Occasionally we bring you something different in a break from the usual fare, and today, for your delight and delectation, we have the pleasure of presenting you with a video about the ‘Scumbag Barbers of Rotterdam’…
The BBC, as with the 5 year old HSBC story that they disinterred to support Labour’s narrative on tax evasion, has timed to perfection a hatchet job on UKIP using the words of UKIP councillor Rozanne Duncan to tar the whole party by association with what the BBC wants you to believe are racist beliefs of this woman……this ‘documentary’ has been held back for quite a while and only released as near to the election as ‘decently’ possible without seeming to be obviously a politically motivated stitch up…..
It is believed the comments were made on a new BBC programme.
Craig Mackinlay, Conservative candidate for South Thanet, said: “Ukip is the party that just keeps on giving, there seems to be something every week.
“Finding out what was actually said is the bit I’m looking forward to.
“Ukip don’t throw people out, they usually let them get away with it.
“For her to have been thrown out this must have been very bad.”
Political game playing by the BBC to let this fester and then release the actual film so much nearer the election when they hope people will still have it in their memory and link UKIP to ‘racism’…….
We know that Rozanne Duncan had to leave UKIP and the Telegraph showed the sort of reaction that must please the BBC immensely as it condemns the woman as a racist…a ‘ranter’, and an ‘extraordinary’ one at that…
The moment a UK Independence Party councillor ended her career with an extraordinary racist rant is to be broadcast nationwide on Sunday for the first time.
However a measured and more thoughtful listener would have made a completely different judgement.
Duncan is clearly upset that she has such feelings and is mystified as to why she has them…and note only Black people make her uncomfortable…she had no problem with Asians or anyone else.
She also expressed concern about Black people getting bullied and picked on in a majority white location.
She says she wasn’t used to black people having grown up in the 40’s and 50’s….but she says that ‘that’s no justification at all [for her feelings]..it’s really bizarre’.
It is a shame the BBC have decided to ‘weaponise’ this woman’s admission, such as it is, and crucify her in order to attack UKIP.
She is clearly not racist in what we would generally accept as the meaning of the term, a deliberate hatred of someone because of their race, she just has innate, subconscious feelings that she can’t fathom and is entirely embarrassed by….perhaps she did have a traumatic experience in her youth? No benefit of the doubt from the BBC Inquisition.
Others were traumatised by Santa in their youth…and suffer ‘Santaphobia’
“Santaphobia” is (apparently) the term for a persistent fear of Santa Claus usually caused by coming into close proximity (by no doubt sitting on his knee) at Christmastime. It’s not genetic, so one child in a family can have it while their brother or sister may not.’
Shameful of the BBC to hang her out to dry and ruin her life for their political ends.
In effect what the BBC has done is no different to the racism they claim to abhor….attacking a woman because she is in UKIP regardless of her genuine difficulty with her unwanted feelings….which are in complete contrast to her other expressed attitudes towards other races.
Did she use ‘ highly racially offensive language during filming for a BBC documentary’ as the BBC claim? Or did she just admit the look of Black people made her feel uncomfortable?
The use of the word ‘Negro’ is a throwback to her generation when it would have been in general, and accepted use. Maybe offensive to many today but for her it is just a word and not intended to be offensive….and consider Cumberbatch when he used ‘coloured’….how is that offensive when Blacks themselves use the phrase ‘People of Colour’? Words are political weapons these days used to vilify and attack people with the label ‘racist’….a label that is the kiss of death of course in ‘decent society’.
In contrast you may have heard Woman’s Hour a couple of weeks back talking about supposed ‘cultural appropriation’ (more of which later) and the phrase ‘male, pale and stale’being bandied freely about……so sexist, racist and dismissive all in one little phrase….never mind that the talk was all about Whitey not being allowed to use ‘Black’ culture.
Relatives of the three missing London boys believed to be heading to Paris have pleaded for them to come home.
The boys travelled to Paris on Tuesday. It is feared they may be planning to join Front National extremists in Paris.
One of the boy’s family said they understood he wanted to help those suffering attacks from Islamist fanatics in Paris but said Paris was “a dangerous place”.
The family said they were “feeling completely distressed”.
The three London boys who all supported Chelsea Football Club, travelled to Paris by train on Tuesday after telling their parents they were going out for the day to watch Chelsea play in the Champions League.
