Wednesday, 14:25BST:
The Guardian (or is it ‘theguardian’ these days?):
Tories offer qualified terror bill support
BBC Views Online:
Tories delaying terror laws fight
The Views Online article did at least start by explaining:
The Tories say they will back proposed new anti-terrorism laws as MPs debate them for the first time, but will oppose some aspects at later stages.
The party is particularly against plans to allow terrorism suspects to be held for up to 90 days without charge.
The Liberal Democrats are expected to formally vote against the Terrorism Bill at Wednesday’s second reading.
The bill would outlaw “glorifying” terrorism and make it an offence to commit acts “preparatory to terrorism”.
The Conservatives’ decision to back the government at this stage of the bill’s progress through Parliament signals an end to the previously united approach on the issue by both opposition parties.
The increase in the time police can hold terrorism suspects, from two weeks to 90 days.
But oh, that awful headline – so misleading – especially for people who didn’t read the story itself. While we’re at it, can anyone tell me what that last paragraph is meant to say? Does anyone at the BBC (including sub-editors) ever read through what they’ve written before clicking ‘Publish’? We are forced to pay for this stuff you know!
The headline was subsequently changed – it now reads: Terror Bill clears first hurdle – but only as part of BBC Views Online’s questionable practice of completely re-writing existing stories rather than either adding an update or starting a new story. Just one more way of re-writing history as we go along!
O/T: RE Iran
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4384024.stm
“Russia is seen as a supporter of Iran in the international row over its nuclear programme.”
No, Russia IS supporting Iran with its nuclear program, it’s tied into a very lucrative contract with Tehran to provide it. The BBC’s inability to comprehend and provide the full details of one of the most saliant facts strikes again, as it did with Iraq.
I still believe the best route to go is the UN.
We must be seen not to have double standards, and we must at least try diplomatically.
This time we have a very compelling argument and the Blair govt with its legal expertise can surely formulate a solid case.
I mean what more do you want: “wipe of the map”
What else can it mean other than intended destruction of another state?
We must seek the UN route, it is the only way to secure lasting peace, and if worst comes to worst, a common sense of purpose.
OT question time last night, i have now stopped watching it.
Really its just too emotional and too biased.
It s a real shame because i did like watching it.
(mostly) OT:
Did I see the 10:20 report on News 24 right ? Does the file photo used for the Beeb’s woman in Iran (the not noticably Islamic sounding Frances Harrison) feature her wearing a head scarf ? How exactly does wearing Islamic regalia mesh with the Beeb’s supposed impartiality ? And will US correspondants now start wearing Stars & Stripes tie-pins ? Or is that a stupid question ?
Off Topic:
I’m not sure how its happened but I’ve had an opinion published on (D)HYS. Not only that, but I have a “side box” as well?????
Maybe the BBC is changing (hahahhahahaha).
Should international aid come from a single fund?
Should the government give any aid to other countries? If the British People wanted to donate money to charity, they would. There is nothing to stop them doing this. What right does the government have to take my taxes (upon pain of imprisonment) and give them away to other countries? I give money to charity, but that is my choice, not the government’s.
Rob, London, UK
For some reason I can’t get urls to work properly.
I can get this type to work:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/4381398.stm
But not the kind where the hyperlink is a clickable piece of text. Any ideas?
O/T Iran
“Iran has defended its president’s call for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, saying this has been its foreign policy since the 1979 Islamic revolution.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4384264.stm
Too true, y’know. It’s not Ahmadinejad’s fault that the BBC don’t tell us these things.
I’m glad MEMRI exists.
http://www.memri.org/
Grimer
Congratulations on ‘Having Your Say!’
Text – I think you need to type the text on a Word document, right click the link, choose ‘Hyperlink’ then ‘edit Hyperlink,’ then you can change it to clickable text.
Grimer: congrats on getting your comment past the (D)HYS filters.
It seems letting your comment through wasn’t their only mistake – the rabidly pro-UN comment from a Bruce Acton has been posted twice!
Here’s the HTML format for links:
<a href=”http://full_url_of_link/”>link text</a>
Hope that helps.
Grrr dopey Haloscan has mangled my post. It worked in the preview.
