Spin

A couple of mornings ago Today sent a reporter to a fruit farm in Godalming and brought back a large punnet of Brexit-related gloom. (The edition in question isn't available on the iPlayer for some reason). Nick Robinson introduced the report with these words:

There's a warning today from Britain's berry growers that Brexit could crush the industry.

Zoe Conway's report included various hard-working, efficient migrant workers (as she portrayed them) worried about their future, plus farm managers fearing the collapse of their business. One farm owner was asked if he regretted his Leave vote, especially if it leads to what Zoe called a "hard Brexit". No contrasting views featured in Zoe's report.

That's par for the course, of course. But tied in with that piece was the reporting that very same morning of the results of a survey among soft berry producers - a survey the BBC itself had commissioned (for reasons known only to itself but guessable by others). 

The main BBC News website report on the survey (by Emma Simpson) is striking for the way it tries to spin its own findings. The BBC's spin is deeply negative about Brexit and conducive to advancing arguments in favour of retaining free-movement:

UK summer fruit and salad growers are having difficulty recruiting pickers, with more than half saying they don't know if they will have enough migrant workers to harvest their crops. 

Many growers blame the weak pound which has reduced their workers' earning power, as well as uncertainty over Brexit, according to a BBC survey.

The results themselves, cited later in the article, are strikingly at odds with the mood music of the report as a whole:

These results say to me that only 3% of the surveyed farmers are seriously alarmed about "migrant labour shortages'. Another 18% are a bit worried. And what the other 79% (though the figures don't actually add up to 100%)? Well, they either say they have have enough seasonal workers or aren't sure if they've got enough. In other words, that 79% don't sound alarmed about the situation, despite the BBC's alarmist headline.  

I think this is a clear case of BBC bias (conscious or unconscious).

And it's far from being the first time that the BBC has spun its own surveys in a favoured direction.

Who can forget the particularly blatant way the BBC spun its own survey on the attitudes of British Muslims back in 2015? While many other media outlets led with the astonishing finding that 27% of British Muslims expressed  some sympathy with those who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre the BBC heavily pushed the "Most British Muslims 'oppose Muhammad cartoons reprisals'" angle. 

Plus there was some very dodgy reporting by the BBC's News at Six and the BBC website into young people's concerns, also in 2015, where both the TV bulletin and the website article omitted all mention of the third biggest concern of the polled young people - immigration. And it was another BBC poll to boot.

And there was Newsnight and the BBC website's blatant attempts to rig the debate before freedom of movement was granted to Romanians and Bulgarians back in 2013, where the BBC twisted its own survey by pushing the 'Few planning to migrate to UK' angle. Others quickly pointed out that the BBC's own figures actually suggested a massive influx of Romanians and Bulgarians was coming. 

As you'll note, all of the above have immigration as a running theme, whether directly or indirectly. And all of them were spun by the BBC in the same way - the pro-immigration way. 

The BBC is not to be trusted with reporting its own poll findings.

The Ahmadi, mainstream Muslims and the BBC

The general BBC reaction to Channel 4's What British Muslims Really Think has proved that the corporation still has a serious bias problem when it comes to covering these kinds of story. And, yet, as Sue wrote recently, programmes like Owen Bennett-Jones's The Deobandis show that the BBC isn't a complete monolith in this respect.

Zoe Conway's report from Glasgow on this morning's Today (from 02:31:47) also struck me as marking another step forward. 

She looked into mainstream Muslim attitudes towards Ahmadi Muslims (the Ahmadiyya community) in the wake of the murder of shopkeeper Asad Shah by another (non-Ahmadi) Muslim. and what she found was pretty ugly: Anti-Ahmadi posters are appearing; Derogatory leaflets have been circulated in a mosque saying, among other things, that even just meeting an Ahmadi in the street hurts the Prophet's heart; Mainstream Muslim children are being told by imams that saying 'hello' to Ahmadis is "haram" (a sin); and Ahmadi businesses have been boycotted, with some Muslim protesters standing outside Ahmadi shops telling people not to go in. Here in the UK. Now.

And this follows a couple of features on yesterday's Sunday (from 16:58) on "what is it like to live in Britain as a member of the persecuted Ahmadi Muslim sect" - features explicitly related to Mr Shah's murder and "the discovery of leaflets in a South London Mosque calling on them to be killed" if they refuse to convert to mainstream Islam. 

