Isn't it remarkable that despite the extensive coverage the BBC affords those who squat on the northern French coast awaiting their first berth into land of hope and welfare, there is never any proper consideration as to WHY they cross vast land masses in order to get into the UK? The BBC meme is that the United Kingdom should welcome all who decide to come here and this permeates every item it broadcasts on this topic. That's why it hesitates to ask those at the receiving end of this multiculti tsunami how THEY feel about it. Like Climate change, the debate is over. The fact that our country has been turned into one vast fetid Welfare swamp by the current government is dismissed as not relevant to the narrative and instead all we get is a series of items sympathetic to the likes of those who infest "the jungle." Is that too harsh? No. It's an opinion and not one the BBC care to hear even they are mandated to reflect all views rather than the cosy liberal consensus produced day in day out. So, it's quite early in the morning, and I turned on the BBC Word Service just after 5am. Talk about bias! A charming female presenter, with a decidedly non-British accent, read out in the space of 15 minutes a litany of one-sided BBC liberal bias. We were told about the very important UN meeting on climate change and "fears" that it might not succeed (whose fears?); we were told about Obama trying to get Israel to accept making peace with Palestinians; we were told about how smoking bans have reduced heart attacks by up to almost 40% in the first two years. Great stuff and all being carefully broadcast globally by our dear friends in the BBC. It's not just the damage the BBC does in the UK that we should reflect upon but rather the global impact of this most biased of broadcasters. Jeremy Bowen has written another article summarising the conflict in the middle east in which he refers authoritatively to the fundamental differences between the two sides. Earlier this month the BBC's Director of Global News Richard Sambrookadmitted that the BBC should have given more coverage to the story about Obama's wacky green jobs czar Van Jones. • US in Afghanistan failure warning As a Biased BBC reader for at least five years, I know that its essence is variety. My second post as a new contributor, therefore, was going to be about something other than the wretched BBC obsession with climate change. However, that was before I heard the unspeakable John Prescott lecturing me on R4's World at One this lunchtime. He, a jumped-up, thuggish shop steward with no scientific training whatsoever, told me that he knew beyond doubt that the science of global warming is settled. His rant - as a bonus - also included a major attack on the US, the nasty industrialists of which he regards as the villains responsible for impending global catastrophe. "Sometimes you look at countries like China and you think, 'Wouldn't it be nice to be an autocracy in times like these?'" Matt Frei, Americana, September 20, 2009 I simply wanted to thank all those new posters who have joined the site in recent days. As you will have noticed, Robin Horbury, DB, David Riddick and the All Seeing Eye now join with Ed, Natalie, Sue, Laban and yours truly to bring you a rollicking good daily read. The cast has grown and it will help me get the time required to get the BBC book completed. Please join me in welcoming the new folks and I wish them all the very best in exposing BBC bias! Current BBC North America editor Mark Mardell on Obama: In his book on BBC bias, Robin Aitken states that the default BBC political mode is more Lib-Dem than Labour. It's a view that I largely agree with and it was on display this morning in the TODAY interview that took place with Nick Clegg by Sarah Montague. BBC bias is a curious beast, spotted this morning lurking in "the jungle" near Calais. Listen to the report here by Andrew Hosken. It is entirely from the perspective of those illegals trying to get into the UK, by hook or crook. Where is the perspective of the local French people, how do they feel? What about the people in the UK who will be forking out benefit to these immigrants? Why is Mr Hosken only presenting one perspective, namely the one most sympathetic to the inhabitants of the jungle? The President of cool, calm and thoughtful
LOVING THE ALIEN...
THIS IS THE WORLD CALLING
Bad Vibrations
>> MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2009
With signs of strain palpably peeping through the prose, he fulfills his obligation to present Israel’s case, as all impartial journalists must. To set the scene, he describes some tacky, militaristic fripperies tourists can purchase at Tel Aviv airport. Inflatable helium balloons shaped like helicopter gunships and decorated with missiles, and suchlike.
