Easter Offering

This is a Guest Post By esteemed commenter Chuffer.
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What you missed by not watching News24 at 11 o’clock, Easter Sunday….

Dramatic Intro Music.


Nicholas Owen: This is BBC News; the headlines at 11 o’clock.
Video: grainy film of a Syrian funeral.
Owen: The Liberal Democrats launch a stinging attack on the [confused pause] campaign to change our voting system.(Video ends – cut back to frowning and confused-looking Owen.) They accuse the ‘No’ side of lies and deceit.

Video: William Hague in a chair (Strapline: ‘Referendum Row’)
Hague: British nationals should leave Syria now unless they have a pressing reason to remain. Obviously I’m concerned that if this trouble got worse, some of them would find that it wasn’t easy to get out of Syria at all.

Video: Cameron and Clegg in a school.
Owen: And, er, the other side have been batting away those criticisms, obviously; we’ll have much more on this, this hour.

Video: urban Scottish street, cutting to red letterbox
Owen: Britons are advised to leave Syria as more than one hundred [garbles] protestersarereportedtohavebeenkilled and also, in Scotland, police hunting those sending, er, parcel bombs to Celtic – people involved in Celtic – are appealing for a young couple to come forward.

Closing headline dramatic music – video alternates between blank screen and static shots of a front door.

Makes you proud to write a cheque every year to keep this flagship news service on the air.

INTERNAL DISAGREEMENTS

Today‘s Evan Davis and BBC political correspondent Louise Stewart had a lot of fun at the expense of David Cameron and Nick Clegg this morning over their disagreement over internships. They returned to the subject later, after which Evan talked to Gus Baker. The Today website describes Gus as “a student and co-founder of pressure group Intern Aware.” Evan Davis described him in similar terms on the programme. Mr Baker criticized the prime minister.

His Twitter account tells us a bit more:

Gus Baker
@gusbbaker Bristol
President-elect of Uni Bristol Students Union. Proud and independent minded Labour Party activist and NPF member. Co-founder @internaware.

Is it unreasonable to think that Mr Baker’s Labour affiliations should have been mentioned?

The same question applies to BBC Online’s write-up of the same interview (Cameron and Clegg differ publicly on internship places) which merely describes him as “from the pressure group Intern Aware” (and generously links to his website).

The Today programme interviewed no-one other than Gus Baker on the subject.

ANTI-SEMITIC SHILLS FOR GADDAFI

A guest post by Hippiepooter:

If I was an anti-Semitic despot desperately trying to cling to power and I wanted to give an interview with pliant Western journalists to make propaganda, I know that Jeremy Bowen would be at the top of my list.

It came as no surprise to me that Mr Bowen was one of the three journalists that Colonel Gaddafi chose to interview him.

This said, in my cursory viewing of the interview, I would say that Bowen successfully maintained plausible deniability that he was acting as Gaddafi’s shill, if indeed it would be fair to construe that that would possibly be his intention.

In what I heard of his reports thereafter there was nothing that really stood out as that untoward. Until recently. As the ‘madman in the kaftan’ has rallied his forces and appears to be gaining the upper-hand over the rebels despite major defections and allied bombing, there has been a decided shift in the BBC Tripoli Correspondent’s tone of coverage.

On Saturday 16th April the Telegraph online reported Lord General Dannatt expressing the following concerns over Mr Bowen’s reporting:-

“People hang on the words of the BBC in Libya and throughout the Middle East and I do wonder if what he has been saying has been entirely helpful,” says General Lord Dannatt, the former Chief of the General Staff. “Mr Bowen has, of course, every right to report what happens, but when he dwells to such an extent on intangible things — such as how long the operation will take and whether the will is there to see it through — then it sets a tone that could hardly have given heart to members of the rebel forces.”

Round about this time I noticed Bowen refer to Gaddafi’s side as ‘Libya’, although he quickly corrected himself straight away.

