Author Archives: Alan

The BBC asks...How do fake news sites make money?

Curiously no mention of the licence fee that the BBC extorts from us.

The BBC was also reporting this week that our money, that is supposed to go to charities, is being used to fund terrorism as their advertising goes to ‘radical’ websites.

So does your money go to fund terrorism, or to fund Muslim religious bigotry, or to fund anti-Christian, anti-Hindu, anti-Buddhist bigotry, or to fund pro-EU propaganda, or to fund the promotion of an extremist pro-mass immigration policy, or to fund the demonisation of Israel, or to fund the spread of anti-Semitism in Europe, or to fund the Labour Party, or to fund anti-Brexit reporting, or to fund anti-Trump prejudice, do you fund the Orwellian manufacture of fake news on an industrial scale?

If you pay the BBC licence fee then you may well be funding all those things.

‘When Labour is on the defensive, as now, the NHS is a powerful instrument of attack.’

When you’re in dire political trouble, your party is tearing itself apart, your own position is in doubt and the polls show you are heading the way of the LibDems call the BBC. They can help.

Labour is in melt down, internally and in the polls as the looney left took over the asylum.   Corbyn has lost control, well he never had any really, and the firm smack of authority is just as much a fantasy to him as to Max Mosley.

But fear not, the BBC is here to help.  It has stepped in to plug Labour’s credibility gap and provide the ‘official opposition’ to the government that Labour fails to.  It is no mere chance that the BBC has chosen to bombard the government with ‘facts’ on the NHS’ performance recently…facts, facts, facts and yet not so much.  We get lots of stuff we already knew, lots of alarming reports of the ‘crisis’ in the NHS, lots of sensationalist reports of the meltdown of A&E and yet not so much on the causes, or the real causes I should say, and not so much on the solutions other than to constantly ask Ministers if they will be providing more money.  No coincidence that the BBC released its information just in time for Labour to use it in PMQs as their main attack theme.  The same BBC that refused to release the video of a school which was bombed with a chemical weapon in Syria just before the vote in Parliament as to whether military action could be authorised…..the BBC influencing the politics with its manipulation of the news?

The real problem is that A&E is vastly over used with millions more patients coming through its doors…Up to 2003 the number of patients calling into A&E was around 14 million, now it is around 23 million.

Even Sir Robert Francis, whom the BBC interviewed this week, told us that the problem was a growng populaton and more complex cases for elderly patients…the BBC chose to report that if the crisis goes on we are heading towards another ‘Stafford’….when the BBC reported on ‘Stafford’ originally they signally failed to mention Labour by name in so many of their reports as if to try and distance Labour from responsibility.

The Telegraph notes….

All week the BBC has been running special programmes and reports on the NHS. We have learnt that the system is “in crisis” with hospital accident and emergency wards overwhelmed and patients often left for hours before being seen.

Without wishing to denigrate the corporation’s journalism, what has this told us that we did not already know?

Anyone tuning in would imagine the system was on the verge of collapse. Yet the big story with the NHS is not that it struggles to keep its head above water because it needs more money to stay afloat; we know that. The real issue is that no one is prepared to recognise that it needs to be run differently if it is to survive.

To use a medical metaphor, the BBC has once again identified the symptoms but has shunned any serious diagnosis of the cause or the cure.

Pointing out the flaws in the health service is the easy bit.   Inevitably, the debate reignited by the BBC always ends up in the same place: how much more can be taken out of taxes for the NHS.

The Conservatives …. always risk political damage whenever the NHS becomes an issue. Not for nothing did Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader, want to “weaponise” the health service during the 2015 election campaign.

When Labour is on the defensive, as now, the NHS is a powerful instrument of attack.

There is something depressing about this cycle. A great national institution is being crucified on the altar of party politics.

The BBC of course has no problem exploiting the NHS as a ‘weapon’ as it tries to prop up its own ailing and elderly political relative just as it had no problem sacrificing so many Syrians on the altar of ‘Peace’…a peace that actually brings more war, thousands dead and millions of refugees…but that’s another BBC story for another time.

Also in the Telegraph…

Why won’t the BBC dare to look at the real causes of the NHS crisis? 

The former Chancellor Nigel Lawson once famously said that “the NHS is the nearest thing the English have to a religion.” Over recent days the BBC has taken on the self-appointed role of championing the faith.    

The chosen method of the Corporation to achieve this has been the traditional one of the evangelical preacher: to create a mood of terrifying, apocalyptic crisis where salvation can only be achieved through ever more fervent worship and ever greater devotion to the case.

