Conversations

I

Peter Hitchens: The BBC has no right to meddle in this crude cheap way with Charles Dickens's 'Christmas Carol': "The BBC plans to rewrite Charles Dickens tonight, complete with the f-word and a scene showing a character urinating on a grave. It has no right to do so."  

David: No doubt done deliberately to get media backlash & increase audience figures.

Peter Hitchens: I’m not sure this is true about the ‘backlash’. Though yes, it is about numbers. The BBC genuinely think the ‘Peaky Blinders’ appproach to the past is a good one. This mad incomprehensible rubbish gets good ratings. 

II

BBC One: We are thrilled to announce that Stormzy will be bringing Christmas Day to a close this year on BBC One, telling the story of the first ever Christmas with a reading from Luke’s Gospel. On Christmas Night.

Allison Pearson: This is the man who just said the UK is “100% racist”. And he’s allowed to read the CHRISTMAS STORY on the BBC funded by the licence payer. The very people who are 100% racist? A new low for public broadcasting. #bbc

III

Iain Dale: Somewhat appalled by the idiots piling in on Owen Jones for no apparent reason other than he is Owen Jones. Grow the f**k up, He has as much right to a voice as anyone. #whycantwealljustgetalong. #ItsChristmasFFS. #SolidarityWithOwenJones.

Andrew Neil: Agreed. Even though he has run a campaign to shut me down.

Laurence Fox: Owen Jones has sought to divide people at every opportunity. I am enormously encouraged that his narrative has been so roundly rejected by the electorate. Do I feel that mocking him furthers the cause of reason? Not really, but you live in the sun and you die in the sun. X 

IV

Dr Paul Stott: If there's one thing the British are rubbish at, it's racism. After Stormzy's dad did a runner, our welfare state helped bring him up. It may not have been perfect, but it was better than what was on offer in Ghana. As a celebrity, we invite him to our schools, where he tells the next generation our society is 100% racist. Our national broadcaster (presumably funded by 100% racists) gives him a platform on the most important day of the year. Although he does not realise it, half the world would swap places with Stormzy in a shot, if they could. If there's one thing we need to hear from this young man in 2020, it is surely thank you Great Britain.

V

Michael Swadling: Are they finally starting to get it? “THE BBC is looking at restricting its journalists use of Twitter, following the waves of online criticism...It comes as Channel 4 reportedly have told non-political staff not to tweet about current affairs”.

Suzanne Evans: Ludicrous idea. Twitter is now my primary source for news and I want to read what journalists are reporting here. Shoving them off social media isn’t the answer - reinforcing principles of objectivity, factual reporting and ensuring sources are checked, is.

VI

Bruce Lawson: BBC Editorial meeting: “So who are we going to get to close Christmas Day by reading from the Bible? How about a misogynist, homophobic millionaire who thinks our country is 100% racist and shouts “f*ck Boris, f*ck the government” at every opportunity? Yes, that’ll do nicely.”

"How did we all get it so wrong?"

The Daily Telegraph won't be flavour of the month at the BBC this week. Allison Pearson has gone on the attack too, writing of the corporation's election coverage, "At a crucial crossroads in Britain’s history, our national broadcaster revealed that it barely knew the nation at all."

Her starting point is this:

"How did we all get it so wrong?" a mournful Andrew Marr asked Huw Edwards on the morning of Friday 13th. Hang on a minute, who did Marr mean by “we”?

Have They Any Non-Boris-Related Jokes For Us?

Ian, laughing as much as I did last night

Have I Got News For You? is back on our screens for its 204th series, threatening our chuckle muscles with acute pain. 

Ian was back, of course, and, as ever, making speeches. (I kept getting distracted though by his ever-expanding neck, which is coming to ever more closely resemble a pelican's throat pouch.)

Paul, however, who in recent series had looked as if he was about to sink into a coma, has now been replaced by a waxwork. The waxwork was, however, pre-progammed to play a recording of the real Paul saying 'Moron!' every time Donald Trump's name came up. (What will they think of next?). 

The first half of the programme was devoted to some pretty vicious Boris-bashing with a round called 'Boris's Brexit Balls-ups'. (Fear not! There was still time for some Trump-thwacking later). 

