Category Archives: The Guardian

Huff and Puff

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Forgive me for mentioning something non-BBC, but has anyone seen a more spectacular own goal than the Guardian’s unintentionally truthful advertising campaign?

“The Whole Picture” goes the slogan.

Everyone knows that the real Little Pigs were acting in self defence when they tricked the wolf into coming down the chimney and landing in the boiling water.

The ad boasts that the Guardian is ‘telling the whole story,’ when they’re so not.

They’ve twisted it, portraying the perpetrator as the innocent party, and blaming the victim!

Many a true word is spoken in jest.
I wonder when someone will point out that the message is not so much ‘we paint the Whole picture’; it’s much more ‘we paint the Wrong picture’?
Oh, I’ve just done done it, by the hairs on my chinny chin chin.

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What The papers Say

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Today: R4. Monday 23rd January 2012.
Yesterday, at about 7:45. Evan Davis read out the newspaper review. An item from the Guardian was singled out, which he articulated with passion and a distinct air of disapproval. What was it? A new scandal about Hackgate? Big Ben toppled over? Breaking news about another atrocity in Syria? No, it was Harriet Sherwood’s article about the ill-treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli prisons. The way Evan spat the words out, you’d have thought he’d been imprisoned there himself.
There’s something in internet parlance, or maybe in general parlance, called ‘whataboutery’. I take it to refer to a rebuttal that solely consists of examples of something worse than the original criticism.
You write about the bloody awful conditions endured by stone-throwing children held in Israeli prisons, and I counter with ‘what about conditions for children who have been tortured to death in Syria?” That’s what-about-ery.

That has nothing to do with Evan Davis, it concerns a CiFWatch article about another of Harriet Sherwood’s stories about Israel’s wrongdoings, real or imagined. These she obsessively researches to assuage the insatiable appetite for such things over at the Guardian.

The CiFWatch piece, cross-posted at Honest Reporting, begins with a graphic and gruesome description of the body of a 13 year old boy who had evidently been tortured to death by the Assad regime. It’s there purely to contrast its stark brutality with the allegations in the Guardian’s special report that Evan spat out with such venom yesterday.

Someone suggested this was ‘whataboutery’. But it wasn’t really, because Honest Reporting didn’t stop there. They went on to include the Israeli response, which, needless to say, was not published in the Guardian.
The Guardian’s video stars two Palestinian youths, one of whom looks like a chubby young Mr. Bean. Shall we call them ‘mature children’.
We are expected to take their testimony at face value. Their interrogations sounded tough, though not horrifyingly brutal, and if there is any truth in their allegations it’s nothing for Israel to be proud of.

“It would be naive to believe that there have never been any Israeli violations of those laws specifically meant to protect the rights of minors in detention. If these cases exist, there are authorities tasked with investigating and dealing with such deviations. This is not, however, the norm.”

Not touched upon at all is the matter of why they were in this situation, leaving the impression that they were completely innocent victims of some random act of vengeance by Israel.

Honest Reporting says that Israel maintains that these allegations are completely baseless.
“The mechanisms of accountability and rule of law actually exist in Israel” So before anyone says ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they’ it does seem pathetic that the lefty Guardianistas and their BBC bretheren are willing to leave aside their critical faculties, and take the words of all accusers, however implausible, as gospel. Film of stone-throwing Palestinian youths is abundant. We know they do it, and we know that slingshot catapults are lethal weapons. We know that exaggeration and faux news is par for the course. Yet people lap up unverified allegations by agenda-driven reporters. They can’t get enough of it.

The Israel Security Agency and its employees work solely within the law and are subject to oversight and internal and external examination, including by the State Controller, the State Prosecutor, the Attorney General’s Office, the Israeli Knesset and Israel’s courts at all levels, including the Supreme Court.”

That response is dismissed out of hand, deemed not worth listening to.
Mark Regev was allowed just enough time on the video to say that representatives of minors who feel they have been ill-treated should ‘come forward’ as Israel knows it is important to treat young people with extra consideration, but this was nullified by what came immediately after. A reiteration of the original allegations, which was allowed the final word.

This unverified report was singled out by some BBC producer as though it was of particular interest to Today listeners, and maybe they’re right.

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THE NEWS YOU WONT READ ON THE BBC

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Most excellent post here on Autonomous Mind questioning the BBCs print wing – The Guardian.

You won’t find this update, about the Guardian’s allegations about Milly Dowler’s voicemails being deleted by people working for the News of the World, on the BBC News website. The BBC, as the broadcast arm of the Guardian, has an editorial culture of omitting stories that paint the Guardian in a negative light and thus will act as if the story does not exist.

