Is Ofcom biased?

On the dreaded trans issue...

According to James Kirkup in The Spectator, Ofcom, the BBC's regulator, has written “a report about impartiality that is not itself impartial” - which he describes as “quite an achievement”. 

He argues that Ofcom's lopsided methodology is at fault, relying on 6 hours-worth of interviews with trans people, and that by listening to only one side of the trans debate Ofcom thereby distorted and skewed its own findings. 

He says the report “not only fails entirely to mention women’s legitimate and legally-protected concerns, but effectively tells the corporation that its coverage doesn’t lean far enough towards one side of that contested issue” and worries this will tilt the BBC towards an even more biased position. 

Methodology certainly counts. If you conduct focus groups and interviews and significantly overrepresent one side with “loud voices” and don't even talk to the other side then, yes, you are going to get a biased report.

On the background to this, I think this pair of tweets puts it in a nutshell:

Emily Kate: Not surprised by this. Ofcom only left Stonewall a year ago. But I think organisations employ Stonewall to entrench existing views anyway. So leaving the scheme isn't going to change much, ideologically speaking. It won't make the organisation fairer or more balanced, necessarily. 

The beautiful symmetry of the national broadcaster being investigated for bias by a regulator who agrees that Position Normal is the one taken by the broadcaster! It's perfect.

BBC 98 Women 2021

It's that time of the year again - the BBC's annual showcase for women they admire: 

BBC 100 Women 2021: Who is on the list this year?

Well, one way of answering that is to say that there are two men on it for starters. 

And I was just going to post that when I saw a Spectator tweet saying:

By including transwomen in that 100 Women list, the BBC is siding with those who argue that “transwomen are women”.

It leads to a new piece by James Kirkup headlined Gender is contentious. The BBC is pretending it isn’t.

Mix-up?

I couldn't make sense of this at all, but I think I might have solved it. I think Kirkup has confused Jon Caldara with our own John Sweeney.

They do look a bit alike. But not very. Talking of which, there's a weird thing going on at Facebook. Following that free speech award, apparently, if a Danish MP mentions Tommy Robinson on Facebook it's OK, but if anyone else does, their FB account is zapped.

Pinch punch first of the month

The snow stole our hard copy of The Times today. I hear the lorry got stuck on the A30. Not to worry, I subscribe to the online version. James Kirkup has written the Thunderer column and it’s called “The BBC needs to go back to basics if it wants to survive“ 

Some of his observations coincide with what critics of the BBC have said a million times already. Actually, they sound a lot like something I’ve said (have I written about it, or just thought it?) about the BBC before.  Namely the flaw it shares with its co-iconic symbol of Britishness, poor old Marks and Sparks - you know, that it’s forgotten its core market and instead wastes its time trying desperately to attract the youth, but it’s so uncool that no-respectable person under, say, 65, would be seen dead wearing those copies of trendy fashion that completely miss the mark. It’s like Dad dancing, says Kirkup. (He’s talking about the Beeb, but I’m talking about both of them)

Just as M & S has been out-trended by the likes of, I don’t know, hundreds of youth-oriented high-street stores, the BBC is being trounced by YouTube and Netflix. 


“The BBC reacts by trying to fight YouTube and the rest on their own ground, seeking the loyalty of future adults with youth-focused content and products. The results are predictably uninspiring. BBC Online now reports on vloggers and celebrity pap as news. To lure the indifferent young to its radio and podcasts, the BBC built Sounds, an app (kids love apps, yeah?) that has succeeded only in annoying existing listeners.” 

M & S needs to concentrate on good quality clothes like jumpers in the right colours that wash well and last a long time, (about 30 years will do) and the BBC should concentrate on “what it does best — public service journalism and programming”.

Obviously, the best bit for me is the below-the-line comments. The ability to access the comments is where subscribing comes into its own. 

Needless to say, many of them are fed up with the BBC’s bias. 

  ********

I’m not going to be mean about Jeremy Hardy now that he has died. It’s very sad that anyone should die at only 57. But it’s hard to be forgiving of the BBC’s wall-to-wall eulogising about his wit and humour and commitment to his “causes” one of which was very vitriolic anti-Israel advocacy. 

He was undoubtedly witty and clever, but humour should be based on truth otherwise it’s not funny. Jeremy Hardy fell for Palestinian propaganda hook line and sinker and the general public’s gullibility allowed him to be sarky and inflammatory without any regard or respect for the truth.

Good cause

Thank you

As Sue noted in her Medley post, James Kirkup wrote an extremely detailed critique of the BBC's coverage of transgender issue this week, and I think his criticisms of the corporation in this case are completely justified and irrefutable - especially his devastating debunking of a BBC Reality Check piece. 

"When it’s good, is first-class public service journalism", he wrote of Reality Check, though as transgender issues are an area of special interest to him he managed to see through this particular Reality Check piece on this occasion. A masked commenter below the article had this to say about that:

The BBC's Reality Check feature is 'first-class public service journalism'? LOL! Welcome to the real world of the BBC, James. You may have liked the angle previous entries took on other topics (Trump, Brexit), but you just agree with them. The BBC journalism in Reality Check is very often like this.

Anyhow, this post is mainly here to thank rockylives, who posted a lovely comment about our little two-handed blog, including:

The people who run the excellent blog "Is The BBC Biased" are scrupulously careful in their criticisms of our national broadcaster and regularly compile detailed and exhaustive reports to support their arguments. They give the BBC the benefit of the doubt where appropriate and do not automatically assume bad faith on its part or the part of its presenters and journalists.

Much appreciated!

