Again

 

It's a sign of something deeply rotten in the state of our country that once rare events, which not so long ago would have dominated the news for weeks, now just come and go. A nine-year-old girl was stabbed in Boston, Lincolnshire last month and overnight we learn that another nine-year-old girl has been shot dead in Liverpool. Quite rightly, both the Sky News, ITV News and GB News websites have been leading with this horrific killing. The BBC wasn't, but is now. The media needs to get back to making such crimes not normal by not moving on so quickly. 

BBC Disinformation

Away from the BBC, we read today in the South Wales Argus that a fire in March at a mosque initially treated as a hate crime by police was started by a desperate drug user cooking up heroin. Wales Online adds that the hapless dope 'likely had no idea the lean-to type kitchen belonged to the mosque'. Can you guess how the BBC reported this back in March though?

Note the irresponsible lack of quotation marks around 'deliberate' in that headline.

The BBC regime cracks down on the UK government's immigration plan

The lead story on the BBC News website this evening is:

Yes, the pro-mass immigration BBC is going after the UK Government again over their 'deport illegal immigrants to Rwanda' plan.

You can tell that BBC activism is in full flow because of the BBC's use of the word 'regime' rather than 'government' as regards Rwanda. 

The last decade or so of the Assad government in Syria always got the 'regime' treatment from the BBC after they switched to disapproving of it.

"Not acceptable"

When the BBC first reported on Saturday that comedian Jerry Sadowitz's show at The Pleasance in Edinburgh had been cancelled due to 'not acceptable' material I read their report and thought it a typically uninformative BBC article, so I googled around and found a hot-off-the-presses piece at Chortle that was far less prissy. 

Reading Chortle's account revealed why the show had been so 'controversial'. 

The BBC has now published a second report on the story that still doesn't give readers much of a clue as to exactly what kind of things in the act proved so provocative to some in the audience, other than the usual words on these occasions - "racism", "misogyny", "sexism" and "homophobia". 

The main difference though between the BBC's two takes and Chortle's take is that Chortle reports both sides of the story. Chortle quotes a critical member of the audience AND a number of comedians and celebrities sticking up for Jerry Sadowitz and condemning the theatre's decision to cancel his second show. Though it quotes JS himself, the BBC has none of that - which is very BBC these days, particularly when it comes to these kind of stories. It reports the 'outrage' from the woke side and presents the 'cancellation' [here literally] without even suggesting alternative points of view that disapprove of the 'cancellation'. 

And - unlike the BBC - Chortle's opening paragraph hints, with a very BBC use of 'insists', that The Pleasance's statements on the matter have been self-contradictory on the issue of free speech:

Edinburgh’s Pleasance venue has insisted it champions freedom of speech after pulling a Jerry Sadowitz gig.

That's something many people elsewhere have picked up on, but the BBC's online journalists clearly decided isn't an issue that needs trouble their readers.

One curious name among Chortle's collection of JS defenders is Jeremy Vine who reacted to the news by saying:

I've seen Jerry Sadowitz perform four times. Each gig was more offensive than the last. No one complained because that's what Jerry does.

I wonder if lots of the younger BBC activists will spot that and accuse him of being on the side of  "extreme racism, misogyny, sexism and homophobia?" 

Three clicks to murder

A guest post from Arthur T

The Salman Rushdie story prompted a search for parity between the murders of Jo Cox and Sir David Amess - after all we know archiving can prove to be the BBC's Achilles' Heel.

BBC News website special page

'Jo Cox murder' (1 click to 'murder' - no navigation required)

BBC News website special page

'David Amess death'

Within the Amess pages is another story with clickbait headline:

'Amess killer given whole-life jail sentence'

Only after clicking the above does the headline appear:

'Sir David Amess murder: Ali Harbi Ali given whole-life sentence'

(3 clicks to 'murder' - navigation required)

This story was buried in the Essex pages. It's only here that the word 'murder' is used. There can't be clearer proof that murder is not reported as murder (in certain cases) when it doesn't suit BBC News.

Introducing Joshua Nevett, BBC Politics - not a fan of Brexit apparently

The BBC News website report in the previous post [now split into two posts] was written by Joshua Nevett from BBC Politics. 

