Did the BBC spike Boris?

spiked has paraphrased the nub of Brendan O'Neill's latest piece into a tweet: 

We need to talk about the role the media played in toppling Boris. The BBC and others blew Partygate and Pinchergate out of proportion and goaded Tory rebels to resign. They helped to orchestrate Boris’s fall. That’s not democratic, says Brendan O’Neill.

Here's the passage that relates to the main theme of this 'ere blog:

But just because the push against Boris had no leader and no decipherable purpose does not mean it wasn’t orchestrated. This is where we come to the most chilling feature of this strangest of political takedowns – the role played by the media. As the old public realm has been denuded of structure and ideas, so the media have come to play an outsized part in shaping political discussion and even determining politicians’ fortunes. The media unquestionably stoked the anti-Boris revolt. First by blowing those daft scandals out of proportion, unilaterally decreeing that they were the most important issues in the land. And secondly by goading, subtly and perhaps only semi-consciously, each of the actors in the lonely faction.

Indeed, the rebels’ letters of resignation were primarily aimed at the media. They were for the BBC and the Guardian and social media, not for us in the now broken and disregarded realm of what used to be called public life. This is why they all first appeared on Twitter – where else? – and why they were written in such media-speak. Because the audience was the media elites, not the people. A clear symbiotic relationship has now developed between an isolated political class searching for a new public realm in which to execute its business and a media that can sniff the power it accidentally enjoys in the post-party, post-ideological age. Call me old-fashioned, but I see little positive in the removal of a PM voted into power by 14million citizens by disparate aggrieved Tory actors and a media establishment that understands us even less than politicians do.

Even if Boris deserved the boot, doesn't Brendan have a point? 

Having each other's backs

Talking of spiked, Mick Hume has a piece in the Daily Mail today headlined Whatever you think of Boris, the BBC’s obsessive campaign to destroy him is a disgrace. Along the way he criticizes Nick Robinson for leading the "Boris-bashing" on Today, and "sneering" and "going beyond what could be considered objective journalism".

Far from being impartial, Robinson was editorialising at every opportunity, the tone always scathing or sarcastic — to the point where one could almost hear him rubbing his hands with glee during each dramatic pause in his diatribe.

Mick Hume puts it down to BBC bias:

It has built itself in the image of the woke metropolitan elites who run it. And they long since decided that, to appropriate Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, Boris is not ‘one of us’.

Interestingly, the comments at the Mail are going the BBC's way for once. "Boris-bashing" has spread in recent weeks among the public, unimpressed at everything they've been hearing about Partiesgate.

Still, I've rather enjoyed the irony today of the very personification, indeed the living embodiment, of those "woke metropolitan elites", ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, riding to Nick Robinson's aid on Twitter:

Alan Rusbridger: Portraying Nick Robinson as a member of the woke metropolitan elite - the latest Mail obsession - is wide of the mark. I doubt it will stop him doing his job rather well. It’s called journalism.

Nick Robinson: Thanks Alan. I rather enjoyed the irony of being accused of anti-Tory bias by a former editor of Living Marxism 🤣.

And Gary Lineker has popped in too with a smug "quick reminder":

Gary Lineker: Quick reminder: the BBC has tens of thousands of people that work for It, with a huge cross section of views. The corporation doesn’t think as one. There’s no political criteria from above other than impartiality in news & current affairs. Any perceived bias is probably your own.

It may be a typo on Gary' part, but I shall think of the BBC as "It" from now it. Never mind 'Auntie Beeb', it's 'Cousin It' from now on.

Doctor Who vs the face-aches

  

The days when Spiked never used to criticise the BBC are long gone. 

They have a piece today about a Kirsty Wark-fronted programme called Womanhood which they say was “close to trans propaganda”: 

The BBC’s Womanhood presents trans dogma as truth and biology as lies. It treated a feminist activist appallingly, while letting males define what womanhood means. The BBC seems to think biological sex doesn’t matter.  