Not any more though. Here’s Bowen on 5Live’s Victoria Derbyshire (19/04/11). The interview starts 1:18:10 (my emphases):-

“[…]The Libyans say that they will allow some humanitarian access coming out of Tripoli into places. Uh, I think they have motivation for allowing a certain amount of it, now of course there’s a trade off between what the army here might want and there’s a trade off between what the more political people might want, but you can see from the Libyan point of view there are advantages in allowing humanitarian aid in”

Bowen is clearly self-identifying with Gaddafi. I had to wait some time in to the interview to confirm that by ‘Libya’ he actually meant the Gaddafi regime. The lingua franca of covering this conflict is ‘loyalists’ and ‘rebels’. While Foreign Secretary the Rt Hon Wiliam Hague MP has announced that Her Majesty’s Government no longer recognises the legitimacy of Gaddafi’s regime for the murderous brutality with which he has suppressed his people’s quest for freedom, Bowen clearly wants to confer legitimacy on Gaddafi in the minds of the British public.

Why would Bowen do this? My contention, or supposition, is that he sees there is a very real possibility that if Gaddafi is toppled Libya will have a Government that does not share Bowen’s pathological hatred of Israel. Such a thing for Bowen would be enough to give him a coronary.
If you listen to the whole of the interview you’ll see that overall Bowen does enough to maintain a veneer of impartiality – enough to seduce the unsuspecting listener into trusting him so that he may steer their unsuspecting minds to where he wants them to go. Although you might consider, as I do, that he was deftly trying to rubbish a rebel supplied casualty figure without having any idea what they’d been based on (Some idea here).

One occasion however when Bowen’s facade dropped spectacularly is etched vividly in my mind.

During Gulf War I a cruise missile struck a civilian bunker in Baghdad leaving hundreds dead.

David Dimbleby interviewed Bowen live from Baghdad.

Bowen reported in terms of ‘aren’t we bad, we really need to stop this war as soon as possible’.

Prior to this, I had read or heard reports that the allies suspected that Saddam Hussein was sending control and command communication signals from civilian bunkers in the hope of causing the very tragedy that had just occurred to leave the US Coalition discredited and strengthen calls for the war to end. I was heartened when David Dimbleby asked Mr Bowen:-

“But Jeremy, what were they doing there?”

Bowen exploded. Face contorted with rage he shouted: ‘They were trying to protect themselves from the bombs that the Americans are dropping on Baghdad!’

Bowen was livid that Dimbleby had got in the way of him promoting Saddam Hussein propaganda. There is no anti-Semitic tyrant that Bowen will not shill for.

Unfortunately, Mr Dimbleby chose not to pursue the matter further, apparently wishing to avoid any further unseemliness from his deranged colleague.

As all the experts have told us, imposing a no fly zone on Gaddafi is an act of war. We are at war with Gaddafi. If Jeremy Bowen keeps heading the way he’s going he risks supplying enough grounds to the security services to place him under formal investigation for aiding and abetting the Queen’s enemies at time of war. Given that Her Majesty’s Government has stretched Her already overstretched armed forces still further with the much needed action against Gaddafi to stop him massacring his own people for seeking freedom, not to mention the unfinished business of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and Lockerbie that must rightly underlie our action, it might be hoped that if Mr Bowen does take that ill-advised step too far, the P45s awaiting our heroic servicemen upon their return may be cushioned somewhat by the long overdue spectacle of HMG taking action against Treason. Hopefully, our Prime Minister would not feel the need to ask Shami Chakrabati’s permission to do this, or is our country so far into its death throes that this might not be such an absurd notion? Treachery, seek it out.
********************Hippiepooter

PLAYING FAVOURITES

Certain think tanks, pressure groups, unions, associations (etc) can pretty much rely on the BBC to report their press releases, reports and studies. Articles appear daily on the BBC website devoted to such things. Others are not so lucky, having their reports ignored – or, if not ignored, marginalised or criticised.

