From Ed West's Telegraph blog yesterday:
Most London media types in their thirties are still sartorially influenced by hip-hop, which American sociologist James Howard Kunstler thinks is a conscious decision to dress like babies.Exhibit A - thirtysomething London media type Richard Bacon tweeting from New York yesterday:
The fractured relationship between Israel and the US was the second item on news headlines this morning, but by the next bulletin it had been demoted it to the tail end. Because of Hillary’s concessionary language it was downgraded from sensational “rift,” announced with relish,
( Paxman called it a ‘Crisis of Historic Proportions) to a grudging admission that both parties were making conciliatory noises.
Too bad for the Beeb, slightly less ammunition to chuck at Israel.
Today R4 promised an interview with Ron Proser ‘before eight o’clock’ but we had to make do with Jeremy Bowen speculating over the implications of settlement building, snubbing the US, and General Petreaus’s ominous warning that Israel’s provocative act is endangering US soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Not forgetting another insurmountable obstacle, the impossibility of expecting the Palestinians to lose face. The BBC accepts unquestioningly that this immovable impediment to resuming talks trumps all others. So the more demands the Palestinians make, the more impossible it becomes to resume talks.
The actual granting of planning permission for the new house-building is more complex than it appears. It has been made to look as though it violates previous agreements as a defiant and deliberately provocative move by Israel. But my understanding is that this isn’t the case.
“The key point is that there was actually nothing to apologise for, since it was explicitly agreed between America and Israel that, as a concession to kick-start peace negotiations, Israel would stop building in the West Bank although it would continue to build in east Jerusalem. Indeed, Hillary Clinton herself, no less, praised Israel for this agreement.”
“America has thus effectively unilaterally repudiated that agreement. In other words, this whole uproar has been artificially manufactured by America to produce a crisis with Israel – while refusing, astonishingly, to condemn the Palestinians at all for their refusal to enter peace talks, their honouring of one of their worst terrorists by naming a square after her, their violent attacks on the Temple Mount in recent days, and so on.”
This is still a huge story for the BBC - I refer to the Sahil Saeed kidnap narrative. It's not often you see SUCH publicity being blasted through the BBC and it was the major headline yesterday and is still right up there in the rankings. As Martin said yesterday, every day is a good day to bury bad news when Labour have to be saved.
Read more...So, let me get this right. On the day when official figures reveal that an astonishing 8.16 million of our fellow citzens are now 'economically inactive' and when that rate is now 21.5 per cent of the working age population - the highest since records first began in 1971, good old BBC decides that all is looking quite rosy! Rejoice - Gordon has saved the day! And just in case you may think that this is a one off, here in Northern Ireland the headline is "Slight rise in unemployed" disguising the fact that almost 28% of the working population is not working and the increase in unemployed sets a new record. But with Labour in power and a stooge Assembly here to preserve it doesn't do to let the details rise too far up the news story, does it? Can you imagine is a Conservative government was in power and these sort of scandalous figures came out the outcry the BBC would lead? This is Save Gordon - the last stand!
Read more...Further to an earlier post comparing the opening paragraphs of BBC articles about the Tea Party and Purple People movements, here are two more examples of tone-setting openers. Both come from recent pieces by the BBC's Madeleine Morris, one on the Tea Party convention in Nashville last month and the other on the first meetings of the new Coffee Party movement at the weekend.
For the Tea Party it's a Don LaFontaine horror movie trailer:
They came from as far away as Hawaii, Maine, and Texas - an overwhelmingly white, middle-aged army of angry conservatives, furious with government spending and influence, and ready to do whatever they can to stop it.The Coffee Party, on the other hand, gets a welcoming, jaunty little local radio ad:
Looking for a little bit of civil political discussion with your decaf latte? Well the newly formed Coffee Party movement may be for you.I note also from the two articles that the Coffee Party's grassroots cred is taken at face value ("A grassroots US political grouping") but that of the Tea Party is not ("The Tea Party movement describes itself as a grassroots movement of conservatives.") Those conservatives, they like to call themselves grassroots but can we really trust their claims?
