As the story of the rescue of the Chilean Miners unfolded I realised that behind my hope that it would be successfully resolved lay an ever deepening dread – that the BBC would somehow find a convoluted way of placing the blame on Augusto Pinochet, one of the key figures in the BBCs pantheon of evil. Watching Friday’s Newsnight my fears were vindicated when a breathless Wark interviewed Ariel Dorfman, an American/Chilean writer who proceeded to wax lyrical on the darkness of the mine being symbolic of the dark days of the Pinochet regime and the return to the surface as Chile coming to terms with its political past. Naturally there were clips of the Presidential palace being attacked by Pinochet’s soldiers during the coup against the extreme left wing and KGB funded President Allende in 1973 – though, of course, no mention of the protests and strikes against Allende’s policies during 1973 or the Chilean Supreme Court’s declaration of illegality of many actions of Allende’s government and it’s paramilitary formations. No mention either of the fact that Dorfman was an adviser to Allende. Although the effusive Matt Frei and sundry other BBC hacks filled the airwaves for three days with a veritable Chile Fest two important pieces of information were either underplayed or scarcely mentioned.......the Christian/Catholic piety of the miners and their families and the fact that President Pinera, who impressed all with his handling of the whole crisis and his conduct during the rescue, was the first elected ConservativeChilean president for over fifty years.... As Private Eye would say...shome mishtake here surely.... Footnote: No mention either of Dorfman’s role in the Duke University rapescandal of 2006 Last week the BBC World Service commemorated the highly significant 43rd anniversary of Che Guevara's death by asking former KGB-funded commie-sympathising Guardian journalist Richard Gott to offer his adoring version of the "Christ-like" psychopathic thug. Be warned, you may need a bucket for this one. (Thanks to Marky for the clip; further hat-tips to Abandon Ship, Rueful Red and John Horne Tooke).er on Townhall.com Humberto Fontova also marked the anniversary, but his version of Guevara's story is somewhat different to the one the BBC serves up year after year. (Marky provides some more related links in the blurb for the above You Tube clip) I bring you this via the Libertarian Bulldog... Anyone catch the easy ride afforded to Nicola Sturgeon during this interview on the BBC? Note how Evan Davies gets lippy to start with, is given a verbal slap by the not so lovely Nicola, and then allows her to trot out one economic inanity after another without serious challenge. SNP delusionalism is given free vent without so much as a demur murmur. I've had several emails on the subject of BBC bias by omission concerning their coverage of the Chilean miners reascue. In essence, it comes down to one thing - a visceral BBC loathing of admitting the formidable contribution the US has made in bringing the trapped men out. Biased BBC contributorJon Hunt spells it out in clear terms... BBC website here sums it all up.... The Guardian has been speculating whether the BBC's committment to reporting climate change is lessening. And earlier in the week, as I noted here, the Daily Telegraph suggested that new BBC editorial guidelines would force more balanced coverage of the topic. I have news for them both. Nothing has changed, and if anything the climate alarmist fervour is getting worse. The evidence? Yesterday, a reporter called Tom Heap presented a programme on Radio 4 in the Costing the Earth greenie strand called "Can Lawyers Save the World?". It is the most outstanding piece of partisan propaganda I have heard in 11 years of monitoring BBC output for a living. I urge you to listen to it, if you have the stomach to do so. It was so astonishingly one-sided that it's difficult to know where to begin. But the theme was that governments are not doing enough to save us from being poisoned by carbon, or from flooding, or from heat, so the fate of the world is now in the hands of wonderful environmental lawyers who are battling heroically to save us all. Seriously, folks. Mr Heap treated all these greeedy, chancer nutcases with breathless reverence as one by one, they spelled out their strategy. His profiles included a legal warrior in New Orleans who wants money for his house that he claims was destroyed by hurricane Katrina, because that was unquestionably caused by climate change. This was followed by an outraged Inuit who wanted millions because the Alaskan coastline is being inundated by unquestionably rising sea levels (not "seal" levels, as I previously had!: h/t Roland Deschain). Next stop was Europe, where a hero legal-eagle was invoking the chilling EU Aaarhus ruling to ensure that every green activist who believes they are affected by climate change can sue whomever is held responsible. Mr Heap followed with a UK woman who has blown £150,000 of her own money heroically fighting a court battle to stop a cement works being built because it plans to use nasty fossil fuels for power. The programme then took on an almost surreal air as environmental camapigners entered the frame. There was an interview with a woman from an organisation calledGaia, who wanted legal rights for trees, and an end to the Western tradition of law because it did not recognise that Mother Earth needed its own charter so that in future, nothing could be done that could be seen to cause harm to ecology. And finally, there was a British lawyer who is campaigning relentlessly to bring in a new international law called "eco-cide", to stand alongside genocide in seriousness. Under it, anyone who transgresses against the environment will be put on trial in the Hague, or wherever, just like the Nazis. She stopped short of calling for the death penalty for offenders - but that was clearly on her mind. In this 30 minutes of eco-buffonery, Mr Heap never once questioned any element of the claims about man-made climate change. It was an unmoderated, unsubtle, one-sided, preposterous pitch in favour of lawyers becoming all-powerful in suing, jailing, and generally nailing everyone and anyone who commits an eco-crime. By giving them such a platform, he clearly supported the idea that those affected by climate change should be awarded billions of pounds in compensation, and for lawyers to have instant powers to jack boot us all into nature worship. Under this regime, any burning of fossil fuel, any cutting down of trees, any human action that was deemed to interfere with nature would be punishable. The so-called climate experts (all warmists, naturally) he called on to confirm that damage is being perpetrated, and to show how it might be calibrated, did concede that everything they did is based on modelling, and that precise measurements of the actual impact of climate change were therefore difficult. But Mr Heap cheerfully glossed over this little difficulty and told us that it would no doubt be overcome in the near future. This was a full-scale pitch of the BBC eco-creed. They may not be sending an army to Cancun, like they did to Copenhagen, but inside the corridors of Portland Place, Television Centre, White City and Salford Quays, they are clearly planning how climate sceptics will be put on trial, and all industrial activity involving fossil fuel will be suspended and so much bound in red tape that it will become impossible. And one thing is for sure. There will be whole battallions of BBC staff at the eco-cide show trials.