Meanwhile, another piece tackles “prejudice against the ugly” on Doctor Who under the headline Diversity: the ugly truth. Prejudice against the ugly is the last unchecked prejudice of our time. But who’ll stand up for the face-aches?:

It’s no secret that Doctor Who has been oddly tactful of late, with the thrills of time and space travel often seemingly taking a back seat to climate-change finger-wagging and lectures about historical racism / sexism. So I was a bit surprised to find myself irrevocably ‘triggered’ by something I saw in episode two of the new series: the Doctor, confronting an enemy whose features are entirely obscured by a battle helmet, yells, ‘Take your hat off, mate!’ – but when the enemy complies, revealing the hideous face of a Sontaran, she sneers, ‘Urgh – on second thoughts, put it back on!’. 

Harmless? Perhaps. But only if there isn’t a single child anywhere in this country who looks even a little bit like a Sontaran – and, frankly, we all know that there are plenty. So why does the BBC feel it’s okay to show something that could lead to those kids getting bullied in the playground, when it is clearly so pathologically cautious about anything that could endanger any of the others? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is that ugly people have become the last under-represented minority on British television.

Indeed. Us beautiful people need to be 'allies' of the homely and the ugly, and Dame Cressida Dick should have a word with Doctor Jodie about her hate speech towards that poor Sontaran. There should be no place in our society for Sontaranophobia, even if Sontarans want to conquer the Earth and enslave us all.

A Spike in representation?

It's a funny old world. 

In years gone by Sue and I would share our astonishment at Spiked's unwillingness to say a bad word about the BBC. 

Yes, they might sharply attack the mainstream media in general from time to time, but the BBC - for some reason - seemed off limits. 

I always put that down to Spiked people being regularly invited onto BBC programmes - as, indeed, they were. 

But Spiked, praise be!, has seriously fallen out of love with the BBC in recent months and joined the ranks of the anti-BBC partisans. 

It’s time to defund the BBC is one of their latest headlines and Calvin Robinson's piece is one of those pieces Sue might have had in mind when she says that posts like ours are becoming so widespread as to pretty much render us surplus to requirements. 

I could have written much of it myself, and rather wish I had,

Indeed, one bit echoes an aborted post I did sketch out on 23 June but didn't publish. 

But I'll publish it now, for what it's worth.

It came after the departing Lord Hall announced another £100K of the licence fee would be spent on "increasing diversity on TV":

But I think the thing that might strike most members of the public on reading this is that the BBC's new commitment is absurd and flies in the face of what they actually see - the evidence of their own eyes (or, if you listen to Radio 4, ears). 

Just look at the question of representation: 

There's no need for the BBC to commit itself to ramping up BAME representation because BAME people aren't under-represented on screen. 

If anything, BAME people are significantly over-represented on screen. 

The extent of this is fully revealed if you look at the Diamond reports of the Creative Diversity Network, which monitors the kind of diversity the BBC is talking about on the five main UK broadcasters from a position of advocating for increased diversity of the BBC variety. 

Its findings (from 2019) confirm the impression many people hereabouts have instinctively felt - that if you tune into BBC TV, you'll see more BAME people than you'd expect to see if you think in terms of the population:

The BAME population of the UK is now around 15%, so - as these figures show -  BAME people are actually over-represented on broadcasters like the BBC in almost every area. 

The figures for children's programmes and religious programmes are especially unsurprising: 36.7% for children's programmes and 44.1% for programmes about religion. 

So the BBC doesn't need to chuck £100m at making BAME people even more over-represented. 

Dig a little further into those Creative Diversity Network findings and you find that people over the age of 50 are the ones most under-represented on screen, and that men fare worse than women.

The obvious conclusion is that the BBC needs a lot more non-BAME, over-50 men on screen to better represent the population. 

Fox in the henhouse

You know why I ignored Laurence Fox’s bombshell on Q.T. and focused instead on Shami?  It’s not just because she poo-poohed antisemitism. No, the reason I chose to highlight Shami’s performance (how can one be shamefaced yet brazen, all at once?) - is slightly different. I ignored Laurence just because I thought what he said was ‘normal’. It’s exactly what most people were probably saying at home. You know, (groan,) “A woman then!”.