B-BBC editors:
Please remove (or amend if possible) my 11:21am post. I used HTML entities (ampersand lt semicolon) to escape the link syntax, which worked in the preview.
[I’ve fixed it for you. Andrew]
A brief description of a few tags in the blurb at the top of the comments page mightn’t be a bad idea.
Btw thanks for all your hard work on the site – much appreciated. Have you noticed Scott Burgess’s fund drive? He’s put a Paypal link on his site – might not be a bad idea for B-BBC!
Slightly OT
Somewhere I came across either a blog or website dealing with TV licence issues, but can’t remember where. Any info gratefully received. Cheers
Thanks John. Unfortunately, I can’t see how you did that. Could you do it again, but use square brackets instead?
e.g.
[url=http://www.biased-bbc.blogspot.com/]Biased BBC[/url]
Thanks a lot,
Rob
The BBC launches a column written by “you, the readers and users of this site.”
“If there’s a subject you are passionate about – whether you love it or hate it – let us know”
First up, a non telly-tax payer who lives in Kiev on how awful television adverts are!
Living with Ukrainian TV
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4384624.stm
Nasty adverts! None of those on the BBC of course……becuase of the ‘unique way’……
People being jailed and fined for having an unlicensed TV-set.
Grimer,
Here you go:
(a href=”hxxp://your.url.com/”)link word or phrase(/a)
replace () with tri-brackets and ‘xx’ with ‘tt’ (h tt p)
Like This?
Kulibar Tree.
Try the Freedom Association they have been running a campaign against the Television licence for three or four years now.
Can i also add, i don’t think the UK should be too gung ho, our military has been practically scaled back so much that we cannot realistically take any form of action atleast for 5 years.
By which time Iran will have nukes.
Well done Government. Maybe time to start re-investing, and buying cheaper and better US equipment?
It will save money and do the job..
But without this investment i oppose any action against Iran or anyone else, as the UK cannot cope now, it most definitely cannot cope in future.
Too true Ian. With the huge holes in Gordon’s budgets and the amount of government wast, there’s no chance of our ared forces getting the investment they need.
The richest economy in the world grows even faster despite being hit by storms.
and its only minor Business news (slipped into the side ASAP).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4385628.stm
If you’re British the BBC are your enemy.
Kulibar Tree: “Somewhere I came across either a blog or website dealing with TV licence issues, but can’t remember where. Any info gratefully received. Cheers”
Try:
http://www.tvlicensing.biz – it’s the site of the campaign started by Jonathan Miller, the Sunday Times journo.
For those learning how to do hyperlinked URLs, the above was entered as:
<a href=”http://www.tvlicensing.biz/”>www.tvlicensing.biz</a>
Fed spending up by over 7% though Rob, those evil socialist Bushites are at it again.
BBC admits ommiting black/asian race info in biased reporting on Birmingham riots:
BBC ‘too cautious’ over riots
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ifs/hi/newsid_4380000/newsid_4386200/4386258.stm
“…many people felt the BBC was omitting a key fact from its coverage – that the clashes had been between black and Asian youths.”
and the BBC News Editor’s reponse?
“… he (the News Editor) conceded that in seeking to be both accurate and cautious, the BBC hadn’t always given viewers the full picture.”
“I think our reporting later in the day on Sunday was absolutely fine, it was pretty clear. Do I think it was clear as it could have been earlier in the day? No, I don’t think it was,” said Mr Pruszewicz.
Had whitey been involed in the riots, we would have had Matt Frei reporting from Birmingham Central in his flack-jacket giving us the full implications of the white ‘racists’ vs the opressed minorities. BBC response to Asian vs Black? “Nothing to report, here, go home now..”
If you want the facts, Don’t watch BBC News. It’s biased.
If tax revenue is up 7% then “no problem” (sort of)…
Bush is FAR too statist for my liking, working Americans should be enjoying 7% tax cuts, and the economic boost that would bring.
P.S. I think the inflation figures are nonsense at the moment. I would say inflation is nearer 7%.
Government spending will be up because of Katrina, Rita and Wilma.
“Cautious” – that’s a joke.
“I was very keen for us to report this as accurately and factually and relevantly as we could.”