He also did a report back in May headlined Why some farmers are turning away from the Tories - a piece he summarised on Twitter like this:

• NEW: Journalism that’s not about Sue Gray or lockdown parties (refreshing, right?). Following May’s local elections, I spoke to three farmers about the post-Brexit challenges they’re facing and why they’re fed up with the Conservative government. This is what they told me 1/4:
• James Small, a livestock farmer from Somerset, said he voted for the Liberal Democrats at the local elections. He said farmers have “no idea what the destination” is for their industry, which has had to adjust to sweeping agriculture policy reforms since the Brexit vote. 2/4
• Pig farmer Anna Longthorp said production costs have skyrocketed recently, saying: “It's been an absolutely awful time”. She said the mass culling of pigs - made necessary by post-Brexit shortages of abattoir workers - has put farmers through “colossal distress”. 3/4
• Dairy farmer Robert Craig didn’t even vote in the local elections. He said Brexit was doing farmers like him "no good whatsoever", citing labour shortages as the "biggest challenge" for his businesses. For these interviews and more, read my piece 4/4. 

Yes, it's all Brexit's fault.

For fans of Twitter archaeology, here are some of Joshua's tweets. He joined the BBC in March 2019. Guess what his view of Brexit is?

1. Sep 4, 2018 - Brexit is 206 days away. As the clock ticks, Hammond says a no-deal would cost £80bn extra in borrowing. May says a no-deal Brexit 'wouldn't be the end of the world'. And Johnson has seemingly launched a leadership bid. Leave voters, let that chaos sink in for a moment. 
2. Sep 15, 2018 - What Bermondsey thinks about Brexit. As you can see, it’s rather lopsided. Those God damn metropolitan elites.
3. May 22, 2019 - Farage is shaken with fear (sorry). [Ed - after more people with milkshakes turned up to an election event where Nigel Farage had had a drink thrown over him the previous day.] 
4. May 24, 2019 - The apparent demographics of this crowd [Ed - at a Nigel Farage hustings] are telling: old and white. Polling also suggests most people over 40 are Brexiteers. Brexit is pitting young and old against each other.
5. Jun 6, 2019 - It’s interesting to hear what an actual D-Day veteran thinks about Brexit. D-Day veteran Eric Chardin: “Brexit worries me. It would be an awful shame if what we’ve gone to so much trouble to do, to collect the European big nations together, to break it all up now would be a crying shame.”
6. Jul 10, 2019 - It’s only a fudge if Corbyn becomes PM and delivers Brexit, which is highly unlikely. Unless PM Johnson tries to ram through a no-deal Brexit, a GE won’t happen. What’s more likely is a people’s vote to my mind. In that scenario, Labour’s position couldn’t be more explicit.

INSISTED Watch

Fans of INSISTED Watch might be interested in the BBC News website report Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak row over recession warning in latest TV clash where Liz Truss gets three times the number of 'insisted's that Rishi Sunak gets.

For Liz Truss:

1. Liz Truss insisted her regional pay policy was "misrepresented by various people".
2. But Ms Truss resisted such an admission, and instead insisted her regional pay policy was "misrepresented by various people".
3. In other parts of the TV programme, Ms Truss insisted she has nothing to hide, telling the audience "there are no skeletons in my closet"

For Rishi Sunak:

1. And Mr Sunak insisted he would "fight incredibly hard 'til the last day" of the leadership campaign and not quit before results day.

Once more unto the breach, Sir Keir, once more

It seems quite something that the forensic ex-lawyer and former Director of Public Prosecutions turned Labour leader Sir Keir Rodney Starmer KCB QC managed to breach the MPs' code of conduct no less than eight times. I see the BBC has already relegated it to a 'small print' headline on the BBC News website though.

Update 11.45am: The story has, naturally, now vanished from the headlines on the Home page. Amusingly, that's not stopping it remaining in second place on 'Most Read', so people are still wanting to see it. [Further update - It's gone now from 'Most Read'].

'Flawed' reporting?

