We used to laugh at the idea of having an open thread on this blog. Don’t make us look like Theresa no-Maytes, post your observations about the BBC below.
The BBC only likes to report 'news' that fits into their own biased remit. Airtime is now taken up in narrative supporting a disparate group of minority interests. The BBC have abandoned the UK majority view on a whole host of subjects, such as Brexit.
Rather than admit that they got it wrong, the BBC think that therefore they need to 'explain' to the majority that everyone should agree with their narrative which is supportive of these minority interests - those who don't agree are immediately labelled as extreme right, racist, homophobic, or now more recently, white supremacists. These 'Explainers' set a sinister tone - akin to Orwell's vision of the Thought Police, or some brainwashing programme designed to reboot dissenting minds.
'Explainers' tell us how to interpret political opinion, how to respond to music and films, how to view sport, how to view art, which historical figures we should have empathy with etc. In fact almost all BBC content is accompanied by 'Experts' telling us how we should respond to events. We should all immediately become tearful at the sight of disadvantaged battling to overcome their lot. We should all feel the same emotions at the same time orchestrated by cynical older men in the image of ageing rock-stars or young women (but not too young and definitely not too old).
Marr, Mason, Kuenssberg, Smith etc have now awarded themselves degrees in smugness that make them virtually unwatchable. They will promote fake-news just as if were true, without blinking. Their self-importance knows no bounds. They can be openly hostile and malicious towards elected representatives of the UK majority with impunity. They are not there as a result of any election - they just bear the BBC hallmark, which is becoming most unpalatable.
Excellent comments, Anonymous! I do wonder, though, if Kuenssberg is as self-assured as she makes out - her increasing reliance on gimmicks suggests that she realizes her outpourings are not being lapped up as eagerly as she would like. Her coverage of the snubbing of Theresa May yesterday: the camera zoomed in on a tiny dot which turned out to be our Laura peering down from the gallery into the chamber, smacked of desperation. Telekinesis doesn't work - she didn't fall over the safety rail!
John Birt started this 'explain the news' trip, and people like Helen Boaden expanded on it. The whole point of titled editors like you've named is exactly that: to 'explain' the news to the public, tell them how to think about it. It allows the BBC to break free from their impartiality remit while at the same time claiming they're not.
From La Boaden's farewell speech earlier this year:
"argued that there was a bias in television journalism. Not against any particular party or point of view but a bias against understanding. News and feature journalism, he said, both failed to put events in their proper context."
Uh-huh. So their remit became to frame events in the proper context. The BBC-approved context, that is. And then they still claim there's no bias.
I'm massively irked by the BBC's coverage of Aleppo. Why are you still in Beirut, Lyse ? Is it so that you don't have to hear the conformations of Vanessa Beeley's and Eva Bartlett's reports over the last two years ? The White Helmets scam blown out of the water for example, as Syrians are now confirming ? As a journalistic organisation, is it not worth investigating why this group have received nearly 100 million dollars in British / US / UN aid, BBC ?
When I was growing up, it was the actions of politicians that were scary. Now I'm scared by the lengths the BBC, CH4 and the Guardian (those who I used to expect better of) will go to to sustain their narrative. The narrative is muddy at best, and avoids serious questions about funding and weapon provision. It's not laziness. Who is pulling the strings and why are the stenographers posing as journalists so prepared to go along with it ?
As it's Christmas why don't we praise the BBC where it's due? I would like to thank Andrew Neil for being the one political interviewer on television and radio that knows what he's talking about, can think on his feet, doesn't constantly interrupt, is polite but doesn't take any nonsense from politicians.
New Year's Resolution: Please can the BBC resolve not to include Alastair Campbell or Will Self on any radio or television programme? The former has no credibility and the latter is an annoying, depressing t&%t who hasn't got a good word to say about anyone. Also avoid putting any comedian on Question Time.
To use the analogy of blackholes and singularity, have we reached the point at which dissenting opinion cannot escape the gravity of the BBC's deeply embedded bias? You can see, written upon Andrew Neil's face, a look of resignation as if he might be about to disappear into the BBC's blackhole of silence and oblivion reserved for anyone proffering a not-wholly-on-message opinion.
