Monday 4 May 2015

Report, report, report


Hamish and Dougal, not looking happy about the BBC's reporting of today's goings-on in Glasgow

Though this is a blog that tries as hard as it can - or at least as hard as one man and one woman with families and busy lives can possibly do - to monitor as much of the BBC's output as possible.....and, given how colossal the BBC's output is, that's nowhere near as much as we'd like - to put it mildly!.....we probably miss a heck of a lot of (potential) bias.

Thankfully, plenty of other eyes are out there.

Some of those eyes, however (like us perhaps), see things through their own filters (and biases) and either find things or miss things that we don't see, or that don't interest us - some plausibly, some implausibly.

This latest bout of introspection arises because The Crazy World of Twitter is going absolutely wild this afternoon/evening with furious accusations of BBC bias...

...but those accusations are coming, it seems, almost entirely from those notorious supporters of the SNP known as 'cybernats' - the sort of people who on seeing Jim Naughtie walking down a street in Dundee march towards him and chant in unison, "Delete, delete, delete". (One for Doctor Who fans there.)

The story, reported on the home page of the BBC News website, is that Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy and Labour-groupie-comedian Eddie Izzard have been rudely heckled - or worse - during a "scuffle" in Glasgow.

The BBC's man-of-the-moment in Scotland, James Cook, paints a grim picture of the scene on Twitter:
James Cook @BBCJamesCook  ·  7h 7 hours ago
Absolute chaos on the streets of Glasgow as Jim Murphy and Eddie Izzard try to be heard over protestors. #ge2015
James Cook @BBCJamesCook  ·  6h 6 hours ago
“Democracy is dead” one of the protestors who shouted down Jim Murphy in Glasgow tells me. #ge2015
James Cook @BBCJamesCook  ·  6h 6 hours ago
More pictures of the scuffles in Glasgow to come if possible. I couldn’t get any as I was watching cameraman @cherlie1′s back.
James Cook @BBCJamesCook  ·  6h 6 hours ago
Eddie Izzard condemns “violent” and “aggressive” protestors at Labour campaign event in Glasgow. #ge2015
Nicola Sturgeon may have distanced herself from the anti-Labour protests, but the cybernats are still calling 'bias' on the BBC for reporting what they call a Labour 'stunt' and they are posting images that they say prove the BBC is misreporting/exaggerating the event (or, to put it more bluntly, lying).

The image endlessly being re-tweeted, in response to James's claims of "chaos" is:


I'm not sure what the second image relates to - but it obviously means a lot to the cybernats. My guess is something to do with the post-referendum violence in Glasgow said to have been carried out by pro-union thugs.

Is that "BBC: Chaos in Glasgow" image a true or a false picture of today's events? Are the BBC over-egging the pudding? Are James Cook and his BBC colleagues covertly campaigning for Scottish Labour?

Well, call me 'an indecisive blogger' if you will but, frankly, I've not got a clue. I've Googled around to try to find out what really happened and yet I've still not got a clue. I rather doubt the BBC are covering for Labour (or covering for the SNP, as I've seen claimed on certain largely English blogs - though the one thing I can be certain about here is that James's tweets certainly weren't doing that!) but, still, I've not really got a clue.

So this is this blogger's take then on this latest outburst of #Beebbiasery from the cybernats is: I don't know what to make of it or who's telling the truth. Is the BBC telling the truth? Dunno. Is the BBC shilling for Labour? Dunno.

Craig's Final Thought - To summarise: Dunno.

1 comment:

  1. David Preiser5 May 2015 at 01:17

    If this actually did happen, I say tough. The same Beeboids wringing their hands over this now were laughing and pointing when Farage was similarly accosted. Screw them.

    Izzard is a bubble-dwelling moron, just like nearly all BBC journalists. They really don't get that Labour has nothing to offer Scotland. Of course, they do offer more or less the same Socialist utopian dreams as the SNP, but the SNP offer (quietly, underneath it all) Scottish ethnic pride and the continued possibility of independence from the hated English. Izzard can bloviate until he's as blue in the face as his nail polish, and that won't change a single Braveheart mind.

    ...but the cybernats are still calling 'bias' on the BBC for reporting what they call a Labour 'stunt'

    It was a Labour stunt, though. Still, we all know the BBC's ready response to this accusation, don't we? They get complaints from both sides of their Scottish Question coverage, so they got it about right, and your complaint has been included in overnight dispatches to producers and editors, so they can have a good laugh and delete them in the morning.

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