As everyone here knows, the BBC refused to report on the Tea Party movement as it grew and grew until the reality of tens of thousands of people gathering across the US on April 15 forced them to acknowledge it. Then, Kevin Connolly grossly misrepresented and cast aspersions on the participants, hinting at dark forces and racist overtones behind the movement. He also insulted the participants with a sexual innuendo used for them only by the Left. Nearly every time Mark Mardell has deigned to mention the Tea Partiers, he makes sure to paint the participants as being exclusively white and middle class, as if that's an automatic disqualifier. It wasn't until Katty Kay's quite reasonable report in December that the BBC even bothered to really talk to the participants in depth. And even there the title of the piece and overall message is one of "boiling anger".Read more...
Now, there has been a new opposition movement starting up calling themselves the Coffee Party. It's hardly anything more than the Tea Party movement was in its first weeks, even before people really started calling them Tea Parties. Yet, the BBC not only reports it, but goes to meet them and get their thoughts.
Coffee Party brews up rival for Tea Party
The only similarity between this and the BBC's reporting on the Tea Parties is the gross misrepresentation of the participants. They promote the lies of the Left here too, only this time they claim that the participants are a real grass roots movement. Which is a lie. This thing is being run by Democrat Party hacks. Annabel Park, whom the BBC presents as part of a "silent majority" campaigned for The Obamessiah, and her own website is owned by a campaign group for Democrat Senator Jim Webb.
They're also all white and middle class. But the BBC strangely fails to offer any such description of the participants.
In contrast to any BBC report on Tea Parties, this one takes the claims of motivation by the participants at face value. No suggestion that they're extremist or angry or potentially violent, as Mardell likes to do with the Tea Partiers. Instead, the Coffee Party astroturf is portrayed as being lovely and wanting nothing more than for government to help people and for politicians to join hands in peace and harmony everlasting.
Don't trust the BBC On US issues.
I am sitting in a BBC Green Room. It’s school holidays, and I have no one to baby-sit Isabella, aged 6, so I bring her along to my interview. The programme presenter, well known for her liberal views, pops in: “Hullo – your daughter?” she smiles at Izzy. I nod, yes. The presenter looks at me: “State or private?”Read more...
“State or private”. Not, “how old?” or “how sweet” or any number of friendly comments a grown-up makes upon meeting a child who is feeling self-conscious in an unfamiliar place. State or private: that has become the ultimate litmus test for so-called liberals today. (So-called, because what is liberal about a group that mocks and ostracises anyone who does not share its values?)
I am sure that all decent people will be pleased to know that the little kidnapped British boy, Sahil Saeed, has been released from captivity from where he was being held prisoner in Pakistan.Is it just me or has the BBC coverage of this story - led by the fragrant Orla Guerin - been MASSIVELY over the top all day? Thoughts?
Read more...“The BBC is currently much more interested in the untimely granting of planning permission for a few houses for Jews. Joe Biden’s visit was just in time for that, but, dammit, just too late for the ceremonial dedication of a public square to Dalal Mughrabi.”
Forgive me for re-posting a snippet of my own copy. I’ve been away from a computer, and now I see that Robin Shepherd has written another cracking article about the BBC’s treatment of these events and the BBC’s attitude to Israel in general.
He cites five examples of certain stories the BBC has chosen to ignore or downplay. Had the BBC given them the prominence they actually merit, a different light would have been cast on the situation. One that would render the BBC’s entire narrative on Israel incoherent.
“What in fact is the BBC line against Israel, as evidenced by the thrust of its writing and reporting?”
Writers that understand the case for Israel and have a grasp of the I/P conflict invariably mention the BBC’ s slanted coverage. The biased reporting that has gone on for the last forty years has a helluva lot to answer for.
“That is why the Dalal Mughrabi story was ignored. That is why the BBC continues to censor all reference to Hamas’s anti-Semitism from their profile of the group on their website. That is why terrorists are referred to as “militants”. And what applies to the BBC applies in Europe more broadly.
By leaving the general population in a state of near total unawareness about the realities that Israel confronts in its dealings with the Palestinians, even neutral and unbiased observers are bound to come away with the impression that Israel is the guilty party in this conflict.
This is real censorship. And it works.”
Here’s another BBC warming fanatic. He’s James Painter, who for the past decade has been filing warming alarmist stories from his beat in his various roles as BBC World Service Spanish American editor and Miami bureau chief. He came to my my attention because he's led the field in reporting alleged climate change related drought problems in the Amazon, one of the areas where the IPCC report has been found to be discredited; Richard North reveals today why it's bunk.