That is either a lie or the phrase “as we could” implies they are completely unable to do so.
“This was an incredibly complicated and incredibly sensitive story to cover.”
Well, it was covered successfully by the press and other broadcasters. One would think that an organisation which takes £3bn from British citizens would be able to report properly a riot in its own country. Evidently not.
“As the situation developed, we provided plenty of reports that explained the trouble in its full context.”
I still don’t remember any reference to “race riots”, or any clear reference to the obviously racially motivated murder which took place.
“There is no culture of political correctness”.
Laughable.
It was funny (as in strange) how easily the Beeb was able to find rampant racism in Louisiana, half a world away, but not in its own backyard!
Where’s Matt Frei and his trusty Birkenstocks when you need him? I expected to seem him comandeer an armored SUV and stage a “rescue” of some poor black family trapped by rampaging “Asians” (or vice versa).
The very fact that they have to keep denying an excess of political correctness is rather telling, isn’t it?
Rob Read,
It is indeed nonsense to track inflation figures without including energy and food, two of life’s most basic necessities.
My God, look at some of the comments in this Have your Say topic about the CIA agent indictment:
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=132&start=0&&&edition=1&ttl=20051028184034
The page should be “Have your lunatic rant against America” rather than “Have your say”.
From that same topic, I liked this contribution from David in Brno:
“Call me European, call me a liberal, call me a socialist or tell the world you don’t care what it thinks- but there are few substantive DEFENSES of the Bush Administration to be seen on this board as yet.”
Well David, perhaps that could be something to do with the organisation who runs the board? The BBC aren’t exactly famous for providing a platform for those defending George Bush are they? Yet strangely enough he won an election last year. A real election, in which tens and tens of millions of people voted for him. Not a bad defence really is it?
Rob,
My (perhaps naïve) opinion is that governments cause inflation by printing money, and then contrive economic interventions (eg interest rates) in an attempt to cover it up.
The only thing that should cause inflation is economic shrinkage, not growth.
O/T (what isn’t?):
Last night’s Spooks – generally a pretty good series, but yesterday’s story was about the government selling hospitals to an evil Russian criminal tycoon, in order to “save the NHS”.
MI5, and particular the Adam Carter character, were allowed a self-righteous rant about how it all shouldn’t be allowed, and that hospitals would be sold off for asset stripping.
I know it’s fiction – but it is hardly a feasible storyline that even this government (who, if they are trying to be Conservaitves, are doing it very badly) wouldn’t sell hospitals to the Russian mafia, and in such a way that asset stripping could take place. But this looked and felt like a more general attack on involving the private sector in the NHS – and MI5 treating it as a threat to national security and getting all leftier-than-thou over it. Such a tenuous contrivance to create a plot seemed motiviated more by leftist institutional bias than simply a fertile imagination.
Or perhaps I’m just being paranoid?
In the interests of balance, maybe in the next series they’ll be stopping the government from forcing innocent people from their own homes to make way for an Olympics Stadium…
Godness, the new (D)HYS is even worse than the old one! I didn’t think it was possible. But one small mercy — I haven’t seen any contributions from Bilal Patel, London, UK yet.
Funny how the Wilson scandal is getting so much front-page news from the BBC but the Oil-for-Food scandal gets hardly any. Where’s the open thread on whether Kofi should be indicted?
from
BBC ‘too cautious’ over riots
“There is no culture of political correctness, there are no edicts given. I was in charge of TV news at the weekend and I didn’t lay down any edict, quite the opposite, in fact,” he explained.”
Isn’t that the whole problem? There needs to be no edict because the bias is much too deeply ingrained through the whole organisation to even register untill others point it out.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ifs/hi/newsid_4380000/newsid_4386200/4386258.stm
from the same article
“But one of the things we are very keen not to be accused of is inflaming things”
unless its in Iraq!
…or stirring up hatred of the US or Israel!
Britain and America have spent time, money and human sacrifice removing a lunatic from Iraq. Anyone see TB at the European summit? Looks and sounds like we need help now.
Otis wonders:
“Or perhaps I’m just being paranoid?”
