Britannia Radio

CABLE - THE FALL OUT

>> WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2010

Well, the BBC agenda on Saint Vince has been spelt out by that intrepid example of independent thought, Nick Robinson. Talking on Today this morning, (8.10am) he explained that the Daily Telegraph has more likely done more damage than good to "political transparency" since our totally honest MP's will now be even more careful what they say to anyone outside their immediate circles. So Cable's only crime was to speak his mind and the DT stands in the dock as the enemy of freedom. You have to admire the delusionalism that reigns within the State Broadcaster.

HIBERIANISATION

Just a curious little item.Lead story on BBC Northern Ireland is that...gasp..Dublin Airport is now open, having been closed by snow yesterday. Dublin Airport is not in Northern Ireland and yet those wonderful folks at BBC NI determine this to be the single most important news story affecting our lives this morning. Gotta love it.

Topsy Turvy Tale

>> TUESDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2010

A reader has asked me to draw your attention to something that the BBC is unlikely to explain.

A Qassam rocket has landed perilously close to a nursery school in a Kibbutz in the Hof Ashkelon area north of Gaza Strip, injuring a girl and an adult.

Squabbles amongst the leadership of the BBC’s favourite terrorist organisation have led to a new wave of provocative acts against Israel. I refer to escalating missile, mortar and raiding attacks, and what DEBKAfilecalls “murderous kidnapping operations inside Israel”.
That, of course, was the widely reported incident in which an American woman was murdered and her companion was injured. Incidentally, on a previous thread, I commented:
“On BBC News 24, the anchor woman was interviewing the Jerusalem correspondent. (I think it was Jon Donnison) She kept on asking if he would agree that the woman’s injuries were surprisingly trivial under the circumstances. I have no idea what she was getting at. Surely she wasn’t implying that the victim was exaggerating, or hiding something?
A most peculiar line of questioning I thought.”
Having read the report on DEBKAfile, which describes the incident as a botched attempted at a kidnapping, I think I see what she was getting at after all. Of a policy eerily reminiscent of the way our own police play down certain sensitive issues, I quote: “Israeli police officers spoke vaguely about exploring different paths of inquiry and cast implicit aspersions on her testimony.”
Casting implicit aspersions. That's what the BBC did too, but why? Does Jon Donnison know more than he’s letting on, or what? Where’s Julian Assange when you need him.

According to DEBKAfile, Israelis are acutely aware of, and constrained by, the international outcry - “disproportionate force!” This now affects their response to provocation. At one end of the scale Israeli police play down the severity of incidents. At the other, it was these concerns that led to a policy of deliberately sending their precious soldiers into a war zone on foot rather than striking from the air, something that Col. Kemp pointed out repeatedly after Operation Cast Lead.

From DEBKAfile, another example:

“Monday, Dec. 20, saw not only a 10-mortar barrage from the Gaza Strip, but three Palestinians armed with long knives trying to assault an Israeli soldier at Givat Zeev. They fled when he cocked his sidearm.
The soldier took care not to shoot and injure any of his assailants – and so bring Israeli anti-terrorist authorities a valuable asset for interrogation – because he was afraid of sharing the fate faced by some of his comrades - trial by the military prosecutor and the mediafor responding with "disproportionate force."

However, take a look at how the BBC reports this escalation of “tensions”. In an article by Jon Donnison headed "Israeli air strike on Gaza as tensions rise" he concentrates on Israel’s retaliation, and plays down the incidents that provoked it. For example:

“The rockets fired by Palestinian militant groups into Israel rarely cause injury or damage, but they do cause widespread fear.”

The rockets certainly cause widespread fear, but they do cause injury and damage, and I’m sure the militant groups would be delighted if they caused more. They rarely do only because the Israelis have taken the trouble to protect people. The kindergarten is a bomb shelter.

“They are not fired by Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza, but by smaller militant groups. Nevertheless Israel says Hamas is responsible because it controls the territory.”

“Israel says?” I think most people would say that Hamas does bear responsibility, unless they were trying to defend Hamas. And why “nevertheless?” Is Jon Donnison saying that he doesn’t think Hamas is responsible? By Jove, I think he is!

“The Israeli military says the air strikes were in retaliation for the firing of 13 rockets and mortars at Israel this week.
Israel Radio says the rocket fired by Gaza militants on Tuesday landed near a nursery school. No serious injuries were reported.”

No serious injuries, so that’s okay then.

The article concludes with the return, after a short absence from every single Israel-related BBC web article, of the death toll from Operation Cast Lead, and another statistical comparison of “Palestinian” and Israeli deaths and injuries, courtesy of the UN.

I do realise that the intricacies of power struggles within the Hamas hierarchy are of little interest to the BBC audience, but surely turning the incident upside down in your impartial report is going a bit too far.

