Monday 17 April 2017

Open thread



Unlike this Easter bank holiday weekend, the following open thread will not be rained off...

31 comments:

  1. TWATO today had Hugh Sykes from Istanbul complaining to Mark Mardell about the pro Erdogan bias before the Turkish referendum. It was as if, said Hugh, in the UK's EU referendum, the UK Government had only supported the Leave campaign and had tried to marginalise the Remain supporters!

    Impossibly hard to imagine, Hugh (because the opposite actually happened!).

    Yup, they've gone mad, tie-ing themselves in knots of tortured analogies whilst trying to maintain the BBC narrative.

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    1. Yes, Hugh wasn't happy at all. That quote in full was, "Imagine the government in Britain only supporting the Leave campaign and marginalising all the people who wanted to stay in the European referendum. It was very comparable to what that would have been like here."

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08m8ysr

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    2. The British government encouraging the country-dwelling uneducated thickos to vote leave. Imagine.

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    3. The UK Government officially supported Remain. But Sykes was okay with that?

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  2. Anybody else seen this from 'BBC Trending'?

    http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39592010

    The rise of left-wing, anti-Trump fake news

    No prizes for guessing how this pans out.

    One of the reasons for the growth in liberal fake news is financial.Many people on the left right now are feeling overwhelmed and fearful and unsure of what's going to happen next. While they're scrolling through their information feeds at speed on small mobile phones their critical functions are not kicking in, and they're seeing information that makes them feel immediately connected with other people who think similarly to them. And without doing the usual checks that they would do, they're sharing and very quickly passing on similarly false and problematic content that we were seeing before the election."

    An apt description of BBC journalists. I wonder if they noticed?

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    1. They had me a 'left right'.

      BBC Trending is a hoot. The BBC spins up an issue, then BBC Trending 'notices' it. I asked them how these 'trends' were registered. You'll never guess: 'purposes of' exempted.

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  3. I like to play Spot the Policy with the BBC. As we know, the BBC has a policy on just about everything whether it's mothers who stay at home (bad), sugar (bad unless in cakes on Bake Off), God (obviously doesn't exist), Islam (obviously a good thing, even though they don't like God, Sharia or patriarchy), race (strict colour gradation in terms of injustice suffered) etc etc...

    Anyway, with the election being called, I wondered what the BBC policy would be...judging from the 2pm radio news and the undue prominence given to Tim Farron, leader of a party that scored only 7% in the last election, I would say the policy is "Boost the Lib Dems At Every Turn".

    The days of boosting the Scot Nats appears over. The BBC does after all support the union (with the exception of Northern Ireland). Given they can no longer put Labour into government via a coalition they serve no useful purpose any longer for the BBC.

    The virtue of the Lib Dems for the BBC is that they are virulently anti-Brexit, their success will secure will finally see off Corbyn who will have to resign, and they might actually take a few seats off the Tories here and there...especially if the boosting of "Famously Far Sighted Farron".

    It's not their ideal scenario but in the circumstances it's the best they can come up with.

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    1. 'Spot the Policy with the BBC': You missed out privileged background (bad). Tim Farron is well placed on this issue, but then his strong Christian belief 'God (obviously doesn't exist)' might need some careful selective filtering - like don't mention it.

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    2. I don't believe that the BBC supports the union at all. They would be quite happy to see the UK fragment into EU Regions.
      Because they don't do joined-up thinking they haven't realised that would lead to splitting up the BBC too, but then think of all those new DG posts!

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    3. Perhaps a better way of putting it, is that they oppose Scottish independence, not least because that would solidify the Tories in power in the remainder state.

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  4. Kuenssberg was at her shrill, sneering, loud-mouthed worst on 6pm news. Be nice if Tories said something in their manifesto about enforcing BBC's obligation to report impartially (again) - and, this time, did something about it.

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    1. The BBC has a new Laura all lined up to speak for the nation.

      Meet... Brenda.

      The only person you need to nod along with. Apparently.

      Must be nice to control the edit.

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    2. Suspect the Beeb is scoring an own goal with Brenda in that the people she's going to put off bothering to vote are more likely to be Labour supporters than Tory.

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    3. Tend to agree. But bizarrely she is across the whole BBC social media estate.

      Not sure that claiming she speaks for the UK is helping them any more than when Laura K did.

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  5. Eddie Mair on R4 PM today "interviewed" Amber Rudd about the GE announcement. He quickly became hysterical and likened Mrs May's approach to Erdogans. Even Amber was taken aback by this.

    It was clear that the thought of an increased Conservative majority freaked out Eddie pretty quick. Maybe the Home Sec. will remember and do something about BBC bias after the GE.

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  6. The false comparison has now become the BBC's response to everything they don't like.

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  7. Couple of things I noticed -

    1. BBC praying in aid the poor predictive power of recent polls...saying "hardly anyone" or "very few" predicted a Brexit victory. Really? True about BBC journos of course, but here and in many other places lots of people were saying Leave were going to win, based on their knowledge of how friends and family were going to vote and their analysis of the polls (knowing how they were being manipulated). But now the BBC journos make a virtue of their own ignorance.