Nope. BBC (And ITV for that matter) scriptwriters are drawn from exactly the same sources as BBC ‘journalists’ and are equally useful in the propaganda war being waged by the Left.
Drama on the BBC (and, in fairness ITV)regularly promotes an openly Leftist agenda. Spooks is just another offender.
There’s a lot more to BBC bias than what takes place in the news room.
Which, of course, is one more reason why the entire BBC must go. It’s rotten to the core.
I think one of the problems of the new D(HYS) is the inability to filter the comments by location.
E.g. Only view the views of people in the UK or Europe or America, etc.
When people recommend posts, it causes certain view points to rise to the top. Whenever America or Israel are mentioned all the anti-american/anti-Israel comments get “recommended” and “rise to the top”. It creates the impression that everybody hates America/Israel. Unless you can be bothered to trawl through every post, it’s impossible to see what other British people think, or Americans, etc.
I’m sure the BBC see it as a kind of “democracy”, but the current system just doesn’t work.
Andrew and Thomas:
Thanks for TV Licensing info.
Cheers.
I wasn’t going to comment on here any further but this piece from DHYS shows what kind of people use the Beeb’s comments section:
“I thank BBc for this ‘have your say’ debate since it has clearly showed the ugly face of the so-called ‘western civilization’ in the spot light.The reaction to someone’s words is more quick then someone else’s actions – Those in the west never been so reactive against attrocities committed by the US and Israel! Thanks again for your contribution BBC.
Rashid Ali, Windsor, Canada”
I wonder why he’s not living in the Middle East… they can receive the BBC down there, can’t they?
matt frei had an early christmas gift with the libby affair.
he was so outrageously happy with the crisis it seems he may have had an orgasm while broadcasting.
he is so repulsive.
the whole organisation is in a state of ecstasy.they love it when there is negative stuff on america.
the strike on iran needs an air campaign lasting days if not weeks.
the nuclear sites have been placed all over the country.
bases in iraq would be ideal.ground troops would not be needed.just keep those f15s f16s and b52s ready.
O/T
(D)HYS on the “CIA Probe – your reaction”
Firstly, why is it if anything negative happens to the Bush administration the “readers” are invited to have a say. I cant remember any “UN Corruption – your reaction”. I even put that one forward.
Secondly, Its odd that almost all the comments are negative regarding the situation. Given that Bush won the last election.
Thirdly, frei should get a new suite. He looked like he sounded on the news last night.
I’m off for a lay down.
The big surprise about the (D)HYS comments on the Lewis Libby saga is that all those people are apparently so well informed about the affair. I must confess that whenever I’ve tried to keep up with this Livvy/Plame business I’ve given up through sheer boredom. These (D)HYS commenters are obviously made of sterner stuff…
David H
The American Expat sums it up nicely, “Plame recap” for people of less sterner stuff.
http://theamericanexpatinuk.blogspot.com/
Speaking on Radio Five Live’s Drive show on Friday the BBC’s Iran correspondent Frances Harrison gave the following account of the anti-Israeli demo in Tehran:
“There were calls for death to America, death to Israel, death to Britain as well. They dragged an Israeli flag along the ground and then trampled on it and then set it on fire. There were make-believe coffins of Americans with American flags on that were set on fire, and there were even Iranian men dressed up as Palestinian suicide bombers who paraded through the streets. Very colourful event.”
( http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/programmes/drive.shtml Listen Again – Friday, about 14/15 minutes in)
A harvest festival at a village church – now that’s a very colourful event. A mass rally calling for the extermination of entire nations? A very colourful event? I don’t think so.
Then again, I’m not a BBC reporter so what would I know?
Sorry, should’ve prefixed the above with OT.
Tom – Thanks for the link – it seems like this whole Plame affair is much ado about nothing. I wonder why the MSM are going to town about it (CNN had an hour long studio discussion on the matter last night – the BBC aren’t the only offenders) and ignoring Oil for Fraud, Galloway etc
Wildly OT
Sky News show banner
“Breaking News: Big Explosion In Deli”
Well I suppose it is the first deli that comes to the mind of a media worker in London.
BBC can’t actually say the religion of peace murdered three girls!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4387604.stm
Sickening. Hopefully this century will be Islams last.