Football managers from clubs across the country have issued a statement pleading with the boys to come home.
Supporters at the London club were asked to come forward if they had any information to help the boys return home safely.
A Club spokesman said the trio, who have been described as “straight-A students”, had been manipulated, possibly influenced by the heightened atmosphere around the subject of immigration during the run up to the election, much of it possibly due to the dangerous attitudes promulgated by Nigel Farage and UKIP.
He said: “They have been misled. I do not know what was promised to them. If they do go to Paris, it ‘s like a war zone and there are serious ramifications for going in to a war zone.”
He continued “Our understanding is the family didn’t have any idea and the children didn’t leave any clues and even their school, which is quite a good school in this borough, they don’t have any clue as to why these three boys just suddenly left.
“They might have some other friends and people don’t know whether they were radicalised online or by some individuals physically.”
“It’s a mystery for the community.”
Police said the boys had previously been interviewed by officers after another boy from their supporters club went to Paris in January, but nothing had indicated they were at risk and their disappearance had come as a great surprise.
In a statement, one family said: “We miss you terribly and are extremely worried about you.
“Paris is a dangerous place and we don’t want you to go there. Get in touch with the police and they will help to bring you home.”
“We understand that you have strong feelings and want to help those you believe are suffering in Paris.
“You can help from home, you don’t have to put yourself in danger. Please don’t cross the border.”
The family said: “In your absence, we, as a family, are feeling completely distressed and cannot make sense of why you left home.
“Due to the speculation that you may be travelling towards Paris, we are extremely worried about your safety.”
David Cameron says the disappearance of three London boys feared to be heading to Paris to join the Front National extremists is “deeply concerning”.
He said “Our authorities will do everything we can to help these boys.”
“But it does make a broader point which is the fight against racism is not just one that we can wage by the police and border control.
“It needs every school, every university, every college, every community to recognise they have a role to play.
“We all have a role to play in stopping people from having their minds poisoned by this appalling xenophobic hatred.”
Police have issued images taken from CCTV of the boys they want to speak to:
Detectives said the priority was to find the boys and “make sure they are safe”.
The families of the boys rejected claims that they had become radicalised saying there was “no concrete evidence” of this.
“They have strong international links which places them in the best position to pursue the investigation overseas and try to find the boys and bring them home,” a force spokesman said.
“We will continue to work closely with the families and the community in London.”
A police spokesman said it was a “really sensitive investigation” and they were doing “everything nationally and internationally” to find the boys.
He said: “We suspect they may have been influenced by others to leave the UK.”
Jim Blarney from the London Sporting Academy said there was “absolutely not” any radicalisation at the Academy.
“I’m 100% confident – with the head and the senior leadership team and the whole school – that we’ve done everything to put in measures that safeguard all the children that attend the school,” he said.
Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “The idea of young British boys setting off to Paris is very disturbing, and shows that more action is urgently needed to stop young people being drawn into extremism and conflict.”
Those with information can call the free Anti-Racism Hotline number on 0800 789 321.
I’m sure you are all familiar with the BBC narrative that promotes the ‘Golden Age of Islamic Science’ and tells us the West owes all of its progress to Islam.
It is a constant refrain, one that the BBC wants to impress upon us, the idea being that once we realise that Muslims were once very clever we will change our perceptions about Islam as a backward, violent and intolerant ideology.
Good luck with that.
The problem is that the ‘Golden Age of Islamic Science’ owes its sheen to the cultures it conquered and the accumulated knowledge of the Romans, Greeks, Persians and Indians. Muslims became great librarians as they stored up that accumulated knowledge from past centuries. It profited from an intellectual drag….once conquered the various cultures held on to their science, philosophy and intellectualism…and we had a great deal of ‘cultural appropriation’…for example…A major innovation of this period was paper – originally a secret tightly guarded by the Chinese. The art of papermaking was obtained from prisoners taken at the Battle of Talas (751), spreading to the Islamic cities of Samarkand and Baghdad. This continued until Islam asserted itself fully and began to restrict the practise and development of science and learning and notably many of the scholars were in fact not Muslim but Christians and Jews.
For a more sceptical view of Islamic claims to scientific genius you might like to read this:
What should be understood is that it wasn’t ‘Islam’ or the Koran urging its adherents to strive in the fields of science purely for the sake of knowledge. The scientific progress was merely a necessary adjunct to practising Islam…the need to know when to pray during the day, in which direction Mecca lay, and the dates of the various festivals and sacred days…as well as the need to administer a massive and complex empire.