Make sure you read it all.

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BBC Ignores Cruel And Crass Tweets From Left Wing Writer

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Nothing at all at the BBC website about Guardian contributor Kia Abdullah’s crass and heartless twitter comments on the tragic death of three British students in a road accident in Thailand.

‘Is it really awful that I don’t feel any sympathy for anyone killed on a gap year?’
‘I actually smiled when I saw that they had double-barrelled surnames. Sociopath?’

All across the twitterverse and blogosphere within hours and hitting the dead tree press by Sunday even the Guardian had to do a nifty piece of sidestepping.

But the BBC obviously felt the story wasn’t worth covering.

I wonder why?

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Miscellany for a Hot Day

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There was a nice piece by Damian Thompson in the Telegraph yesterday about the Johann Hari dilemma. Is the means okay – even cheating – if it justifies the end? Hari’s views are unpalatable and immature. They would be; it seems he’s only thirty two years old, if a tad chunky for a young fella. But the principle is not unlike the line postulated by defenders of Charles Enderlin’s decision to air the unverified Al Dura story on France 2, which subsequently ‘went viral’ with dire consequences. These defenders said, “What does it matter whether it’s true or not? – we know it’s the sort of thing that happens all the time.” I’ve heard similar views expressed on the BBC, not to mention speakers who still give credibility to the incident.

The spat between Cameron and Bercow was announced on the radio this morning. I can’t remember if it was presented as a direct report from the pages of the Guardian, but in any case, that’s what it was. Funny, because the Telegraph seems to side with Bercow, and the Mail with Cameron. The Guardian seems to be facing a dilemma. To go with their ‘class’ or their ‘Semitic’ prejudice. They seem to have come down in favour of the first. After all, Bercow is hated for his pomposity, his stature, his traitorous politics, and most of all, for his wife. His Jewishness almost pales into insignificance. Whereas Tory Toffs Sam’n’Dave trump all that because they represent Eton, privilege and puppy dogs’ tails. The Guardian’s theory is that the feud stems from their differing backgrounds. When I heard that, I wondered whether ‘differing backgrounds’ was a euphemism for something sinister, but it’s class again.
Quite a few Jews are short. Let’s call it petite, which is what people call me. Occasionally, someone will ask me “Aren’t you tiny?” which I assume they feel free to do, probably not considering it to be rude, at least not as rude as it would be to greet a new acquaintance with “How d’you do? Aren’t you podgy?” or aren’t you bucktoothed, bald, strange-looking or bandy-legged?
If you’re a man, though, they’d never say ‘aren’t you tiny’, unless they were saying it as an insult. David Cameron seems to think it’s perfectly okay to get a laugh out of calling Bercow a dwarf, which is not big and it’s not clever. So much as I’d normally say a plague on both their houses, I’m with the Jew. I guess that also means I’m with the BBC.

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Our Culture

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The Guardian’s favourite cartoonist.
“Steve Bell – At the centre of our culture”
(David Yelland. Today radio 4.)

Update: New Sharon cartoon to replace previous image that wasn’t by the Guardian’s favourite cartoonist Steve Bell. Sorry for any inconvenience, and thanks to Mr Gregory for pointing out my mistake.

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The BBC Guardian Love-In (With Our Cash)

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A nice little bit of investigation by B-BBC contributor Billy Blofeld, who has been busy with the FOI requests. The BBC have now provided him with up-to-date data broken down by how much they spend on recruitment advertisement with external organisations.

30% is quite a shocking slant of payment towards one particular source, but if you isolate only national newspapers this rises to a staggering 70%. From his blog:

The BBC are the biggest fish in the media pond. Whatever they say, they are not subject to the vagaries of the market like a commercial company is. The BBC can influence and change markets, because the licence fee payers give them the financial whip hand. In short the BBC can choose to advertise wherever the hell they like and people wanting a job in television will follow.

Given nearly a third of the BBC total spend is with companies with political affiliations, it is a disgrace that nearly 80% of spend in this major category is with the left wing Guardian.

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PROGRAMME TO SPIN…

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The Guardian is the print version of the BBC and so it comes as NO surprise to read a sympathetic article in it entitled  “The BBC must reprogramme itself to win.” 

“The big salaries paid to some stars give the government a line of attack that it believes resonates with the public. Other criticisms rarely do. The BBC remains popular; the licence fee is one of the least-detested taxes .”

It’s still detested though and the point is that B-BBC exists to make the endemic bias as widely known as possible, Best of all the BBC knows we watch it. 

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