How BBC Manipulated a Major Arab World Survey in Order to Slam Israel is the headline of a piece at Honest Reporting by Gidon Ben-Zvi. The BBC online report, Arabs believe economy is weak under democracy, is mainly about what it says it's about, but also contains this passage:

According to the EIU [Economist Intelligence Unit] Democracy Index, the Middle East and North Africa is the lowest ranked of all regions covered in the index – Israel is classed as a ‘flawed democracy’, Tunisia and Morocco are classed as “hybrid regimes”, and the rest of the region is classed as ‘authoritarian’.

I can see what Gidon means when he says that this makes Israel sound akin to the 'hybrid regimes' and 'authoritarian regimes' that surround it rather than the democratic exception that proves the rule. The BBC 'achieves' this by not giving context - specifically by not saying what a 'flawed democracy'. Other 'flawed democracies' include France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the United States, Belgium, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Malta, Cyprus and Greece. Indeed, Israel ranks higher than all of those except France.

The Honest Reporting piece ends with a question, which it doesn't leave hanging in the air:

Does the national broadcaster of the United Kingdom have an anti-Israel agenda? The British Broadcasting Corporation’s long history of perpetuating an alternate version of reality with regards to the Jewish state certainly raises serious questions about its ability to report on events coming out of the Middle East with any kind of impartiality.

Slur

Oh dear...

I might be wrong, but I thought it was now pretty much confirmed that it emerged - after all the fuss and brouhaha and 'outrage' earlier in the year - that Labour deputy growler Angela Rayner had joked to fellow parliamentarians about opening and closing her legs to show off her, ahem, ‘ginger growler’.

Regardless, the po-faced BBC - which made so much of it at the time - is making this headline news this afternoon, minus any mention whatsoever of that now famous phrase about a 'growler' which happens to be 'ginger' in its hue:

The story involves the Conservative MP for Grimsby, Lia Nici - who, despite her name, apparently isn't a pop star.

The word 'slur' in the headline shows where the BBC stands on the matter. 

Firmly.

Someone on Twitter asked, 'How is the truth a slur?' But is it the truth or a slur? Or something in-between, where a joke morphed into a later day in the House of Commons, at PMQs, where Ms Rayner wore a skirt split up to her growler region and then, as photos showed, displayed more leg than a dancing centipede at the Moulin Rouge? 

Anyhow. Back to Dua Lipa MP...

High on the scent of blood perhaps, might the BBC be after another Tory scalp? 

If so, will Lia MP - even as they're placing the axe against her forehead and lighting up torches to burn her at the stake - still be a nice Tory and soak it up and do nothing whatsoever about the BBC?

...because the BBC remains very selective in who they make into 'outrage' headline news.

One thing we learned about this though, if you recall, was that certain parts of the North - people from some alleged county apparently called 'Yorkshire' - call pork pies 'growlers'. 

I'd never heard of that, being from the other side of the Pennines. But my dad, hailing from east Lancashire, has another word for them entirely. He continues to call them 'meat knockers'. 

What is it with pork pies and connotations that would make even expert Scrabble player Albert Steptoe blush?

More red ink applied

Newsniffer reveals that there's been a striking stealth edit to a 15 June BBC online report about police racism in Canada. The report, by the BBC's Holly Honderich originally bore the headline:

This has now changed to:

The body of the report has seen the same change, with...

The report from Canada's largest municipal force confirmed longstanding concerns that people of colour are disproportionately targeted by police.

...becoming, 25 days later:

The report from Canada's largest municipal force confirmed longstanding concerns ethnic minorities are disproportionately targeted by police.

Somebody at the BBC seemingly felt the need to correct this linguistic slippage into American usage. 

Front-page Rory

We've written on several occasions about the BBC's affection for one particular Tory - now an ex-Tory - namely, Rory Stewart. In the last Conservative leadership election, a remarkable range of BBC voices openly sang his praises [John Simpson, Gary Lineker, Quentin Somerville, John Sweeney, Danny Shaw] or retweeted praise [Emily Maitlis]. So this doesn't surprise me in the least:

Paul Embery: I very much hope that former MP Rory Stewart finds his wedding ring, but does the story really merit a place on the main BBC News page?