Under the pretext of examining the North/South economic divide, the 6pm tv news took us to Cleethorpes. What they were actually seeking to do was to reinforce the notion that Brexit supporters are old and uneducated - the ones in the programme like to dress up as cowboys and go line dancing (What of it? you may ask). The important thing from the Remain propagandists' point of view is that the reporter managed to find an old man who believed that Brexit would be a sell-out and that we should be, 'stuck in the EU forever.' This, then, looks like being the second phase of the BBC'S Remain offensive: phase one has been to soften us up with a five-month-long creeping propaganda barrage and now we are to be exposed to defeatist talk - just a dribble at first, then, no doubt, a flood. Clearly, the BBC has been saving this footage for the better part of a month (spot the Armistice Day poppies?) and have lobbed it in now while they think Brexiteers are reeling from the EU Leaders' snub to Theresa May; it won't work! I'm still reeling from the reporter's revelation that the cowboys' pistols were replicas - we'd all imagined the good folk of Cleethorpes would be packing the genuine article, loaded with 250 grain hollow point!
The BBC has so many news "narratives" going at the moment, it's a wonder even a £5 billion operation can keep up! :)
Let's see: all Brexit voters overweight thick northerners on mobility scooters...all 27 EU negotiators savvy well co-ordinated in their response...Trump victory delivered by pesky Ruskies...all Aleppo "rebels" nice pro-democracy types or at least far more horrible than Assad...we love Saudi Arabia - except in Yemen for some reason...Turkey was moving towards being a strong democracy in EU, somehow derailed...
Just finishing Roger Scrutons "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands" straight from the library! Need read no more about what the agenda is in journalism colleges and the MSM. So enjoy what Nigel and Donald, Beppo have done for us in 2016-and here`s to Milo, Douglas, Geert, Marine and AfD next year too. Goodbye Euro, au revoir EU...won`t be TOO far behind. Take bets on whether it`ll be Greece, Italy or France that`ll stick an icepick through the Brussels bonce.
With respect, the decline of the BBC "flagship" current affairs shows goes back a long way before "Newsnight", "Tonight" and "Midweek". It was on my first day working as a trainee on "24 Hours" that I overheard the editor (Anthony Smith) tell one of his reporters, "Go and cover the South American" earthquake and if its over do a story about how the rescue efforts are NOT working". The tradition of constructing news is truly an old one.
The difference between then and now is that we can check the validity of news stories much more easily. Fake news is exposed for what it is quite quickly.
Absolutely correct. In the 1970s a BBC in house journal circulated called "Urinal" ("Ariel") exposing some of the "fake news" of the time. The Beeb shut it down, though by today's standards it was pretty innocuous. Now that so many of us old hands are secure in our pensions and away from the fray we should start spilling the beans. It would be quote an eye opener to the baby boomers.
Andrew Marr's paper review panel segment was vomit-inducing enough with the hand-wringing over the children of Aleppo (soon to be a pop charity song). "There are no easy answers" but something must be done anyway. Oh, and the UN and Security Council need to be reformed so "the strong doesn't always win," meaning Russia shouldn't be allowed to veto things. Virtue-signaling waffle, but not realizing she just said she wants a "rules-based system" that should be rigged.
Then when discussing foreign aid, Suzanne Evans was making good points on how bad the system is, with executives trousering large sums, Angela Eagle had to interrupt by intoning, "Let's remember that foreign aid is a good thing." Evans replied in the negative, and Eagle started talking about how foreign aid "stops states failing" and helps women and children, the usual talking points. When Evans started to ask why someone would need to be paid a million quid to do that, Marr stepped all over her and moved along to the next topic, something vacuous about some karaoke controversy at a Labour event. Don't want to let them actually debate an important issue.
Marr's interview with Osborne was soft. Predictably so, as Osborne is not only no longer the nasty Tory Chancellor destroying the country with austerity, but is actually on the same side as Marr on Brexit. So soft is the order of the day.
He made a gesture towards being serious by asking Osborne if he actually told Cameron at the beginning that having an EU referendum was a bad idea because they would lose, and it would ruin the Tory party. Osborne didn't even try to deny it or answer it, and instead rattled off interviewee boilerplate about how he enjoyed his time in office and working closely with David Cameron. It was even less of an answer than a non-answer.
Then Marr pretended to want to get Osborne to admit that Project Fear was wrong. Oh, no, George hopes that the predictions were wrong, but...blah, blah, blah, Project Still Afraid.