Not that I agreed with Laurence that Starmer would make the best Labour leader. He’s not even the least worst.  As John Lennon might have remarked ”He’s not even the best drummer candidate in the leadership contest. 

However, I happen to think Laurence’s choice was a bit sexist, but not in a bad way. I think he was being ‘sexist’ in recognising masculinity's inherent authoritativeness. Shouldn't say so, but there you go. 'Trust him, he’s a bloke’ is how (I’m guessing) Laurence’s mind was working. 

Maybe he had mugged up on the Labour Party’s leadership race in anticipation of his stint on QT, but I’m thinking not. I bet he hasn’t been as obsessed with the matter as the BBC has been. (I love the way they call it a ‘race’ ) I’m sure the Beeb wasn’t half as interested in the minutiae of the qualities of the contenders for any other Party’s race.

This ridiculous kerfuffle has been all over the media. I’m just linking to Brendan O’Neill’s piece without even having read it yet, though I intend to do so in a minute.

Has Laurence been chucked out of Equity? Something like that. All the luvvies adhere to woke - it’s the rules.

Don’t read this, go and read Brendan.

Update:
Oh, and of course, Douglas

...and on and on...

Meanwhile, following Sunday's The Andrew Marr Show, the War of Arron's Ear rumbles on...

spiked's Brendan O'Neill has written what I think is an absolutely spot-on defence of the BBC over at the Spectator. (And Rob Burley will love it).

Brendan rails against the "self-important" enemies of free speech - and a free media - who want to force the BBC to permanently exclude people whose views they dislike, and contends that such people's "unhinged Banks-bashing" is merely a cover. Remember, remember, he argues. "Remember it is voters they’re really hating on" - Brexit-voting voters:

It is the role of a news organisations to decide what is interesting, to arrange interviews, to interrogate people who are involved in politics or business or some other important public pursuit. That is exactly what the BBC is doing this morning. It is contributing to a healthy open society. Those trying to starve Banks of the oxygen of publicity are doing the opposite: they want to limit media freedom, freeze difficult discussion, and force broadcasters to conform to their worldview. They are a menace to democracy and open debate.

Meanwhile, over at the Guardian, those very people are out in force. There's Lord Adonis, of course,  who described Andrew Marr's treatment of Arron Banks as "pathetic", but also Suzanne Moore (who I can never think of without thinking of Germaine Greer's infamous description of her "hair bird's-nested all over the place, f*ck-me shoes and three fat inches of cleavage"), who talks of "Marr’s failure to press Banks" - which certainly isn't what I saw - and of the BBC having "the Ukippy right wing...run circles around it" - which is just plain silly (as anyone who saw Jo Coburn's recent interview with Gerard Batten will testify).

'Complaints from both sides' arguments are shown up again here. The likes of Lord Adonis and Suzanne Moore are talking complete nonsense. One side is merely frothing (or fake-frothing) at the mouth.

P.S. Arron Bank's would-be nemesis, Carole Cadwalladr, wasn't happy with The Andrew Marr Show:

• Nice work BBC. You just provided a platform to a liar. Who has just smeared me on live tv. Thank you so much.
• Add it to the bill.
• This whole episode is utterly shameful. And you owe me an apology.
• I had to be pre-recorded to go on BBC R4 Today to talk about Arron Banks . Why wasn't he? #Marr. Serious serious editorial mistakes here.
• I am genuinely shocked and upset about this. If you value what The Observer has been trying to do for the last 2 years, please consider supporting our work. We don't have a licence fee. We have a fraction of the BBC's resources. And we need your support. 
• Or give money to openDemocracy. Proud to have worked with @PeterKGeoghegan & @maryftz on these latest revelations. Their work (and @AdamRamsay) has been exemplary.
• The editor responds. I don't even know where to start with this. The last few minutes were a car crash. Lies upon lies. All unchallenged. He lied about Eldon, what had been declared to Electoral Commission, the "emails", me.
• Banks is happy though.