There’s an article on the website at the moment that, rather unusually, considers two separate reports from different organisations. Not that you’d know that from the headline:

****Teachers’ survey: Schools changes ‘won’t benefit poor’

The headline summarises the findings of one of the reports – that from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) on behalf of BBC regulars, the Sutton Trust charity. This undermines Michael Gove’s education policies from the standard BBC perspective, so it is given the vast bulk of the article. The short fourth paragraph, however, shifts to another report – “Separately, the pro-free market Adam Smith Institute has said free schools should be able to make a profit.” This other report attacks the government from the Right and is subsequently marginalised. Immediately Paragraph 5 reverts to the Sutton Trust study and dwells on it at great length and in considerable detail. Finally, in Paragraph 19 (after 14 paragraphs on the Sutton Trust report), we return to the Adam Smith Institute report. This is given just three paragraphs in total (one of Lilliputian size) and goes into no detail whatsoever.

I suppose the Adam Smith Institute should be grateful that the BBC gave space to their report. (They may even have been surprised!) But I suspect their gratitude will be tempered by not being given an article to themselves, by being given very short shrift, by being shoved at the bottom of a long article about another very different report and by not being given a mention in the article’s headline. I only found the BBC’s take on the Adam Smith Institute report by accident because I spotted the headline and thought it might be a good chance to check out whether the Churnalism search engine (h/t Katabasis)would suspect it of being churnalism for the Sutton Trust. (It did).

(This post of mine might be proof of the saying ‘You wait ages for a bus and then three come along at once!’)

NOT SO EVAN-HANDED

Getting back into the swing of things, I thought I’d monitor the New Channel’s coverage of the AV referendum campaign on Tuesday. On that day at least (I can’t vouch for any of the others), it seemed scrupulously balanced – balanced number of guests, exactly the same length of interview (well three seconds difference!) for the pro- and anti- spokespersonages, appropriate questions to each side, same number of interruptions, and the BBC even kept quoting an opinion poll showing a significant ‘No’ lead. I wasn’t expecting any of that, but it shows the BBC can do it.

Unfortunately, they often fail to do it – as Evan Davis demonstrated this morning.

Here, staged before an audience at the South Bank Centre (who sounded even less representative than a Question Time audience), Evan hosted a debate between Jonathan Bartley of the Yes campaign and Stephen Parkinson of the No campaign. Evan did much more than host it though. He actively joined in the debate, almost entirely on the side of the Yes campaign. It was effectively two against one.

The interruptions flew at Mr Parkinson, often only seconds (one time just a second) after he had begun to speak. So did the questions. All but one of the questions asked/points made by Evan Davis came from a stance opposed to the No campaign. Transcribing Evan Davis’s words should make the extent of the bias clear:

Questions/comments put to Stephen Parkinson (No to AV):

1 Stephen, you’re against AV. Can we just talk about fairness because it seems like..you keep saying the winner under AV loses which means, you know, the system’s unfair but if the winner loses it’s because the majority of voters don’t want that person to win, they want another candidate instead.

2 The crucial thing is whether you view it as an election where people have one vote and then a few people get another vote and another vote and another vote or whether you view it as a sequence of elections which very cleverly are concocted to be held on one ballot paper, isn’t it Stephen?

3 (interrupting) Well it IS a sequence of elections, it’s a sequence of counts and the person who puts their first preference and that’s not knocked out gets their first preference counted again.

4 (interrupting) And some get their first preference counted twice!

5 (interrupting) But it uses something similar. Most systems, even the American presidential election, uses something where you wangle the candidates down to a run-off between two effectively, or some sort of run-off, they do it on the X Factor, they do it on Big Brother, they do it in the American presidential election with the use of primaries, isn’t that what everybody does?

6 (interrupting) But I mean that’s just true. It’s not going to make a difference in most seats of the UK, is it? I mean that’s just telling you it doesn’t matter which way we go..

7 One issue that has come up is the issue of whether people understand AV. Can I just ask the audience here if you think you understand AV and what it entails? And how many say you don’t understand it, it’s too complicated? So again about 98% of people understand it. That has been a bit of your campaign hasn’t it Stephen, a little bit of scaring people with the complexity of it all?

