PATTEN AND THE WORLD SERVICE

I read that Chris Patten is performing to cue;

The new BBC Trust chairman told the Sunday Telegraph he would fight for it as a 20% budget cut across the corporation takes effect this year. Lord Patten has said his love of the BBC World Service made protecting it a “priority” – particularly the “core” Arabic, Somali and Hindi services.

I think the World Service, and in particular the “core” he defines, SHOULD be cut, as a priority. The BBC spreads its malignancy via the tendrils provided by World Service so best it take the brunt of the cuts.

MARRED

Andrew Mitchell, he who thinks we should aspire to be an “overseas aid super power”, is the kind of Conservative that the BBC likes. He got an easy ride on the Sunday morning horror that is the Andrew Marr show. Dripping wet, he is a C.I.N.O. in the proud tradition of Clarke and Patten, and the BBC love him for it. He was on Question Time earlier this week and up he pops again, much in demand. I also caught an odd interview with Simon Callow who was allowed to blabber on about the life of Shakespeare, claiming we know all the key details of his life. We don’t but Callow is another luvvie much favoured by the Beeb. Former Aussie PM Kevin Rudd was on and to be fair he didn’t quite give the answers that Marr was looking, which was quite entertaining.

STILL LOVING OBAMA

Anyone catch Mark Mardell’s latest love note report on Obama here? It’s the fawning sycophancy that most sticks in my throat. George W Bush was far from perfect AND so is Obama but the tone the BBC adopts  towards the two men could not be more different. The BBC meme is that Bush was always a miserable failure whereas Obama is a stunning success worthy of four more years. If you listen to the clip you will even hear Mardell lead the Democrat he interviews into the “let’s get out of Afghanistan right now” narrative so beloved of the BBC. On another front, the BBC has kept a pretty low profile on “Weinergate” and I see that Mardell gives it short thrift on his blog here. Still, with all those Palin emails to pour over, I am sure Mark will be a busy boy this weekend.

BBC/Guardian United In Palin Email Frenzy

A short while ago I posted the following in the Open Thread:

I see the Guardian is going balls deep over the Palin emails. They’ve even got a dedicated Twitter account about it, FFS. And if something is big news to the Guardian you can guarantee it will be big news to the BBC.

Right on cue, here’s an exchange of tweets between Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis and the Guardian’s Ian Katz:

Don’t you just love that “(of course). (yiippee)”? They hate her. They really hate her.

UPDATE. They’re searching urgently for something really bad:

And just for good measure, also on Newsnight tonight:

Finding BBC bias – like shooting fish in a barrel.

LAUGHING STOCK…

My beef with Richard Black, repeated in more posts than I care to remember, is simple. He has become an advocate, not a reporter. I am not a scientist, but was once a BBC producer and reporter – who became a very senior executive of a news organisation – and so I do have the competence to judge him in this respect. Today, in this piece claiming that global warming is now proven, he has yet again crassly demonstrated that he is not doing his job.

True to style, he has picked one remark by a constroversial climate scientist called Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia and elevated it to the level of a major news story. The point that Mr Black has chosen to exaggerate and thus endorse in this way is that the said Professor Jones has now found evidence that the warming of the past fifteen years is a “real” phenomenon because global temperatures over the past year have again been high.

Why is this approach so wrong and so fundamentally at variance with his duties as reporter? First Mr Black knows that because of Climategate, Professor Jones is a highly controversial figure who in some quarters (to put it mildly) does not have credibility. He would be an idiot not to. Chosing him is thus deliberate confrontation, akin to asking Goebbels to give Hitler a character reference.

Second, the statistical concept which Mr Black maintains confirms Professor Jones’ observations, is not accepted in the way he suggests. Bruce Hoult, for example, on the Bishop Hill site, notes succinctly:

To put explicitly what others have alluded to: significance at the 95% confidence level (2 sigma) is generally accepted as the threshold for saying “gee, this looks interesting, more research is justified to see if we can tighten up those bounds a couple more sigma and see whether there’s really anything here or not”.It is most definitely NOT grounds for saying something is proven beyond reasonable doubt or to a level warranting policy action.

This is a point about elementary scientific methodology – as always Mr Black takes the side of the advocate he wants to believe. He further puts two fingesr up by stating:

Since then (Climategate investigations), nothing has emerged through mainstream science to challenge the IPCC’s basic picture of a world warming through greenhouse gas emissions.

Third, Mr Black never ever provides balancing comment or evidence. He wants instead to blare out that Professor Jones is right. Yet he ignores (in his piece today and always) evidence like this, the much-discussed and publicised G.G.Koutsoyiannis paper (fully peer-reviewed)which throws serious doubt on the theorising about rising global temperatures. The BBC has broadcast or published not a peep about this paper and yet carries on regardless pumping out endless climate change drivel.

I repeat. For all these reasons – and more – Mr Black is a cheap propagandist, not a reporter. I’m spelling it out yet again because I believe that one day, someone at the corporation will realise that such agitprop has made the BBC’s alleged journalism into a laughing stock.