OPEN THREAD

OK, well Heathrow Airport may not work very well but your Biased BBC open thread is fully functional, ice-free and awaiting the heat you can bring to bear on the BBC. Take aim - fire!

SAINT JULIAN OF ASSANGE DAY

Well, it's pretty easy to work out what the BBC finds so attractive about Wikileaker Julian Assange. His viscerally anti-American agenda was always going to resonate with the BBC so he was afforded two interview spots on Today this morning as John Humphyrs travelled to his mansion to pay seasonal homage to him. There was SO much wrong with this simpering interview not least the way in which the BBC insists that Wikileaks is a "whistle-blowing" website when it is not. It is much closer to a criminal conspiracy that accepts hacked and stolen information but so long as the US is the victim, who cares, right? Assange is able to suggest that he cannot justice in Sweden hence his attempt to avoid being sent there to face the serious allegations concerning sexual assault and the entire interview was set up as a soapbox for the peculiar ego-tripper Assange.

THAT CABLE GUY

"Today" featured an item (7.50am) concerning Vince "My heart beats to the left" Cable. His arrogance and self-conceit have been wonderfully exposedby a couple of undercover Daily Telegraph journalists and so this poses a problem for the BBC. You see Saint Vince used to be a good guy through the prism of the Beeb before he went and spoiled it all by joining the wicked Conservative coalition. But BBC hopes have been raised as Cable talks of using the "nuclear option" and resigning which would, apparently, be the cue to bring the Coalition down. Naturally he is "embarrassed" that he has been caught out but the BBC are keen to portray him as a noble hero fighting for what is decent amongst the "maoists" in the Conservative Party. I expect Cable will continue to get the hero treatment just so long as he represents a threat to the lawfully elected government of the UK.

"The winters of our youth are unlikely to return"

It was amusing to see that the most viewed item on the Independent's website yesterday was the article "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past" from 2000.

Similar claims have been made by the BBC, of course. In February 2007 the BBC World Service's One Planet devoted an episode to warmer winters. Here's the presenter, BBC science correspondent Richard Hollingham, giving us his conclusion :

Richard Hollingham: Those of us who grew up with very cold winters, who tell our children that winter's not what it used to be, we're right aren't we?

Brenda Ekwurzel (Climate Scientist, Union of Concerned Scientists): Yes. Absolutely. It has changed.

Hollingham: Sitting here at the BBC, leafing through my old photos, I can't help feeling nostalgic for proper winters. This year we had just one day of snow in southern Britain. Mind you it still brought the roads, railways and airports to a standstill and shut the schools, but as most people in London, Moscow, Washington, Beijing or Oslo will testify, a cold crisp winter's day with snow on the ground is infinitely preferable to the mild damp miserable winters many of us are having to get used to. It seems the winters of our youth are unlikely to return.

And here's the BBC's 'Ethical Man' Justin Rowlatt writing on the Newsnight blog in January 2007:

Do you remember snow? It’s that cold wet stuff you used to trudge through in the olden days.
I was reminded of the stuff – not by the weather of course – but as I looked through some super-8 footage of my family that my dad shot. It’s been collecting dust at my parent’s house for years. I dug it out because we were looking for images to use in the Ethical Man series.
I built the snowman with my sisters in January 1968. The shots of us sledging are from January 1971. It is beginning to look like my kids will be lucky to ever build a snowman in our garden.

Or how about this on the BBC Weather website from 2004:

There haven't been to [sic] many cold winters recently in the UK and the number of days with snow cover are becoming fewer too. It's getting harder and harder to make a snowman in Southern England! Many young children living here are still waiting to see their first white Christmas. If global warming predictions from the Met Office's Hadley Centre are correct they may never live to see it.

Oh, won't somebody please think of the children?

Snow - a thing of the past. Just imagine, if the powers that be had believed all this there might be chaos right now.

[Previously - BBC reports the demise of the ski industry.]

Making History

>> MONDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2010

It seems like only yesterday that we were lamenting the BBC’s distorted history lessons designed to beguile children with short attention spans.

Horrible Histories I believe their child-friendly series is called. I think they intended the title as an anarchic, anti-authoritarian way of ingratiating themselves with the kiddies in a ‘Roald Dahl / we hate adults’ kinda way.
But the title makes more sense as a straightforward description of their version of history, which is horrible in a ‘blame-our-ancestors for everything bad-that-ever-happened’ kinda way.

Now, on a website from down-under called J-Wire, the BBC and the History Channel have been taken apart by David Singer for gross misrepresentation of the history of you-know-where. Major omissions abound. You can read about it here, here and learn something relevanthere.

Is it really surprising that we are where we are?