As a result, the BBC news this week was completely dominated by NHS stories. Day and night the bulletins were filled with dire reports from the “front line”, as if the health service were a war zone. Viewers were bombarded with images of weeping nurses, stressed-out doctors, and patients lying on trolleys.  

I listened with amazement, but no surprise, to John Humphrys attempting to blame the government for the witch-hunt against British troops by the likes of Phil Shiner.  Humphrys sententiously told us that ‘something had gone badly wrong‘ and that the government was surely complicit in this hounding of the troops.

The government certainly set up the inquiries but why?  The only reason such inquiries are deemed necessary is because of the likes of the BBC which puts enormous pressure on the government by its relentlessly negative reporting which always looks to find fault and blame and does so with a high moral tone demanding ‘justice’ and ‘human rights’.

But the real twist in the tale is of course that it is the BBC that is complicit in the witch-hunt and hounding of the troops that made them endure years of pressure and intense scrutiny and uncertainty.  For years the BBC reported Shiner’s claims as fact, as the truth, when they were a pack of lies.  This has had enormous consequences, not just on the lives of the troops, but on national security and on the radicalisation of Muslims as the BBC’s narrative that the war in Iraq was illegal, a war against Muslims and that ‘Britain’ has been committing war crimes against Muslims, fed into the Jihadists’ own narrative that they use to recruit more head chopping fanatics.  Thanks Lord Hall.

When the BBC hunts down British troops and does all it can to hinder a war effort whilst at the same time supporting and excusing Muslim terrorism something has gone badly wrong at the BBC.  Fix it or close it down.

Funny old world as the BBC twists and turns and contorts itself in a desperate attempt to maintain its grip on the news agenda.

Fake news is big news these days and the BBC is at the forefront of  peddling it whilst at the same time presenting itself as the defender of truth and accuracy…as James Purnell so helpfully informs us…

When there is so much information and misinformation, the BBC can be a trusted guide through that abundance.

That’ll be right.

You may have noticed recently a curious tic the BBC has…when the accusation of fake news is directed at itself or one of its friends it laughs the idea of fake news off as a fanciful invention of Trump…there is no such thing as fake news.  However when it suits the BBC Trump is the creator fake news and the father of the post truth age.  Last week we had Nick Robinson tell us that it wasn’t Putin who was spreading lies and and misinformation creating a post truth era it was Trump….a pretty astonishing statement from a puffed up, preening presenter about the President of the USA.  Later Robinson interviewed two experts on cyber security and information wars…they told us that there was ‘nothing fundamentally different happening now to what happened previously.’  In other words truth was always a commodity that could be bought and sold….ie we are not in a post truth era at all…the BBC is lying to us…as usual.

Such a revelation did not stop the trailer for Any Questions stating that we are in such a post truth, post fact, alternate fact era.  Isn’t it great that the supposedly impartial, accurate and trustworthy BBC is such a dishonest and corrupt peddler of misinformation?

The BBC has teemed up with Buzzfeed as you know…which is remarkable as Buzzfeed is possibly worse than the hated Mail being a click-bait site in essence.  The BBC held its nose in the search for the ‘youth’ audience and to have a useful idiot it could use to do the dirty work the BBC couldn’t be seen to be doing…such as the publishing of the fake and very dodgy dossier on Trump created by an anti-Trump snooper.

The so-called dossier was patently suspect as even Buzzfeed admitted..and now Buzzfeed is being sued for falsely naming someone in relation to the dossier...

A Russian-tied tech firm named in a controversial dossier containing uncorroborated allegations about President Donald Trump and the hacking of Democratic National Committee email accounts announced late Friday that it has filed defamation suits against the online news site BuzzFeed, its editor in chief and a former British intelligence agent.

The lawsuits were brought by XBT Holdings, a Cyprus-based company owned by Russian tech magnate Aleksej Gubarev. Lawyers for his firm filed complaints Friday in London against the former spy and his company, and against BuzzFeed and its editor in chief, Ben Smith, in Broward County Circuit Court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where XBT’s subsidiary Webzilla is headquartered.

“The dossier included libelous, unverified and untrue allegations regarding XBT, Webzilla and Gubarev. The lawsuits seek yet undetermined compensation for the damages suffered by XBT, Webzilla and Gubarev as the result of the publication of the dossier,” a statement said.

