IGNORING UKIP...

IGNORING UKIP...

>> SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2011

Daniel Hannan, the Conservative MEP, has an interesting point here. It's election time again, and the BBC are routinely bracketing UKIP with BNP in their continual efforts to cast Britain's second most popular party(* see below)as racist, no-hope, nasty-smelling extremists. It's a familiar ploy. In the same vein, there's some further pretty damning research about BBC EU/withdrawal bias here, on the Global Britain website. It's a formal complaint that's been made this week to the BBC about its EU coverage, based on the monitoring of half the editions of Today programme over the past six years, a pretty mammoth task. Global Britain is a cross-party think-tank run by the former UKIP leader Lord Pearson of Rannoch (an ex-Tory), and the Labour peer Lord Stoddart of Swindon. The complaint is well worth a read in full if you can spare the time, but among the key findings are:

-There were only 17 questions about withdrawal put to withdrawal advocates in 857 surveyed editions of Today between 2005 and 2010, an average of one every 50 programmes; - Explanation of withdrawal-related policies amounted to only 5,300 words (approximately 37 minutes of airtime, or 6 minutes for each year that was surveyed), strung across 89 separate, mostly fragmentary responses, an average of 59 words (about 23 seconds) per response. This was four ten thousandths of the time available to Today editors.

Today, of course, is the BBC's self-declared flagship news and current affairs programme, and it would be expected that it would give reasonable coverage to those advocating withdrawal from the EU; such a view was, after all, supported by more than 16% of voters at the last European elections and around 1m voters in the general election of 2010. The reality is that the BBC does not give a stuff about withdrawal as an issue, disgracefully under-reports it (or worse, of course, omits it altogether) - and when spokesmen do appear, they are never asked about the issues involved, but told that they are "BNP in blazers" - and thus deliberately bracketed with racism. What also emerges from the complaint is that the Wilson report into the BBC EU coverage found disgraceful bias six years ago. The BBC promised to improve; but in reality, it gleefully stuck two large fingers up and carried on as usual. And as Daniel Hannan notes today, nothing has changed. Nothing. * in the Barnsley by-election

BRITAIN CAN'T TAKE IT

>> SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 2011

This is a guest article by Hippiepooter, make sure you give it a read as it covers quite a few biased bases...

"How much longer can we tolerate the Thought Police tyranny that is theBBC? Britain as a nation is on a precipice and it is BBC bias that has led it there.

Nothing highlights BBC bias more than this piece on the TODAY programme last Thursday on the Prime Minister’s immigration speech.

The ‘interview’ itself was mainly Justin Webb harrying and hectoring Immigration Minister Damian Green. It was preceded by a couple of clips from UKIP and the BNP (falsely tagged on the link as “a debate”). Clearly, framing the Damian Green ‘interview’ this way was a device to lump the Tories in with the BNP. If anyone can recall a Labour politician being on to express disquiet about immigration and being trailed by a BNP spokesman sharing his concerns, please let us know.

Justin Webb had also claimed that besides the comments solicited from UKIP and the BNP they had asked the Labour Party to comment but they said they would wait till after Mr Cameron had made his speech. I don’t buy it. If we are going to judge the TODAY programme on past form as an adjunct to the Labour Party, as I think we must, a far more plausible explanation is that Labour colluded with TODAY to set up the Tories for the above smear.

The Mail Online also reports today how another core Labour insider has said that the Labour Government lied about immigration. Groundbreaking stuff. But not part of the news agenda that the TODAY programme wishes to set.

Sir Andrew Green also has an article in today’s Daily Mail asking ‘Why is the BBC STILL so hideously biased on immigration?’. He leads with the TODAY piece. Its well worth a read, and well worth noting the balance and perspective he draws in contrasting BBC Radio 4 with BBC 5Live. Its essential that we ourselves draw this balance if we’re ever going to stand any chance of dealing effectively with a BBC that overall has been a cancer eating away at our society for a good few decades now.

In the last couple of weeks we have seen the BBC celebrate the recreational hooliganism of the Brixton riots and the copycats that followed as a ‘people’s uprising’, the Hon Louise Bagshawe MP complaining to theBBC over its callous indifference to the Fogel family murders, Melanie Phillips’ open letter to the Culture Secretary to investigate the BBC’s anti-Israel bias, and pulling out all the stops, as we see above, to rig the immigration issue.

If Britain is to survive in any meaningful form as a democracy, urgent and drastic action is needed to rid the BBC of its sundry and myriad subversives and restore the impartiality for which it was once rightly renowned."