For pathos, he mentions the tragedy of the son of a celebrated dead Israeli hero who was killed recently in an air-training accident. He recounts some poignant observations from the funeral. A continuous thread; father and son laid to rest, early Zionist pioneers, “farmers with guns.” Thus, the case for Israel is concluded. But not quite. Suddenly, in a line all on its own there comes a startling insight.
“Many Israelis feel as if they are surrounded by enemies.”
No. Really? So that explains the military style toys! Many Israelis feel, because of “historical vibrations,” that the Arabs are unremittingly hostile. Is this an illusion? Or just some bad hysterical vibes. Jeremy Bowen says that worries over Iran push into perspective the Palestinian problem, which boils down to a squabble over a bit of stolen land.
Any fule kno - cos the telly tells us so - that The Jews Stole The Palestinians’ Land. Now Jeremy informs us, by way of innocently relaying ‘Palestinian beliefs,’ that what the Israelis are after is “Not just the soil and rock, but the water underneath it too.” So give it back immediately you damned Joos, so there can be peace.
There is one fundamental thing missing in Bowen’s analysis of the fundamental differences between the two sides.
Islamic Fundamentalism.
This curious blind spot is due to moral equivalence. It involves projecting our own pacifist and altruistic ideals onto others and ‘denying that a moral hierarchy can be assessed.’
Those who proudly adorn themselves with the Kaffeyeh and proclaim their solidarity with the Palestinians have had to confer upon them a sentimental chocolate-box fiction of wronged and suffering passivity. How else could they justify siding with a people whose faith embraces values diametrically opposed to their own liberal ones? And anyone who says so is a racist Islamophobe.
Forget Bowen’s wrong-headed interpretation, compare it with this eloquent analysis. Don’t ask the Jews to offer the Palestinians a bunch of helium love-hearts, or urge them to give ‘their land’ back; rock, soil and Israel.UNTOLD STORIES
Since then, another scandal embarrassing to the president - this time concerning the Obama-supporting community activist group ACORN - has registered little more than a tiny blip on the BBC news radar.
Today revelations have emerged about the National Endowment for the Arts, a publicly funded agency which is supposed to be politically independent. Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood has evidence that arts groups funded by the NEA have been co-opted into promoting Obama's political agenda. As with Van Jones and ACORN, if something similar had happened under Bush BBC journalists would have wet themselves with excitement. I don't expect headline coverage for these stories, just recognition that they are important in the context of American politics and that they help explain more fully the increasing disaffection with Obama's administration. The BBC's simplistic approach to the US political scene (old, nasty, befuddled, racist whites standing in the way of enlightened progress) reflects the prejudices of correspondents and promotes those prejudices to the world. I for one do not recognise the picture of the American right portrayed by the BBC and would like to see more balanced analysis.The BBC and Afghanistan - Every Little Helps..
• Italians mourn Afghanistan dead
• UK army 'rotten', Iraq probe told
Full marks for BBC News today – three of the top online headlines fitted neatly into one of the key items on the Corporation’s agenda which appears to be to do everything possible to build up the Taliban as the genuine voice of the Afghan people and to undermine the NATO mission in Afghanistan (and also to remind us of previous problems in Iraq). Remember a few weeks ago when Paxman was haranguing the Afghan ambassador to Britain about electoral “corruption” and a proposed law allowing an Afghan husband to starve his wife to death if she refuses to have sex with him. Paxo forgot to mention that corruption was rife under the rule of the Taliban, that the wife starving law was designed as a political titbit to attract Taliban supporters and that the Taliban are explicitly opposed to elections or, indeed, any form of democratic political structure.
Keep tuned in for many further “failure”, “quagmire”, “probe” headlines unless, of course, the McChrystal/ Petraeus surge starts to work then Afghanistan will disappear from the BBC headlines just as it Iraq did during the Bush surge in 2007/2008 (derided and disdained by every talking head until it started to work.....)PREZZA: MORE HOT AIR
Martha Kearney, his so-called interrogator, rolled over like an admiring puppy dog in the face of his onslaught, and was concerned only to ask him how bad the situation really was.