Comments could have gone far better for her though. 

Lots of people picked up on her "give money to openDemocracy" tweet as revealing something they think she's not been straightforward about (which given her complaints about transparency might be considered hypocrisy on her part). 

openDemocracy's largest funders are organisations belonging to a single foreign donor who, coincidentally, is campaigning in the UK to stop Brexit - namely He Who Mustn't Be Mentioned, one George Soros.

Maybe Rob & Co. at the BBC can investigate that?

Reality Recheck

Further to yesterday's post about the BBC's Reality Check being giving its own reality check by Tom Slater of spiked, Tom has now written a piece about it for The Spectator headlined The BBC is wrong: university censorship is definitely not a myth. He describes the BBC's report as "incredibly partial" and ends by saying:

And it’s also ironic that on Wednesday, 24 hours after the BBC ‘Fact Check’ was published, students at Oxford voted to ban a controversial Christian group from Lady Margaret Hall. If campus censorship is a myth, someone should probably tell them.

Is free speech under threat?

The BBC's Reality Check has a piece by Rachel Schraer and Ben Butcher headlined Universities: Is free speech under threat?, and the answer they give is a pretty emphatic 'No'. 

Indeed, it's clearly an attempted debunking of the kind of fears you find expressed by the likes of Brendan O'Neill and spiked, and also by many on the political Right.  

Naturally, the good folk at spiked have responded, and I have to say that I found their reality checking of the BBC's Reality Check rather convincing - especially as they give large numbers of links which back up their claims (which I've added to this post).

*******

So over to Tom Slater:

CAMPUS CENSORSHIP THREAD: This BBC piece is being enthusiastically shared by lecturers and students' union officers who want to pretend Free Speech isn't under attack on campus. It is. And here's why this BBC research is so shoddy 1/10

spiked's Free Speech University Rankings has for four years assessed policies that limit speech as well as bans on speakers, events and materials by both unis and students’ unions (SUs). In 2018, we found 55% placed explicit restrictions on speech 2/10

The BBC focuses on different (and very limited) metrics, and breezes over the role played by policies -- policies that, for eg, ban 'transphobic' material outright, as some unis do. Hey ho. But putting those huge oversights aside, its claims still don't stack up 3/10

It claims only six universities have banned speakers since 2010. This is incredibly misleading. The majority of speaker bans are imposed by SUs. Everyone knows this. But it seems because SUs aren't subject to freedom of information requests, they haven't been included. 4/10

We at spiked actually bother to check. We analyse news reports, contact SUs directly and pore over publicly published SU documents. But frankly, an hour on Google would make clear that six speaker bans since 2010 is a big underestimate 5/10

Only 6 speakers banned since 2010? Here's 6 to start with (Unis & SUs):

Bindel and Yiannopoulos at Mancs

Bindel (again) at Sheffield

O'Neill and Stanley at Oxford

Haddad at Kent 6/10

Here's 6 more (Unis & SUs):

Gifford at UCL

Namazie at Warwick

Robinson banned at Edinburgh, Durham and Brookes  

Haddad (again) at Westminster 7/10

Beyond speakers, here are 6 banned events (Unis & SUs):

Pro-Palestine events at UCL, UCLAN and Exeter   

UEA event, over UKIP speaker

Cardiff comedy gig

Durham social

I could go on

8/10

The BBC also pretty much dodges No Platform, despite the fact No Platform policies (held by 37% of SUs) are blanket, pre-emptive bans on speakers/groups. Events featuring speakers from those groups don't have to be cancelled because they're never approved in the first place 9/10

Measuring campus censorship is tricky. So much of it is cultural, rather than institutional. Events are disrupted by protests. People self-censor. But even if you're just looking at black-and-white policies and bans, the 'it's barely a thing' conclusion is just plain wrong 10/10

*******

A BBC Reality Check that is just plain wrong? Well, blow me down with a feather!