William Crawley introduced the piece by saying of the Ahmadiyya community, "Seen as heretical by other Muslims, persecuted in Pakistan and now, it's reported, facing increasing hostility here in the UK".

From the sounds of it though, it's gone well beyond being a case of "it's reported". It actually is.

An Ahmadi imam from London then described some of the "hate crimes" he's witnessed and said that "this sort of thing is happening quite frequently". He added, "Maybe some people are trying to create an atmosphere here as back in Pakistan, for example. There is a lot of persecution of the community going on. They are bring that feeling over here as well and want to create the same situation in this country".  He wants the government to sit up and take notice.

Adil Khan, an American academic, was then very interesting on the background. The persecution of the Ahmadiyya really kicked in with the formation of Pakistan - a country premised on being an Islamic state. The 1974 Pakistan constitution declared Ahmadis to be "non-Muslim" and the persecution got even worse.

Though William Crawley suggested (as you might expect from a BBC presenter) that this shows it's "more to do with politics than theology" (a milder strain of the 'It's nothing to do with Islam' meme), Professor Khan replied, "You need both". 

The more I think about where we now find ourselves with this kind of imported hatred, and how such things have been allowed to creep up on us, the more I despair at just where our politicians and (parts of the) media have been blithely leading us in recent decades (led, of course, by the BBC).

I had no idea about any of this until the past year or so. And now, unfortunately, I've had to quickly learn about it from scratch, and I don't think I should have had to.


Update: More on this can be found in a just-published piece at the Spectator: Sectarianism is on the rise in Britain – as any Ahmadiyya Muslim can tell you by Hussein Kesvani.

His piece also mentions the BBC. It appears as if it was the BBC that broke the story of the murderous leaflets in a London mosque:

More recently, the BBC revealed that literature which called for capital punishment for the Ahmadis had been discovered in a London mosque with links to the group.

Zoe v Ken

Credit where credit's due to Today's Zoe Conway. 

Supporters of Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman held a rally last night. The speakers included Ken Livingstone and George Galloway.

Zoe made it clear from the start of her package on this morning's Today that the audience was "overwhelmingly" from the Bangladeshi community. Mayor Rahman is frequently accused of favouring that community.

She also described the speeches as "arguably rather provocative", specifically citing Livingstone's call to "fight on all fronts". (Her cautious BBC-style use of "arguably" didn't disguise the fact that she clearly thought it was provocative.)

That is really was provocative is, I would say, undeniable - though the word I'd use is "inflammatory". This is what 'Cuddly Ken' said:

When these commissioners [from PricewaterhouseCoopers] turn up, find out where they live and then have a peaceful demonstration outside their homes so their neighbours know these are the kind of people who overturn a democratically elected mayor. Make their lives intolerable. This is an appalling situation.

[If people can be hauled in by the police for tweeting derogatory comments or reading Churchill speeches in public, then how on earth can Ken Livingstone be allowed to get away with that?]

Zoe next pulled the rug out from under Lutfur Rahman's defence:

In terms of what Mayor Rahman's defence is, he's arguing that Pricewaterhouse has found no evidence of criminality or fraud. But there is a problem with that argument, and that's that Pricewaterhouse said there is evidence of possible fraudulent payments by the council to nine organisations but they've decided to step back and let the police pursue. 

And what followed was even more remarkable.

Braving what must have been a highly intimidating atmosphere, Zoe challenged Messrs Livingstone, Galloway and Rahman. She completely exposed Livingstone's bullshit, beginning with the words, "That's not true! That's not true!" (I've never heard a BBC reporter speak to Ken Livingstone that way before) before taking on Galloway and Rahman. By simply repeating her point that the auditors had found evidence of possible fraud, their guff fell flat. Good on her!

"This is much more than a local news story", she then told Justin Webb, proving her point by pointing out the frankly staggering fact that Tower Hamlets council has a budget of £1 billion. 

Her discussion with Justin ended with the following damning words:

We would like our own interview with the mayor but unfortunately so far Mayor Rahman has not agreed to an interview. 

Now, I suspect the presumption of many of us would be that the BBC would have inclined towards lending Lutfur Rahman, Ken Livingstone and George Galloway a sympathetic ear. They are left-wing, pro-Islamist, pro-racial identity politics after all. Zoe Conway gave us a good counter-example here. (As did John Ware's Panorama some months ago). 