EU MENACE

Since Britain joined the EU, a deluge of laws have been enacted that have curtailed our freedoms and have ceded power to the faceless, unelected and unaccountable European Commission. The BBC website charts on a daily basis their encroachment into our lives, but there is never a questioning of our slow, agonised, descent into rule by tryranny. Here, there’s a story about a nasty little exercise – triggered by EU recycling laws – by money-to-burn researchers at Newcastle University encouraging students to snitch on their fellows who don’t contemplate every tin can before ditching it. Here, there’s coverage of a disaster entirely triggered by EU greenie laws which have encouraged a switch to biofuels. Surprise, surprise, hedge funds – as often as not advised now by greenie fanatics like KPMG – have dived in and are pushing poor African farmers off their land. The reality is that they have simply pursued – like rats up a drainpipe – the “opportunities” that EU biofuels policies have created. And here, Richard Black is in full gloating flow about how our masters in Brussels are opening their greedy maws to fine us millions of pounds for not reducing trace elements of “pollutants” enough, in line with their ludicrous green targets. As usual, Mr Black accepts hook, line and sinker all the propaganda about the alleged hazard, exactly conforming to EU groupthink.

None of these laws have been passed with the approval of the British people, and all of them are inspired by lunatic idealism on behalf of the socialist-Marxists who dominate EU decision-making. The BBC supinely reports their actions, but never, ever joins up the dots to show how we are becoming vassals of a vast superstate subjected to pointless, costly, unwanted laws.

Question Time LiveBlog 9th June 2011


Question Time comes tonight from Norwich.

On the panel we have Andrew “Let’s be a proud international aid superpowerMitchell, ex-local MP who lost his seat in 2010 Charles Clarke, anti-Easter Egg campaigner Jo Swinson, anti-man campaigner Germaine Greer and Peter Hitchens.

The LiveBlog will also stay open for the bizarreness of This Week, with Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo and Alastair Campbell. Expect the Blue Nun Bingo to be as aggressively competitive as ever.

David Vance, TheEye and David Mosque will be moderating the abuse here from 10:30pm. See you later!

The Archbishop Of Canterbury, Polly Toynbee with A Beard

Wow, the Archbishop of Canterbury keeps his beard but discards his sandals for Doc Martens and gives Cameron a good kicking.

Naturally the BBC has an orgasm.

The tone and strength of language used in Dr Williams’ attack on the coalition has taken ministers by surprise.
Accusing the government of being committed to “radical, long-term policies for which no-one voted” is an overtly political statement and one Downing Street has quickly rebuffed.
But they can’t ignore the broad sweep of criticism or questioning of their mandate to govern.

Thus warbled Jo Coburn alleged to be BBC Political Correspondent.

Well, Jo, one effective strategy might well be to ignore it. After all Williams has form on this and his attachment to the Guardian/BBC zeitgeist is as established a fact as Polly Toynbee’s property portfolio in Tuscany. Nobody outside the NW1/Oxbridge media/academic elite gives a fig for what he thinks. He is head of a religious structure that is as empty a husk as the official cult of Rome in the early years of the first millennium. If you want fervour and commitment you go to the evangelicals or other faiths. Williams and his ilk have done more to secularise our culture than any humanist league of bores – so why give him any more oxygen?

The other option, however, is to rip into him tooth and claw, ignoring any screeches from the great and the good. Like Prince Charles Williams believes he has a pass to step up and pontificate from a richly endowed soapbox and hector and lecture us without fear of response except from elements of the tabloid press. Maybe it’s time those soapboxes were kicked away from under their feet.

Tim Montgomerie has already entered the fray with a blistering exposure of the Archbishop’s hypocrisy over social issues. What irritates me is the prelate’s claim that he articulates the concerns of Mr & Mrs Public.

At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context,” he said.
In a wide-ranging attack, he accused the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of creating “anxiety and anger” in the country by introducing reforms without sufficient debate.
………
“Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around questions such as these at present,” he said.

What he means, of course, is the “anxiety and anger and fear” being expressed by the cartels and special interest groups that feed at the trough currently overflowing with taxpayer’s money, particularly in the field of education, the law, health and social services.

If he really wished to articulate the fears of the silent majority in this country, the people who try to obey the law, pay their own way without incurring massive debt and accept the fact that they have responsibilities as well as rights he would be following a different path by

Asking why it is that so much of our daily life is now decided by faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats from Brussels

Voicing the concerns of the poorest elements in our society worried by the apparent inability of successive governments to confront the issue of unrestricted immigration.

Questioning the wisdom of allowing those guilty of violence, murder and intimidation back onto the streets within a few years of their crime.

Demanding how it is that the “rights” of criminals and terrorists are of a higher order than the public’s right to go about its legal business without interference or assault.

Condemning those who use taxpayer’s money without regard to transparency, fiscal rectitude and effective and meaningful outcomes.

But then he wouldn’t get the great and good seal of approval from James Naughtie, Simon Jenkins and Polly Toynbee and that would never do

WAVING, NOT DROWNING?

Let’s be clear where the BBC stands. Obama has done a great job, he has healed some of the wounds created by the evil Bush, oh, and he’s saved the US from another great depression. The rest is detail, or so the BBC would have us believe. Naturally, the reverse is true and so the BBC has to spin even harder to sustain the Obama-delusion. Take THIS report from Stephanie “Two Eds” Flanders. The shock horror news is that “some” parts of the US economy are “slowing down” rather than “moving towards a quicker recovery”. The good news is that “recoveries are never linear, you get setbacks”. Stephanie pretends the US economy has moved out of recession (it hasn’t) but is now going through a soft patch. In this way she seeks to obscure the central fact that Obama has done more than anyone to delay the recovery through his massive injections of QE and the truth is that his “stimulus” hasn’t stimulated anything.