Undecided and Uninvited - Biased BBC

Undecided and Uninvited: "I may have been a bit slow to realise this, but as soon as one becomes associated with a particular cause, one alienates people.

It is a mistake to assume that reasoned argument will win anyone over. People make their minds up for all sorts of reasons - then say “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

The more rational you are, the more people use distancing strategies to avoid being seduced by your reasonableness. They marginalise you, label you, and grossly exaggerate your position to avoid accidentally considering any of your points.
This principle works both ways. I confess I’ve caught myself doing it, remonstrated with myself, and carried on regardless.

Questioning the wisdom of pandering to Muslims puts one into the dreaded position of Islamophobe.

On the Sunday programme R4 (31:06) I had to listen to Ed Stourton asking a group of Muslims about their voting habits. One was from the Muslim Council of Britain, an organisation I thought had been deemed unrepresentative of the ‘Muslim voice,’ but no matter. The MCB fella said their aim was fighting Islamophobia and mobilising the Muslim vote, though he was also anxious to point out that there is no such thing as a Muslim vote, apart from successfully ousting Oona King that time.

The conversation turned to ‘cavassing’ Muslims and encouraging them to get out and vote. There is a tickbox system to aid selection of your candidate. A helpful suggestion came from Ed Stourton.. ‘What,’ Muslims must ask, ‘are your views on foreign policy, and do you support Israel?’
‘Posh Ed’ presided benignly over a mutually assured consensus that no Muslim should entertain the idea of squandering their vote on anyone who supports the Zionist entity.

Fighting Islamophobia evidently entails embracing a little antisemitism. This reminds me of another incident that erupted on the internet that also revealed Muslim cognitive dissonance.

It involved the last minute withdrawal of an invitation to Douglas Murray to speak on a panel at the NUS conference at Gateshead.
Douglas Murray is an outspoken opponent of radical Islam, and an advocate of Jewish issues. Therefore, he has alienated quite a few.

The Federation of Islamic Student Societies (FOSIS) refused to participate in the conference unless Douglas Murray was disinvited.

Although Douglas Murray’s friendship is invaluable to supporters of Israel, especially when such eloquent champions are few and far between, the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) felt, on balance, that the chance to expose the hypocrisy of FOSIS before an NUS audience was worth the regrettable loss of his participation.
So they withdrew the invitation, whereupon he publicly criticised the UJS for being cowed by the Islamic Students’ demands.

According to the UJS, in the event, the FOSIS rep was well and truly defeated and exposed as a fool and a hypocrite; not a terribly difficult a task given that they host extremist Islamist speakers such as Anwar al-Awlaki at universities, and justify it on the grounds of ‘free speech,’ an argument that self destructs as soon as FOSIS is seen refusing to appear near Douglas Murray.

The argument is about whether it was worth jeopardising the ongoing backing of Douglas Murray, and sacrificing the opportunity to have him speak at the conference, for the sole benefit of exposing FOSIS to a comparatively limited audience. Past performance indicates that FOSIS itself is unlikely to change, and the ephemeral UJS triumph at the NUS conference seems to have evaporated.

It’s unlikely that Douglas Murray would retaliate by withdrawing his backing, but those who appreciate Douglas Murray’s friendship and support, and see its value in the context of the bigger picture, are concerned that the UJS were rude, misguided and unappreciative.

Antisemitic radical Islam infiltrating Britain’s academia is of no interest to the BBC it seems. There was a programme on R4 about rehabilitating radicals, but they are invariably regarded as the exception, not representative of the real Islam, and as misfits and outsiders.
Events suggest otherwise. That they’re not an exception, that they are representative, and they're gaining ground.
So if you haven’t already made up your mind, ask your prospective candidates whether they support Israel, and if not, don’t give them your vote.

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LET'S KICK UKIP... - Biased BBC

LET'S KICK UKIP...: "For an example of BBC bias at its sneery, snidey best, have a listen to The World This Weekend here - the relevant item is at about 35 minutes into the programme and is by a reporter called John Manel. His target was alleged flaws in UKIP's immigration policy. He claims basically that the party is so stupid that it doesn't know what it is doing. In order to set up his premise, he talks to a chap called Will Sommerville, who he describes as follows:

Will Sommerville has worked as a civil servant in the Cabinet Office on immigration, for the left-leaning think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research, and for the Commission for Racial Equality. He is now a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, based in Washington DC.

