Category Archives: Panorama

PANORAMIC BIAS

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Is it possible, do you think, that the BBC could engage in the malicious damage of a rival in the same way that they allege Murdoch was doing? Biased BBC contributor Alan asks..

“Biased BBC has previously posted a look at Panorama’s investigation into ITV’s ‘Ondigita’ demise and whether Murdoch had anything to do with it. ‘Spiked’ magazine has taken a long look at this subject also and come up with yet more evidence that the BBC were at best merely inaccurate, at worst attempting to create a story that would be as damaging as possible to its biggest rival. (In other words doing exactly what they claimed Murdoch was doing…using the BBC’s power and influence to smash a commercial rival)

The article examines whether anything Murdoch did ‘killed off’ Ondigital and whether his company was emgaged in similar activities in Australia.  The answer to both seems to be a definite no….and that’s from people working in the companies Murdoch was supposed to have attacked……

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/12328/

Panorama and the toxic BBC culture

‘The editor of the Weekend Australian says the BBC’s claim that News Corp encouraged piracy against competitors is pure conspiracy theory.

The blighters at NDS had apparently been encouraging piracy against Australian pay-TV operation Austar, with the aim of driving down its value so that its rival, Foxtel, 25 per cent owned by News Corporation, could pick it up for a song.

The man at the helm of Austar at the time of the alleged skullduggery, CEO John Porter, said Chenoweth’s story was ‘so farcical that I really don’t think it is worthy of my time’.

He said he had seen no evidence whatsoever that News Corporation had promoted pay-TV piracy to damage his business. ‘Quite to the contrary’, he told ABC Radio. ‘We’ve worked very closely through the years with both Foxtel and heavily supported by News Corp, and I’m aware that News Corp has worked globally to try to solve the piracy issue.’ ‘

If Panorama’s story is proven pure hogwash, by mistake or design, will the BBC Trust be applying the whitewash or will there be a genuine investigation and suitably robust reaction should the Panorama team be found to have concocted a pack of lies? “

FOUR MORE YEARS….

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Anyone watch Panorama this evening? Quite remarkable bias, even by the BBC standards. The programme was all about America’s homeless but as ever that was the subterfuge for a more subtle agenda of; 1/Chiding Obama for not being more progressive (although it was the bad Republicans in Congress that prevented him for doing what must be done – spreading the wealth around )  2/ Presenting Republicans as cold hearted monsters who would sooner see kids eat rats …yes rats….than increase Welfarism  3/ Point out that America is a fading superstar, almost third world and  4/ Remind us how thankful we should be for the NHS.

I was also surprised to hear Vegas introduced as “the centre of capitalism” …. and then we got to hear about the people who live in the sewers. Vegas may be the centre for gambling but that is a long way from the hard endeavour of capitalism. The juxtaposition of interviews with Republican figures and images of the alleged starving was not so subtle but I am sure it did the job the BBC wanted. Programmes like this live down to our expectations of the State Broadcaster and the left wing socialist bias exuded right across the duration of the broadcast.

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Mangold on Panorama

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Not sure if this was mentioned in the comments, but ex-Panorama journalist Tom Mangold unloaded on his former employer in Sunday’s Independent:

Primark’s objections were investigated by the BBC’s internal Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU); its admirable report, completed last summer, was, at the request of Primark, never published – because the retailer thought it would jeopardise its appeal to the BBC Trust. Remarkably, senior BBC managers used that decision to put an aggressive public relations operation into action: someone authorised the press office to brief several newspapers that Panorama had been exonerated, when, in fact, the report had done nothing of the sort. In fact, the ECU, set up after the Hutton inquiry, specifically highlighted the suspicious nature of the footage in question.

It is only now, three years after the programme was broadcast, that the BBC Trust has forced Panorama to admit the error of its ways. In the meantime, the BBC’s arrogant refusal to admit it was wrong has resulted in an editorial catastrophe not only for Panorama, the flagship, but for all the corporation’s journalism.

And this from Tim Black on the self-righteous moralising behind the Panorama programme is good too:

That ethical consumerism is almost solely concerned with using the lives of the world’s impoverished to chastise those crowding the aisles of Tesco or Primark was clear from a particular segment in On the Rack. There, Panorama reporter Tom Heap confronted shoppers across Britain with the now infamous child-labour footage. This, as Daniel Ben-Ami remarked at the time on spiked, was ‘the contemporary equivalent of forcing someone to confess a sin’. It was a moment that captured the deeply elitist, profoundly snobbish core of ethical consumption. That is, it’s all about elevating those who shop ethically above those who shop on a budget: the masses can have their cheap chic, runs the barely concealed logic, they can even look good – but we are better than them.

So sure of their superiority, in fact, that they think it’s OK to fake a crucial scene and then bullshit the papers about it later.