During it, HIGNFY broadcast a montage 'showing' how much the British public loathes Boris Johnson (Boris being booed, Boris being told to go away, Boris being called named), all to the delight of the panel and the whoopy audience. 

Meanwhile, in another galaxy:

Britain Elects: Preference for Prime Minister: B. Johnson: 41% (+1). J. Corbyn: 21% (-1) via @YouGov, 08 - 09 Oct.

That poll provoked this Twitter exchange last night:

Allison Pearson: You wouldn’t know this from the media would you? Huge disconnect between Boris bashing pundits and swelling public support.  

Phillip Hodson: Had the identical thought when watching tonight’s exceptionally dull episode of “Have I Got News For You”. The entire panel & the presenter were drawn from the bien pensant, London-centric Left. They all appeared to loathe Boris whereas the country clearly does not. 

Allison Pearson: I also think the BBC may be Brexit’s biggest casualty. All pretence of impartiality gone. I give the licence fee a decade. 

Steven Richards: It's a substantial point. The BBC's flagship comedy prog, with all the talent available, and also it's flagship political prog, QT, aim at a minority. I think a decade will be pushing it unless there's a hung parliament or narrow majority.

We'll see.

The wrong messages.

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian cloak-and-bonnet tale and the BBC’s Rise of the Nazis. A pair of allegories-with-a-message. 

Reviewers were quick to recognise that these programmes bore comparisons between present-day reality and dramatised fiction. Craig has already cited James Delingpole who points out that within the programme (Nazis) former Cambridge historian Professor Sir Richard Evans laid it on with a trowel; Trump =  Hitler. 

There are indeed parallels and messages, Jim, but not as we know it. Not as you know it. Y’all took away ’the wrong message’.

I started to pen a review of  “the Nazis” but it got filed under ‘pending’. (‘Pendings' are beginning to stack up). Objections to Ash Sarkar’s inclusion in this programme have already been well documented, so I won’t waste time on that. 

The parallels I saw were the opposite of the good Professor’s. The real parallel is between the rise of antisemitism and the Corbyn-led Labour Party. 

But no, the intelligentsia has pronounced that the parallels were between Boris Johnson, President Trump and populism and, somehow, fascism.

Allison Pearson has written about a similarly topsy turvy ‘take-away’ from The Handmaid’s Tail.  Sorry, tale.

The Republic of Gilead is not Trump’s America. The parallel is with a certain religion. Praise be!

Unique

‏Probably meaning today's BBC One's News at One, Allison Pearson tweeted the following early this afternoon:

Police today arrest 44 men - 44! - in Yorkshire over child sex abuse. And BBC News leads with one minister manhandling a woman?

News of that mass arrest (in Kirklees, Bradford and Leeds) didn't appear on either tonight's BBC One News at Six or BBC News at Ten.

In contrast, Sky have been reporting it tonight and it featured as a main story on ITV's early evening news bulletin. 

There is something unique about the BBC. And not necessarily in a good way.

The soft bigotry of low expectations

Pakistan-based journalist and commentator Khadija Khan, an author at the Gatestone Institute, tweeted the following yesterday:

BBC News has chosen the niqab as its "Wardrobe of Rebellion" on  International Womens Day 2019 for us, over countless women of Muslim heritage defying this regressive attire while waving hijab flags to protest compulsory veiling. 

She calls it "the soft bigotry of low expectations",

The BBC News website does indeed include the niqab in this item, featuring a Danish Muslim woman.

British journalist Allison Pearson replied:

Did the BBC really nominate a garment that covers the female face for its International Womens Day 2019? Women are literally risking their lives to cast off the veil. Despairs.

...adding:

Thank you for pointing this out, Khadija. BBC News is too concerned with virtue signalling to worry about millions of women oppressed by the veil. Sorry.

It's the BBC that should be sorry Allison.

What Muslims Don’t Really think

Well, after all the hype, how did Trevor Phillips do? If polled, I’d be inclined to say that after all that hype, the programme itself was an anticlimax. 

Did you think Trevor Phillips’s programme was truly representative of what Muslims think? 

• Strongly agree, 
• Agree, 
• Neither agree nor disagree, 
• Disagree, 
• Strongly disagree. 