Who better to give and independent view of UKIP policy? Mr Manel's next tack is to sneerily talk to party figures and he edits the whole sequence into something which - hey presto! - Mr Somerville then says won't work. And in a final twist of the tale of bias, Mr Manel frames his reporting to suggest that this particular UKIP member is so venal and naive that he won't apply the policy to his own family; in other words, that old chestnut - if all else fails throw in ad hominem attack, especially if it is on someone who the BBC perceives to be right-wing.

This was a particularly biased report aimed at showing that UKIP are stupid, nasty, xenophobic racists. That's the BBC's default approach to the party. In coverage of UKIP so far, the leopard hadn't shown his spots; but it was only a matter of time before reports like this surfaced.

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FACTS FOR THE MEMORY.... - Biased BBC

FACTS FOR THE MEMORY....: "

Here is an interesting exchange you should read....

On 7th April on the TODAY programme, champing
at the bit to link David Cameron to Richard Nixon for his use of the phrase
‘the great ignored’, M/s Berg falsely claimed that Richard Nixon coined the
phrase “The silent majority”.

The phrase 'the silent majority' was
actually coined by De Gaulle's Prime Minister Pompidou after De Gaulle called
parliamentary elections in 1968 and saw his party achieve the first absolute
majority in the history of the French Republic (clearly not something the BBC would wish to link David Cameron with).
The compiler of our B-BBC digest
Graeme sent a complaint to the BBC
8th April and copied it to the Conservative Party. He received a reply
15th April from BBC Complaints
Correspondent Liam Boyle which compounded falsehood upon falsehood.

See
Graeme's response below:

Dear Mr Boyle,

Thank you for your email.

Firstly, I note that when I submitted
my complaint via your website no reference number was generated or automated
email acknowledgement sent. This is very bad practice for dealing with
complaints and is an indication of the bad faith in which an endemically biased
BBC acts.

What, in my view, starkly
characterises the bad faith of today's BBC
and its contempt for democratic values is your following direct
falsehood:

Sanchia Berg's report
for the 'Today' programme on April 7th did not claim

that President Nixon coined the phrase the 'silent majority'

Sanchia Berg's exact words
once more: "Over 40 years ago Richard Nixon
coined a new phrase 'the silent majority' ... "

I transcribed these
words carefully from the recording you carried on your website. Of
course, you only carry these recordings for 7 days. I wonder if it is a
coincidence that you only respond to my complaint with this direct falsehood
after this recording has been removed?

Fortunately, the recording still comes
up under a search (see below) and I was able to confirm the 100% accuracy of my
transcription. As someone who adheres to the democratic standards the
Gramscian BBC has such contempt
for, I do not use the word "lie" to describe your direct falsehood as
I do not have the incontrovertible proof necessary that it
was intentional. However, on the basis of the systematic bias of the
BBC over the years I have every
reason to believe it was.

http://www.google.es/#hl=es&source=hp&q=sanchia+berg+%22the+silent+majority%22&meta=&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=eb46abfb6321b77e

Mr Boyle, you're dealing with someone
who as a Tribunite member of the Labour Party in 1979 thought the only real
bias at the BBC was towards the
left and was against it as it was bad for democracy. I am absolutely
certain that Mr Cameron does not have the moral bottom to deal with the threat
the Gramscian BBC poses. I'm
sure you can continue to pursue your subversive ends with such patent
falsehoods with impunity till the Gramscian left has finally brought down
British democracy, which I'm sure it will. What you will
never escape though is that there will always be people like
me willing to remind you what your moral choice in life says about
you as a human being.

God bless,

Graeme...

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FISHY.... - Biased BBC

FISHY....: "Here we have the BBC's Richard Black in the oleagenous, snake-oil-salesman mode he adopts whenever he seeks to tell us that he's listening to sceptics. He tries to convey that the Oxburgh report into Climategate had an important core message; that it's vital that climate scientists ensure that their work is accompanied by suitable warnings about its limitations. Yet he omits to tell us the most crucial fact in this particular equation - that in reaching their conclusions, Oxburgh and his fanatic cronies chose just 11 papers as a 'representative sample' to verify whether porkies were being told. And when asked, the Royal Society (the body which was behind the enquiry) come up with completely fishy explanations like this about how these papers were chosen. As Bishop Hill points out, it's a bit odd - to put it mildly - that the 11 were exactly the same as those also chosen by the House of Commons for its recent Climategate report. These people obviously think we are total, utter imbeciles.

