'PM' on Munich

Here's a set of short transcriptions showing how tonight's PM framed the latest on the Munich massacre for BBC Radio 4 listeners. 

The headline was:

The man who killed 10 people at a shopping centre in Munich was German-born with no apparent link to terrorism. Most of his victims were foreign-born teenagers.

The newsreader said:

Police in Munich say the teenage gunman who shot dead 9 people last night had researched previous mass killings. The attacker, named by local media as David Ali Sonboly, had no links to Islamist extremism. 27 people were injured when he began shooting in and around a shopping centre. 10 are in critical condition. Investigators are checking whether he hacked a Facebook page to lure his victims to McDonald's with the promise of a free meal. Bethany Bell sent this report from Munich.

Bethany Bell's report said:

The 18 year old student appears to have been obsessed with mass shootings. German police say they found no links to international terrorism but when they searched his flat they found books and papers about mass killings. They are investigating parallels with the far-right Norwegian killer Anders Breivik. The gunman had a Glock pistol and was carrying more than 300 bullets. Several of those he killed were teenagers. A 13 year old boy is in a critical condition. Relatives and friends have been visiting the site in bitter distress. 

Impartiality flies out of the window

There's another spot-on post today from David Keighley over at Conservative Woman. 

Here's how David ends his post:

Shame on the BBC. Their duty, as defined by the public purposes, is to offer balanced reporting that reflects all sides of this massive story [the migrant crisis]. Instead, we are getting the Gospel according to the Liberal Left. On Friday night, elements of coverage were actually accompanied by epic movie music. This was not news reporting. You could call it instead what it actually was: propaganda.

I don't doubt for one second that epic movie music was used for some of the coverage, although I didn't hear it myself (as I was away on Friday night and didn't have much time for BBC-related matters). As I returned home on Saturday morning there was a moving piece about Palmyra on Today that made use of one of the most haunting pieces of modern classical music (Howard Skempton's beautiful Lento) to flood listeners' hearts with sadness. (An emotional 'flooding' I fully related to).

It really does seem to be propaganda that the BBC's pumping out though at the moment, doesn't it? 

When Sue and myself started this blog I really wanted to avoid that kind of accusation and to be as fair as possible to the BBC. Well, being as fair to the BBC as possible, I think it is propaganda they are pumping out now. And they ought to stop it.

As well as all the other evidence we've posted here in recent days to back that up I'd just like to add another line of thought - one that's also struck me over the past couple of days, though one I've hesitated about posting about (for some reason)....

There seems to be almost a template for certain BBC reports at the moment. Whether it comes from Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany or Sweden (or wherever) and whichever BBC reporter is doing the reporting, the template usually seems to be: 

Report stories of individual suffering (preferably women's stories, or stories involving children). Tell stories of 'good' people helping/welcoming migrants. Contrast them with 'the other side', using far less positive language about those people. And, above all, keep linking those opposed to the present 'influx' to the far-right. And use the term 'far-right' or 'hard-right' at every opportunity.

There are so many examples of this I've rather lost track of them, but there was Nick Thorpe in Hungary (besides all the other faults in his reporting we've outlined here over the past couple of weeks) welding himself to pro-migrant activists there (all female) and constantly mentioning the far-right in opposition to them. And Bethany Bell in Austria repeatedly talking about a far-right party there leading the opinion polls (as indeed the Austrian Freedom Party does, by quite a significant margin in poll after poll), and only about that party, in contrast to all those nice Austrians rushing across the border to help the migrants in Hungary. And Jenny Hills's cheering crowds v neo-Nazis in Germany. And Graham Satchell and Tom Bateman's ever-present hard-right/far-right Sweden Democrats, getting 20% in a recent poll according to Tom Bateman, always contrasted to all the nice pro-migrant people in Sweden (who stage rallies in favour of migrants). And Rob Cameron's extraordinary From Our Own Correspondent piece from the Czech Republic where nice pro-migrant people were juxtaposed with Hitler-supporting, obnoxious anti-migrant people. 