I’d tick ‘neither agree nor disagree’  

I’m a terribly bad liar. I hardly ever lie in real life, but when I’m polled I lie all the time. Not that I’ve ever been polled about anything interesting. Just market research, which I deeply regretted as soon as I realised I was being bombarded with junk mail purely because of my gullibility.

The programme itself was always going to be an anticlimax, these things always are when all the juicy bits have already been cherry-picked and disseminated all over the place.

I thought it was a good plan to begin with a reassuring preamble about the methodology of the ICM poll. Insurance against the kind of criticism Trevor Phillips correctly anticipated he would face. The last thing a programme like this needs is doubts about its veracity. However it didn’t convince me. 

I mean, the decision to select interviewees from heavily Muslim-populated areas threw up more questions than it answered. The logic of that decision was missing. Surely including areas populated more sparsely (by Muslims) would show up a different set of results with a different set of questions, eg., would these Muslims absorb western culture or resist it more fiercely if they weren’t cushioned by or influenced by the like-minded? 

I was more interested in some of the press reviews of the programme than my own reaction to it. 

Andrew Billen’s review in the Times included this passage: 

“Phillips, knowing that his programme would be controversial and that the pollsters are not riding high on credibility, took admirable care to explain the methodology of his documentary’s professional question posers. I have no quarrel with how ICM found the 1,081 Muslims it talked to face-to-face. Quarrels with the programme’s interpretation of their answers I do have.

However, the Telegraph’s Emma Barnett questions the methodology.:

I don’t have a problem with such surveys being done per se, although there are some serious questions about the methodology used – one being that the only Muslims polled lived in areas where they made up more than 20 per cent of the local population. 

Allison Pearson, also in the Telegraph, takes a different approach. She takes the methodology at face value because she’s much more interested in the fact that at last someone has decided to investigate this topic, and even better, that a mainstream channel has agreed to air it. She takes recent events into account and puts them into context, something which the other journalists cited here seem afraid to do.

Emma Barnett seems angry. She thinks Trevor Phillips has only succeeded in making British Muslims feel more isolated. Jeremy Corbyn’s fans dismissed accusations of his links with terrorists and antisemites as ‘smears’. Is that what Emma Barnett is doing here?

“Having had real conversations with some real Muslims, they are appalled by his handiwork and feel attacked, not “listened to”. 

As one woman said to me: “Even the title of the programme implies Muslims have some sort of collective hidden agenda, which is horrifying.” 

Reactions online have been predictably hysterical, with people seizing upon the data to support their creeping Islamophobia.”

This response goes to show that some people are resistant to any interpretation of any kind of poll if the findings indicate something disagreeable.

Andrew Billen seems to be echoing Polly Toynbee. He compares the conservative attitudes of pre-enlightened non-Muslim Britain with current Muslim attitudes towards, say, same-sex marriage or the ethics of including the word ‘obey’ in the marriage vow. 

With a little wishful thinking one can equate and conflate some conservative attitudes in the hope they’ll eventually liberalise. That might be a plausible theory, but the attitude to terrorism was not quite so easy to dismiss. He admitted it was worrying, but he disputed the presentation, i.e., the way the question was phrased.

Well, it’s a poll. The wording’s subtle affect on the outcome is one of the built-in shortcomings of polls. Nuance there is not. 

The issue both the programme and the reviewers skirted round - or ignored - concerned the attitude to Jews. 

Many Muslims said they thought Jews had too much power. That’s a view that is embedded in their religion. That’s where Andrew Billen is wrong. The softening of hard-line views necessitates a softening of the religion itself. The views we fear are part and parcel of the religion. If Muslims are unable to relinquish some of their religiosity (which their religion does not permit) no amount of wishful thinking will help.

Any Questions?

Last Sunday I was going to make a comment on Craig’s recent post about Question Time and Phil Burton-Carledge’s ‘forensic’ statistical analyses, which concluded that if there was indeed any partiality, which he tended to doubt, the bias was towards the right. I wrote half a comment but events prevented me from posting.

I was going to say statistics aren’t everything. In fact in the case of AQ and QT, they aren’t anything.