Such contradictions are clearly far too complicated and too inconvenient for Mr Black to even consider.

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£1.6m for 18 new BBC bosses as it 'cuts costs' - Daily Mail

£1.6m for 18 new BBC bosses as it 'cuts costs': "
One of the executives is being paid between £310,000 and £340,000 a year, and two between £190,000 and £220,000."

Yes, you heard right: BBC sends thousands of staff on course to teach them how to LISTEN - Daily Mail

Yes, you heard right: BBC sends thousands of staff on course to teach them how to LISTEN: "
The BBC has been criticised for using licence fee payers’ money to send staff on a course to teach them how to listen."

Unreliable Sources by John Simpson | Book review - Guardian

Unreliable Sources by John Simpson | Book review: "

Peter Beaumont finds partial truths in a BBC veteran's tale of his trade

Anyone who has been a journalist knows that whatever admiration one's efforts attract tends to be balanced by hatred and condemnation from another interested group. Ours is a Manichaean universe. This has always been the case, but what does seem to have changed recently is how visible those discontented with what is sneeringly known as the mainstream media (or 'MSM') have become.

For those on the further edges of both left and right, the MSM is usually defined as the problem. For tea partiers, we are too liberal and in hock to government, while for those who subscribe to Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent, we are too right wing and equally subservient to power.

So when Nick Davies's attack on the state of British journalism, Flat Earth News, was published two years ago, it plugged into a widespread sense of discontent with the MSM, which had been exacerbated by the misreporting of the run-up to the war in Iraq. While I didn't agree with everything he wrote, Davies did diagnose many of the modern media's failings and his coining of the neologism 'churnalism' seemed especially accurate.

He argued that there had once been a better era for reporting, before hacks became chained to the wheel of 24-hour news. This is an idea that John Simpson, the BBC's veteran world affairs editor, examines in Unreliable Sources. His survey of 20th-century reporting seems to confirm most of what critics of the MSM claim. From the Boer war onwards, he depicts egotistical and often unscrupulous hacks, many of them servile before power or even secretly working for it, such as the Times colonial editor, Flora Shaw, who was a go-between in the planning of the Jameson Raid of 1895-96.

When he offers 'extraordinary' exceptions, two are American – Ed Murrow and Martha Gellhorn – although he seems to forget that the latter, a friend of his, was capable of a famous fabrication, falsely placing herself at the scene of a lynching.

There are a couple of problems with this weighty volume. The first isn't confined to Simpson's book but to the broader issue of media criticism from Chomsky onwards, which has argued that journalists tend to self-regulate what they report to please authority, an assertion that has only ever been at best partially true. For what it fails to distinguish between is the degree to which journalism sets out to influence the society it operates within and the degree to which it is an inherent reflection of cultural norms and values.

Simpson, for instance, describes the media representations of the sieges of Mafeking, Ladysmith and Kimberley in the Boer war. But his assertion that 'Mafeking ensured that the mass of newspaper readers regarded the war as part of the nation's imperial adventure, rather than something questionable and potentially disastrous', while reflecting how we might see it today, ignores how contemporary readers would have felt about empire. It is a mistake he makes more than once, compounding the book's peculiarly ahistorical feel. In his conclusion, he says the media at the beginning of the 21st century are recognisably the same as those which existed at the beginning of the 20th. Is this really the case?

The second problem is related. The scale of his book, which tries to span two world wars, the end of empire, Northern Ireland, the Falklands and Kosovo, means it is difficult to marshal a cogent argument save that a lot of rum things go on in the media. Hardly a startling revelation. The drawbacks of this approach are particularly noticeable in later sections, where he is selective in presenting his material. His depiction of the Blair government's attempts to control the media over the Kosovo war, for example, is crudely stripped of explanatory context and the war is turned into a simplistic tale of gung-ho misreporting and government misdeeds.

Isn't he guilty of what he lambasts others for – misrepresentation? For if his subtext is that honest, passionate reporters have to struggle against vested interest to tell what they see, he has written out of his history an awful lot of them. In the case of Kosovo, this means the likes of Tim Judah, Anthony Loyd, the late Kurt Schork and photographers Ron Haviv and Andrew Testa. All have been edited out of history to make a better story. But that's journalists for you.

• History
• War reporting
• BBC

Peter Beaumont

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