*******

Incidentally, it's only a very few years since BBC Online journalist Rachel Schraer, who co-wrote this piece, was writing pieces for The New Statesman - such as this during the 2015 general election, subsequently reposted at her own blog. 

The Conservatives want you to think that their programme is nasty but necessary. They’re half right.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks shouting at middle-aged white men. They are very keen to reassure me I’ll come round to their side once I grow up a bit, get a fatter pay packet and stop being so young, naïve and female.

Because, this much we know to be true – the left-leaning among us might have the bleeding hearts, but it’s the centre-right, cynical but pragmatic, who make the necessary hard decisions to fix the economy – because they used to be like you, you know, until they got real. You can accuse the Nasty party of a lot of things, but naïve idealism is not usually one them.

There’s a persistent narrative here that needs interrogating, not least so I can stop getting into arguments with old Tories. It’s become so ingrained that even people who stand against Conservative policies have internalised the belief they are based in hard-nosed, sensible economics.

I presume she wasn't a BBC journalist three years ago, but fresh out of uni maybe? Where, as a "left-leaning" student, she'd have been regularly "shouting at middle-aged white men" perchance? Was she the very kind of student union activist that she's defending here?

"Doing a lot of good work in that area, isn't she, Justine Greening?"

For a powerfully-argued counterblast against the government's plans to allow people to pick their own gender without a doctor's diagnosis - and specifically to allow them to change their own birth certificates (from male to female, female to male, or either male female to 'X') - please read Brendan O'Neill's piece about it at Spiked. 

And once you've done so please go on to read the BBC News website's report about those plans. 

The thing you'll immediately notice about that BBC report is that it gives the government's side of the argument (quoting extensively from Justine Greening) and then gives the views of people who agree with the government's plans. 

Everything, from the chose of parties quoted, to the direct quotes used, to the article's sub-headlines, to the Getty image chosen, presents these plans in a positive light. Everyone seems to agree that 'it's a very good thing, and about time too!'

And yet, as Brendan O'Neill proves, not everyone does agree that it's a very good thing. A lot of people will think that it's a very bad thing. Brendan himself calls it "Orwellian":

Britain is going full Orwell. The Tory government is proposing to include in the Gender Recognition Bill the ‘right’ to alter the sex on one’s birth certificate. So if a 32-year-old man decides that he is in fact a woman, he could be able to go to the General Register Office and insist that the word ‘Boy’ be erased from his birth certificate and replaced with the word ‘Girl’, or ‘Female’. Even though he was not a girl when that certificate was drawn up. Even though the midwife who declared ‘It’s a boy!’ when he was born, and the birth registrar who later wrote the word ‘Boy’ or ‘Male’ on his birth certificate, were telling the truth. That truth, that publicly recorded truth, that national truth, would be replaced with a lie. We’ve entered Ministry of Truth territory. The memory hole is real

The wholly one-sided BBC report gave no sense whatsoever that anyone might think that the government's plans are wrong-headed and dangerous. 

And that tells you a good deal about the BBC's bias towards social liberalism. 

It probably never even occurred to the reporter behind that piece to even think of seeking out a counter-balancing view. 

******

Incidentally, in trying to check out whether this BBC report was typical of the BBC's coverage (it was), I came across the following example from Sunday morning's Breakfast. Guest Margaret Doyle was doing the paper review and discussing this very issue with BBC presenter Christian Fraser. Here's how that part of their discussion ended:

Margaret Doyle: There's a bit of controversy over it but I think that the broad thrust of this government is to push forward that agenda of liberalisation and equality and say, well, maybe we need to change how we look at transgender, just as how we have changed also the way we look at homosexual relationships.
Christian Fraser: Doing a lot of good work in that area, isn't she, Justine Greening?
Margaret Doyle: Yeah. 

It probably never even occurred to Christian Fraser that his expression of a personal view there was even remotely controversial or in any way lacking in impartiality. It could hardly be less impartial (however much you may agree with it). 