Knowledge and learning were not next to Godliness, they were just a practical necessity.
Suggesting that Islam is ideologically a driver of scientific endeavour and knowledge is like saying warfare is…and by virtue of that we must all love War.
Huge leaps in scientific progress come out of war as the arms race sucks in huge funding and resources to develop war winning weaponry but there is no ideology of ‘War’ that directs and eulogises this development….the Army does not turn five times a day towards the MOD building in London and kneel in prayer as they submit themselves to the wisdom of Michael Fallon MP, Secretary of State for Defence.
Funnily enough the same people who praise Islam denounce the ‘Industrial-Military Complex’ as evil.
The magnificent Koran’s science tells us that the Sun orbits the Earth…a view still held by some….
The Qur’an mentions numerous times that the sun and the moon travel in an orbit, but does not mention once that the earth does too. This is consistent with a earth-centered (geocentric) view of the cosmos that places a motionless earth at the center of the universe and all “heavenly bodies” travel around the earth. This was the prevailing understanding of the universe prior to the 16th century when Copernicus helped explain and popularize a sun-centered (heliocentric) view of the universe. Tellingly, the sun’s orbit is always mentioned in the context of night and day.
It is notable that at times when a strict interpretation of Islam was followed science and culture died.
For 800 years Islam turned a land of sand into an intellectual desert, a backwater.
However, that, apparently, is an ‘invidious, ungentlemanly’ view…according to Evan Davis on Newsnight.
…a tweet in which you drew a very invidious comparison between the number of Nobel prizes won by people from Trinity College, Cambridge and the entire Muslim population of the world. Trinity College, Cambridge comes out on top of that comparison. Now, not disputing the factual basis of it, why make such an invidious comparison? Why raise that? Why raise the issue? What’s the point of drawing attention to that?
I can think of much more gentlemanly ways of making the intellectual point that Islam has not been a great scientific…
The Dark Ages – a period in which Europe, and scientific progress, slumbered.
“Just because Europe was stuck in the Dark Ages,” argues Jim Al-Khalili the professor of physics at the University of Surrey and author of Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science, “we shouldn’t assume that the rest of the world had stagnated. There was this great flourishing of scholarship and discovery in the Islamic world of the middle ages”.
Curious isn’t it that the BBC can rubbish European culture and then go to enormous lengths to burnish the credentials of Islam with claims that it was a culture that a thousand years ago may have produced great scientific leaps to which we all owe our modern lives to and yet, when someone comes along to suggest all is not well now with the Muslim world, they are told to shut up, told not to mention the fact that Islamic countries are intellectual and scientific backwaters, that it is just a bit rude to say so.
I did laugh because the great enemy of Richard Dawkins, the slippery Mehdi Hasan, is on Dawkin’s side on this.
In Hasan’s now infamous speech in which he labelled the non-Muslim as immoral, ignorant cattle he also said this….
The Middle East, despite all its oil wealth…is an intellectually stagnant area of the world, where one in three Arabs, 65 million human beings, Muslims, are functionally illiterate, of which two thirds are women. 10 million children in the Middle East have never stepped foot inside a classroom, inside a school. That is the modern Muslim legacy. The Middle East…is now intellectually closed off to the outside world. … Closed off to the world – and let s not hear any of this nonsense about foreign literature, or foreign books, or foreign languages, being alien to Islam. It is the only way to learn, to open your minds to non-Muslims, to open your minds to other cultures, to learn foreign languages.
Just think about our priorities as a community, as a Muslim world, think about our priorities,: because when you look at our priorities….you look for example in the field of research and development…the West as an average spend around 2% of their GPD, their national income, on research and development…no Muslim country spends more than 0.5% of its national wealth on research and development…instead we spend the money on what? On killing, bombs, bloodshed, destruction, warfare, arms. Take Pakistan, for example, the “Islamic” Republic of Pakistan, with shamefully high levels of child illiteracy, and one of the world’s worst child labour problems, and yet it spends 20% of its GDP on its military and 2% of its GDP on education.
