The Daily Telegraph reports that children’s BBC presenter Kirsten O’Brien

has joked at the Edinburgh Festival that:

Everyone at CBBC is either gay or childless and don’t like kids.

…before going on to say:

Still, at least we’re better than Palestinian children’s TV, which gets kids to sing songs about AK-47 rifles.

…which is interesting, because for some strange reason the BBC always seems to be looking the other way when Middle Eastern broadcasters spew hatred about other people and nations at their viewers, children or not.

Does anyone fancy starting a book on:

a) whether or not this story is mentioned on BBC Views Online;

b) whether or not they’ll mention O’Brien’s reference to Hamas and AK47s?

Thank you to reader Anonanon for the link.

Peter Barron, editor of Newsnight

, invites us to send a message to the TV industry on the BBC Editors blog for the mediagrauniad Edinburgh International TV Junket Festival this weekend (though Peter missed out the mediagrauniad bit for some reason).

Biased BBC reader Rockall tried to send a message, but was yet another victim of the BBC’s apparently buggy comment submission process. Knowing how keenly Newsnight follow Biased BBC, here’s Rockall’s comment for Peter:

I haven’t got a problem with most TV – its rubbish largely, but that’s fine.

I really resent the BBC though. You think you are there to make Britain better. Our self appointed moral guardians. You are so arrogant.

I have to pay for your services but you don’t speak for me.

At least if we don’t like what politicians are doing or saying we can vote them out. You are completely unaccountable.

You control the news agenda in the UK. You cannot control the internet. People can finally find out about all your grubby doings. Although it never appeared on the 6 o’clock news covering up the Balen report was a massive own goal. It showed you as a bunch of hypocrites rather than seekers of truth. I’m sure that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Everyone knows what the BBC thinks about America, Israel, Christianity, the Monarchy, the Conservative Party, President Bush, Multiculturalism, Immigration, Green Issues, Fidel Castro, Palestine, Islam, the European Union and the Labour Party so I don’t need to say what I think the BBC position is on any of them.

The reason I hate the BBC is perhaps because I once held it in such high regard. You were supposed to be working on behalf of the ordinary people of Britain. You sold us out and laughed at us while you did it.

Like I’m sure you are doing now – laughing into your cappuccinos.

…sentiments shared by many – especially paragraph six, “Everyone knows what the BBC thinks about…”. Sums up the BBC nicely. Will that do Peter?

Richard Littlejohn, writing in the Daily Mail

, reckons that Truth is the first Casualty at the BBC, as he weighs into the debate about the BBC’s decision to change a Casualty episode depicting an attack by an Islamist terrorist into an animal rights attack:

I’m only surprised that they didn’t rule that the bus station bombing in Casualty should be carried out by “militants” linked to UKIP, demanding a referendum on the European Constitution.

Turning to the controversy over BBC message boards and the disparity of action against religious bigotry, he asks pertinently:

Anyway, when did it become part of the remit for licence-payers to provide a noticeboard for anonymous anti-Semites?

And then reminds us about the BBC’s apparent problem with the Balen Report, the one that they have gone to so much trouble and tellytax expense to keep under wraps:

Meanwhile, the BBC is still refusing to publish a report it commissioned into whether or not there is systematic anti-Israel bias in its news coverage from the Middle East.

So we’ll take that as a “yes” then.

I don’t like to indulge in gratuitous Beeb-bashing, because there’s so much good about the organisation.

But it is too big, too unaccountable and too riddled with an institutionalised mindset which holds that it’s fine to heap scorn on Christians and Jews, but cravenly appeases Muslims at every turn.

The BBC is a publicly-funded body which has a duty to be even-handed to all and not pander to the political prejudices of those who work for it.

If it can’t manage that, it should be broken up and sold off.

Do read the rest.

Open thread – for comments of general Biased BBC interest:

Please use this thread for BBC-related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, Danny Finkelstein

, Associate Editor of The Times, reckons We’re to blame for BBC bias. It’s an interesting, and hopefully wry, take on the causes of the BBC’s cultural mentality. Here’s the key part:

If Zimbardo is right, then the political slant of BBC reports is not the result (or at least, not mainly the result) of the disposition of the BBC’s reporters. It comes about because of the role they see themselves playing.

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards and the prisoners behaved very differently, despite being similar types of people. Each of them behaved as they thought they were supposed to. This is the key. Understanding BBC bias and how to change it depends on understanding how their reporters come upon the idea that they should behave as they do.

And I have a controversial candidate for the powerful group helping to make the BBC reporters biased against Israel. It’s us.

Listen to an immigrant talking to their British-born children. The parent talks with the accent of their homeland, but the children don’t. They talk with the accent of their peers, their mates.

This is how the BBC works. It is a very large, very diffuse organisation. There is no single source of power. In these circumstances, BBC reporters are constantly looking around, eyeing their mates, trying to work out what their identity is, what a good reporter should be saying, how people like them are supposed to behave.