It goes without saying that Prescott was never much known for his intellect; this item showed exactly why. This was a former (or maybe current) trade unionist arguing for steps that will progressively de-industralise and impoverish not just Britain, but also much of the Western world; at the same time, his measures, on the government's own admission, would lead to increases in the cost of heating that will put millions of pensioners and our least well-off into fuel poverty.
On these topics, Kearney was strangely - eerily - silent.
As a lesson in pig-ignorant biased propaganda it was not bad (Goebbels would have approved - the science of racial superiority is 'settled' don't you know?), as an exercise in balanced journalism, it was simply appalling.CHINESE STIR FREI
Three weeks after Obama's election victory, Matt Frei was filled with the spirit of hope'n'change and was looking forward to the prospect of "America's brightest people" once again having the chance to put the country on the correct path:Thanks to the multiple distractions of Bill Clinton and his administration, some of America's brightest people were too busy ducking subpoenas or grappling with indecision at the top to perform their best work.
Things haven't really gone to plan since then, and it's all been the fault of those pesky "distractions" again. On this week's Americana Frei interviewed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in the hope of finding a solution. And boy, what a doozy they came up with:
The Obama administration is a chance for them to prove their critics wrong and to live up to past expectations.Matt Frei: Why all these distractions?
What Friedman "wrote the other day" received this response from Mark Steyn:
Thomas Friedman: There's a lot of reasons. One, the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War made us really unserious because we lost our main competitor. Where would the New York Times be without the Wall St Journal? Everybody needs a competitor, right? All right, we lost ours so we got a little fat, dumb and lazy, and then we had money and politics out the wazoo. We now have a 24 hour news cycle. We have a blogosphere - I can start a rumour about you Matt that will tie you up for the rest of the week, OK, and by the time you catch it it will be half way to New Zealand. And we have a permanent presidential campaign. All of those have created an echo chamber where any bozo can come along and distract even the president.
Matt Frei: Sometimes you look at countries like China and you think, 'Wouldn't it be nice to be an autocracy in times like these?'
Thomas Friedman: Well you know I wrote the other day that you know there's only one thing worse really than one party autocracy and that’s one party democracy - what we have right now, where only one party is playing.The New York Times's Thomas Friedman finally gets to where he's been wanting to go all these years. Everything would be so much better if we could just submit to the benign rule of an enlightened elite.
Jonah Goldberg expanded that thought:If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman's intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are "drawbacks" to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet.
Still, it's a small price to pay for the autocratic rule of an enlightened elite, and far better than letting all those bozos and their distractions frustrate the wishes of intellectual superiors such as Friedman and Frei.B-BBC - the new team!
RUDE REMINDER
His conclusion was that "the easiest way of getting 15 minutes of fame is to be rude".
Previous BBC North America editor Justin Webb on himself:"I'm rude about quite a lot of people, I was very rude about Sarah Palin which upset some people."
SOAK THE RICH...
IN THE JUNGLE
Mardell OBNs Obama
If there was a message, it was about tone. Opinion polls seem to show that whatever people think of his policies, people like the president. His calm and thoughtful manner, the impression that he will look at a picture in the round, rather than make a knee-jerk judgement, seems to go down well. This interview showed him as almost professorial, like a distinguished figure from a think-tank, compared with the Obama who roused the troops when he talked to the unions, or indeed when he addressed Congress. The message is that Obama is still keeping his cool, and sticking to long-term goals.
Mardell has only been BBC blogging for a few weeks but it is quite clear that he is attempting to out Dionne E J Dionne himself in reaching for that coveted place in Private Eye’s OBN spot. The gospel according to Mardell is crystal clear. Here is a cool,calm, reasonable guy just trying to do his best to keep his fellow Americans healthy by setting up a government controlled insurance option and a handful of wingnuts were dominating the media and drowning out reasonable debateIndeed, in the four or five speeches I heard on the radio, details of tax rises and healthcare were hardly mentioned: the theme was "recapturing America" from "tyranny" and regaining "freedom".