He’s now moved on to become a lecturer and research fellow at the Reuters Institute in Oxford, but this is partly funded by the BBC and he is still a BBC Latin American analyst, filing stories on the impact of drought and the shrinking of glaciers. So Mr Painter remains a BBC man through and through. He is clearly of that BBC breed that believes climate change is a crusade. He recently gave the annual keynote lecture to the Society of Latin American Studies. It’s well worth a careful read because his speech is a case study of the extent to which bias has infected every aspect of BBC journalism in this area. He says:
To summarise then, climate change is happening, it’s happening faster than expected, and it will have a huge impact on Latin America. Of course there are all sorts of scientific uncertainties, but uncertainty should not be an excuse for lack of coverage in the media. In the same way that climate adaptation policies have to be incorporated into governments’ development strategies, global warming as an issue has to be mainstreamed into the media.
…there is plenty of evidence to suggest that by some key performance indicators - the rate of warming, the rate of melt in some parts of the world and the rise in GHG accumulation - real-world changes are at the upper bound or beyond the worst-case scenario presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) last year.
Here we are, frantically battling against the bias at the BBC. Year in, year out, we stab away at our keyboards, foam-flecked spittle flying, blood pressure on the point of spontaneous combustion.
Auntie, meanwhile, gaily carries on, undeterred, oblivious and undaunted.
Then, along comes Bob. Hell hath no fury like a live-aid organiser scorned. The BBC sits up and openth one eye.
So. Should we recruit a celeb?.
Anyone else have the misfortune to watch the Andrew Marr show this morning? It was the usual left-liberal fest. First up we had the new Green Peace President Kumi Naidoo on to tell us about the horrors of global warming. He took the opportunity to also express his support for law-breaking. Andrew just smiled at him. Then we had author Ian McEwan on to warn us about the horrors of...global warming. Get the message? After that, on sauntered Lord Adonis to warn us of the evils of Conservatism and the need to abolish the House of Lords. To finish, Ken Clarke was interviewed and he insisted that Conservatives needed to go after the liberal vote in order to win the election. Balanced and fair from start to finish as Andrew shines his light.
Next up, the execrable Nicky Campbell "Big Question." The first question on this Mothering Sunday was "whether we need fathers". The general consensus was that we didn't and that two lesbians provided the almost perfect model for bringing up children. There was also talk of "it takes a village" to bring up a child. Fathers were seen as an irrelevance to having a happy child. The feminised audience were a disgrace but par for the course. Next up, "Is it time for a maximum wage"? Hard left trade union Unite had a representative on to explain that it is an outrage that there is no ceiling on how people can be paid. He lied about the minimum wage being a great success (It hasn't) and now he demands a maximum wage. Pure Communist thinking and endorsed by Nicky Campbell.
Here are the opening paragraphs of two articles from the BBC today, both from stories about anti-government protest movements. One discusses the "egalitarian" Purple People movement in Italy while the other is about the "conservative" Tea Party movement in America.
"Think of a world of politics without spin doctors, teleprompters, stage-managed conferences, party headquarters, manifestos, cynicism or even leaders."
"When the bearded activist in wraparound sunglasses put his hand on my shoulder, I felt his anger."No prizes for guessing which is which. (Compare the pictures, too. One group is happily "festooned" in symbolism, the other has "declared war" "bitterly".) Read more...
From Autonomous Mind:
John Inverdale, the BBC presenter fronting the Scotland v England Six Nations Rugby today, said a few moments ago on BBC1 that Christine Bleakley successfully managed to water-ski ‘across the whole of the British Channel’ yesterday.Read more...
The first offering from Simon Schama's much-trailed ten-week stint on Radio 4's A Point of View is pretty much as expected - Labour spin from a Labour supporter. According to Schama the narrowing polls prove that "we" the electorate really want bad tempered tough guy Gordon Brown as our leader, in defiance of those nasty anti-Brown newspapers and their politically-motivated narrative about the PM as a bully. (Remind me - where was Andrew Rawnsley's book serialised? Oh yes, those renowned Tory rags The Observer and The Guardian.) In his attempt to convince us that Gordon's the man we desire Schama gives much of his essay over to an embarrassingly unfunny imagined phone call between Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell (whose name he misspells). Schama's services don't come cheap; if this dire effort is a foretaste of what's to come I think a BBC Trust inquiry could be in order. There's not much that BBC bosses enjoy more than throwing bundles of cash at their favourite historian in return for his reliably left-of-centre take on events, but even some of them must be concerned at the quality of this opening piece.