Mehdi Hasan admitted that the Muslim community’s ‘dirty little secret’ was anti-Semitism, the BBC’s dirty little secret is it’s anti-England racism.  Naturally it isn’t actually much of a secret.  Its constant attempts to undermine ‘Britain’ is part of the long march to trample over English history intended to diminish or demonise England’s past achievements so that people start to feel guilt or even disgust at being English.  All part of a campaign to destroy any feeling of loyalty or belonging to the nation state…paradoxically the BBC does this by encouraging nationalist feelings and fostering anti-English resentments in the other nations of Britain.  The end game is of course to break up the UK and serve us up on a plate to the EU…divide and rule….another reason they want mass immigration of people who have no loyalty or history of belonging to Britain….the same reason the EU forces freedom of  movement upon us…it’s not economic but political….the intention to create people not loyal to England or Poland or Germany but loyal, obedient citizens of the EU….an inverted kind of ethnic cleansing.

The BBC’s own racism is so often apparent…..think how it reacted after Brexit when it denounced ‘Britain’ as a nastier more racist place…of course it was pointing the finger not at all ‘Britons’ but solely at the white population..the hideously white population. The same BBC that is happy to demonise white males as ‘pale, male and stale’….how they laugh when they say it…only today we heard it in reference to the FA.

Then of course there is the NHS…run by different governments in the devolved nations….hard to find the BBC criticising their failures…indeed the BBC will do its best to hide the truth…not so long ago when attention was being drawn to the Labour run Welsh NHS’s failings the BBC told us that all was pretty wonderful and better than in England…when that was just not true…as current figures show on waiting times for A&E.

You may have noted the BBC’s little survey on A&E released just in time for Corbyn to use it in PMQ’s.  This survey was just of the English A&E…we are told that this is because Welsh and Scottish A&E figures are collated differently…that doesn’t stop the BBC at other times comparing them when it suits….and the government seems perfectly able to do such a comparison.  Any chance the BBC are intent on providing ammunition to Labour to attack May and the Tory ‘English’ government and are not really interested in the NHS’s performance at all really?

What is the real problem with the NHS?  The BBC pushes relentlessly the narrative that it is all about care in the communtiy blocking beds…but the real problem is at the other end, the vast increase in patients using A&E as well as more elderly patients with more complex needs….however the government says that the proportion of patients with complex needs has not increased…so it is not that there are more elderly patients by proportion as the BBC keeps telling us…just more because there are more patients in total…

The recent QualityWatch report on A&E found little evidence that the
complexity of cases in A&E has increased. The proportion of people with
one or more long-term conditions attending A&E has not changed
notably.

Up to 2003 the number of patients calling into A&E was around 14 million, now it is around 23 million…spot the difference?

The King’s Fund tells us that around 2/3rds of delayed discharges are due to internal NHS issues, the rest can be attributed to problems in finding places for patients in care homes….however look at this graph…it shows that the ‘bed-blocking’ was actually worse in 2008…consider that in 2008 there were fewer patients using A&E and you might think the government now is doing better than Labour….

The Today show managed a whole segment without mentioning Trump by name [08:24], though he loomed large over the discussion….the unnamed boogeyman disrupting the civilised party who must be exorcised.

A discussion about a female SOE operative in WWII made a massive leap of association by connecting her heroics in her fight against the Nazi’s fascism to the battle against the new fascist world order…Trumpism.

The world needs role models like her who know which is the right path, what is the acceptable, ‘civilised’ behaviour, what is wrong with the world…you must fight what is wrong….. as barriers are going up, movement stopped and people described by their religion or race…wrong, wrong, wrong.  Naturally that didn’t stop them telling us it was the SOE agent’s sufi [Muslim] religion that kept her going as she was abused by the Fascists.

Might suggest the real Fascists are those liberals who don’t believe in democracy and will say and do anything to subvert it, including supporting Islamist terrorism [though of course they don’t in such cases like to make an association with Islam as they do when it suits a pro-Muslim narrative]….or killing Trump.

Remarkable….the BBC has become the seeker of Truth, a warrior cutting down falsehood and lies in order to protect us from the evil doers.

Once, not so long ago, the much fêted Victoria Derbyshire would sit in mute silence as obvious Muslim radicals used her programme to spread their propaganda, Derbyshire herself often backing what they said and indeed on one occasion, Phil Shiner-like, told us that British troops were murderers  of civilians who were accidentally killed in military strikes against the Taliban.

That relaxed attitude has gone, she’s a changed woman, a changed journalist, now she scours the world for stories of injustice or extremism that she can do her bit to rectify…in fact all the way to a small, remote village in a very remote part of Europe…

Muslims and gays ‘are unwelcome here’

Muslim dress and “homosexual propaganda” have been banned in a remote village in southern Hungary. The BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme reports.