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Two in a Million.

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We tear our hair over the way BBC journalists misrepresent issues we care about, so maybe we should sympathise with poor old Hamza A Tzortzis who complains rather perceptively that decontextualised references aren’t fair.

He has responded to John Ware’s Panorama ‘British Schools, Islamic Rules’ with a press release. (H/T Elder of Ziyon)

“In short, the programme misrepresented established Islamic teachings on a range of issues in a manner that portrayed them as crude and insensitive whilst linking them to social unrest and violence.”

I know how he feels about being misrepresented, but I’m not so sure about the rest. He quotes from a statement by Saqib Sattar , Vice Chair of the Islamic Education and Research Academy.
“The attack on Muslim schools as an institution is both ill-informed and misguided” He praises the academic excellence of these schools, which he attributes to their being rooted in Islamic scholarly tradition, then seamlessly encompasses all faith schools in a sweeping statement which compares them with an easy target – failing secular state schools.

Hamza A Tzortzis also says that Islamic law is like ours, only better. and that before we cut the bits off we really really make sure we’ve got proof. Honest.

Elder notices that their response didn’t actually contradict the Panorama. He reproduces this quote from the iERA press release:

“The attack on mainstream Islamic speakers because they hold established theological views is making the job of community cohesion difficult, as is the constant misconstruing or lack of context with regards to their statements. The programme-makers would have been better served to look deeply into the Islamic scholarly tradition and its historical impact, and they would have found a beautiful model of community cohesion. For example it is a well known historical fact that Islam and Muslims for centuries have been offering protection to the Jewish community.

and Elder concludes:” That “beautiful model of cohesion” is that the despised Jews can be “protected” as long as they meekly accept their inferior status and pay the jizya tax to their Muslim overlords. But that is apparently in no way incompatible with schoolbooks that ask Muslim children to detail all the “reprehensible” characteristics of Jews, which seems to be an established theological view.“

A set of two whole Panoramas have flown in the face of tradition, deviated from the norm, and departed from the default position! Both Jane Corbin’s Mavi Marmara Panorama and John Ware’s ‘British Schools, Islamic Rules’ Panorama strayed from the usual BBC pattern of sanitising Islam and denigrating Israel. Whatever next?

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The Going Rate

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Panorama, what is it for?
The one about teachers being unsackable. Melanie Phillips has written about this state of affairs here.
“Just imagine the outcry ” she says “if incompetent doctors weren’t struck off but were moved to another hospital, thus exposing yet more patients to dangerous treatment.”
Or if paedopriests were shunted away to other child-rich parishes.
Oh wait. Shocking innit.
Seriously, schools might be a shambles, state education may be all over the place, the teaching profession is probably in meltdown, but Panorama certainly didn’t add anything constructive to the mix.

The number of people who declined to be interviewed outnumbered those who agreed. Panorama pressed ahead regardless, making do with the oddbods they were left with.

The presenter styles herself on the appearance, but not the intellect, of Vanessa Feltz. The camera lingered on her expression while she cocked her head from side to side attentively whilst yet another shocking revelation was revalated.

Chris Woodhead suffers from motor neurone disease and is now in wheelchair. Pity he couldn’t have given Samantha wassaname and Jeremy Vine the day off and produced and presented the whole programme himself.

Now to Today. Charles Moore has decided, now that Jonathan Ross has gone, to pay his licence fee. “In the old days,” someone said, “icons like Sir Robin Day were paid a pittance, and they didn’t complain.” “They didn’t have all the competition from ITV then” said someone else. “It’s the talent. If you want talent, you have to pay the going rate.” It seems that the BBC does pay some of its employees rather handsomely. But where oh where is the talent?

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Yobborama

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Panorama used to be a grown up serious programme. In the olden days. Now it’s more of a pantomime. They set out to prove something to the halfwits they assume are watching. Last night they decided to prove that Asians suffer racial abuse. They set about recruiting two Asians to hang out with hidden cameras, as a kind of undercover honey-trap. Well, they weren’t undercover, they were actual Asians, with religious headdress. That confused some of the target racists into shouting “Paki” or, once, “Jew!” Some of the taunts were undeniably racist. But that’s not what real racism is.

The disgraceful hostility emanating from the lazy goodfornothing lumps of pointlessness we were shown was less an example of Islamophobia than of societal meltdown. I suspect that anyone loitering there would cop it, doubly so if they were wearing identifying apparatus of any kind, be it religious – or any other random sign of weakness, infirmity, or purse carrying. It was a kind of no-go area. So what was Panorama trying to prove?
That they were incompetent documentary makers who had little regard for the intelligence of the audience? They tried to manipulate one of this country’s worst social abominations into a matter of Islamophobic /Asian victimhood, but what they succeeded in showing was their own agenda.

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