Brendan O'Neill: Selected Posts

Thoughts you are unlikely to hear on Radio 4's A Point of View or Four Thought:

"Europe"

Brendan O'Neill has a very interesting piece at Spiked putting 'the progressive case for a Brexit'.

Whatever your views on leaving or remaining, the opening section of his speech-turned-article makes a point about the BBC which merits sharing here:

The Brexit camp has asked the BBC to do it one, pretty small favour in the run-up to the EU referendum: to differentiate between ‘Europe’ and ‘the EU’. To encourage its reporters to say ‘Europe’ only when they are referring to the vast continent we live in, and to say ‘the EU’ when they are referring to the Brussels-run union of 28 member states. 

And the BBC has refused. Or it has at least failed to clarify when these two very different terms may be used by its staff. This means the BBC has implicitly given a nod of approval to its reporters to say ‘Europe’ when they really mean ‘the EU’. 

Some observers think the Brexit lobby is mad for asking for this clarification from the BBC. A writer for the New Statesman said it showed that some people will find bias in the most innocuous of things. In other words: chill out; it is not a problem for the national broadcaster to use the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘the EU’ interchangeably; stop making a fuss about nothing. 

But I think the BBC’s unwillingness to maintain a distinction between ‘Europe’ and ‘the EU’ is actually very revealing, and worrying. 

It speaks to one of the worst aspects of the debate about the EU: the conflation of the Brussels-based oligarchy with the continent of Europe; the mixing-up of the small, unaccountable cliques who peer down at Europe from their air-conditioned towers in Brussels with Europe itself. 

Think about some of the phrases that could potentially be uttered by BBC reporters if they use ‘Europe’ for ‘EU’. They could say that the people of Peterborough, one of the most anti-EU parts of Britain, are ‘against Europe’. They could say that people in Warrington, the seventh most Eurosceptic part of Britain, ‘hate Europe’ or are ‘voting to get out of Europe’. 

But of course they’re doing no such thing. Britain isn’t leaving the continent of Europe. That isn’t what we’re voting on. And these people in Peterborough and Warrington might love Europe. They might holiday in Spain, have friends in France, love Swedish TV dramas. Many, if not most, of them won’t be anti-European — they’re just anti-EU. 

The Stay campaign’s habit of conflating ‘Europe’ and ‘the EU’ means that those who are anti-EU can be easily depicted as anti-Europe, as xenophobic or nationalistic. These people’s political outlook — their dislike of the way Brussels can impose its writ on nation states — is reduced to a prejudiced outlook, a simple case of being anti-Europe. Their politics is pathologised, turned from opposition to a political system into opposition to a whole continent and its cultures and peoples.

The BBC and "the self-censorship of true opinion"

There's a very interesting piece at Spiked by Frank Furedi (h/t Guest Who at Biased BBC) which is well worth reading in its entirety but from which I'll quote the opening pair of paragraphs:

For me, the most memorable moment of the General Election campaign occurred a few days before voting. I was listening to the Radio 4 Today programme, which was running a feature on the issue of immigration in Northern Ireland. The presenter said that the traditional hostilities and tensions between Catholics and Protestant had been suspended, giving way to a new division between the Irish and immigrants. Interviews with people from Catholic and Protestant communities seemed to back up the claim that they no longer felt threatened by the ‘other side’. But what was truly fascinating about their comments was the language they used to describe their new concern. Time and again, they used a variation of the expression ‘We are not allowed to say what worries us’. It was as if they self-consciously feared naming the source of their concern. In the end, after failing to extract what it was that the interviewees were ‘not allowed to say’, the reporter said to them: ‘You mean immigration?’ At which point one could almost visualise the female respondent nodding her head in agreement as she blurted out: ‘Yes, immigration.’

Something about this exchange struck me as very disturbing. Over the past week my mind has kept coming back to it, to reflect on what it meant. Is it not worrying that in a free society ordinary citizens feel uncomfortable with publicly expressing their true opinions? What I found even more unsettling was that the BBC reporter did not express any surprise about the hesitant and reluctant manner in which her questions were being answered. One would have thought that the frequently expressed comment ‘We are not allowed to say’ was itself newsworthy, and an important point to comment on. But it was just nodded through, capturing the view that, yes, it is understandable that people should feel they are ‘not allowed to say’ certain things. In hindsight, it was difficult to avoid the impression that the BBC itself — perhaps inadvertently — was complicit in legitimising this self-censorship of true opinion.