The rest of it was all from a Remain ('Soft' Brexit when the mask slips) perspective. Not a single challenge from Marr, not a single attempt to get him to answer any of the difficult questions, only easy softballs for Osborne to opine upon, and act the optimistic patriot. At one point, Marr gave him the chance to do a little Project Fear monologue about how the Financial Industry was worried about what would happen if the UK didn't get some fantasy deal. Uninterrupted, unchallenged. Same with immigration. As usual, the Remainiacs conflated 'immigration' with rapid, mass immigration, particularly of a lot of fundamentalist Muslims from third-world countries in record-shattering numbers. Marr allowed it and supported the dishonest conflation.
The segment with Liam Fox was remarkedly different from the Osborne interview, because Marr was challenging him immediately to try to get him to admit that he accepted that Britain might stay in the EU Customs Union. Same with the next topic: tarrifs. A difficult question, with a follow-up challenge. But then he let Fox drone on with lengthy answers. Here come "Complaints From Both Sides" about Marr giving him a free platform for Evil Brexit Propaganda.
Marr should have taken another week off if he's not strong enough to do his job properly. The only time he got animated at all was at the end where he was asking about Farage and Trump.
Does anyone have a pool going yet on which ubiquitous BBC talent will spark controversy either by having a profanity-laden Christmas special or by the BBC stuffing the schedule with their performances? How about one on just how extremist the Today guest editors will be?
Also, are the rumors true that Andrew Neil is on his way out?
I hope not too! At the other end of the BBC spectrum, Norman Smith was at his oleaginous best on 1pm news: he managed to make a connection between the escalating strike action & what he called, 'Our old friend Brexit.' And what was the connection? Well, sadly, Theresa May would be too busy planning Brexit to deal vigorously with the strikes. I paraphrase, but that is the gist. Desperate or what? As I predicted yesterday, there were more gloomy comments from disappointed Brexiteers on the 6pm news. I definitely think spreading defeatist despondency is their new tactic.
Norman needs a refresher course in Faking Brexit Bad News Connections. Very poor. He should have pointed to the predictions (from Remainiac organisations) of a Brexit related inflation surge as definitely fuelling concerns among workers about the economic outlook and greater militancy as a result. See - wasn't so difficult was it Norman?
Why does Jenny Hill keep helping the German authorities to obfuscate and confuse. This is one of her twitter headlines: "Police in Berlin say they're not sure that the man they arrested last night was the driver of the truck." The phrase "driver of the truck" is unhelpful to say the least. We know there was a legitimate Polish driver of the truck. He appears to have had his truck hijacked and to have been shot dead during the hijack. Why not "the terrorist"? Or "Jihadi attacker".
As we know from previous attacks, the BBC's next diversionary tactic will be to start agonizing over the risk of a backlash against the Muslim community whom they will describe as the 'real' victims.
In the meantime, they gave air-time to a refugee/economic migrant who wanted to complain that he had been searched and questioned by the police. Now, how did they find him? Did they invite complaints on Twitter? Never mind, the important thing is to feed the immigrants' sense of grievance.
The usual anti-Trump stuff here on BBC Fake Trending:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-38381745
But I wonder whether I've discovered a new BBC TMT (Thought Manipulation Technique)?... When you get to the end of the anti-Trump story they have a "next up" preview of a story regarding the horrible cyber-bullying of a tragically disabled child. Will be interesting to see whether this is a pattern in the future: associating Trump with stories of horrible,anti-social and pathological behaviour.
I think you most probably have. The emergence of a new anti-Brexit tactic aimed at demoralising Brexit supporters was confirmed on last night's News with the third interview this week with a 'disappointed' Brexit voter. See my posts above for Dec. 16th & 19th.
How factual is the BBC World Service on the facts of history?
Here's an easy mini Christmas quiz (quizlet or quizling):
What year was the Falklands War?
What date (month and year will do) a) did Hitler invade Czechoslovakia and b) when did the Second World War start? (Was it roughly 6 or 9 months later than a)?)
I turned on the radio (World Service) for the 2 am news on Wednesday morning only to be told that the UK and Argentina has agreed to find and identify Argentine soldiers killed in the Falklands War in 1984.