There may be grains of truth in all of those, but so lop-sided, so intense, so didactic is this kind of BBC reporting that impartiality seems to flying out of the window and doesn't look likely to return any time soon.

"Hardliners"

Bethany Bell's piece on PM tonight reported various approving reactions to the Iranian nuclear deal, without labelling the speakers with anything other than their job titles.

Then she moved on to those disapproving of the deal:  

But there's stiff resistance to the deal by hardliners in both the United States and Iran, and Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says it's a stunning historic mistake.

Tying together critics of the deal in the U.S. and Iran (very different groups of people) with the Israeli PM, and binding them all together under the somewhat pejorative blanket term 'hardliners' seems to me to suggest 'bias by labelling'.

And without some five minutes Jeremy Bowen was at it too:

The biggest problem the agreement faces right now I think are hardliners and in Tehran...So at the moment the signs are that those hardliners, on either side, will not succeed in stopping it.

 Incidentally, here are a some other Jeremy Bowen soundbites:

You know, I think this is actually a pretty spectacular diplomatic achievement. 

I think [it's] a major diplomatic achievement. 

The Western powers especially and Iran now have a habit of working together. That's a plus. 

I think he approves.


Update: Douglas Murray has spotted something very similar:

Or there is the type of moral vacuum the BBC has just slipped into. The main report on Iran on its website now says of this deal that, ‘There has been stiff resistance to a deal from conservatives both in Iran and the US’. A statement which is not just incorrect, but which suggests that ‘conservatives’ everywhere are the problem and that US House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner and, say, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei are on the same moral tier.

Who to believe?

Dropping in on the blog Biased BBC, as is my way, I was struck by David Vance's characteristically pithy post entitled ALL MEN ARE RAPIST?, which highlights a BBC report about violence against women across Europe.

The BBC report begins:

About a third of all women in the EU have experienced either physical or sexual violence since the age of 15, according to a survey by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.

That corresponds to 62 million women, the survey says.

The figures in the EU's survey are absolutely staggering (if true), finding that one in 10 women has experienced some form of sexual violence since the age of 15, and that one in 20 has been raped, that 22% of women have suffered from physical or sexual violence by a partner, and around 18% of women say they have been the victims of stalking since the age of 15, and that 55% say they have been sexually harassed, often in the workplace.

I have to say that my immediate thought was that an e-mail should be sent to Radio 4's More or Less to check these results out. 

They sound utterly unbelievable, don't they? 

Have 44% of British women really suffered from some form of physical or sexual violence? It really seems hard to believe that it's so high a figure for something so serious, doesn't it?

So, is there something wrong with the way the survey was carried out? How did it define its terms? Or is there something wrong instead with the way the media has reported the survey? 

Or, God forbid, could it actually be true?

I myself know quite a few women who have been seriously physically abused, and even a member of my own family has been stalked, so the incidence of such crimes should never be underplayed or taken lightly...

...but these figures are truly extraordinary, and I'm finding them hard to accept at face value.

The BBC report, by Bethany Bell, simply parrots what the survey says, without question. 

I'd be very interested to read what statisticians make of the survey. Does it stand up? And, if so, how does it stand up? 

David Vance regards the survey on which the report is based as "manipulated nonsense from the EU" [pro-EU bias] before wondering "if the BBC comrades might explore which ..ahem..communities within this apocalyptic zone of rape and abuse contribute most towards such violence?"

...by which he means Muslims (as his regular readers quickly spotted).

As there are 19 million (or so) Muslims in the EU, they can't (logically) contribute "most" towards that 62 million figure (especially as around half of those Muslims will be women), so I'm afraid to say that I'm as sceptical about David's take on this as I am about that of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (in fact, more so - if truth be told!) but...

...what on earth should we make of this story?