A bit of ping pong between the BBC bias sites……here is a look at the BBC’s revisionist view of history by ‘Is the BBC biased?’s’ Craig based on comments kicked off by JonT on this site:
BBC exclusive: Kennedy was shot by a right-wing Republican
Several commenters at Biased BBC have been pointing an accusing finger at a BBC documentary broadcast last night on BBC Two, as part of the corporation’s build-up to the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy this week.Here are the exchanges at B-BBC:
JonT says: November 17, 2013 at 7:23 pm. Just watched a documentary on BBC2 about the Kennedy assassination. Three times they they stated that Texas was an evil ‘right wing republican state’ but not once did they deign to mention that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist. Watch this in ignorance and you could believe that JFK was murdered at the behest of the republican party…incredible.
Craig says:
Surely it couldn’t be true that the programme completely failed to mention Lee Harvey Oswald’s extensively documented communist activities (and his time in the Soviet Union), could it? That would be genuinely extraordinary.
Well, genuinely extraordinary it is because – as the commenters at B-BBC said – there was not a whiff of any of that. Not a whiff.
So, imagine (if you can) that you’re a school pupil watching this programme for the first time and trying to learn about the assassination of JFK.
If you’re that school pupil, you will not learn from this programme that Oswald – the prime suspect – was a communist.
Can anyone defend this ten-year old BBC documentary? I’d love to hear such a defence.
Pretty hard to defend I would have thought.
The BBC just cant help re writing history,the same as Mr Fry changing the name of gibsons dog.
Everything that the BBC puts out seems to be a lie,the Queen walking out for one,a very big one.
Its about time Auntie retired and put out of her misery.
If Texas was a Republican state (evil, right wing or whatever) it would be mighty strange of them to elect a Democrat as one of their two Senators, or for that matter 21 Democrat s out of their 23 Congressmen. And of course the Governor was John Connally a (wait for it) Democrat.
Perhaps this documentary was purchased off the shelf from that highly respected bunch of clowns “The Bureau of Investigative Journalism”?
Yep, Texas was a Democrat state in 1963, Lyndon Johnson the Democrat president after Kennedy came from Texas.
The current meme is that those Democrats in Texas were really racist, a sort of BNP if you will (Labour plus racism) and were hived off and became Republicans– a theory which may have seemed to have some plausibility, if indeed it ever did, in the days of Nixon.
But when you consider that any voter registered in Texas in 1963 is at a minimum 71 years old today, that bloc of turncoat Dems is small indeed.
A whole generation of Texans grew up under Ronald Reagan and may have become enamoured of his stance on many issues. Texas, because of favourable tax laws and mild climate (especially the southernmore part) has attracted many people from all over the US in the intervening half-century. It cannot be that all Republicans are the turncoat Dems of olde. The state elected a Latino (excuse me, “white-Hispanic”– who at least had the decency to have a Spanish surname) as one of their US Senators, on the Repub ticket.
Texas today “ain’t yer Grandpaw’s Texas,” in other words.
Basically Democrat until the 1980’s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Texas
This seems such an egregious example of their leftie bias, re-writing all the facts to fit their lying agenda, that someone should write to Lord Hall asking him why it was broadcast. Bypass the usual complaint channels that get the boilerplate ‘got it about right’ response. Make sure that Hall knows that our TV tax should not be used to spread Marxist propaganda.
If you mention enough times that Texas was an evil right wing state, then the casual viewer will be subconsciously indoctrinated to believe that Harvey Oswald was also a jackbooted Fascist….
The BBC have been carrying out such subversion for years, and the only thing that I can add is “hey ho what the hell’s new”?
Just read a very interesting book by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa called Disinformation.
Pacepa was the former head of the intelligence service in Romania under Ceausescu and defected to America in the 1970s.
In it he claims that all the conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination were started and funded by the KGB. Why? To divert attention from the fact that Oswald was a Communist and had defected to the Soviet Union.
One month before the assassination, Oswald had visited Mexico. There at the Russian embassy he met the head of the KGB “wet operations” (code for assassinations).
In this book Pacepa points out the odd aspects of Oswald’s life. Especially his marriage while in Russia to a woman who was basically communist royalty (marriages at that level were always arranged). He was also allowed to return to America with full support of the Communist Party.
