confronted with another bothersome fact…crime is going down. Mark Easton has decided this too is a riddle…though never when Labour was in power. The riddle of peacefulness All a bit of a conundrum … Continue reading →

  There is a new, at least to me, theme that it might be worth listening out for on the BBC, and elsewhere. There are no links  for this but I have heard this new theory several times now on the BBC. For over thirty years the BBC has attacked Mrs Thatcher’s policies and record,  blaming her for destroying manufacturing, the mining and steel industry, rising unemployment, social breakdown…and added … Continue reading →

  The revelation that the Gay Girl in Damascus is actually a stubbly bloke in Edinburgh has sent shockwaves through the media. That serious journalists fell for MacMaster’s fiction speaks to a profound crisis of objectivity in the modern media, and a preference for simplistic moralism over the tough task of reporting. The trend for transforming other people’s struggles into self-serving morality plays has led to an alarmingly casual attitude … Continue reading →

  Primo Levi: “Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will. There are many ways of reaching this point, and not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and … Continue reading →

OK folks, here we go with a new Open Thread. Enjoy…

Hi folks. I am currently on vacation in Australia but I just couldn’t let this one pass. Here is the considered view of Mark Mardell as regards our website Biased BBC, and as contained in an email shared with yours truly. What a disgusting website ! Talk about lies and bias! Just what irked Mark to abandon his famous impartiality…? Well, it seems that this post caused him to damn … Continue reading →

        Can anyone explain the difference in treatment that the BBC gave Tom Herndon whom they believe undermines the case for Austerity,  here on the Today programme (08:49):  Last week Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff paper that showed that growth slows dramatically if a country’s debt goes over 90% of its GDP was found to contain significant errors. Tom Herndon, a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, … Continue reading →