And what's with Schama referring to himself in the third person? He did in it one of the two oft-repeated trails for the programme (the other had him enthusing about Labour closing the gap in the polls), and he does it again in an interview for the Radio 4 blog. It's an affectation that's ridiculous in ego-inflated punch-drunk boxers, never mind fucking historians.
Update. Forgot to add, Schama does get one thing correct - suck up to your opponents and likely they'll spit in your eye. Last week, in one of those depressingly common celeb-obsessed announcements that all political parties love, the Tories promised to involve big-name historians in their proposed overhaul of the national curriculum. One of those historians? Simon Schama.
The BBC needs every penny of that £3.5bn it steals from us each year. I mean, it does such invaluable work.
The BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds on teaching staff how to use Facebook. The corporation is holding classes for large numbers of its 23,000 workforce, despite the fact that using the social networking site is second nature to millions. Hundreds of BBC workers have already signed up for the sessions, in which they learn how to set up accounts on Facebook, as well as Twitter and Bebo.
Caught BBC TV news this morning, rather in the same way as one catches a cold. There was an item on Samantha Cameron talking about her husband, David. I thought she came across fine and quite human. The BBC instantly went to get a woman's group who found the whole thing "patronising". It's clear they seek to undermine the Conservatives even on the most mundane level. Then there was a fawning interview with Nick Clegg, in which he was allowed to bash "the rich" and agree with the Orwellian Childre's Commissioner that we are criminalising children. BBC loves the liberal agenda and this translates into the toadying interview with Cleggy.
Read more...Two untypical BBC items to report.
The Culture Show BBC2 featured the Jewish Museum, soon to reopen after a £10 m refurbishment. Sharfraz Mazoor chatted to some well-known Jewish TV faces, and took us through various bits of British Jewish history. Which was nice.
Item two, Radicalization in Prison
BBC News 24 has been featuring Daniel Sandford’s report about this topic as 'news.' It even appeared slightly critical, and perhaps a tiny bit judgmental.
Which is – not nice, but comparatively frank for the Beeb.
Of course it’s not new, surely it’s been common knowledge for ages; and it goes without saying that they’re referring to ‘a distorted version of Islam,’ not the real version, which is peaceful.
There's an upcoming documentary on R5 Sunday by Donal MacIntyre.
Back to abnormal with something more typical.
Melanie Phillips reveals how the PA, led by so-called moderate Mahmoud Abbas, really feels about ‘the liberation of their own land.’ They still regard a mass murdering suicide bomber as a heroine. This might be hard to reconcile with their so-called desire for peace. But not to worry. Jeremy Bowen had this sorted in 2003:
“these people are seen by Palestinians as heroes of their would-be independence movement, and it's important for them to be mentioned [by Yasser Arafat] and it fulfils their ritualistic sloganising function”. [bless]
“Let's not forget that before Israeli independence Messrs Shamir and Begin were regarded by the British as terrorists. They went on - in the case of Begin - to win the Nobel Prize for Peace.”
The BBC is currently much more interested in the untimely granting of planning permission for a few houses for Jews. Joe Biden’s visit was just in time for that, but, dammit, just too late for the ceremonial dedication of a public square to Dalal Mughrabi. Which was a shame.
It seems that many posters and bloggers assume that it goes without saying that the BBC is terminally biased against Israel and in favour of Muslims. So much so that many of them do literally allow it to go without saying, unless something exceptional comes up and prompts them to mention it in passing. If people are so resigned to the BBC’s bias that they just sigh and roll their eyes at it, it makes B-BBC, including myself, look a bit futile and old hat. Which is annoying.
When Alan (I’m telling your story) Johnston was kidnapped in Gaza we never heard the end of it from the BBC.
But when whassisname was kidnapped, silence reigned.
Now Paul Martin’s been released, and Tom Gross offers an explanation.
Something to do with wanting to tell the truth.
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