Questions/points put to Jonathan Bartley (Yes to AV):

1 Jonathan?

2 Jonathan, let me put this to you. Does it not encourage the candidate who is the most banal and least offensive to always win and you end up with a government that is sort of the lowest common denominator?

Not very even-handed, is it?

HOBSON’S CHOICE

If you use the BBC News website’s ‘Search’ function, as many do, you’ll find that broad categories have a right-hand section where BBC editors recommend sites ‘elsewhere on the web’ for readers to investigate. Some of these (usually links to newspapers or news agencies) are regularly updated. Others are much more permanent choices, staying up for several months. The three examples below have been the editor’s choice for over half a year now (at the very least). Do they provide BBC Online readers with a fair spread of opinion? Hardly.

Type in ‘Climate Change’ and the two other sites permanently linked to are:
The Met Office
Greenpeace International

Type in ‘Wind Farms’ and the permanent Editor’s Choices are:
Renewable UK
“Renewable UK, formerly the British Wind Energy Association, the professional body for the UK’s wind and marine industries, providing news, links and downloadable resources”
Yes2Wind
“Learn about the Yes2Wind campaign to use wind energy to tackle global warming”
(Incidentally, there is also a No2Wind website, which the BBC chooses not to link to).

Finally, type in ‘European Union’ and the only other site on the web permanently linked to is:
Europa
(the official website of the European Union)

P.S. Happy Easter!

"UNCLEAN, UNCLEAN…"

There’s nothing that BBC greenies like better than to make us feel bad. It’s glorious spring weather and it’s a holiday, but David Shukman is at pains to warn us that our enjoyment should be limited…and that our unpleasant polluting habits like driving cars and should be reined in. The eco-bogey this time is smog, that nasty, indeterminate stuff (fully of menacing green-creed stuff like PM10s) that will kill us all even if other greenie threats like rising sea levels don’t. True to form with such scare stories, it’s the perfect occasion for Shukman and his chums to give a platform for eco-warriors like Green Party London Assembly member Jenny Jones (the BBC’s favoured candidate to become next London mayor) to pontificate that London is a very dangerous place (the most polluted in Europe, donchya know)where unwitting victims should be warned that they will enjoy the royal wedding at their peril – all very reminiscent of the crews who were paid during plague years to tour the capital intoning “Unclean, unclean”.

It’s a perfect opportunity, too, for the BBC to act as propaganda conduit for the EU and to tell us triumphantly that draconian new emissions fines will be forcibly extracted soon. How wonderful; not only is the EU going to force us to pay more simply to be members (and we have no choice)- it also has a new wheeze to cane us for daring to use cars.

Actually, for the record, it seems that smog “pollution” is on the decline in the developed world , but of course there is no mention of that in this latest BBC sermon.

Update: I don’t often respond to B-BBC comments; I respect other people’s views and that’s what the site is for. However, Alfonso Paulista is an exception. I’ll ignore – though I loathe it – his gratuitous use of the ‘f’ word (I’ve always believed the English language can be powerful enough without the use of expletives); but the claim that WUWT is “not a credible source of information” typifies greenie arrogance and is a gross misunderstanding of how sceintific debate is conducted. Dozens of experienced academics contribute to the site, and on this occasion, the information about smog levels in the US was based on research by the Scientific Coalition of America, the advisory board of which contains 12 leading experts in directly relevant fields. My point is not that smog is harmless or should be ignored – it’s the one-sided, alarmist way the BBC reports such matters that is in question.

I go to WUWT because it is a credible multiple source of information. But it is inaccurate to say that I do not quote from elsewhere. As for my ‘denialism’ – here intended I presume as a gratuitous insult – I wear my doubt and scepticism about climate alarmism (especially when it is based on propaganda spread by government agencies, the EU, and multi-national power companies) and greenie lies as obstinate badges of honour.