Adrian Hilton: You really couldn't find a much greater pointer to BBC bias than this. I, too, hope Rory Stewart finds his wedding ring, but he has no political status in the UK at all. If Jacob Rees Mogg had lost his wedding ring, it would have been totally ignored, or greeted with derision.

Not everyone agrees this is bias though:

Colin Garthwaite: How the hell is this bias? BTW, the BBC are ran by Tories. Stop talking BS!

Colin's Twitter bio reads #ScrapNHSBill #ProudToBeWoke #BLM #RefundTheBBC, so - despite the BBC being 'run by Tories' - he's proudly pro-BBC. Wonder what it is about the NHS-worshipping, pro-woke, pro-BLM BBC that so appeals to him?

💣

It will be interesting to see what kind of coverage Kemi Badenoch receives from the BBC News Channel now that she's thrown her hat into the leadership race to replace Boris. 

She had a spat with the then-editor of Huff Post UK, Jess Brammar, over the behaviour of Huff Post journalist, Nadine White. 

Jess Brammar is now the boss of the BBC News Channel and BBC World.

Incidentally, Nadine - now at The Independent - is on fine form today, tweeting:

Can you imagine a Black or Asian person leading the Conservative Party? Others argue that the very concept is diametrically opposed to the party's core values.

It would be amusing if Kemi became Conservative Party leader, if only to see Nadine's reaction. 

By the way, I see that Jess is still retweeting Nadine White:

 

Meanwhile, the BBC News website's report - Kemi Badenoch launches bid to be Conservative leader - has an odd subheading paraphrasing this passage:

Setting out her stall in an opinion article in The Times, Ms Badenoch said a "strong but limited government focussed on the essentials" was needed.

You might think they'd use, say, “Strong but limited government”, but they took out “government”, leaving:

Are they implying something?

The Strange Case of the Missing Wossy

It's a very good thing that Maya Forstater has won her employment tribunal claim for discrimination and victimisation after losing her job for stating her belief that people cannot change their biological sex, especially given that the appalling judge at her first tribunal had said her views were not "worthy of respect in a democratic society" - which must be one of the most undemocratic things a British judge has said for a century or more. As for the BBC's reporting of it, I was intrigued by one edit. The original version read:

Ms Forstater's case previously gained public attention, including attracting some high-profile supporters, such as Harry Potter author JK Rowling and presenter Jonathan Ross.

32 minutes later Wossy vanished:

Ms Forstater's case previously gained public attention, including attracting some high-profile supporters, such as Harry Potter author JK Rowling.

Given that Jonathan Ross has backed her, why was he edited out of this report? 

BBC Sport News

So, according to the Mail, Michael Vaughan was forced out of his BBC cricket commentating role by six disgruntled members of staff who work on the BBC's football and digital outputs. They sent their email anonymously and didn't seek a meeting with him. Charming!

The three top-rated comments below the article are:

• BBC are 'WOKE' and employ 'Woke' staff. General public do not agree with their views! They are not neutral.
• Hopefully the BBC lose the cricket commentary contact as this sets a dangerous precedent.
• Oh look the minority dictating to the majority again......the new normal.

Meanwhile, it was inevitable that culture secretary Nadine Dorries getting rugby league and rugby union confused would be headline news on the BBC News home page. Some people's every 'gaffe' gets the full BBC treatment. Others can 'gaffe' away to their hearts content and the BBC will cover for them by not reporting it. It seems very selective who gets each kind of treatment.

And, as discussed on the outgoing open thread, the BBC is giving an uncritical ear to Lewis Hamilton's call to stop giving 'older voices' a platform. The BBC News website piece by Andrew Benson, the BBC's chief F1 writer, is full of language that backs up Lewis. That said, would Mr Benson dare do anything other at at the BBC these days?

Taking away democracy

Rather like the CCP in Hong Kong, the BBC has taken away democracy. The BBC News website article Xi Jinping defends China's rule of Hong Kong , written by By Tessa Wong, BBC Asia Digital Reporter, previously said:

But Hong Kong has seen huge pro-democracy protests over the years and many, including Western countries, have criticised Beijing's growing interference in the city.