It is no surprise then that when you look at the Muslim world you see that we 1.2 billion Muslims have just 10 Nobel prizes to our name….and our Jewish brethren who we spend so much time fighting and arguing with, 12 million Jews in the world, they have 150 Nobel prizes to their name….We are not under-armed, we are under-educated. We have lost our ability to think, to acquire knowledge, to advance intellectually, and then we wonder why our community is in such decay, why globally wherever you find Muslims we have such problems. It’s not a secret, it’s not a conspiracy, its clear to anyone who looks at the numbers.
Once again we see the BBC propaganda machine at work, you can see the cogs actually moving…Islam good, Europe bad.
The BBC is lying to us. The more we get bombed or otherwise attacked by ‘Conservative’ radical Muslims the more we get patronised and lied to by the BBC about how wonderful the ‘Religion of Peace’ is.
People in MI5 tell me that denying the connection between Islamism and terrorism derives from the belief that if you accept it, there’s no hope for a multicultural society in Britain: we would just have to recognise that part of the population is permanently liable to become terrorists.
In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
It seems the BBC would prefer to accept some ‘collateral damage’ amongst non-Muslims rather than upset certain communities with the truth about the causes of radicalisation and extremism.
Change the narrative about foreign policy, about Muslim victimhood and admit that what drives radicalisation is an ideology that stems from the Koran.
Not all Muslims are terrorists but most terrorists are Muslim at this time in history. Why is that? Is it ungentlemanly to ask?
I must face the fact that there is a vast woozy mass of liberal-leftists who will never change, and would not fight back even if a bomb exploded in their own back yard.
I will not let supposed liberals forget that, by their own cowardice and lack of conviction, they have brought this dismal moment on themselves.
If you want to commit a crime and not be hung out to dry by the thought police make sure you have some ‘ethnic’ authenticity and credibility in the bank.
If you’re white and push a person of colour off a train you’re big news.
If you’re a Muslim who stabs someone for not being a Muslim then you’re probably justified in doing that by virtue of undoubtedly having suffered a history of oppression and humiliation….and you’re not big news.
A Detroit man who allegedly attacked two men after asking if they were Muslims has not been charged with a hate crime by prosecutors in Oakland County, Michigan.
He allegedly asked the men if they were Muslim and when they said they were not, he allegedly began attacking one of the men.
Terrence Lavaron Thomas allegedly stabbed one man five times and another – who police said tried to intervene – allegedly was stabbed in the hand. The men were treated at the hospital and have since been released.
The alleged attack happened at a bus stop in Southfield, Michigan, a suburb of Detriot, and police arrested Mr Thomas shortly after. Mr Thomas allegedly was carrying two knives and some marijuana, and told police he was a Muslim.
Rather than representing the nation as a whole, the BBC has become a vital resource – and sometimes attack weapon – for a narrow, arrogant Left-Liberal elite.
Awkward…..Did the BBC and Guardian splash this on their front pages day after day in 2011? I am guessing Peter Oborne wasn’t such a hero then.
Coming to the BBC, an everyday story of bias and falling standards
The corporation has fine values. It must act swiftly to stop their further erosion
There are very few institutions – maybe only the monarchy, the Armed Forces and Parliament – that express what it means to be British more than the BBC. The state broadcaster enjoys a very privileged place indeed at the heart of our national conversation. But this, in turn, means that there is an implicit deal between it and the British people.
On the one hand, the BBC is funded by public money and given a semi-monopoly of broadcast news coverage. On the other, the BBC is by charter expected to reflect the British values of fair-mindedness, decency and tolerance.
Sadly, it is only very rarely that the BBC keeps its side of the bargain, and this negligence is starting to become a scandal. Rather than representing the nation as a whole, it has become a vital resource – and sometimes attack weapon – for a narrow, arrogant Left-Liberal elite.
BBC chiefs used to deny this charge outright, but in recent years even they have been forced to acknowledge the weight of evidence. The organisation and its staff were institutionally opposed to Margaret Thatcher, whereas they took New Labour to their heart. They have swallowed every progressive orthodoxy, while viewing with naked contempt the concerns of ordinary people.
The BBC is doctrinally pro-European. During the 1975 referendum campaign, it was the propaganda wing of the pro-Brussels machine, and this attitude has not changed since. The ranking members of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten of Barnes and his deputy Diane Coyle, have never made any secret of their contempt for Eurosceptics, let alone the opinions of the very significant and growing minority of the British people who want us out of Europe altogether.