Medley

A short medley of observations about BBC bias, Jeremy Corbyn, and related matters.

I am not a Beeb-basher, not least since so many of the people who bang on relentlessly about the BBC’s supposed biases are stupid or horrible or both.

So says James Kirkup on the Spectator (£)  His area of expertise appears to be transgenderism. And he has spotted a bias related to this issue within the BBC. Personally, I can’t seem to get interested in transgenderism no matter how hard I try (not very) but I have to admit that when I see a six foot five-inch ‘woman’ in high heels and mini skirt mincing along, the mind does automatically boggle.

I didn’t get very far with Kirkup’s article. As someone said below the line, tl;dr, but I did ask myself if I was truly stupid and horrible -  wot, moi?  - but then I realised he wasn’t talking about us (Craig and I.) surely he had to be talking about the semi-literate Momentum type keyboard warriors that accuse the BBC of being the mouthpiece of the far right. Like the tweeters on the Victoria Derbyshire thread. You know, the Judophobes who get cross when they’re accused of antisemitism.

 H/T Anonymous (Open Thread.) In a post, circa 2006, Peter Hitches presents a curate’s egg type précis of pre-Nazi era antisemitism, from which I have plucked the following excerpt:

 “But of course most people don't form their opinions in this way. They pick them up, as they pick up other fashions, from what they hear around them, from the prejudices of the media, which become their prejudices by a subtle process. These, by the way, don't take the form of the BBC correspondent saying "Israel wickedly bombed civilian targets last night". You only catch it on the edge of a remark. The reporters themselves often don't know they are doing it. It is their unconscious choice of verbs and nouns, their tone of voice, the selection of pictures and the attitudes to spokesmen that you have to watch. 

For instance, Palestinian and Arab spokesmen tend to be interviewed respectfully and courteously, whereas Israelis are often interrogated fiercely and aggressively (Watch out for this. I'm interested to see if any readers noticed a flagrant example of this on a well-known news programme recently). 

Well, if this bias is based on racial prejudice, which I rather suspect it is, then it should stop right now. And if it is designed to appease Muslim hostility to Jews (which I am afraid to say exists, encouraged by some passages in Muslim scripture, and which - unlike Christian Judophobia - is not adequately disowned and denounced by the leaders of the religion) then that is just as bad.

 SOHRAB AHMARI / AUG. 14, 2018 Commentary magazine “As a right-wing American:”

“There is a great danger looming inside Labour. Its shadow extends from the British Isles across the West, including the United States. That danger has a name, Jeremy Corbyn, and there is a duty to prevent his ever coming to lead Her Majesty’s Government.

Then, of course, there’s our own Rod Liddle. (£) (He's not literally 'our own') We used to write “Is the BBC’s bias due to ignorance or malevolence?” we never settled that question, but of course the answer is ‘a bit of both’.

Same goes for Corby. 

But what Corbyn has never done is meet with the other side. He will not meet with the Israeli government, ever. He has not done so. The last Labour party trip to Israel commended itself for not meeting a single figure within the Israeli government. Corbyn himself declined even to meet Benjamin Netanyahu when he visited Britain. So the dialogue for peace stuff is a downright, absolute lie. He is an anti-Semite who, furthermore, is happy to suck up to whatever foul ideology is opposed to this country’s interests or the interests of western democracy. Cuba, Venezuela, Soviet Russia, Black September, Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA. You name a crock of purulent, murderous, anti-democratic, racist shit — and he’ll be for it. 

Oh — and the BBC. Nice of you, auntie, to cover the story of the wreath-laying two days later than everyone else did. I have a screen shot of BBC News online on the day the papers were carrying the Corbyn story. As both Guido Fawkes and later the Daily Mail pointed out, there were no fewer than six stories about Boris Johnson making a joke about letterboxes and none at all about Jezza. Get rid of the licence fee, now. The level of bias has become absurd.

And now for something completely different.

Poor little Ahed. How ever did she endure her eight-month incarceration?

Shrugging off critics Trump-style, Corbyn withstands outrage, rises in polls https://t.co/94yYTtnq9m pic.twitter.com/F727LOk9BD

— The Times of Israel (@TimesofIsrael) August 16, 2018

Update (2)
Brendan O’Neill  The shameful double standards of the Corbyn crew

“Yet far from denouncing Corbyn, his supporters are turning a blind eye to the photo, or are even denouncing its publication as yet another smear on their Dear Leader. And that’s because the man Corbyn was snapped alongside wasn’t linked to the slaughter of imams in a mosque but to the slaughter of rabbis in a synagogue. And as we now know, almost beyond reasonable doubt, Jews matter less to Corbynistas than every other social group. 

The photo published in the Times comes from the now infamous 2014 ceremony in Tunisia; it shows Corbyn mixing with Maher al-Taher, leader of the proscribed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. This was an often ruthless terror group. Just a few weeks after Corbyn hung out with its leader, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on a Jerusalem synagogue in which four rabbis, including a British one, were massacred with guns, knives and axes. The photos of the synagogue’s floor and books coated in blood are among the most disturbing to come out of the Middle East in recent years.
[…]
As I say, double standards. Jews and Jewish issues are always treated differently by Corbynistas. And there’s a word for that: prejudice. If you attack people for making mild gags about burqas but shrug your shoulders over people who mix with men whose associates murdered Jews in a synagogue, if you say freedom of speech is unimportant except when it comes to the freedom to call into question the legitimacy of the Jewish State, then you are sending a quite extraordinary message into the public sphere: ‘Jews are different. They’re fair game. Screw them.’