It is, indeed, difficult to avoid that impression - though the extent to which such things are "inadvertent", especially given the BBC's past record, remains very much open to question.

As I wrote the other day: 

This is a TV and radio broadcaster, after all, that, it emerged in the course of the largely-pro-BBC, BBC-funded Prebble report, really did censor phone-in callers who expressed strong reservations about immigration (on Radio 4's Any Answers), because they felt such opinions might cause offense. (I'm still surprised that this admission hasn't been raised merry hell about by anti-BBC bias campaigners - as Sir John Major might have put it. It seems quite extraordinarily damning to me).

And, even if those views aren't straightforwardly censored these days (as they used to be), then expressing them live on air can still earn you a public shaming from a BBC interviewer. (For evidence of that - and sticking with Any Answers, please see an earlier post at ITBB that provides just such an example). 

Unless you're incredibly thick-skinned (or a keyboard warrior), why wouldn't you self-censor yourself rather than face embarrassment and a telling-off from the Right-Thinking Brigade? You've seen and heard on countless BBC programmes just what happens to people who dare to say such things out loud. Why would you want that to happen to you too? 

Helping Hamas?

The Israel-bashing Independent columnist Mira Bar-Hillel has been gloating this weekend:

...a YouGov poll this week found that only 15 per cent of Britons support Israel’s actions in Gaza. The credit for that goes to brilliant, brave reporters who have brought graphic images of the Gaza atrocities to our newspapers and television screens.

Mira forgets to mention that those those YouGov results show even less support for Hamas' rocket attacks on Israel (with 7% taking the David Ward line) and that more British people blame Hamas than Israel for the civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip.

Mira B-H, presumably, has the likes of Jeremy Bowen, Paul Adams, Yolande Knell, (etc) in mind when praising those "brilliant, brave reporters" for helping to turn the British public against Israel here.

If so, I think she's spot on. Their reporting, including their use of distressing images, must surely have had a - and, probably, the - major impact on the British public's apparent lack of support for Israel's actions, given that the British public still tends to see the news through their eyes.

On their use of graphic images and distressing stories, are they actually doing more harm than good though?

Spiked's Brendan O'Neill certainly thinks so:

The message that all this morally pornographic promotion of images and reports of Palestinian death sends to Hamas is this: victimhood works. The feverish Western marshalling of emotive imagery of Palestinian corpses to the political end of seeking sanctions against Israel or greater international protection for the Palestinian territories surely has the effect of encouraging Hamas to try to provide more of the same, more ‘telegenically dead’ Palestinians. There is a logic to Hamas’s alleged encouragement of great risk among the Gazan civilian population and certainly to its ‘parading’ of dead bodies before the press: it’s a response to the grotesque Western fashion for looking at, sharing and using as political tools images of dead Palestinians. Hamas is best seen as a kind of drug pusher to those in the West who have developed a very ugly habit of exploiting images of brutalised Palestinians both for their own needs (to advertise their emotional awareness) and for political purposes (to exert pressure on our leaders to condemn Israel).

And so does BBC Watch's Hadar Sela.

She appeared on BBC Radio 5 Live's Breakfast Show this morning (from about 1hr 51m in):  

I think one of the most significant factors has actually been what we aren't seeing. There's been dozens of Western reporters in the Gaza Strip for the last two weeks and more now, and yet we haven't seen one picture...I haven't seen one picture...of armed terrorists. I haven't seen one picture of terrorists shooting up RPGs, anti-tank missiles or mortars. 2,300 missiles fired. We haven't seen one picture of that in action in the Western media. Around 10-15% of those missiles fall short and actually land in the Gaza Strip and often, unfortunately, injure civilians there. We've seen no pictures of that. We've seen no pictures of injuries caused by shortfall missiles. There's been at least four summary executions taken place by Hamas in the Gaza Strip in the last week or two. We've seen no pictures of that. We've seen no pictures of Hamas people at all, even at the Shifa Hospital where they hide out, and yet we've seen journalists attending news conferences there, but nobody's actually talking about why these people are hiding and what's going on...