This ossified institutional attitude has become an urgent problem. Thanks to this week’s uprising on the Tory benches, and the financial catastrophe now facing the 17 eurozone countries, it now looks very likely indeed that a further euro-referendum can be expected in due course. Given the abysmal record of BBC partisanship, and the unashamed pro-European bias of the corporation’s board, there is no hope that the debate when it comes will be treated in an even-handed way.
This problem is made much worse by the fact that bias is not the only problem. A further difficulty is lack of standards. It is not simply the opinions of BBC producers and reporters that are suspect. So are the facts they put in front of the public.
One notorious recent case concerns the documentary produced by the flagship BBC current affairs programme, Panorama, about Primark. Screened in June 2008, it made a series of very serious and damaging claims, of which the most troubling was the assertion that the clothing company employed child labour in Bangalore.
There is ample evidence that Panorama’s “undercover” footage showing three boys in a Bangalore clothing workshop was actually an elaborately constructed fake – and this evidence became available almost at once. But the corporation was unbelievably slow to admit this. Only three years later, in June this year, did the BBC come up with a grudging apology. By comparison, when the columnist Johann Hari was caught out in a comparable (though not identical) act of fabrication, his newspaper suspended him within days.
Even before the discredited Primark documentary was screened, the BBC was caught out in another act of fabrication. This one, because it involved the Queen, gained massive publicity. The BBC showed the monarch, in full garter regalia, angrily leaving a photographic sitting after being asked to remove her tiara. It made compelling television, and at first was accepted as true. In fact, the scene was a fake, the result of misleading editing.
It cannot be stressed enough that the BBC makes a great deal of excellent television and radio, while employing many admirable journalists. But there is a pattern forming here. It now emerges that the corporation has fabricated yet another story, this one involving the Conservative backbencher Andrew Tyrie.
Three weeks ago, Mr Tyrie was the subject of a mocking BBC report at an otherwise dull Conservative Party conference. He was shown preparing to give a televised response to George Osborne’s party conference speech, then being led away by some Downing Street heavies, only to return full of praise for the Chancellor. The inference made was that Mr Tyrie had been nobbled.
Nothing of the sort had occurred, as the BBC reporter involved, James Landale, has since to his very great credit made clear (though unfortunately only in a little-read blog written some time afterwards). It was ingenious television editing which made it appear that Mr Tyrie had been got at by No 10’s heavy mob. The crucial point is that Mr Tyrie had already told the BBC exactly what he was going to say about the Osborne speech before he talked to Downing Street officials – and not one word had changed after.
The BBC has been trying to brush this affair off as a matter of no consequence, a cunning tactic. For Mr Tyrie is a man of few political friends, and none at the top of the Government, where his discomfort has been openly relished. I have followed his career for many years, and he is the very model of what a backbencher ought to be: independent and unbribable by office or money, dedicated only to a high-minded vision of public service.
Now chairman of the Commons Treasury Committee, he has been unafraid to take on George Osborne – for instance, using investigative powers to find out the ugly truth about the state-owned RBS bank. For the past six years, he has waged another lonely battle to find out the truth about the controversial and unethical practice of extraordinary rendition (the dispatch of terrorist suspects to foreign countries, where they can be tortured). He is now involved in a challenge to the CIA in the American courts. Thanks to the inaccurate BBC story there is now a real danger that Mr Tyrie’s quest for the truth may be hampered. The American intelligence agency could claim that he is simply the easily exploited pawn of a foreign government.
The truth could not be more different. Mr Tyrie has no official friends. All he has is his integrity, a commodity the BBC was disgracefully ready to trash for the sake of an eye-catching television package. It is time he was given a generous public apology.
I am one of those who love the BBC. I wake up in the morning listening to Radio 4, and it is often the last thing I hear before I go to bed. I believe that it represents something civilised and inspiring which sets Britain apart from other countries.
But there are forces – led by Rupert Murdoch – that want to annihilate the BBC and destroy what remains such an essential and unifying part of our public domain. In recent years, its senior management seem to have bent over backwards to give legitimacy to enemies, abusing its unique public trust by pursuing a factional agenda and rubbishing its own magnificent values. The character assassination of Andrew Tyrie, at heart an act of empty nihilism, is just the latest example. It is time the BBC woke up.
