A sob story swallowed by the BBC

BBC image

So what have I missed this past week?

Well, for starters various Conservative MPs took umbrage with the BBC after an interview on the Today programme with a headmistress from South London where she claimed to have cleaned the toilets and served in the canteen at her school because of budget cuts. Various newspapers, however, reported that the school’s accounts showed that the cleaning budget rose by £27,000 in the year 2017-18 and that her own salary rose by at over £10,000. And when she told The Sun (in response to such points) that the pupil population of the school has increased significantly since 2017, The Sun looked at the official figures and found that the school had fewer pupils in 2018 than the year before. It's quite a story!

Now, the BBC defended the Today programme, saying "We are confident this interview complies with our editorial guidelines", and adding that she was questioned and pressed. And, in fairness to the BBC here, how could her interviewer know that she was being economical with the truth if - as happened - she insisted what she was saying was true?

Here's a Twitter exchange on the matter: 

James Cleverly MP: She forgot to mention, when telling the story about how money was so tight that she was forced to clean toilets in her school, that her cleaning budget has risen 90% in a year - and she's had a £10k pay rise.

Alex Deane: I remember this interview. It really stuck with me because after she asserted that the sky was falling in it was put to her that funding is actually up. Her only reply, which the presenters naturally found unrebuttable, was “I am not making this up.” Well...

Melindi Scott: Radio 4 Today treated her like a messiah.

Alex Deane: They did at least ask her the question. She effectively asserted “it is true, as I am saying so.” Without further particulars it would have been very difficult for the interviewer to out and out call her a liar.

Melindi Scott: The point at which she was discussing the funding of her school theatre should possibly have rung alarms.

I agree with Alex. The interviewer couldn't really call her out.

However, if we can excuse Today, what about the BBC News website? 

The story is still up: 

It still begins:

A head teacher says she has had to scrub the toilets, clean the school and work in the canteen because of school funding shortages on schools. 

Siobhan Lowe, head of Tolworth Girls' School in Surbiton, south London, spoke of the embarrassment of not being able to fund support for her pupils. 

She says she has already sold off land, cut subjects and a deputy head post to stay afloat, as budgets tightened.

And Newssniffer shows that her tale was made the main angle on the story for the BBC after that Today interview - with the headline changing from Heads angry at minister's school funding 'snub' to Head teacher talks of cleaning loos amid funds shortfall. Even odder, seven days later the headline changed again to Head teacher talks of cleaning toilets in funding shortage - the only change made to the article in that final version.

So why hasn't the BBC website updated this article to put the points found out by the newspapers about the 'toilet-cleaning head teacher'? Why didn't the BBC check the facts of the story themselves, instead of just regurgitating it whole? 

One-sided

A tweet from DB (which follows on neatly from one of yesterday's posts)

The article in question is certainly one-sided - and in the usual direction for the BBC.

A TALE OF TWO REPORTS!

Starting with the bold exclamation quoted in the title of this post, Number 88 at Biased BBC has spotted an absolutely astonishing pair of contrasting reports about a special away-day session at the University of Oxford held by Parliament's Education Select Committee. 

He has in mind the respective accounts from the BBC and the Daily Telegraph, and I'd urge you to read both of them back-to-back.

Number 88 is not wrong when he writes:

MSM reporting of the proceedings is diametrically opposed and the differences in the account of the evidence given by this man, Professor Alistair Buchan, who is in charge of Oxford’s Brexit strategy, is quite startling. Were the reporters at the same meeting?

In the Daily Telegraph's version...

...Professor Buchan presents a positive take on Brexit to MPs, saying the Brexit will bring the best and the brightest to the UK and that the EU held back such people from the likes of Canada, Australia and the U.S. It might help to revive English-speaking medicine. 

According to the Telegraph's Harry Yorke, the academics at the session looked to a global view post-Brexit, though towards the end of the article he reports that the Oxford academics said that a 'hard Brexit' that ends freedom of movement could be damaging to the UK's role in the educational world.

In contrast, the BBC's version is wholly negative about Brexit...

...and begins with that very 'warning' about a 'hard Brexit', saying:

...that the MPs heard an unrelenting message that leaving the EU was a grim prospect for higher education and research.

And this BBC piece by Sean Coughlan is certainly "unrelenting" in its "message". 

Nothing good is said about Brexit by any of the contributors in his account and all the positive stuff from Professor Buchan & Co. (as reported by the Telegraph) is simply absent from the BBC's gloomy report.

Indeed, Professor Buchan is now cast as one of the "unrelenting" Brexit gloom-mongers by the BBC reporter: 

Showing how seriously they take this, Oxford University has appointed its own head of Brexit strategy.

So you could say that at least Brexit has already created one extra job.

But this new postholder, Professor Alistair Buchan, saw leaving the EU as threatening to relegate the UK's universities behind their global competition.

Oxford has been ranked as the world's top university, but Prof Buchan said that in 1970s the UK's universities did not have that top status. This had been built through the EU years and growing networks of international partnerships.

He described Brexit for universities as the "Manchester United problem".

Why would any football team with international ambitions deliberately want to restrict its access both to better talent and to bigger markets? 

The Telegraph also cited Professor Buchan's "Manchester United problem" but, whereas the BBC casts it in a negative light, the Telegraph casts it in a positive light...

...and, by actually quoting him much more extensively than the BBC, suggests that the professor really did mean it positively:

In stark contrast to other leading figures in the sector - many of whom remain party to the Universities UK against Brexit campaign - Professor Buchan also compared Britain's situation to that faced by Manchester United.