    2. Reality Check gets it wrong AGAIN...so no surprises. Looking at the calling of an early election (obviously something that miffs the BBC a bit in the circumstances), they claim:

    "This method would have required an absolute majority of voting MPs. But it would be slower, and the government would have to engineer it artificially by getting Conservative MPs to back a motion of no confidence in their own government."

    Not necessarily. The Conservative MPs could have abstained, on a motion of confidence. The Opposition would then be obliged to move a vote of no confidence which they would win if the Tories abstained again. Then if a Labour Government was appointed, the Tories could pass a vote of no confidence in the them and trigger an election via that route.

    Pedantic, I know but the whole point of "Reality Check" is that it is supposed to be thorough and it is wrong to say the only alternative is to BACK a motion of no confidence against yourself, which is what the inaccurate BBC claim.

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  8. Being part of the liberal/left bubble means you believe some things to be true long after those outside the bubble know them to be false. And so it was today at 9:49 Nicky Campbell came out with

    Sarah Palin from Alaska - she used to say 'I can see Russia from my bedroom...'

    Of course,Palin said nothing of the sort.
    http://www.snopes.com/politics/palin/russia.asp


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    1. Nicky Campbell thinks a Saturday Night Live sketch was real? I didn't think he could sink any lower in my estimation.

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  9. Campaigning is under way, and what do we see? BBC News website with a headline picture of Corbyn, smiling and waving to his supporters - with a red panel backdrop identical in colour to the BBC's own page headers. No mention of Mrs May or Conservatives on the entire page - just confirmation that David Dimbleby will be presenting the 2017 Election 'Show'.

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    1. No mention of Brexit either.

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  10. Sneerpike at the Spectator posted a recording of Eddie Mair's interview with Labour MP Dawn Butler on PM. She's an idiot, couldn't string a coherent sentence together, even with Mair trying to help her along at first. But when closing the segment, he called her 'Dawn Bottler', and it was about as accidental as when the Beeboids had that faux-Freudian slip over Jeremy Hunt's name.

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/04/listen-dawn-butlers-car-crash-interview-election-theresa-may-trying-rig-democracy/

    Really obvious, not professional. Mair didn't hang his opinion at the door.

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  11. As I type this it's 05:57 uk time and there's another article today on the BBC website saying Labour and JC are going to say something about education it went up 2 hours ago.

    Is this yet news? They may have briefed it, but he hasn't actually said it yet. So he's getting extra exposure until he does? Is that bias? Is it fair?

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    1. Yes, this 'news' seems to have strayed from the General Election 2017 section of the BBC News website into the actual (reported) news section - without any balance whatsoever.

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    2. Any Labour press release is news. The BBC must provide 'balance' and make the extra effort now in response to all those anti-Corbyn complaints, you know.

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    3. IIRC this can go hilariously pear shaped, when I think it was Nick Robinson who 'scooped' something he'd been passed in advance that subsequently got changed when the speaker's spinners twigged it was not going to play as well as hoped on the day.

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  12. 'Britain Goes a Full Day without Coal' - is the headline on this morning's BBC News website. Reading on ... 'Friday is thought to be the first time the nation has not used coal to generate electricity since the world's first centralised public coal-fired generator opened in 1882, at Holborn Viaduct in London...'

    Accompanying this story there is a prominently displayed nostalgic black and white photo of two white grime-covered miners - taken we might guess in the 1970s.

    Is it the intention of the BBC, by using this photo, to stir up memories of the 1984 miners' strike and the BBC rhetoric of 'Thatcher's destruction of the mining industry'? This will play well with their default position of anti Tory narrative.

    The reality is that UK mined coal has not been used in significant quantities for power generation for years. A more accurate photo would have been that of a bulk carrying ship being unloaded onto railways for transport to the power stations. A photo of Columbian miners (or should we say minors) might have been more accurate.

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    1. There is an irony here. If the BBC are trying to invoke a loyalty to core Labour supporters by use of this nostalgic image, they should remember that in all probability, the miners in traditional Labour voting smoke-stack areas have long-since retired and/or moved on. They will have little or no allegiance to Corbyn's London elite Labourites' machinations, and will most-likely feel betrayed.

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  13. I can think of a few other images from 70’s that might educate some of the more youthful Corbynistas.

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  14. Just watched the BBC report about the the "marches for science" today. Loads of "scientists" and and random rent-a-mob marching to fight "false news", "alternative truth" and other anti-science and ignorant viewpoints.
    And who did the BBc report as being at the London march, but none other than the "father of modern science", Dr Who (Peter Capaldi for the moment). Death to false news...

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    1. Did they mention that in the US these 'non-partisan' science supporters want to form a political action group aimed at getting more Democrats elected?

      https://www.facebook.com/pg/314pac/about/?ref=page_internal

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