Britannia Radio

SKINNY GENES?

>> SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010

Helen Boaden is Director of BBC News and here she is telling us that"impartiality is in BBC genes." In what universe is this lady living? She singles out the likes of Flanders and Easton, not forgetting Robinson, as models of professional impartiality. Is she mad or is she so removed from real feedback that she lives in her license-tax funded ivory tower? In a sense her bland arrogance confirms our suspicions,

Weird Customs

Pounce, familyjaffa and Deegee (Open Thread and B-BBC COMMENTING thread) have highlighted the BBC’s clumsy and ill-informed picture show about Yom Kippur. It seems like a last minute attempt to address the imbalance between their blanket coverage of Muslim festivals and customs and their comparatively underwhelming coverage of Jewish ones.
The major difference is not in the quantity of the coverage, but in the treatment. With Islam, the BBC does all it can to normalise customs and practices most people consider abnormal. With Judaism, it does all it can to insinuate that all Jews are ‘other’
I know very little about religious practices - I tend to see them all as a form of slapstick - but as a staunch supporter of Israel I have great respect for Jewish festivals and celebrations. For information about what’s gone wrong with the BBC’s Yom Kippur article, please read Deegee’s post.

PROGRAMME TO SPIN...

The Guardian is the print version of the BBC and so it comes as NO surprise to read a sympathetic article in it entitled "The BBC must reprogramme itself to win."

"The big salaries paid to some stars give the government a line of attack that it believes resonates with the public. Other criticisms rarely do. The BBC remains popular; the licence fee is one of the least-detested taxes ."

It's still detested though and the point is that B-BBC exists to make the endemic bias as widely known as possible, Best of all the BBC knows we watch it.

WINE LIES...

One of the constant idiocies of the BBC's reporting of climate change is the misleading choice of pictures used in stories. Power stations are picked, for example, to show hazardous "smoke" - the reality is that what is shown is steam. Then there's endless pictures of ice shelves, icebergs, cracks in the ice, not to mention stormy seas, or the aftermath of mudslides, hurricanes, monsoons and the like. All of which are perfectly natural, though not in the BBC's book; they are the harbingers of doom.

Heatwaves are a bit more tricky of course, because it's difficult to represent "heat" as such. Have no fear, though, Richard Black has come to the rescue in his latest one-sided alarmist nonsense, a warning from lunatic Cleggeron and Friends of the Earth spokesmen that power stations should in future be built to avoid rising seas (even though they haven't risen yet). The heat dimension is cunningly illustrated with a glass of wine, with the caption that a consolation of us all frying in the heat will be that it will at least be possible to cultivate home-grown wine.

Well I have news for Richard. Although the British climate is not ideal,English wine-producing grapes have been grown in the UK since Roman times, and in Norman England, there were 39 vineyards. By Henry VIII's reign, the number had grown to 139. What reduced wine production in the nineteenth century was not climate but a switch to free trade and a reduction of duties on wine imports which meant that British producers could not match the prices of their more intensive French competitors. A further twist in the knife came during the first world war with sugar rationing. The actual number of vineyards in production today is 381, which is 50 less than in 1988 when the current phase of warming is supposed to have started. In 1991, there were about 1,000 hectares of vineyards, roughly the same as now (although the figure went up by 200 hectares in 2009, no doubt fuelled by the warmist propaganda about better growing conditions). And the year of the highest amount of wine produced was 1988, when temperatures were supposedly one degree less than now.

A picture is worth a thousand words...of BBC propaganda.