Goodness! I remember the Falklands War and even where I went on holiday that year. It was 1982. What goose or gosling wrote that piece of misinformation?
This reminded me of a programme last year that halfway through, changed the date of Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia from 15 March to 15 May, and to compound this, then stated that the war started nine months later - which would make it February 1940.
I thought any fule no the war started in September 1939. We've heard about it often enough and heard countless times the recorded announcement that we are at war with Germany. Auden even has a famous poem about it with the helpful title September 1 1939.
Yet the renowned and self-proclaimed world's best broadcaster can't get even the most basic facts right about a couple of notable recent wars in our history. What kind of people run that station?
Most of them are staggeringly ignorant about many topics outside of various media and political issues. Even the ones with English or history degrees. We've seen plenty of historical ignorance in their news reports. Often enough, it's just personal ideological bias or a desire to write something for the narrative the editor wants that leads to the mistakes. No excuse for sheer ignorance and being too lazy to look it up.
A certain memorial single doesn't make it into the charts...suddenly we get a "Do the Christmas charts really matter any more?" article on the BBC website. Sometimes their narratives are so predictable! If the single had been a great success we would have been treated to a story about how this is a new golden age for the Christmas single...
The BBC only likes to report 'news' that fits into their own biased remit. Airtime is now taken up in narrative supporting a disparate group of minority interests. The BBC have abandoned the UK majority view on a whole host of subjects, such as Brexit.
ReplyDeleteRather than admit that they got it wrong, the BBC think that therefore they need to 'explain' to the majority that everyone should agree with their narrative which is supportive of these minority interests - those who don't agree are immediately labelled as extreme right, racist, homophobic, or now more recently, white supremacists. These 'Explainers' set a sinister tone - akin to Orwell's vision of the Thought Police, or some brainwashing programme designed to reboot dissenting minds.
'Explainers' tell us how to interpret political opinion, how to respond to music and films, how to view sport, how to view art, which historical figures we should have empathy with etc. In fact almost all BBC content is accompanied by 'Experts' telling us how we should respond to events. We should all immediately become tearful at the sight of disadvantaged battling to overcome their lot. We should all feel the same emotions at the same time orchestrated by cynical older men in the image of ageing rock-stars or young women (but not too young and definitely not too old).
Marr, Mason, Kuenssberg, Smith etc have now awarded themselves degrees in smugness that make them virtually unwatchable. They will promote fake-news just as if were true, without blinking. Their self-importance knows no bounds. They can be openly hostile and malicious towards elected representatives of the UK majority with impunity. They are not there as a result of any election - they just bear the BBC hallmark, which is becoming most unpalatable.
Excellent comments, Anonymous! I do wonder, though, if Kuenssberg is as self-assured as she makes out - her increasing reliance on gimmicks suggests that she realizes her outpourings are not being lapped up as eagerly as she would like. Her coverage of the snubbing of Theresa May yesterday: the camera zoomed in on a tiny dot which turned out to be our Laura peering down from the gallery into the chamber, smacked of desperation. Telekinesis doesn't work - she didn't fall over the safety rail!
DeleteJohn Birt started this 'explain the news' trip, and people like Helen Boaden expanded on it. The whole point of titled editors like you've named is exactly that: to 'explain' the news to the public, tell them how to think about it. It allows the BBC to break free from their impartiality remit while at the same time claiming they're not.
DeleteFrom La Boaden's farewell speech earlier this year:
"argued that there was a bias in television journalism. Not against any particular party or point of view but a bias against understanding. News and feature journalism, he said, both failed to put events in their proper context."
Uh-huh. So their remit became to frame events in the proper context. The BBC-approved context, that is. And then they still claim there's no bias.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/bbc-radio-director-helen-boaden-to-announce-resignation-at-prix-italia-preview-in-lampedusa-a7337181.html
I'm massively irked by the BBC's coverage of Aleppo.
ReplyDeleteWhy are you still in Beirut, Lyse ?
Is it so that you don't have to hear the conformations of Vanessa Beeley's and Eva Bartlett's reports over the last two years ? The White Helmets scam blown out of the water for example, as Syrians are now confirming ? As a journalistic organisation, is it not worth investigating why this group have received nearly 100 million dollars in British / US / UN aid, BBC ?