The BBC are outraged, and not a little gutted…..in order to pay for their election campaign the government has plundered the incomes of some of the most vulnerable people in society who were callously, cruelly, forced out of their jobs by the savage and brutal austerity imposed upon the economy and made to fend for themselves. Stripped of their dignity and all the trappings of success in this human tragedy all that they were left with was their indomitable human spirit to forge a new life and to rebuild their dreams. They were the very people who could put the economy back on the road to recovery with their daring, enterprise and ingenuity….these were the self-employed who risked all as they were left to sink or swim by a cruel government in the perilous waters of the free market only for that predatory Coalition government to leech off them, filling their coffers with their ill-gotten gains wrenched from the calloused, work worn hands of those who earned it with the blood, sweat and toil of honest labour despite being abandoned, left behind by this pitiless and merciless Coalition government whilst Osborne travels the country to crow about it.
I think Polly Toynbee must have hacked my computer…back to normal now…..
So tax receipts have amounted to a rather tidy £9 billion…though I’m slightly confused…the BBC radio news said this was less than experts had expected (or is that mre than the BBC hoped for?) and yet the web report tells us the opposite…’A better than expected rise in tax receipts’
However if you have been listening to BBC news or its commentary on the economy over the last few years as reports of employment continually rising came in you will have heard the BBC continually attempt to downplay the significance of that, claiming that they were mostly part time…they were in fact mostly full time, that women were suffering the most when last week we heard that women were in fact the better off, that they were zero hour contracts..always bad in BBC eyes or that the jobs were generally two bit jobs in the dismissive words of one BBC presenter, jobs like window cleaners or painters and decorators and gardening jobs…..shows what the BBC thinks of anyone making an honest living however ‘humble’.
Seems that was all in the imagination of BBC presenters who always seemed to put the bleakest interpretation on any good news for this government.
A £9 billion surplus would indicate that the self-employed are doing very nicely and that the economy is also chuggig along quite well. This of course has been backed up all along by small businessmen who rang in to BBC phone-ins and kept having to insist that, yes the economy may be sluggish for some, but they themselves were doing very well thanks….businessman after businessman rang in to many phone-ins…the BBC ignored them.
The BBC ignored all these people’s statements and continued down the road of claiming the economy was in dire straits, even claiming we were about to hit the dreaded ‘treble-dip’ recession when the truth was we hadn’t even had a double-dip recession…and yet you can still hear BBC presenters talking of it.
The BBC insisted that rising employment was a ‘puzzle’…and yet the simple solution would have been to hit the road and ask the businesses that were employing these people as to why they were doing so….or listen to the businesses ringing in to the phone-ins.
But the BBC never did…for years they kept up that mantra about rising employment being a ‘puzzle’…..because of course it either couldn’t be true or there must be some appalling downside that we couldn’t see. The answer could never be that the economy was picking up.
Anyway here we are….tax receipts up, solid proof of an economy on the mend and wages, at least for the self-employed, going up.
Never mind Russia, the Middle East and Grexit fears….all going well the UK has been put back on a sound footing…..whatever happened to that ‘Plan B’ the BBC used to urge us to adopt?
Roy Greenslade in his support for Peter Oborne in the Telegraph uses ‘research’ by the Media Standards Trust to back up claims about the lack of reporting by the Telegraph on HSBC’s woes…
An analysis by the Media Standards Trust has found that the Telegraph published “far fewer articles” on the recent HSBC tax avoidance scandal than rival papers. This also requires explanation from TMG.
The BBC’s Robert Peston is a trustee of that ‘independent’ organisation which is about to launch this:
Every Thursday, from 26 February until the election on 7 May, Election Unspun will presentstatistics of news coverage of the campaign from the previous week.
Party leaders in the news: a league table of leadership coverage
Prominent in the news: other political and non-political figures who appear in political news this week
Coverage of the parties: how often each of the main parties features in the news
Issues by news source: is The Telegraph focusing on cuts to benefits while The Mirror concentrates on the cost of living?
Election coverage day-by-day: how coverage played out over the week
What the media say: a statistical analysis of leader columns
I’m sure we will be treated to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…as they see it.
Sir David Bell …chairman of the Media Standards Trust until he joined the Leveson Inquiry into media (er that’ll be just News International!) standards, and Common Purpose trustee….and chairman once again.
The Media Standards Trust houses the Hacked Off campaign and provides administrative and strategic support. The campaign manager, and one of its founders, are employed by the Media Standards Trust. Many of the campaign’s activities and supporters have no direct connection with the Trust.