Chilean Mine Disaster - Newsnight Sees Pinochet's Shadow....
>> SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010
Dorfman is one of the group of 88 professors who, in the wake of the Lacrosse players scandal, signed a controversial letter thanking protesters for "making a collective noise" on "what happened to this young woman" – assumed to be rapeThe letter, which was later published as a full-page ad in local newspapers and reprinted across the country, has been widely criticized as a prejudgment; later it was determined that no sexual assault had occurred. The charges against the players were eventually dismissed and the District Attorney who prosecuted the case, Michael Nifong, was disbarred and jailed.
YET ANOTHER BBC CHE SLURPFEST
>> FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2010
OBAMALOVE...
It strikes me yet again that poorer black Americans have infinitely more patience than those who are new to economic hardship, (Mmm......is he trying to say w-h-i-t-es?) and they don't expect change to happen overnight. But they, too, await results. There is little doubt that Mr Obama's image is not all it was when he was elected. What is fascinating to watch is how much the upcoming elections force him to become another sort of president still - either more accommodating or more political and tactical.
MISREPRESENTING AS ALWAYS!
Quango reform will cost jobs, warns Maude
No, really? Wow, who would have thought it. I'm not watching the entire discussion so cannot say whether Frances Maude did or did not make such a warning. What I'm pretty sure of though is that he probably said something more interesting in his speech than the obvious. In fact the article quotes him saying: For too long we have had quango pay spiralling out of control so that seven people in the Audit Commission are paid over £150,000 a year at a time when the average civil servant's pay is £23,000.
Would it be too cynical to suggest that the publicly funded BBC didn't want to bring too much attention to the positive sides of cutting government spending on non-government jobs?"FISHY BUSINESS
MINING THE BIAS....
"The real heroes are American, not that you would know that from any British news organisation (and we're supposed to be America's greatest ally). For example, the company whom the Chilean government contacted to rescue the miners is a certain Chilean-U.S. outfit called Geotec Boyles Bros. SA . They immediately contacted associate company Layne Christensen of Pennsylvania.
It was Layne Christensen who provided:
a) the mobile drilling rig built by a fellow Pennsylvanian company by the name of Schramm Inc.
b) the special drill bits, manufactured by fellow Pennsylvanian company Center Rock
c) the drillers Jeff Hart and Matt Staffel - the real heroes of the operation, whom they flew in from Afghanistan
Without these guys and their specialist equipment the miners would still be down there today.
So, how did the UK media cover this amazing side of the story - how the rescue depended almost entirely on American equipment and personnel?
A Google news search shows that Jeff Hart & Matt Staffel's joint roles are widely reported throughout the U.S., South America, Germany, and Spain - but not by any UK news organisation.
Over the last month alone the BBC has produced a jaw-dropping 130,000 web pages reporting the Chilean mine rescue. And yet, the only one that reports Jeff Hart's pivotal role appears in the Corporation's Spanish-language site - suggesting that the BBC's Spanish staff are not as imbued with the same anti-Americanism as its Guardianista UK staff - while there is no mention anywhere of Jeff Hart's colleague Matt Staffel.
Nor has the BBC reported the role of the U.S. companies involved: Searches for Layne Christensen and Center Rock turn up zilch.
A search for Schramm throws up several reports which name it as the manufacturer of the drilling rig, but only one mentions that it is a U.S. company. Meanwhile, a search for Geotec Boyles, to whom Layne Christensen reported, also produces nothing, but a search for Geotec produces a BBC bulletin describing the company as "Chilean" and implying accordingly that it was Chileans who were the key personnel involved in the rescue. The BBC reports:
Mr Buttazzoni, the head of the Chilean mining company Geotec, said his drill had already cut through 464m (1,500ft) of rock. He said his team expected to break through to the area where the miners are sheltering in 3-4 days.
- a complete and utter mis-portrayal through omission."
BBC ON FAIRNESS
"Fairness is nothing more than coalition spin."
Vote Labour!HEAP OF S**T...
Saturday, 16 October 2010
Have a giggle as we enter the weekend by reading Mark Mardell's latest love poem to Obama.
Waugh, it's all so unfair. How's that hopeychangey thing workin' out for you, Mark?
"The BBC has made available on its website a 54 minute recording of the discussion in Parliament about the quangos situation. The page is headlined:
No, not cynical. 100% accurate
In the BBC world-view, American corporations are always evil so best ensure they get NO credit even when they help save lives.
Posts