When I was growing up, it was the actions of politicians that were scary. Now I'm scared by the lengths the BBC, CH4 and the Guardian (those who I used to expect better of) will go to to sustain their narrative. The narrative is muddy at best, and avoids serious questions about funding and weapon provision. It's not laziness. Who is pulling the strings and why are the stenographers posing as journalists so prepared to go along with it ?
I thought I'd post this link to one of Vanessa Beeley's excellent articles. This, as far as I am concerned, is journalism.
Deletehttp://21stcenturywire.com/2016/10/09/channel-4-joins-cnn-in-normalising-terrorism-then-removes-video/
As it's Christmas why don't we praise the BBC where it's due? I would like to thank Andrew Neil for being the one political interviewer on television and radio that knows what he's talking about, can think on his feet, doesn't constantly interrupt, is polite but doesn't take any nonsense from politicians.
ReplyDeleteNew Year's Resolution: Please can the BBC resolve not to include Alastair Campbell or Will Self on any radio or television programme? The former has no credibility and the latter is an annoying, depressing t&%t who hasn't got a good word to say about anyone. Also avoid putting any comedian on Question Time.
Sorry - Andrew Neil is about to be sent out to grass (which is why he has been more outspoken recently). He won't be replaced with Andrew Neil.
DeleteTo use the analogy of blackholes and singularity, have we reached the point at which dissenting opinion cannot escape the gravity of the BBC's deeply embedded bias? You can see, written upon Andrew Neil's face, a look of resignation as if he might be about to disappear into the BBC's blackhole of silence and oblivion reserved for anyone proffering a not-wholly-on-message opinion.
DeleteUnder the pretext of examining the North/South economic divide, the 6pm tv news took us to Cleethorpes. What they were actually seeking to do was to reinforce the notion that Brexit supporters are old and uneducated - the ones in the programme like to dress up as cowboys and go line dancing (What of it? you may ask). The important thing from the Remain propagandists' point of view is that the reporter managed to find an old man who believed that Brexit would be a sell-out and that we should be, 'stuck in the EU forever.'
ReplyDeleteThis, then, looks like being the second phase of the BBC'S Remain offensive: phase one has been to soften us up with a five-month-long creeping propaganda barrage and now we are to be exposed to defeatist talk - just a dribble at first, then, no doubt, a flood. Clearly, the BBC has been saving this footage for the better part of a month (spot the Armistice Day poppies?) and have lobbed it in now while they think Brexiteers are reeling from the EU Leaders' snub to Theresa May; it won't work! I'm still reeling from the reporter's revelation that the cowboys' pistols were replicas - we'd all imagined the good folk of Cleethorpes would be packing the genuine article, loaded with 250 grain hollow point!
The BBC has so many news "narratives" going at the moment, it's a wonder even a £5 billion operation can keep up! :)
DeleteLet's see: all Brexit voters overweight thick northerners on mobility scooters...all 27 EU negotiators savvy well co-ordinated in their response...Trump victory delivered by pesky Ruskies...all Aleppo "rebels" nice pro-democracy types or at least far more horrible than Assad...we love Saudi Arabia - except in Yemen for some reason...Turkey was moving towards being a strong democracy in EU, somehow derailed...
Just finishing Roger Scrutons "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands" straight from the library! Need read no more about what the agenda is in journalism colleges and the MSM.
ReplyDeleteSo enjoy what Nigel and Donald, Beppo have done for us in 2016-and here`s to Milo, Douglas, Geert, Marine and AfD next year too. Goodbye Euro, au revoir EU...won`t be TOO far behind. Take bets on whether it`ll be Greece, Italy or France that`ll stick an icepick through the Brussels bonce.
The idea of an open thread is so website viewers can post links such as this below, and everyone can read...
ReplyDeletehttps://countrysquire.co.uk/2016/12/14/newsnights-inexorable-decline/
Most enjoyable read. Time I stopped that direct debit for the license fee.
DeleteWith respect, the decline of the BBC "flagship" current affairs shows goes back a long way before "Newsnight", "Tonight" and "Midweek". It was on my first day working as a trainee on "24 Hours" that I overheard the editor (Anthony Smith) tell one of his reporters, "Go and cover the South American" earthquake and if its over do a story about how the rescue efforts are NOT working". The tradition of constructing news is truly an old one.
DeleteThe difference between then and now is that we can check the validity of news stories much more easily. Fake news is exposed for what it is quite quickly.