At which point the presenter, Rachel Burden, interrupted, putting the BBC/Mira Bar-Hillel point :

I suppose the story really is though the story of the 700+ people in Gaza, most of them civilians, many of them children, who've lost their lives and some of those pictures of children some people will find uncomfortable, others will find distasteful, others will say "That's very powerful and those are pictures that have to be brought to the world".

Hadar replied,

They are certainly very powerful pictures, and they're obviously very tragic and very sad pictures. I think there's a question here as well, you know...we've seen a lot of..as you say..a lot of pictures of dead people, dead children, injured people. We've seen at least one BBC crew actually filming in a morgue! Now, one of the things that struck me is, would the BBC go and film in a morgue in the UK? I'm not sure they would. Would they show pictures of blood on the floor in a morgue in the UK? I'm not sure they would, and so you have to ask yourself, why the different standard and what does that actually say about the journalism?

Now, as you quite rightly said in the beginning, at lot of these pictures are actually intended to influence world opinion, and this is a very big factor in this conflict because Hamas and terrorist organisations know they can't win this war militarily...they just can't...so they seek to win it on the public opinion field - and on what we call the 'lawfare' field - and so pictures like this obviously, beyond the fact that they are obviously a terrible documentation of what is happening, but they also serve a purpose and...

And which point Rachel Burden interrupted again and brought Hadar's short but important appearance to an abrupt halt in order to talk to a Palestinian journalist.

This is a genuine moral dilemma, isn't it, though? Do you not show such powerful images in your reports and, therefore, risk being accused of censorship (and bias), or do you show them and help a terrorist organisation like Hamas win the battle for public opinion by putting their own people in harm's way? 

BBC: another non-scandal, another overreaction

It's a strange thing that Spiked - which rose from the ashes of Living Marxism - is now one of my favourite magazines, publishing some of the most unexpected, intelligent articles around on all manner of subjects. (That I happen to agree with most of their articles probably helps.)

As the following - by Charlie Pearson - is a short article, I'll take the very rare liberty of quoting it in full as its sums up the BBC's 'The Sun Has Got Its Hat On' fiasco to a tee:

Charlie Pearson - BBC: another non-scandal, another overreaction

There can be no doubting that the sacking of BBC Radio Devon DJ David Lowe last week was poorly handled at best, and straight-up stupid at worst. The veteran local-radio DJ mistakenly played the 1932 version of ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’, which contains the ‘n-word’ in the second verse, and was asked to ‘fall on his sword’ by the BBC after offering to resign or apologise on-air.

Lowe himself summed up the situation best, stating that he was ‘compelled to pay the ultimate price’ for falling foul of ‘today’s unforgiving obsession with political correctness’. The BBC have since offered Lowe his job back, but he has declined, citing health reasons related to the fallout from the incident.

The fact that the decision was made after a single complaint makes this story even more shocking. The idea that just one complaint is enough to end a long and blemish-free career reflects the BBC’s inability to deal with even the most minuscule of scandals – indeed, the vast majority of his listeners either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

The disproportionate nature of the BBC’s reaction was hammered home when Weyman Bennett, the president of anti-fascist group Unite Against Fascism (UAF), criticised the BBC for dismissing Lowe. UAF, a group that is plagued by the complete lack of fascism to unite against in modern Britain, has become known for denouncing anyone it could speculate to be racist. The fact that even UAF admits it was an honest mistake shows how bizarre the BBC’s reaction was.

What the whole incident shows more than anything is how alienated the BBC decision-makers have become from ordinary people, who they assume are all irrational, and liable to lose their nut whenever an outdated lyric is aired.