Mardell’s answer? Obama needs to “rise above” the 24 hour news cycle, focus on strategy and leave his “foot soldiers” (orchestrated, one assumes, by David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel) to deal with things at the tactical level.
The implication here is that the US media (TV and print) is allied with Obama’s opponents in ferociously undermining the administration’s healthcare proposals....if only! The big guns of the US media (with the exception of Murdoch’s Fox channel and his papers) are as dominated by the left as the BBC over here. The Tea Party healthcare protests stemmed from a similar spontaneous grassroots movement opposing the magnitude huge burden of debt being placed on future generations by the Obama/Pelosi/Reid stimulus. The Tea Parties had been happening for months, well reported in the blogosphere but generally ignored by the US media (and, naturally, the BBC)
Whilst painting the opponents of Obamacare as a noisy, angry minority Mardell conveniently forgets the fact that most polls are currently reporting the USA as either evenly divided or with a slight majority against the proposals..
But then the US networks and the Beeb, so meticulous in reporting anti Bush demos, Hurricane disasters and corrupt Republican politicians, suddenly developed tunnel vision once the Democrats took over. Hence little or nothing was reported about the background of Obama’s prospective “Green Czar” Van Jones until the blogosphere pushed it forward. To be fair to Mardell it was bubbling just before he arrived (ignored by Justin Webb, of course, until Jones resigned) but nothing about the current ACORN scandal from either Mardell or, apparently, BBC News.
No doubt about it – apparatchnik Mardell toeing the BBC line in the USA as diligently as he did in Europe....
Tuesday 22 September 2009
So, I'm driving home from the airport at the end of a long day and I turn on the radio to relax. Mistake. I happened upon the first in a new series of File on Four. It was about the terrorist threat we face here in the UK. It was about the extremists that seek to cause mass slaughter. It was about....the "extreme right".
Intrepid BBC reporter Alan Urry sets it all up by reminding us of those dreadful attacks......on mosques. Then there is the nightmarish English Defence League and their endless provocations. Throw in some Hitler memorabilia, white supremacists and lots of "right-wing" references and the groupthink meme is reinforced.
Now I believe that ALL forms of terrorism need to be tackled in the most vigorous way possible but I find the suggestion in this programme that "extreme right" terrorists constitute the single greatest menace to the UK at this time surreal, Did I imagine 7/7?
Cleggy's big idea is...gasp surprise..to soak the rich, or as he puts it, to spread "fairness". (Wealth redistribution is so passe se days!) This reduces down to forcing those who live in properties valued at more than £1m to pay an extra annual tax -the proceeds of which would be spread to increase "fairness."Montague chose NOT to pursue the obvious question as in whilst the property may be valued at £1m+ there is no direct link to suggest that those living in it have the sort of disposable income that can stand an extra tax hike. In many cases, elderly people live in properties bought many decades ago that have considerably appreciated in value but their wealth is on paper unless they sell their homes. So where is all this cash coming from, Cleggy? Doesn't matter - Saint Vince Cable endorses this planned assault on the assets of the prudent. Instead of challenging Clegg on the substance of this latest Lib-Dem fantasy, Montague decided to ask him just how "savage" his cuts would be! This set up Clegg to declare that he would indeed by savage when it came to removing our nuclear defences by axing Trident.
The Lib-Dems get the easiest of rides from the BBC because the BBC is broadly sympathetic to the policies of Clegg and co. I see it as part of the ratchet mechanism by which the UK body politic shifts ever further left. The Lib-Dem's adopt the most demented leftist policies and the BBC generally approves of these. Labour then competes by moving onto similar ground which then in turn pressurises the Conservatives to make at least some token movement in the same direction.
Clegg has no chance of ever getting into power and the BBC knows that. But by treating Lib-Dem policies in such a sympathetic manner, the BBC influences the national political debate and moves it in the direction required. That's part of the menace of the bias. It's not just visceral, it's dangerous.
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