The BBC will go to any lengths to say it is not biased, as Mark Thompson has graphically shown this week with his faux confession that the corporation was guilty of bias in the past but not now. The Leviathan wriggles, it bends, it contorts, it grimaces in pursuit of that central tenet. We on this site know that such defensiveness is a load of hogwash, but it's nevertheless very rare for anyone who has held a senior position to break ranks and come clean on the record. The BBC Thompson unbiased mindset is made up of a complete set of nanny-state values that is based, in turn, on fantasy views of science and human development. One of the central axioms is that life in nature and the past was idyllic. People grew their own food, didn't produce any carbon dioixide, didn't burn nasty fossil fuels and lived in constant orgasmic stasis (or whatever tendy word is in vogue). Anyone who advocates such ideas is instantly elevated to sainthood, or at the very least, front page status on the BBC website. So it is today for this piece of moonshine, carefully crafted by BBC health zealot Jane Elliot. She talks admiringly of a group of behaviour police in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, who are touring schools telling long-suffering youngsters that if they eat like peasants (peasants, note, not the villanous landowners because they crammed themselves with expensive nasties) did in medieval times, they will not get fat and not taint their bodies with vile salt or - shock, horror - food from abroad. Craig in the comments has already noted how Mark Mardell has posted a BBC online diary entry which is biased against Sarah Palin. First of all we had the headlines about Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s pledge to kill more Israelis, but they used the phrase “Israeli targets” which subtly lends legitimacy to their murderous intentions. Interesting to read Andrew Gilligan's critiques of the BBC's love-in with radical Islam. 
RED LETTER DAY!
>> SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 05, 2010
September 5 is therefore a red letter day, because former Today editor Rod Liddle, writing in the Sunday Times (frustratingly, I can't link to the article because of the site paywall),lays bare the pressures he was under in the early noughties. He tells how every week, he was summoned to the office of his boss to be lectured on the need for impartiality on topics such as the US election - by a man who had posters on his wall supporting the Democrats. He also relates a story about something I know something about, having been to some extent involved.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch - back in 2001, a Conservative peer, now of course, soon-to-be ex-leader of UKIP - commissioned a series of independent reports into the BBC's coverage of the EU. This work, stretching back to 1999, is very detailed, systematic analysis of a range of BBC programmes, and has found - as readers of this site will know - that the BBC's coverage of the EU seriously under-represents the eurosceptic perspective (to put it mildly).
Mr Liddle recounts how he was persuaded that what the reports said had substance, and he raised this at his weekly meeting with his Democrat-supporting boss. The response? He was told that Lord Pearson and "these people" (behind the report) were "mad".
Adds Mr Liddle: "Ah, that's the BBC. Desperate to be fair, according to its charter, but never truly fair. its editorial staff are convinced that they are not remotely biased, just rational and civil and decent, and that those who oppose their congenial, educated, middle-class poiint of view are not merely right-wing, but deranged. They will not for a second accept that they are in fact biased at all..."
What Mr Liddle does not say is that when he was editor of Today, he was just as guilty of stonewalling complaints as his colleagues. He met Lord Pearson to discuss the issues raised by the reports about the EU back in 2001. Then, exactly like his boss, he resolutely defended his programme's output and accused Lord Pearson in print of trying to define bias by stopwatch. This was a classic BBC diversionary riposte that conveniently glossed over that the reports were far more than measurement of the time devoted to the eurosceptic perspective. But at least our Roger has at last seen the light.
Peter Hitchens also looks today at BBC bias in the wake of Mark Thompson's remarks this week. Relevant to what Rod Liddle says, he notes the recent admission by BBC reporter Jonathan Charles about the blind new-era excitement he and his colleagues felt when the euro was launched back in 1999. Lord Pearson also complained about that, and he backed it up with solid analysis of how biased the coverage had been. Like everything else, the document was pooh-poohed by BBC top brass as xenophobic fanatasy.HORRIBLE HISTORY...
That will be the medieval diet that meant in reality that there was a life expectancy of around 30-35, diseases were rampant and there was a dependence on local food that meant every period of bad weather or low rainfall spelled starvation for our ancestors. Not to mention the back-breaking labour involved. There's an excellent critique of the food problems of the past here; the writer also brilliantly shows how the greenie obsession with localism and organic food is dangerous, self-indulgent nonsense. For the thought police of Mr Thompson's unbiased BBC, of course, the brilliant analysis of Mr Budiansky is heresy against the green creed and will never see the light of day.Plain Mardelled
>> SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 04, 2010
I am having a go at analysing why it's so unfair, because it has some elements of straight reporting combined with deeply suggestive comments which slant the whole thing. No one could accuse Mardell of being stupid, so let's look at what he does. It's the kind of sly character assassination and snide socio-political bias which telly taxpayers pay for, after all. Let's look at what they get for their money...RE-ASSURANCE REQUIRED
>> FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 03, 2010
Labour called for ''clarity and reassurance'' from the BBC after the director general of the corporation was photographed going into a meeting in Downing Street to apparently discuss coverage of government spending cuts.
BBC V Israel
Of course the real threat is to Israeli civilians, but the BBC would rather we didn’t realise this.
Then they announced that right-wing Israelis were angry with the prime minister for stating that Mahmoud Abbas was a partner for peace.
Was that by way of some sort of crazy counterbalance? Pitting proposed genocide against a run of the mill thumbs down?
The next bulletin promoted the angry Israeli story to the top spot; death threats relegated to second place. I said this somewhere else. They’re spending some of the anti-Israel venom saved up and banked from the even-handed Panorama.
Jeremy Bowen was still on about the grafted on nonsense. He thinks the conflict is over land, or stolen land, “occupied land, Palestinian land, holy land” as yesterday’s Hamas expert Beverley Milton-Edwards would have us believe.
They have managed to filter out the fundamentally antisemitic nature of the religion of peace which has been driving the Islamic resistance to Israel’s existence since before it existed.
Jeremy Bowen thinks it’s something that’s only just been “grafted on”.
They guy they interviewed this morning, he was from the electronic intefada. Sarah Montague said so in her introduction. What she didn’t say was what the electronic intefada is. It’s an intefada. Uprising. (against the existence of Israel)
Some people may not realise that. Others may know what it is, but think it’s a perfectly respectable outfit, seeing that the BBC turns to it for advice.
So it’s official. It’s not only the Israel/Palestine conflict but also the Israel/BBC conflict.BBC'S LOVE OF ISLAM
'Why does the BBC air Islamist propaganda?'
Andrew Gilligan
13 March 2010
The Islamic Forum of Europe is decried by most Muslims as vicious and unrepresentative, says Andrew Gilligan. So why did Any Questions air its views?
'The BBC's propaganda for fundamentalist Islam '
One of the main conclusions I drew from my Telegraph/Channel 4 Dispatches investigation of the East London Mosque was quite how gullible some parts of the white establishment were in the face of a persuasive PR machine telling them what they wanted to hear.
Sunday, 5 September 2010
Cue four years of the BBC going out its poisonous way to attack the Coalition in order to prove how unbiased it is. Everybody...."Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,We'll keep the red flag flying here."
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