I'm not the only one impressed by Zoe's report though. The genuinely indefatigable Ted Jeory of Trial by Jeory was impressed too:

brilliant report just now on @BBCr4today by @zoeconway1 on last night's Water Lily event. Put Ken, Lutfur & Galloway on spot over PwC report
— Ted Jeory (@TedJeory) November 13, 2014

The new Crimean War, national socialists in Ukraine, UKIP, Wacko, and sturnus borealis

Last night's Newsnight was a classic of its kind.

First up, Ukraine and Russia's military activity in Crimea. The programme began by asking if Russia's deployment of troops in Crimea could escalate into war with Ukraine. Thankfully, diplomatic editor (and military historian) Mark Urban [who managed to survive Ian Katz's cull] was on hand to dampen down the sensationalism of its introduction. 

Gabriel Gatehouse's subsequent investigation into the role of role of the far-right in Ukraine was a case of Newsnight (and the BBC more generally) starting, very belatedly, to catch up with warnings many people online and in sections of the press have been sounding for weeks (and, at Harry's Place, for months). The BBC happily clapped while the 'revolution' was ongoing, downplaying or ignoring completely the pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic elements who spearheaded the anti-government violence and helped make the 'revolution' possible. 

Gabriel talked to several such groups, with individuals openly admiring National Socialism, and blaming the Jews and Russians for controlling the economy, and pointed to the 'Heil Hitler' iconography worn by leaders of the nationalist Svoboda party, which now holds four posts in the new government (including, rather worryingly, the defence ministry).

The BBC isn't usually slow to focus on far-right groups or to make them the centre of a story. The fact that they were so slow to do so here could again be put down to blindness (bias?) on their part, caused perhaps by their over-enthusiasm for the pro-EU/anti-Russian Ukrainian protests. 

From Svoboda to UKIP...

...a party which no sane person could ever accuse Newsnight of being biased towards - as this edition again so graphically demonstrated.

A report from their spring conference from Newsnight began with a stunt about a fruitcake and with Newsnight reporter Zoe Conroy asking Nigel Farage, "Are you a fruitcake-free party?", on the back of it. Then it was onto questions about why they'd "borrowed the BNP's 'Love Britain'" slogan. [Did they really 'borrow' it, Zoe? Or is that a smear?] Then Zoe, though reporting from this year's conference, showed clips of Godfrey Bloom at last year's conference, and recalled 'Bongo Bongo Land' and 'sluts' [without mentioning that he'd had the part whip withdrawn from him by UKIP]. Various UKIP figures then had to defend their party on camera before Zoe said the party "was in no dangerous of seeming too PC today" with Nigel Farage making "one of his strongest attacks on immigration policy". 

"But it was questions about the role of campaign director Neil Hamilton, the former Tory MP who took cash for questions, which got the party leadership rattled. Could he really be the face of the new UKIP?", Zoe said, before taking the lead in stirring up this little controversy, including at the press conference with Nigel Farage. Was she the journo Nigel accused of being "obsessed with it?". I think she was. 

Nigel Farage was due to be interviewed on Newsnight last night but (as Emily Maitlis put it), he cancelled the interview after that press conference. UKIP's press office said that was because they "didn't want to dwell on the wrong issues" - which, given Zoe Conway's report and Newsnight's past record of reporting UKIP, is exactly what Emily Maitlis would have made him do. 

Newsnight always treats UKIP this way. I blame it on the boogie bias.

Finally, it was onto the issue of corporal punishment and the question, 'So is beating character-forming, or is that just claptrap?' 

One of Ian Katz's all-women panels discussed the matter, with Emily interviewing "author" Kathy ('Am I right, girls?)' Lette and "novelist and parenting author" Anne ('Thought for the Day') Atkins. 

Poor Anne Atkins was talked over right, left and centre by Emily Maitlis and Kathy Lette, who really should have been taught at school to behave with more respect and wait her turn. (Alex Ferguson's teacher, Mrs Thomson, might have known how to deal with her!)

You can read what Sir Alex Ferguson actually told the Times Education Supplement here. Newsnight was guilty of sensationalising what he said.

Finally, it was the newspaper front pages: The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph and The Times (in that order), before ending with images of starlings swirling and the aurora borealis over Britain the night before, accompanied by hip music.