Monthly Archives: February 2011

Stormy Weather

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Old films are very popular. We love nostalgia, the costumes, the funny accents, lots of smoking, and we can observe with the benefit of hindsight, people going about their business in the 20s and 30s. We know, as they do not, of the tribulations to come. We particularly relish seeing everyone pooh-poohing the threat of Nazism, and we empathise with the frustration felt by a lone voice expressing alarm. We understand the complacency and innocence that made people miss the obvious signals, if only they would spot them, of the gathering storm.
Even when war became a reality, obstinacy and blindness persisted. We know all that now.
Last night on BBC World service “The Strand” I heard Egyptian novelist and political and cultural commentator Adhaf Soueif talking from Tahrir Square. She’s one of Egypt’s liberal female writers, and was breathlessly enthusing about the uprising; the diversity, the creativity, the unity and the spirit of the people in Tahrir Square. All marvellous, until her final words – “we must stop pandering to the interests of America and lsrael.”

In the same programme there was an interview with German photographer Kai Weidenhofer who has an exhibition in London. Images of the human cost of war. (Gaza) He cited the Goldstone report to justify using such voyeuristic subject matter.

The bout of insomnia wore off and I woke up to the dulcet tones of William Hague complaining about Israel’s belligerence. According to Hague, Israel must reinstate the settlement freeze and abracadabra there will be Peace in Our Time. Actually, I saw the same interview on the telly, and he did mention that the Palestinians should also make a concession or two, but that was omitted for the purposes of Today.
Then there was a shameful interview with Sir Sherard Cowper Coles, who echoed Hague’s sentiments, and said in no uncertain terms that all the region’s problems are Israel’s fault. James Naughtie disgraced himself by confusing PaliLeaks with WikiLeaks, and then repeating the Guardian’s and Polly Toynbee’s face-value interpretation of them: ‘Israel was offered everything, turned it all down, offered nothing in return. Swaggered.’
Does he actually think it was WikiLeaks, and not Qatari Al-Jazeera’s malicious “release” of selected spin, designed to undermine the PA, Abbas, Israel and the entire peace process?

Where was Israel’s point of view? Oh I forgot. We don’t need that. Because we’re well into the olden days. The days when, despite some lone voices expressing alarm, everyone’s happily missing the signs if only they would spot them, of the gathering storm.

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FOX NEWS

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Further to Robin’s earlier post, here’s another interesting blast from Fiona Fox’s past:

DISGRACED former Labour politician Jim Devine persuaded a friend to call his office manager pretending to be a journalist looking into MPs expenses, it was claimed today.
But when she took time off for stress after discovering his actions had been an elaborate hoax, he told other staff that it was her being investigated for fraudulent expenses claims used to fund a non-existent gambling habit…

…But when she came into the office the following day, the office manager realised it was all a big hoax.
She said: “I went into work and checked my emails and I had access to Jim’s email.
“There was one marked urgent so I opened it.
“It was from Fiona Fox mostly about the Embryology Bill.
“She is the Director at the Science Media Centre in London.
“But at the end there was a PS said that ‘I phoned that poor woman in your office and left the message. Hope you’ve put her out of her misery.“

Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample commented at the time:

Few people who are familiar with the small pond that is science journalism in the UK will have failed to gulp on reading about the ex-Labour MP Jim Devine and the unthinkable bullying he unleashed on his office manager, Marion Kinley.
Devine, who was an MP in Livingston, Scotland, before being caught up in the expenses scandal last year asked an acquaintance to make a fake call to Kinley and pretend to be a journalist investigating her financial affairs. The story gets darker with every step and you can read more about it here. Devine has since been ordered to pay Kinley £35,000.
Though appalling from the off, it was not the top line that shocked many of my colleagues most. What came as a surprise was the revelation far down the story that the fake call in question was made by Fiona Fox, head of the Science Media Centre in London, a prominent venue for press conferences on all matters scientific and medical. Otherwise articulate people who read the story struggled to say more than three letters: WTF?

This is the same person lecturing about “integrity” on the BBC College of Journalism website.

UPDATE. In the comments Beeboidal points us to the BBC’s account of the Devine bullying case. No mention of Fiona Fox, of course.

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UNFIT TO LICK HIS BOOTS

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The content of Fiona Fox article on the BBC College of Journalism site has been ably and rightfully savaged in the comments that have been posted. There’s nothing I can add, except that it was shooting ducks in a barrel. My point about this latest exercise in smug, we-know-we-are-right agitprop is to ask who at the BBC thought Ms Fox was qualified in the first place to write such a piece?