I can see some merit in Danny’s explanation for the BBC’s collective groupthink, though I’m sure Danny is being facetious with his suggestion that the BBC would become less biased if the BBC’s critics ceased to point out its bias.

To my mind, at least half of the problem is just getting the BBC to accept that they do have problem with institutional bias, that they are indeed out of step with the perceptions of their telly-taxpaying customers. Only then will the BBC even begin to do something about the problem.

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Max for the link.

Following Ed’s post below

linking to the Telegraph’s editorial Terror victims are BBC licence-payers, too, the Telegraph has more coverage of the BBC drops Casualty suicide bomb plotline story that has been discussed in the comments here. Lord Tebbit is quoted:

People were perfectly free during the violence in Northern Ireland to produce dramas about terrorism for which presumably they might have been accused of stereotyping IRA terrorists or even suggesting that all Catholics were terrorists. What is the difference here?
The BBC exists in a world of New Labour political correctness.

Meanwhile, Telegraph writer Damian Thompson has a new blog piece about how the BBC’s coverage of Islam is gutless, particularly in contrast to that of Channel 4, producer of documentaries such as Undercover Mosque, a hidden-camera investigation of what some Imams preach to their faithful.

Last Saturday’s edition of the BBC’s current British Film Forever series

came with this Radio Times warning:

I strongly suggest you keep your finger hovering over the mute button on your TV remote controls, because you’ll want to silence, yet again, the witless and sneering commentary that’s characterised the series so far.

My time watching the programme was interrupted (“Daddy, I can’t get to sleep”, “Well, come and watch this BBC tosh then, that’ll do the trick” etc.), and I got back to the programme as it reached Richard Attenborough’s classic Gandhi to hear (from memory):

[Gandhi] had been radicalised by his experience of apartheid,
a system that was still getting tacit support during Mrs. Thatchers time…

(or it might have been “from Mrs. Thatcher’s government”)… yet another revisionist BBC sneer-in-passing, aimed at smearing the reputation of Margaret Thatcher and her government.

Update: Ever knowledgeable, Peregrine points out that apartheid wasn’t introduced until 1948, the year of Gandhi’s murder, at the age of 78.

A fellow BBC critic, writing on the Toady programme’s message board

, reports a BBC Views Online front page ‘highlight box’, describing the featured story as:

Tale of two cities: ‘Not like in Dickens, kind of American’ – a visitor’s view of Brum.

…except that in the story, Not like in Dickens, it turns out that the visitor the BBC refers to is actually an immigrant – not normally a synonym for visitor, except perhaps in BBC La-la-land.

From the comments David Preiser writes:


“I couldn’t help noticing the ridiculous BBC online coverage of the idiotic global warming protest camp at Heathrow over the weekend. The BBC’s coverage sure seemed to me like a veritable propaganda newsletter, complete with maps.”

Ah, but he was not the only one.

Donal Blaney writes on his blog:

“With fawning excitement, the BBC has paid excessive attention to the sordid collection of hippies, pot smokers and anarchists who are protesting at Heathrow Airport against freedom of movement of our citizenry.”

Meanwhile the excellent Weasel writes (with highlighted quotes) about one of the early articles during the protest:

“This is such propagandist, sandal wearing tosh, it is hard to know how to begin, but it is yet another clear demonstration that the BBC has lost all pretense of being neutral about certain issues, the environment being one of their little pets”

But David, in his comment, alludes to a darker side to the protests, and sure enough he is right to- Green Activists Attack Jewish Warehouse- Hoist Palestinian Flag!.

I don’t know what pro-Palestinian gestures and anti-Israeli violence have to do with green issues, but there seems to be something in the mind of protesters that there is such a connection.

It seems to me there is something though which might explain both the BBC’s reticence concerning reporting negative news concerning them, and their positiveness concerning the protests generally.

There is a strong sense in the BBC that such protests are righteous, falling into a long and in their eyes noble tradition of “progressive” protest, and the Beeb throws its moral weight behind them.

Update

(14.50 UK): I notice via David K in the comments that The UK Telegraph includes the Jesus comment story in an editorial today which you can read here.

I think we may safely say…

That Biased-BBC comments are considerably more sanitary than the BBC message boards. I am not really up to speed on BBC message boards. I don’t go there. However, the enthusiastic commenters who do enjoy posting there are making the news. This site is specifically tracking them, and doing a lively job of it.

A few days ago we were dealing here with how it appeared that a BBC member of staff had inserted into Wikipedia the view that George W. Bush was a w***** (this among other wiki-highlights courtesy of the BBC). Now a provocateur’s assertion is that Jesus was a b******. Seems to me the commenter might have found his natural home. Unfortunately for him, the BBC have been forced to evict one of his prize comments. (via LGF).

Yes, there are questions. Who funds these freaky forums, diverting people from worthy and free blogs? Why didn’t those paid to clean round said public cages remove the comment straight away? Would it have been tolerated for more than a minute were it to have been stated that Mohammed was a paedophile? Not a formulation I would use, naturally. Just asking. (and please, regular commenters would be best not to try to disprove my initial point ;-).