Mr Paulista appears to believe that because the smog story was based on a government warning, the BBC should report it; my training as a journalist – admittedly in a different era – was to scrutinise very carefully any government information or press release. Here it was re-cycled without further question, and the message was slavishly embellished by the inclusion of unsupported Green party propaganda about the levels of pollution in London.

And finally, what evidence do I have that greenie Jenny Jones is the BBC’s favoured candidate for mayor of London? The fawning, almost worshipful tone of the link I provided is one clue. So, too, is the number of times that this charisma-free lady is being quoted on BBC outlets. How did she get her free pass to pontificate? She got 458 votes from Green party members. Well golly gosh.

Less is More

The necessity for brevity in BBC online articles calls for ruthless pruning of irrelevant material. Ditching the detail and binning the background lays bare the priorities and prejudices of the BBC. What’s hot and what’s not; the salient v the superfluous. What’s left unsaid says it all.

Let’s peek beneath the cloak of impartiality to expose the agenda-driven underbelly and unveil the secrets of the subtle but revealing body language of Jon Donnison.
In other words, what you say and what you leave out speaks volumes. The answer my friend is lying on the cutting-room floor.
Democratically elected!
Hamas, for example, is a violent Islamist group, resolutely opposed to Israel’s existence. They were elected to govern Gaza ‘by the people’ “democratically” yet they are officially a terrorist group – the BBC doesn’t know whether to love them or loathe them.
The tangible and subliminal Arabist vibes radiating from the BBC have inspired many Europeans and Westerners to see Palestinians solely as victims, not of their own government’s policies, but of Israel. Some particularly passionate, empathetic individuals are so moved emotionally (and physically) that they cross the globe to participate in ‘the struggle, ’ achieving both celebritydom and martyrdom.
I can I can’t!
Hamas can’t make up its mind whether it can or can’t control breakaway factions that send rockets into Israel, (it can’t) or capture hostages so as to make demands, (it can).
When Italian pro Palestinian activist Vittorio Arrigoni was abducted by Salafist Islamists, but prematurely hanged before the set deadline, Hamas set off in pursuit of those responsible to show who’s boss.
Blame Israel!
Meanwhile, despite the video, Salafists denied that they were involved, and various experts suggested Mossad bumped Arrigoni off before he could participate in the forthcoming anti Israel publicity-stunt flotilla.
Hamas organised a shoot-out, whereupon, as the BBC puts it, two Salafist suspects “died”.
Not Enough Information !
There’s more, but the BBC sticks with:
*a brief summary of the outcome of the siege.
*The abduction, and Hamas’s condemnation of it.
*An endearing quote from Hamas about the humanity of the Palestinian people.
*A brief description of Salafism,
*another brief description of the siege, including
*injuries sustained.
*Another reference to Hamas’s condemnation of Arrigoni’s killing, this time ‘by Jon Donnison in Ramallah’ and
*a reminder that this is the first kidnapping since 2007, indicating that Hamas have shown restraint and been very good well-behaved boys.
Deemed Superfluous!
The BBC evidently decided the following points are irrelevant.
*Hamas are as violent as Salafists who are affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
*“Peace Activism” is the exact opposite of what it says on the tin.
*Arrigoni was a shit-stirring trouble-maker.
*Arrigoni’s girlfriend was, of all things, ”co-ordinator of Israel/Occupied Territories Section” of our old friend Amnesty International.
*Ludicrous conspiracy theories that blame Israel for everything under the sun are rampant in the Arab world.
*Israel desires peace despite being surrounded by hostile Jew-hating neighbouring countries which constantly and deliberately provoke retaliation as an excuse to resume the traditionally devillish tactics of warfare that the international community deems immoral and underhand when practised by other countries, but which said International community blatantly overlooks when employed against Israel by her enemies.

Since the BBC has a habit of reiterating anything that casts Palestinians in a good light and Israelis as liars, the last point deserves reiteration as often and as repetitively as the death toll from Operation Cast Lead.
H/T Pounce