Catching up again....
There was a very important post from Pugnazious at Biased BBC on Friday looking at the BBC's treatment of Tory London Mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey.
Here, as an example of the BBC's coverage, is the start of the report on the BBC News website:
Now, as Pugnazious says, if you read that 2005 pamphlet you find that Shaun Bailey wasn't saying what either his critics are accusing him of saying or what the BBC have been reporting him as saying.
"The comments in the pamphlet have been taken, twisted, misquoted and distorted in order to portray Bailey as some kind of racist and Islamophobe", Pugnazious wrote. "Needless to say his meaning and intent, obvious to any reader, is not to say any such things."
Pugnazious is entirely correct about that. Mr Bailey's actual meaning and intent is very obvious.
This is what Shaun Bailey wrote:
As Pugnazious writes:
As you can see he does not say Islam and Hinduism ‘robs Britain of its community’, what he is saying is not teaching those black youths their own Christian, western culture robs them of a sense of community, identity and unity which is needed for any successful society. He is not in any way blaming Muslims and Hindus for this, he is not criticising teaching ethnic cultures but criticising the lack of teaching of the British culture….as if we are ashamed of it….as the BBC is of course. Hence people don’t want to identify as ‘British’, or maybe cannot as they have no idea what being ‘British’ means….always told it is a bad thing to be British.
So when the BBC captions its image of Shaun Bailey with the words 'In 2005, Shaun Bailey warned accommodating Muslim and Hindu cultures "robs Britain of its community"' and then repeats that claim in the report's second paragraph they are misreporting what he said.
They are also misreporting what he said when they go on to say that he said that 'accommodating Muslim and Hindu cultures...could lead the country into a "crime-riddled cesspool"' (literally joining the dots).
His opponents are trying to smear him and the BBC is simply parroting those smears as facts. That seems very clear to me.
Please read the BBC report for yourselves and then read the Multiculturalism section of the 2005 pamphlet and see if you agree that this is a particularly poor piece of BBC reporting.