Where would we be without VD in the nether regions of the EU?

Remember that ‘cabinet’ memo, you know the one that said we’re all doomed because of Brexit and which said May was not in control?  Remember how the BBC splashed it over their news for days, insisting that the ‘cabinet’ memo was very important…telling us…‘the document does matter because it underlines what we have reported and others have written about many times.’?

Of course it didn’t matter one jot…it wasn’t ‘cabinet’ memo at all but a job application in essence by a company touting for business as a consultant…this was the BBC spreading misinformation on a massive scale in order to make Brexit seem an ever more unattractive  prospect and put the pressure on for a change of mind.

At the time we wrote…

The problem the BBC has these days is that the Internet makes lying much more tricky.  Not only can people easily fact-check you but can then disseminate the truth to counter your lies that much more easily as they have never been able to before.

That doesn’t stop the BBC still trying to pull the wool over our eyes though…it valiantly battles on against the truth and the facts to spread doom and gloom about Brexit by blaming it for every price rise,  every fall in sales, and so often neglecting to connect the OPEC decision that put up oil prices, or the steep rise in world commodity prices, to price rises here, instead blaiming them on Brexit.  Only this morning we were told that shoppers had returned a lot of items they bought online in January and therefore the high retail sales were misleading and shops didn’t sell as much as claimed…due to Brexit.  So people bought stuff…looked at the BBC news about Brexit and decided to return the items ‘because of Brexit’?  Desperate stuff from the BBC.

Still, they chose to just ignore a good news story for the UK economy #DespiteBrexit as PWC announce [as the Guardian tells us]…

‘UK could be fastest-growing G7 economy if it gets trade deals right’

The UK could shake off the near-term impact of Brexit to become the fastest-growing economy in the G7 group of rich countries between now and 2050, according to a report that paints a bright outlook for the country’s prospects outside the EU.

Consultants PwC say the UK economy will not escape entirely unscathed from the decision to leave the bloc and that it will dampen growth prospects in the short term. But the brunt of the impact would be felt by 2020 and in the years that follow the UK would outperform its peers thanks to its relatively large working age population and its flexible economy.

I can’t see it at all on the BBC website, if it’s there it’s not prominent and I didn’t hear it mentioned once on the radio today…which, when you consider the torrent of anti-Brexit coverage we got as the BBC surrendered their network to the fake ‘Cabinet memo’ story , is remarkable…a report that suggest the UK could have the best performing economy in the G7 and the BBC ignores it?

The BBC spins on an industrial scale a false anti-Brexit story but ignores one that adopts a completely different perspective on the outcome of Brexit to that peddled by the BBC itself….and this report comes from PWC who were on the Remain side during the referendum.

What does the BBC choose to publicise?

Tax burden to be highest in 30 years, says think tank

Tax is set to rise as a share of the UK’s income to its highest level since 1986, according to a think tank.

Higher income from taxes and relatively low growth will combine to create this effect, according to the the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Way back in December 2014 we posted the below about the BBC and Phil Shiner…I see no reason to change anything…..it more than stands the test of time which is more than Shiner and the BBC do…..Time for Lord Hall to apologise for all the slurs and traumas he has helped put British troops through.

If like me you have been listening or watching the BBC for the last few years and hearing their coverage of the alleged abuse of Iraqis or Afghans by British troops you will know that the BBC has given itself over to the likes of lawyer Phil Shiner and his extraordinary tales, his own very singular version of the truth.

Today the BBC must be absolutely gutted as the Al Sweady inquiry clears, as expected, British troops of allegations they tortured and killed prisoners.

The BBC has put a lot of work into helping Shiner smear the Army’s reputation and put a great many soldiers through the wringer for so many years.

In 2008 the BBC’s Panorama produced a programme, On Whose Orders?, that claimed to investigate the allegations….here is what one viewer thought of the programme:

Is it just me or do these left wing lobbyists and solicitors actually work with, or very close with the BBC , they have a voice out of all proportion and seem to be able to spout whatever bollox they like on the BBC, I swear they should give Shami Chakrabati her own show, for someone who’s never been elected as any kind of public official, she seems to get more airtime than the PM!

Is it any co-incidence that her sister works for the beeb?

What I’m getting at is do these far left lawyers aproach the bbc with program ideas?