Was Oswald a KGB agent? Who knows. But the Russians were embarrassed with his Soviet connections. Hence they started a black propaganda operation to blame other parties, especially anti-communist ones.
I have vague recollections of coming across a report that the author of one of the first books, written within 12 months of the Kennedy Assassination, which was integral in creating the idea of it being some kind of massive conspiracy and cover up, was found to be a KGB stooge when many of their files were made open to investigation.
I can’t remember any of the details because of the length of time which has passed but it would fall in line with what +james says. Perhaps somebody else has heard the same and has some more details.
I do recall seeing a programme recently where many of the claimed alternatives were tested by setting up identical scenarios, using original film footage to create complete accuracy, with some using the actual location of the incident and a trained sniper to test the possibility of more than one shooter. Some of the locations were ruled out because there would simply have not been a shot possible and the mystery gunman on the “Grassy Knoll” ruled out because any shot from there would have had to pass right through Jacky Kennedy, killing her, before it could have hit Jack Kennedy.
As with many supposed conspiracies most are pure fantasy and ,whilst some may be plausible as possibilities, the fact that after fifty years, countless examinations of what happened by heaven knows how many thousands of people and with many witnesses contacted and interviewed, nobody has found a single concrete fact showing that anybody, other than Oswald, was involved. Anybody who has spoken to several people who witnessed a serious accident will find that, more often than not, of the two cars involved five were red, three were green and one was huge lorry being driven at two hundred miles an hour which mysteriously vanished into thin air.
Has anyone put in a complaint? Not having seen it, I don’t feel in a position to do so, but I’d love to see how they think they got that one about right.
Sorry to ask: in which documentary are these claims made? There seems to many on iPlayer and the one shown on the 17th concerns Kennedy’s home movies.
My bad: it’s the “Days that shook the world.” I presume it’s a repeat as the series aired 10 years ago. Oh well, bias is always bias regardless of age.
Every once in a while I wonder if any of these Left-wing Kennedy fans realize he’s the one who really entrenched the US’s anti-Communist stance which kept their darling Castro and Cuba isolated for decades. Then I remember the reality that their opinions are generally based on emotion and superficialities rather than reason, and forget about it.
At least Mardell stepped outside the fan club for a moment to suggest that Kennedy wouldn’t have passed the Civil Rights Act and Jim Crow laws and racism would still be the order of the day. It’s always about race, deep down, with Mardell, isn’t it? Everything always comes down to that.
He also stated his belief that Kennedy wouldn’t have gotten us more involved in Vietnam, which once again shows how ignorant he is of the country on which he’s supposed to be the BBC’s most-trusted and most important journalist. The “Domino Effect” wasn’t working, and JFK had already increased US “military advisers” in Vietnam to about 16,000, and spoke against withdrawal. This is before the 1963 coup which pretty much set the whole thing off in a big way. We were already in deep before Johnson started sending real troops. Despite what some experts say, he wouldn’t have sent them like that otherwise.
Watched a very convincing programme on the Kennedy assassination on Channel 5 last week that showed the most likely person to have fired the fatal headshot was a Secret Service operative travelling in the car following the presidential limousine.
They showed the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s head exploding and said that the bullets in Oswald’s rifle were solid enough to pass through Kennedy’s throat and into the passenger in front of him. The fatal shot showed that the bullet must have been hollow point and explosive. This would not have been fired by Oswald’s rifle. The only firearm capable of firing an exploding bullet was shown being carried by the Secret Service man in the following car. The weapon was said by other CIA operatives to have always been carried cocked and with the safety off. It theorises that it was a case of SNAFU, because the gun went off as the CIA bodyguard jumped out of the car when he heard Oswald’s shots. Unfortunately the bullet went straight into Kennedy’s head and unintentionally completed what Oswald had attempted. Hence the need for a cover up. It wouldn’t have looked good for an organisation charged with protecting the President’s life to be seen incompetently ending it.
Sorry, but that seems so unlikely. So many people would have been aware of that one-in-a-million unlucky chance. i.e. people watching from the side, the secret-servicemen involved, and no-one has said anything!!!. It is one of the most bizarre hypotheses. It is clear that Oswald shot the President, but why Jack Ruby did what he did and how he was able to do it is a much richer source for speculation.