Biased BBC reader Alex asks;
“Here’s a little analytical activity. Compare the Islamic and Judaism entries within the “War and Peace” sections:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/rs/war/
Please take special note of the very last paragraph in the Judaism entry.
Do these entries offer a fair representation of both religions’ tenets on war? Discuss.”
Right, this one arrives early for a stage. Got something to say about the State Broadcaster? Well this is the place to share it…what BIAS have you seen or heard?
So, let’s look at the story first;
The shooting of a 36-year-old man in Newtownabbey on the outskirts of north Belfast has been described as a “ruthless, careless killing”.It is understood the victim was shot six times and died at the scene. At least two men are believed to have been involved in the attack.
Now, who does the BBC go to for a quote? Yes…
Sinn Fein Newtownabbey Councillor Gerry O’Reilly said there was “shock and anger” in the area at the murder. He said there was speculation among residents that dissident republicans were responsible for the attack, which he said happened in the man’s home.
Now, then, would that be the SAME Sinn Fein whose IRA brutally murdered almost 2000 people, maiming thousands more? Asking THEM for a quote on an alleged terrorist murder is akin to asking Ian Brady for a quote on child care provision. Also note how O’Reilly is allowed to speculate on the nature of the killers..”dissident republicans” in this instance. This story is designed to make the IRA seem quite a decent lot, with Sinn Fein the caring face of republicanism. BBC Northern Ireland’s infatuation with Sinn Fein/IRA is repulsive but also significant. It helps sanitise their vile deeds and sustains the illusion that all is well.
The BBC’s bias was wonderfully illustrated by a little item on Today this morning just before 7am. They had tracked down an American professor who has authored a book that shows that contrary to Clinton’s assertion “It may not be the economy, stupid” when it comes to determining the outcome of elections. Yup, and so Obama’s woeful performance on the US economy “may not hurt the President” and that mixed economic messages suggested Obama could not really be blamed on how the US economy was performing. Same argument was extended to many EU economies, bizarrely. By contrast, and this really amused me, the Professor pointed out that the UK’s economic performance could be laid directly at the feet of the Conservative element in Government! Magnificent ..an Obama apologist and Conservative critic being allowed to opine without dissent. As Helen Boaden would say (when she was not busy trying to stifle Savile’s critics) “Impartiality is in our genes”, right?
I think anyone listening to the BBC will know that this is true….the government announces a new policy and the Today programme and 5Live are awash with the sound of charities and interest groups wailing that children are being ‘punished’, disabled people will become prisoners in their own homes and the old will die an early death.
The BBC rarely challenges such assertions.
Of course the BBC itself is the biggest culprit being chock-a-block with labour supporters…champagne swilling ones at that.
Cameron is unfortunately a soft touch…too weak to really be ‘political’ in the way that Labour is…..look at the appointment of Tory wet, Patten, to the BBC Trust……he was never going to be ‘impartial’…he was always going to be ‘Left’ of centre in his thinking…he was in fact the man the BBC would have chosen themselves.
Andrew Gilligan let’s rip at BBC ‘management’….possibly though a little bitter about Hutton, and himself being blamed for the sexing up of his report…..he was though to blame wasn’t he? It was him speaking not Greg Dykes.
However back to today………
The standard rule in a media storm is to put one person in charge and to establish the facts quickly. The standard BBC rule is to put nobody in charge and to find someone other than senior management to take all the blame. An internal inquiry into the Hutton fiasco concluded that I, the most junior person involved, was wholly responsible. I did wonder why, if that was genuinely the case, the BBC’s management had ever come to my defence in the first place. The fact was, we were all responsible.
And now everyone, from the director-general, George Entwistle, on down is dumping on the editor of Newsnight, Peter Rippon, for what, we’re told, was his sole decision to drop the Savile report. He’s already become a BBC unperson, his name removed from the Newsnight credits.
But blaming it all on Rippon is simply not plausible. His team’s film was strong. They had been working on it for weeks; there were no legal risks. Yet within days, Rippon performed a 180-degree turn – from eager enthusiasm to curt dismissal – for reasons that seemed flimsy, even before they were shown to be untrue. It is hard to imagine that his superiors played no part in this process – but proving it will be another matter.
The thing about Rippon is that he almost certainly wasn’t in charge. At ITN, or Sky, or any newspaper, there’s a clear chain of command. The buck really does stop with the editor. But the editor of any BBC programme has the stale breath of at least five different bosses over his shoulder. That helps all those bosses, of course, avoid the blame when there’s a crisis. But it also makes for the kind of terrible, unfocused decision-making that causes crises in the first place.
In Savilegate, there probably wasn’t a smoking email with some top boss ordering the story off air – instead, there will have been conversations in corridors between Peter and Helen, or Helen and Steve, or George and Mark.
[There are] serious questions about George Entwistle’s suitability to run anything. As the Panorama special on Savile showed, some of the BBC’s reporters are lions. But they really are led by donkeys.