"This a Manchester United problem isn't it? The idea that Manchester Utd would not recruit players and wouldn’t have fans and wouldn’t play abroad really means that we have got to do three things. We have got to be absolutely sure we are open; every student and every staff member that comes to Oxford is a benefit for this country because we recruit quality, people that play in the top league.

"We now have to start figuring out what's possible in order to look at the benefits rather than what's being taken away."

Now, having not been at the session, I can't know whether the Telegraph is giving us a misleading pro-Brexit spin or whether the BBC is giving us a misleading anti-Brexit spin - or (as I suspect) both of them are spinning the story in their own preferred direction. 

The contrast, however, is truly staggering, isn't it?

And Sean Couglan certainly appears to have 'edited out' all of the positive things said about Brexit by Professor Buchan and to have given an anti-Brexit twist to his Manchester United analogy. 

The BBC man's bias seems to be showing here, doesn't it?

Sheikha, rattle and roll

Alan at Biased BBC's post about the BBC's reporting of a speech by Qatar's Queen Mum, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned (who may or may not like corgis but is unlikely to be fond of gin), calls attention to the fact that the BBC thought her Oxford University speech denouncing "Muslim-ophobia" newsworthy.

As far as I can see, only the Guardian (among the UK media) also considered it newsworthy. So it may not have been newsworthy after all.

[I would have found a look at Qatar's increasing role within British universities more newsworthy].

Both the BBC and the Guardian give her speech pretty much criticism-free coverage, for whatever reason. 

Unlike the BBC's article, however, the Graun opens up its piece for comment - and I think it's safe to say that even the Guardian's commentariat thinks Sheikha Mozah's grievance-mongering rant is rubbish from start to finish.

Incidentally, fans of the later series from the Star Trek franchise might suspect that Sheikha Mozah (pictured on the right, above) is part of Starfleet. 

Live long and prosper - unless you're a kuffir.

"Teacher, what will the Angel Gabriel do if a woman says 'No' to sex with her husband?"

Talking about comparing and contrasting things, the difference between Sky News and BBC News in their reporting of terror chief Peter Clarke's report into the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham is quite striking.

From the BBC's Sean Coughlan we get:

Teachers could face misconduct inquiries, she [Nicky Morgan] told the House of Commons, after Mr Clarke's report found a social media group called the "Park View Brotherhood" used by male senior staff at Park View School.

Mr Clarke's report said this included "grossly intolerant" messages.

He said the social media messages included "explicit homophobia; highly offensive comments about British service personnel; a stated ambition to increase segregation in the school; disparagement of strands of Islam; scepticism about the truth of reports of the murder of Lee Rigby and the Boston bombings; and a constant undercurrent of anti-western, anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment".

From Afua Hirsch of Sky News, however, we go beyond quotes to get some of the shocking details:

Clarke scrutinised 3,000 messages sent via a private, all-male group called the Park View Brotherhood on social networking app WhatsApp, characterising them as "highly offensive".

The messages included the claim that the murder of fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich was a "hoax", that gay people are "animals" and their attempts at marriage "Satanic" and that women belong in the kitchen and have a "perpetual role serving men".

Although these messages were sent in private between teachers, the report reveals a correlation between this ideology and changes in the curriculum at the schools concerned.

At Park View, the report says, all discussion concerning sexual orientation was removed from sex education lessons, and boys were told in a worksheet that: "If a woman said 'No' to sex with her husband, the Angel Gabriel would strike her down and condemn her to an eternity of hell."

Girls and boys were segregated and, at Nansen Primary School, the school day was considered inappropriate both for the young age of the children and for a secular school.

That said, if you want to get the shocking details in shocking detail you have to go to somewhere like...er, yes, the Daily Mail: 

Teachers at the centre of the 'Trojan Horse' plot to takeover Birmingham schools exchanged messages that the murder of soldier Lee Rigby was a hoax, it emerged today.

A damning report into Birmingham schools has unearthed 'compelling evidence' of an attempt by a group of hardline Muslims 'to gain control of governing bodies', Education Secretary Nicky Morgan said.

The investigation, led by former anti-terror chief Peter Clarke, revealed details of a WhatsApp group called The Park View Brotherhood which also included a description of homosexuals as 'animals' with 'satanic ways’.

Mr Clarke was called in to investigate claims that schools in Birmingham were taken over in a plot to impose hardline Islamic rule. His was one of four inquiries into the allegations.

During his probe he was handed a dossier of more than 3,000 messages posted in the WhatsApp group from April 2013 until it was shut down in March.

Some of the messages suggested the brutal murder of Lee Rigby and the Boston Marathon bombings were both faked.

One post above a YouTube link attributed to someone identified as Teacher L on 24 May last year said: 'ATTACK ON ISLAM! Plz watch and share ASAP before they remove it!!!!! London butcher incident; It’s is a hoax And this is the link to reveal it.'

A message sent by Teacher C on 19 April said: 'Watch PROOF! Boston Marathon Bombing is Staged Terror Attack on YouTube.'

In May last year Mr Faraz allegedly posted a link to a news article about gay marriage followed by the message: 'These animals are going out full force. As teachers we must be aware and counter their satanic ways of influencing young people.'

There was evidence of young people being encouraged to 'adopt an unquestioning attitude to a particular hardline strand of Sunni Islam'

As they say: 'Compare and contrast'.