DeleteAbsolutely correct. In the 1970s a BBC in house journal circulated called "Urinal" ("Ariel") exposing some of the "fake news" of the time. The Beeb shut it down, though by today's standards it was pretty innocuous. Now that so many of us old hands are secure in our pensions and away from the fray we should start spilling the beans. It would be quote an eye opener to the baby boomers.
DeletePlease do Cuz Buzz, because at the moment the BBC is spinning "fake news" as being exclusive to the far right.
DeleteAndrew Marr's paper review panel segment was vomit-inducing enough with the hand-wringing over the children of Aleppo (soon to be a pop charity song). "There are no easy answers" but something must be done anyway. Oh, and the UN and Security Council need to be reformed so "the strong doesn't always win," meaning Russia shouldn't be allowed to veto things. Virtue-signaling waffle, but not realizing she just said she wants a "rules-based system" that should be rigged.
ReplyDeleteThen when discussing foreign aid, Suzanne Evans was making good points on how bad the system is, with executives trousering large sums, Angela Eagle had to interrupt by intoning, "Let's remember that foreign aid is a good thing." Evans replied in the negative, and Eagle started talking about how foreign aid "stops states failing" and helps women and children, the usual talking points. When Evans started to ask why someone would need to be paid a million quid to do that, Marr stepped all over her and moved along to the next topic, something vacuous about some karaoke controversy at a Labour event. Don't want to let them actually debate an important issue.
Marr's interview with Osborne was soft. Predictably so, as Osborne is not only no longer the nasty Tory Chancellor destroying the country with austerity, but is actually on the same side as Marr on Brexit. So soft is the order of the day.
He made a gesture towards being serious by asking Osborne if he actually told Cameron at the beginning that having an EU referendum was a bad idea because they would lose, and it would ruin the Tory party. Osborne didn't even try to deny it or answer it, and instead rattled off interviewee boilerplate about how he enjoyed his time in office and working closely with David Cameron. It was even less of an answer than a non-answer.
Then Marr pretended to want to get Osborne to admit that Project Fear was wrong. Oh, no, George hopes that the predictions were wrong, but...blah, blah, blah, Project Still Afraid.
The rest of it was all from a Remain ('Soft' Brexit when the mask slips) perspective. Not a single challenge from Marr, not a single attempt to get him to answer any of the difficult questions, only easy softballs for Osborne to opine upon, and act the optimistic patriot. At one point, Marr gave him the chance to do a little Project Fear monologue about how the Financial Industry was worried about what would happen if the UK didn't get some fantasy deal. Uninterrupted, unchallenged. Same with immigration. As usual, the Remainiacs conflated 'immigration' with rapid, mass immigration, particularly of a lot of fundamentalist Muslims from third-world countries in record-shattering numbers. Marr allowed it and supported the dishonest conflation.
The segment with Liam Fox was remarkedly different from the Osborne interview, because Marr was challenging him immediately to try to get him to admit that he accepted that Britain might stay in the EU Customs Union. Same with the next topic: tarrifs. A difficult question, with a follow-up challenge. But then he let Fox drone on with lengthy answers. Here come "Complaints From Both Sides" about Marr giving him a free platform for Evil Brexit Propaganda.
Marr should have taken another week off if he's not strong enough to do his job properly. The only time he got animated at all was at the end where he was asking about Farage and Trump.
Does anyone have a pool going yet on which ubiquitous BBC talent will spark controversy either by having a profanity-laden Christmas special or by the BBC stuffing the schedule with their performances? How about one on just how extremist the Today guest editors will be?
ReplyDeleteAlso, are the rumors true that Andrew Neil is on his way out?
Do I hope not, but I have also seen similar on the usual places.
ReplyDeleteI hope not too!
ReplyDeleteAt the other end of the BBC spectrum, Norman Smith was at his oleaginous best on 1pm news: he managed to make a connection between the escalating strike action & what he called, 'Our old friend Brexit.' And what was the connection? Well, sadly, Theresa May would be too busy planning Brexit to deal vigorously with the strikes. I paraphrase, but that is the gist. Desperate or what? As I predicted yesterday, there were more gloomy comments from disappointed Brexiteers on the 6pm news. I definitely think spreading defeatist despondency is their new tactic.