Make no mistake , this was phil shiners program, the bbc only tried to distance themselves from him at the end because of all the critisism they’d recieved in all the major newspapers , that’s the reason they emphisised the program was still being made in the newspaper reports, to do some last minute distancing from phil shiner.

The Sun newspaper wasn’t impressed:

Beeb ‘slurs’ on Iraq heroes

The BBC were initially blocked from broadcasting the programme but went to court to force the issue so insistent were they about finding out the ‘truth’ of the matter…here they are boasting of their ‘victory’:

Panorama’s legal victory

Panorama has won an important victory in the High Court against the Ministry of Defence which was attempting to prevent the broadcast of details of alleged abuse by soldiers in Iraq.

The Panorama programme ended with a bit of a disclaimer…as set out in the web report:

Panorama has seen no proof that prisoners died at the hands of their captors and concludes that the case being brought by solicitors Phil Shiner and Martyn Day represents the most extreme interpretation of a troubling but confusing incident. They are asking for the bodies to be disinterred and evidence to be handed to Scotland Yard.

Despite that dsitinct lack of proof for the next 5 years the BBC continued to bombard us with the allegations in a manner that suggested there was far more substance to them than there was…as we now know…they being the result of deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hatred….you can wonder whether the judge was talking about the Iraqis, Shiner, the BBC or all three of them.

The BBC was very proud of its Panorama programme stating this on the announcement of the inquiry:

New inquiry into British army abuse in Iraq vindicates Panorama

Ironically the first line of this pyrrhic victory was this:

Time can make a world of difference in an emotive, ongoing story.

The BBC goes on to suggest:

In revisiting these allegations through public inquiries, the entire system of military justice will inevitably be called into question.

Well I imagine military justice has been vindicated…the RMP said there was no case…and there was no case….it was clearly a case of highly suspect allegations being encouraged by ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers backed up by a media organisation that had its fingers badly burnt as it was caught lying about the Iraq War Dossier and has been seeking to exact revenge ever since.

As the BBC was so clearly ready to congratulate itself on firstly getting its ‘legal victory’ and then slapping itself on the back when it thought itself ‘vindicated’ perhaps it should now make a very large apology to the Public it so badly misled and not least the soldiers it helped pillory and their families who have all had to suffer these allegations for so long.

Con Coughlin at the Telegraph is of the same mind:

Al Sweady inquiry: The British Army deserves a full apology from the BBC

Looking back, it is amazing just how many people were prepared to believe the accusations that the British Army routinely tortured detainees.

In sum, they conclude that the role of social media was overstated, with television remaining by far the primary vehicle for consuming political news….Television remains more important by a large margin.

A study of fake news in the US during the election has completely undermined the BBC narrative that Trump stole the election due to fake news on social media sites fooling people into voting for him.

The BBC has been leading the campaign against ‘Fake News’, telling us that, remarkably, and falsely, that most Americans get their news from social media like Facebook and Twitter.  That’s just not true…nor is it true that ‘Fake News’ impacted in any significant way at all on the result of the US election…..

Did fake news help elect Trump? Not likely, according to new research

“Fake news” stories favoring Donald Trump far exceeded those favoring Hillary Clinton but did not have a significant impact on the presidential election, concludes a new survey of social and other media consumption.

In sum, they conclude that the role of social media was overstated, with television remaining by far the primary vehicle for consuming political news. Just 14 percent of Americans deemed social media the primary source of their campaign news, according to their research.

In addition, while fake news that favored Trump far exceeded that favoring Clinton, few Americans actually recalled the specifics of the stories and fewer believed them.

“For fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads,” they conclude.

The paper is worth consideration especially given overriding press assumptions about the potency of ideologically driven news coverage.

The BBC has also argued that the US is extremely polarised with Republicans only reading right-wing news and liberals only left-wing news etc but again..not true…. [as your own reading will undoubtedly reflect…the internet has opened up the world of different ideas and views, not created the echo chambers that the BBC insists is the norm now]…

Gentzkow and Shapiro countered that view by showing that most people do not get their news from ideologically driven sources, with more traditional neutral wire service and local TV fare outweighing the much chronicled cable news channels, notably Fox News, and politically skewed websites.

Can’t wait to see the BBC ‘analysis’ of this report.  Any bets they’ll hum and haw and then dismiss it as not fully representative and the wrong interpretation of the data, just as they did when a highly respected black professor concluded that whites were more likely to be shot by police than blacks?

Oh..and just for interest considering the BBC’s views on race and immigration…here’s an American Black thoroughly enjoying an immigrant getting his come-uppance after he attacked a bus driver…..