You can take the lists of contributors, over the entire history of those panel shows if you like, and you might also assess the political nature of the  selection of questions, the questions themselves, Dimbleby’s (either one) interruptions, and stick them into categories of your choice, but the conclusion is still a matter of interpretation. Up to you old bean.

 As Craig pointed out, you could put the non-politician guests and celebs (or the Lib Dems) into the left, right or centre column depending on which side of the bed you got out of that day, but the one factor you can’t explain is the audience. 

We’ve heard that you have to complete a questionnaire for the honour of watching Q.T., but the BBC says it does this in order to achieve a broad spectrum, or balance, or whateva, and who am I to doubt it. Apparently they ask how you vote, amongst other things. We must assume they have no choice but to trust that the answer is honest.

So what accounts for the audience’s clearly left-leaning responses? Is it merely that the left are more shouty? More vocal, more aggressive?

If the BBC was genuinely concerned about the criticism it gets, which, (apart from a couple of episodes featuring George Galloway) is always about lefty bias, it really ought to address this problem. Why? It's impartiality stupid.

Allison Pearson was battered and bruised after appearing on last week’s Any Questions. I didn’t listen to that episode, but the scenario she described sounds fairly typical.

I must say I’m surprised that she was even surprised. What did she expect?

Don’t these people ever listen to programmes they’re invited on to? Vilifying conservatives R us, it’s known as. Probably.

 “My Leftie hell on Radio 4's Any Questions

Conservative voters, when 'Any Questions' comes from a school hall near you, get your coat on and go - the BBC audience could do with the balance”

Well, maybe you can with A.Q., but you can’t do so with Q.T. You have to apply.

“How could it be, when almost all of Cambridgeshire and, indeed, East Anglia, is true blue that the Any Questions audience appeared to be composed mainly of Corbyn fans?”

I don’t know how it could be, but the BBC seems to manage it effortlessly enough. We tend to cluster round those with similar views to our own, confirmation bias and so on. I wonder if the BBC has Any Questions to ask of itself ? Maybe it’s Question Time for the BBC.

"You know, what shocked me most about Any Questions? Me. Faced with all that loathing, I started to think that perhaps I should suppress my own beliefs and say something that would chime better with the self-righteous fans of Citizen Corbyn.

The audience can turn into a baying mob at the wink of an eye. Very few panellists are thick-skinned enough to ignore their answers being greeted with a deathly silence or being booed while others receive loud applause and whoops of approval.

“After the recording, the show’s excellent host, Jonathan Dimbleby, sighed heavily and told me it was a constant problem.
He and the whole AQ team found it immensely frustrating that Tories simply did not show up on the night to add their voices. The producer said it would cost £5,000 a week to pay someone to assemble a politically balanced audience.”

Why? who are they going to hire? Wayne Rooney? 

How hard could it be? Just get hold of one of those lists gleaned from some god-forsaken market research survey, match it to the relevant demographic, region, political proclivity, send out some posh invites and Bob’s Yer Uncle. That’ll be £5,000 please; make the cheque out to me.

   

Or they could simply vet the audience differently so as to arrive at a more representative group, (don’t ask me how)  - refrain from emotive cinematographic tricks like cutting to Yasmin Alibhai Brown tutting and eye-rolling while others are speaking, try out a fresh, more assertive chairperson, call on the audience’s ‘opinions’ less frequently, or abolish the audience altogether.

No. Ain’t gonna happen. Before people like Allison Pearson are ever going to get a fair hearing on a BBC political panel show, the BBC needs to take a more balanced approach throughout its whole output, comedy, drama, political analysis and news reporting, they need to respect and reflect the views of that overlooked, unrepresented  75%.

Peter Oborne, self-awareness and 'follow the money'

When I heard of Peter Oborne’s high profile resignation my first thought was ‘Yippee I can buy the Telegraph again’. But on second thoughts, no. When we cancelled our subscription a while ago the Telegraph marketing department rang us at home to try to tempt us back, pleading: “we’re more left wing now." “precisely” I said or words to that effect.

Isn’t it a funny old world? If you look at online comments (I do) you’ll notice that the commentariat seems to have migrated en masse from The Telegraph to the Guardian and vice versa. I believe some of the credit for the improvement in the Guardian can be attributed to the relentless monitoring of its antisemitic and anti-Israel output by CiF Watch. 