First, Miss Fox is not a scientist. According to her own CV, she is a press officer who happens to have been appointed to a post that provides information to journalists about science. Most of her career has been actually been spent in political activism. Her current role is no different, as the Centre’s consistent, one-sided support for the political objectives of the warmist creed illustrates. Everything she does is underpinned by warmist zealotry; she is not objective, and is thus in no position to be able to reliably rebut Mr Sissons’ arguments – especially as she herself spends much time berating those who dare to challenge “the science” of global warming.

Second, she is an extremist who has demonstrated a lack of sound judgment. For example, she has written for Living Marxism, a publication in which she seemingly sought to blur the lines of responsibility for the Rwanda genocide and to gloss over the massacre by machete of thousands of children. Even the Guardian attacked her for the extremism of her stance. This was admittedly some time ago, but nothing she has done at the Science Media Centre indicates that she has changed her politics or worldview.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Miss Fox says she is a journalist, but I am afraid her qualifications and work experience are very limited. She obtained a trendy two-a penny media degree from Thames Polytechnic, then went straight into agitprop press office work with a succession of agencies which are hardly at the centre of national life.

Peter Sissons, by contrast, the man she tells us does not know what he is talking about on the subject of bias, went straight from Oxford university to the bear pit of ITN newsroom, and he rose under the great Sir Geoffrey Cox to become one of their leading foreign correspondents. He was shot covering the Biafra war, and, re-invented himself as an industrial correspondent and then presenter. He rose to the upper echelons of ITN under Sir David Nicholas and when Channel 4 News was launched in 1981, he was the natural choice as presenter. In that pioneering role he won numerous accolades and awards. When he was at the height of his powers, the BBC decided to do what the BBC does and throw more than the equivalent of a million pounds in his direction to poach him.

I dwell on this because, in my book, though Miss Fox is entitled to her opinions (as we all are), she is emphatically not in a position to be able to judge properly or objectively whether Mr Sissons has got it wrong when he says the BBC’s climate reporting is propaganda. Nothing she so piously says undermines his observations, and the way it is said demonstrates instead that she is not fit to lick his boots. She is a jumped-up press officer of limited vision and intellect with no experience of working in a newsroom, he is a giant of British journalism who won his spurs at the coalface of newsgathering time and time again. That the BBC College of Journalism – their self declared “centre of excellence” – should choose her to rubbish Mr Sissons in this way is a disgrace, and an indication of how low BBC journalism has sunk.

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Pass That Violin

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The BBC are running a series on the rise of the ‘far right’ in Europe, and leveraged their investment with a report on The World Tonight featuring the Danish People’s Party*, and the hopes of human rights (aka open borders) activists that the judiciary may change some of the unsatisfactory immigration legislation resulting from the unrestricted use of democratic elections and the universal franchise. I’ll pass by the writer’s assertion that the unauthorised use by the DPP of an Abba song is ‘a scandal’ and note instead the concern that DPP influence was changing something essentially Danish :

“All this feels very different from Denmark’s reputation as a place of generous Scandinavian welfare and international solidarity … shortly before his death last month one of Denmark’s leading political commentators told me about the change he’d observed from the country he grew up in“.

Words fail me. I would love to listen to a British Broadcasting Corporation programme which asked elderly Brits about the changes they’d observed in the country they grew up in. But somehow they never quite seem to find the time or resource – what with tape recorders being so expensive, old people always being too busy to talk, and scarce resources being devoted to that vital Secret History of Social Networking, The Truth About The Roma, and Greta Scacchi’s Celebrity Activists. Anyone know what’s Danish for ‘chutzpah’?

UPDATE – they could have asked Tim Lott’s mum what she thought.

* from their Wiki entry the DPP are ‘far-right’ in that they wish to restrict immigration, outrageously seeming to want to keep Denmark Danish. Otherwise I see no plans for massive rearmaments, paramilitary wing, minorities to wear special clothing, invasion of Sweden etc. The only places in Denmark where God’s creatures are imprisoned in inhumane escape proof camps before being slaughtered in their millions are pig farms.

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POT EMPLOYEE CRITICISES RIVAL KETTLE GROUP

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BBC journalist Iain Mackenzie has returned from his stint in America. I’ve just stumbled across his newly-named Twitter account and was quite taken with this tweet from last month:


Kudos for pointing it out, Iain, but given the BBC’s record I’ve got to say that’s quite a pair of balls you’ve got there.

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PARALLELS

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This morning’s Today programme devoted substantial time to allegations – scandalous if true – that the Metropolitan Police has undertaken an orchestrated campaign to discredit expert defence witnesses in Shaken Baby court cases. One of the pathologists in question stated:

“…it appears to me that there has been an attempt to remove from the courts all of those people who are willing to challenge the mainstream hypothesis”

A supposedly impartial and highly influential state body using dubious methods to discredit those who dare to disagree with the establishment’s consensus opinion. Remind you of anything? (Clue – Paul Nurse’s Horizon and Storyville’s Meet the Climate Sceptics.)

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