Johnny L Lee (whoever he is) seems to agree that management leaned on Rippon in the quietest way on Twitter to Derbyshire:
Johnny L Lee @JohnnyLee14 @vicderbyshire we all know how invisible leaning works in television
Today was a bad day for BBC economic reporters…for months they have cast doubt on the rising employment figures suggesting that there must be an underlying problem with the economy….and that employment rising is possibly a sign of something rotten at the heart of failing British industry.
Today they have had to eat a large portion of humble pie…..the growth figures seem to have shocked Stephanie Flanders so much that she was forced to report in a balanced and reasoned manner…not only that but Martha Kearney and Andrew Neal savaged Ed Balls over his lies….he looks increasingly untrustworthy and discredited.
What did Flanders admit? She had to admit that the figures showed that far from having been in the longest recession in 100 years the economy has been growing, slowly but steadily since Spring, by around 0.3pc.
That kind of explains why jobs are being created I would have thought. Something Flanders and Co could easily have discovered by going to any company taking on workers and asking why they were doing so. But she never did. The answer might have been inconvenient.
The jobs are real jobs and the economy is in long term growth…however slow….all of which undermines Labour….will we see that reflected in future BBC reporting or will Flanders revert to her usual none too subtle support for Plan B, Keynes and the dynamic duo of Balls and Miliband?
A big juicy bone for Dez and Co as they’ve been quiet for a while:
Vanessa Feltz stood in for Jeremy Vine yesterday and asked the question ‘Is Entwistle being made a scapegoat?’ That’s easy to answer….No…he’s made a complete mess of things.
She also said this in regard to Savile’s misdemeanours…..
‘Perhaps we could look at it in a different way…perhaps we could see it as a lovely treat for the girls’
I’ll leave you to consider if, in the context, she was right.
Everything is going a bit pear shaped at the BBC regarding Savile……and no matter how many ‘media consultants’ or media analysts from Univeristies (who usually turn out to be ex-BBC employees) the BBC parades in front of us to say it’s something all about nothing really, the increasing likelihood is that Entwistle might go….if this was a Government department you can be sure one of John Humphrys questions would be ‘Should you consider your position?’
Roger Laughton, BBC employee for 25 years and now a media consultant type, was wheeled on yesterday to tell us he felt sorry for Entwistle….‘being grilled by a bunch of quite aggressive MPs….they were attack dogs…jusy looking for questions he couldn’t answer…he tried to answer honestly.’
A new line of defence is that the victims, the girls, are being forgotten in all this and the BBC has become the story instead….that’s because the BBC is the story…how it allowed Savile to ‘get away’ with it for nearly 50 years, why Newsnight abandoned its broadcast…was it to safeguard the BBC reputation?, and the general incompetence of the senior management’s reactions in response to a major crisis.
Now though it looks like there is more trouble brewing internally as they fall out amongst themselves as Victoria Derbyshire on Twitter lays into management…i.e. Entwistle:
Victoria Derbyshire @vicderbyshire ‘If BBC journos/Eds make a poor editorial call, (& most of us hve at some point), will they be treated by mgemnt like Peter Rippon has been?
And:
The Daily Mail reports that the BBC tried to ‘gag’ a government minister, Grant Shapps, when he appeared on question time by laying out what the ‘facts’ really were regarding Savile and the BBC…the facts of course as the BBC management saw them….
And:
BBC Trust chief, Chris Patten, was slow off the mark to comment…and when he did it might have been better if he hadn’t bothered as he completely misjudged his approach when answering a letter from a government minister and implied that the government was in some way threatening the BBC’s independence.
As stated previously when you see the performance and attitudes of past and present chairman of BBC Governors or Trust you realise it is probably almost pointless to complain to them about BBC behaviour….it seems they will defend it however wrong it was.
And:
Another indictment of management is the attitude of Entwistle and his predecessor Thompson who claim, in the interest of BBC ‘independence’, to have refused to take any interest whatsoever in the working of the BBC and therefore cannot be held responsible for whatever goes wrong.
Not a bad get out clause….’I’m in charge but don’t blame me…..I’m just an inspirational figure head or something……pays well though.’
All told a pretty shabby shambles…..still….when the BBC come to make the ‘Film’ I have no doubt that we will find we were all badly mistaken and Savile was actually employed by ITV and it was the BBC, aided by Labour’s Tom Watson, who broke the scandal wide open.
Two stories from the US as covered by the BBC.
Note also that the second headline puts ‘voter fraud’ in inverted commas. For those who haven’t seen O’Keefe’s video it can be viewed here.
UPDATE. And don’t think for a moment that BBC reporters aren’t aware of what they’re doing and why. Here’s Philippa Thomas quoted in a recent article about coverage of the US election by the foreign press (emphasis mine):
Thomas, a 2011 Nieman Fellow in the throes of covering her fourth U.S. presidential campaign for the BBC, is used to pleading her case with campaigns. “The BBC News website has massive American readership and a lot of what it publishes is shared on Facebook and Twitter,” Thomas wrote. “A lot of the politicians know it: I reckon my challenge covering current U.S. campaigns is to persuade the gatekeepers that the BBC is seen, heard and read by enough key voters to get us on their lists.”