(I remember issuing a press release to theBiased-BBC audience to promote CiF Watch’s  imminent launch, whereupon rather than welcoming the good news, the btl commentariat  roundly turned on me for ‘advertising’. ) Oh well. Bitter memories.

So the Telegraph has moved to the left, and the Guardian has moved towards the middle. Let’s hope Adam Levick of CiFWatch builds up enough momentum with his new media watch enterprise to improve the likes of Sky.

Here’s one that goes against that trend. I always thought of Allison Pearson as one of the Telegraph’s columnists with a slightly lefty tendency. Maybe I was wrong. I don’t know if there’s a change on her part or if I was mistaken all along, perhaps getting her all mixed up with Mary Riddell, but you should read this.

I thought it was a clever and  thought provoking piece, and it demonstrates that weird thing I mentioned with the BTL comments. (mostly castigating her at the time of writing this)

There is a guest article on Harry’s Place that sums up Peter Oborne. I urge everyone who hasn’t already done so, to read it now.  

Of course if you tap Peter Oborne into this blog’s search facility you come up with a positive treasure trove.  The H.P. article about the piggy-eyed one  ends:

"My guess is that he’ll shortly announce his move to Al Jazeera or,  like The Guardian’s David Hearst, the Hamas thinktank, Middle East Monitor.”

I’ve just caught the tail end of newly released Al-Jazeera journalist Peter Greste telling the BBC’s Anita McVeigh that journalism needs to be open and unrestricted.  No doubt we’ll be hearing him on and off all day on the Beeb, with obvious irony and the BBC’s customary lack of self-awareness. 

James Naughtie did an interview on journalistic and editorial integrity, advertising, sponsorship and so on with Harold Evans on the Today programme. Harold Evans said any compromising of journalistic integrity will damage advertising revenue, as attracting the best (most lucrative) advertising depends upon the credibility of the journalism; circular fashion. He disapproves of ‘native advertising’ which is when the advertiser fashions ads to look like editorial. 

Does the same thing also go for sponsorship?   If Qatar, for example, sponsors something on, say, Sky, does that impact the unrestricted journalism that Peter Greste is asking for?  (Rhetorical question.)

Over on Biased BBC I followed a link (H/T Guest Who) to this  (no wonder the BBC uninvited Stephen Woolfe MP onto that infamous Galloway Q.T.)

which links to this 

None of us are free from the tentacles of root of all evil (except Craig and me) Hmm.

Precautions

There’s a good piece in the Telegraph by Allison Pearson. I particularly noticed this bit:

Some things, however, are no laughing matter. At dinner recently, a Jewish friend shocked me. “We’ve been thinking about whether we should get out sooner rather than later,” Anna said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, Anna, her husband and their three lovely kids are as British as you or me. Sadly, it looks like she was merely giving voice to a widespread unease. Anti-semitism is nowhere near as bad here as it is in France, but a new poll reveals that more than half of British Jews fear that they have no future in the UK. British society is at a “tipping point” with Jewish families increasingly questioning whether to stay in the country. To make matters worse, a YouGov poll found that 45 per cent of Britons agreed with at least one of four anti-semitic statements.So this is where we are in 2015. One of the best-assimilated minorities in the UK, a group which makes a contribution to the arts, science, business, black-cab driving, laughter, you name it – and one that is out of all proportion to its size – is getting ready to pack its bags while the group that has been worst at integration demands ever more shrilly that we bow to its world view.To quote Margaret Thatcher: No, No, No.

The penultimate paragraph reminded me of this: By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered aterrible truth - Europe died in Auschwitz ..We killed six million Jews andreplaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitzwe burned a culture,thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen,because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science,art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world.These are the people we burned. And under the pretence of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove toourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gatesto 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religiousextremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingnessto work and support their families with pride. They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities intothe third world, drowning in filth and crime. Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, theyplan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts. And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred,creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness andsuperstition. We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and theirtalent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging tolife because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumedby the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children andtheirs. What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe..

I wonder if Allison Pearson has seen it?

I noticed Tim Willcox was reading the news about new precautions that are being taken to protect Jews going about their daily lives. That's here, in Britain.