Who runs the Hacked Off campaign?
Martin Moore, the director of the Media Standards Trust, and Professor Brian Cathcart, from Kingston University, direct the Hacked Off campaign. It is managed by Thais Portilho-Shrimpton.
Baroness Helena Kennedy QC …lefty human rights lawyer and favourite of the BBC.
Julia Middleton founded ‘Common Purpose’, a member of the Media Standards Trust and founder of the left wing Demos think tank. A good friend of the BBC’s Robert Peston.
The Right Reverend Stephen Platten...a ‘turbulent’ political Bishop.
Sir Anthony Salz Executive Vice Chairman, NM Rothschild; member of the Scott Trust and on the board of the Education and Employees Trust which supports Peston’s speakers charity, an Media Standard Trust trustee and used to be vice chairman of the BBC board of governors 2004-06….the Scott Trust being ‘The Guardian’
Anthony SmithBroadcaster, author and academic….and ex-BBC producer
David LoynDeveloping world correspondent, BBC
Another of note is ex journalist Mary-Ellen Barker who now runs MEB Projects which tells us…
What we do
We offer financial services groups and media organisations advice and support to extract value from content.
.
Extract ‘value from content’. Doesn’t that mean making money out of their content?
How we do it
By maximising the value of content and data. Our expertise is:
So one of the leading lights of the Media Standards Trust that is criticising the Telegraph from making money out of content is herself running a business that encourages the very same thing?
MEB Projects was approached to define a news content strategy for a major content provider, which wanted a competitive differentiator to help drive customer retention and revenue generation. The task was to define customer requirements across a range of end-users, commission customer research, and build a 3-year plan to plug content gaps.
So shaping a news content strategy to suit customers.
Shock horror. No?
Can we trust an organisation so loaded with people with very defined agendas and close links to the Hacked Off campaign group and Leveson that the Telegraph has huge issues with?
Can we expect the Media Standards Trust to really hold the BBC to account in the same way it undoubtedly will right wing papers?
The BBC criticises the Telegraph for allegedly shaping its editorial to suit HSBC when HSBC were unhappy with the Telegraph’s reporting about it….similarly the BBC is unhappy about the Telegraph exposing the BBC’s own failings and bias in its journalism and rather than accept that criticism the BBC set out to attack the Telegraph using its own news platform as a weapon….are they any different in effect to HSBC in their reaction to criticism, or any different to the Telegraph in compromising their journalism to suit their own interests?
This newspaper cares passionately about maintaining the highest standards of journalism. We believe that journalism, when practised properly, protects the public from abuses of power by exposing those who are guilty of dishonesty, corruption or injustice. Journalism that harms the innocent – by telling lies or spreading falsehoods about them, or by unjustifiably invading their privacy – does the exact opposite of what good journalism aims to achieve.
Good journalism is in peril in Britain today. The cloud of suspicion, condemnation and mistrust that is starting to engulf the BBC will increase the public’s growing distrust of what journalists do. Newsnight’s claim that a leading figure in the Conservative Party participated in the abuse of children at a care home in North Wales has been retracted, generating an appropriately grovelling apology. But it is too late for an apology to do much to diminish the damage done to the BBC’s reputation for accuracy.
Newsnight apparently lost faith in its own journalists, for it used a freelance organisation, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which is attached to London’s City University and funded by David Potter, a former Labour donor, to provide much of the story. Even then, Newsnight hedged its bets: it did not broadcast the name of the individual it wanted to “expose” as a paedophile, leaving it to users of social media sites such as Twitter to name him.
The BBC’s journalists broke the most elementary rules of journalism.
That fundamental failure to follow basic journalistic standards is what has led so many people to question whether the BBC can be trusted. Investigative journalism is a serious business. It can take months of work and cost a great deal of money. It requires adherence to the highest standards. Newsnight’s spectacular fall from grace raises the question: how can we be sure that standards are not compromised elsewhere within the BBC? Where does the rot stop? Has it been stopped? Can it be?
It would be terrible if, in a few years’ time, Britain has a regulatory environment that prevents a free press from investigating and publishing the truth about the abuse of power by our rulers, but allows innocent people to be smeared as paedophiles on social networking sites or, in effect, via the BBC. Unless we are very careful, that is where we are likely to end up.
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