Norman needs a refresher course in Faking Brexit Bad News Connections. Very poor. He should have pointed to the predictions (from Remainiac organisations) of a Brexit related inflation surge as definitely fuelling concerns among workers about the economic outlook and greater militancy as a result. See - wasn't so difficult was it Norman?
DeleteWhy does Jenny Hill keep helping the German authorities to obfuscate and confuse. This is one of her twitter headlines: "Police in Berlin say they're not sure that the man they arrested last night was the driver of the truck." The phrase "driver of the truck" is unhelpful to say the least. We know there was a legitimate Polish driver of the truck. He appears to have had his truck hijacked and to have been shot dead during the hijack. Why not "the terrorist"? Or "Jihadi attacker".
ReplyDeleteShe's only concerned that he's safe now, so her tweet is understandable.
DeleteAs we know from previous attacks, the BBC's next diversionary tactic will be to start agonizing over the risk of a backlash against the Muslim community whom they will describe as the 'real' victims.
ReplyDeleteIn the meantime, they gave air-time to a refugee/economic migrant who wanted to complain that he had been searched and questioned by the police. Now, how did they find him? Did they invite complaints on Twitter? Never mind, the important thing is to feed the immigrants' sense of grievance.
DeleteThe usual anti-Trump stuff here on BBC Fake Trending:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-38381745
But I wonder whether I've discovered a new BBC TMT (Thought Manipulation Technique)?... When you get to the end of the anti-Trump story they have a "next up" preview of a story regarding the horrible cyber-bullying of a tragically disabled child. Will be interesting to see whether this is a pattern in the future: associating Trump with stories of horrible,anti-social and pathological behaviour.
I think you most probably have.
DeleteThe emergence of a new anti-Brexit tactic aimed at demoralising Brexit supporters was confirmed on last night's News with the third interview this week with a 'disappointed' Brexit voter. See my posts above for Dec. 16th & 19th.
How factual is the BBC World Service on the facts of history?
ReplyDeleteHere's an easy mini Christmas quiz (quizlet or quizling):
What year was the Falklands War?
What date (month and year will do) a) did Hitler invade Czechoslovakia and b) when did the Second World War start? (Was it roughly 6 or 9 months later than a)?)
I turned on the radio (World Service) for the 2 am news on Wednesday morning only to be told that the UK and Argentina has agreed to find and identify Argentine soldiers killed in the Falklands War in 1984.
Goodness! I remember the Falklands War and even where I went on holiday that year. It was 1982. What goose or gosling wrote that piece of misinformation?
This reminded me of a programme last year that halfway through, changed the date of Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia from 15 March to 15 May, and to compound this, then stated that the war started nine months later - which would make it February 1940.
I thought any fule no the war started in September 1939. We've heard about it often enough and heard countless times the recorded announcement that we are at war with Germany. Auden even has a famous poem about it with the helpful title September 1 1939.
Yet the renowned and self-proclaimed world's best broadcaster can't get even the most basic facts right about a couple of notable recent wars in our history. What kind of people run that station?
Most of them are staggeringly ignorant about many topics outside of various media and political issues. Even the ones with English or history degrees. We've seen plenty of historical ignorance in their news reports. Often enough, it's just personal ideological bias or a desire to write something for the narrative the editor wants that leads to the mistakes. No excuse for sheer ignorance and being too lazy to look it up.
DeleteThree random examples:
http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2010/10/07/sheer-ignorance/
http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2011/09/20/bbc-continues-to-lie-about-history-and/
http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2007/10/01/bbc-rewriting-english-history-when-dr/
The same people who are currently moralising about “the post truth age”.
ReplyDeleteA certain memorial single doesn't make it into the charts...suddenly we get a "Do the Christmas charts really matter any more?" article on the BBC website. Sometimes their narratives are so predictable! If the single had been a great success we would have been treated to a story about how this is a new golden age for the Christmas single...
ReplyDeleteReality Check: Do men earn less for part-time work?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38385259
I play a game these days I guess the BBC conclusion from the the headline - I bet you can to.
This answer by the way is yes they are, but the BBC spin is that in all other employment men are paid more so that's ok then....so predictable.
Ps I don't even know if men are paid more? I've seen things questioning this "fact" before.
First google link http://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap sounds plausible #questionthenarrative
ReplyDelete