But now it says:

But over the years Hong Kong has seen huge protests and many, including Western countries, have criticised Beijing's growing interference in the city.

Why have they toned it down? 

Bongbong

Ferdinand 'Bongbong' Marcos Jr has been sworn in as the president of the Philippines, taking over from Rodrigo Duterte.

The three links in the BBC's main report about this suggest that the BBC isn't overly impressed:

More fake history from the BBC

[h/t StewGreen]

History Debunked's Simon Webb has a new video out about how history is being faked for woke reasons and how the BBC sometimes simply swallows and regurgitates such fake history.

It's very obvious from Googling around that some 'journalist' at the BBC, back in 2017, simply Googled around too, read some revisionist 'black history' sites, wrote the following and got it published on the BBC website, where it still sits five years later under the headline BBC 100 Women: Nine things you didn't know were invented by women:

2. Caller ID and call waiting - Dr Shirley Ann Jackson 

Dr Shirley Ann Jackson is an American theoretical physicist, whose research from the 1970s is responsible for caller ID and call waiting. 

Her breakthroughs in telecommunications have also enabled others to invent the portable fax, fibre optic cables and solar cells. 

She is the first African-American woman to gain a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the first African-American woman to lead a top-ranked research university.

If you Google yourself, once you pass over those revisionist sites - which are clearly not interested in factual history - you discover that Caller ID was invented by a Greek-American man called Theodore Paraskevakos back in 1968-1971 and Call Waiting wasn't her invention either. And it's all goes downhill from there.

Hilariously, even Wikipedia debunks those fake historians - and, as a result, exposes the extreme copying-and-pasting of certain 'journalists' at the BBC - saying on its entry on the estimable Dr Jackson:

Although some sources claim that Jackson conducted scientific research while working at Bell Laboratories that enabled others to invent the portable fax, touch-tone telephone, solar cells, fiber optic cables, and the technology behind caller ID and call waiting, Jackson herself makes no such claim. Moreover, these telecommunications advancements significantly predated her arrival at Bell Labs in 1976, with these six specifically enumerated inventions actually occurring by others in the time frame between 1954 and 1970.

Dr Shirley Ann Jackson is clearly a brilliant scientist, even if she didn't do what the BBC says she did. Goodness knows what she'd make of this BBC 'journalism'.

It's not great that it's still there on the BBC website either. 

BBC fact-checkers really do need to start turning their focus onto the BBC itself. 

One to make Tim Harford gasp

    

We all mistakes, but the BBC's online report about the Nasa launch of its first rocket from an Australian commercial spaceport went through five versions and four edits - and eight hours! - before someone corrected a rather big numerical blunder.

Earlier versions said:

But the data gathered in that time will help illuminate the secrets of star constellations 430 million light years away, says the chief executive of Equatorial Launch Australia, which runs the space centre. 

"Without getting too deep into the science, it was effectively a large X-ray camera looking at various... phenomenon and trying to capture parts of boulders in the Milky Way and particularly the star cluster of Alpha Centauri," Michael Jones told the local network Nine.

The latest version says:

But the data gathered by the mission's X-ray camera in that time will help illuminate the secrets of Alpha Centauri A and B, the closest double-star system to Earth that is located just 4.3 light-years away.

The earlier figure is a mere 100,000,000 times more than the correct figure. 

The title of Radio 4's statistics show More or Less springs to mind. This was definitely 'More'. A LOT 'More'.

That it took eight hours and many editorial revisions to finally realise this and rectify it beggars belief in an organisation so big and so well-funded.

So what happened next?

It only seems like yesterday, but was actually two days ago, that I wondered aloud whether the BBC's capitulation to a complainant's call for the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) to be labelled when introduced (e.g. as 'free-market') would lead to think tanks from other parts of the political spectrum receiving similar treatment. 

I specifically mentioned BBC favourite the Resolution Foundation. 

Well, the BBC is making headline news of another Resolution Foundation report today under the headline Levelling up to cost billions more than government thinks, says think tank and, no, there's not a label in sight in that article. It's simply 'the Resolution Foundation' and 'the think tank'. 

Much as could have been guessed. 

Other media outlets go with 'left-leaning'.