BBC’s BNP Question Time panel is a travesty
Here is now the final panel: Sayeeda Warsi, Jack Straw, Chris Huhne, Bonnie Greer and Nick Griffin.
The panel is not only shockingly weak, but is very likely to fail to persuade anyone wavering towards the BNP to come back. I’ve tried explaining why before, but let me try again. Nick Griffin may have middle-class origins but he speaks to a very working class constituency who feel deeply disenfranchised from politics, or feel that the middle-class establishment are screwing them over in different economic and social ways.
To undercut that you need people who speak the language of the people Griffin is trying to reach out to, and point out that his is a politics of hatred that will not and cannot deliver any solutions. After all, BNP councillors have shown themselves to be even more incompetent, corrupt and lazy than those of other parties.
Unfortunately, other than Sayeeda Warsi and perhaps Jack Straw – none of the others will be very effective at undercutting that message. Chris Huhne and Bonnie Greer might even reinforce it.
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Carter-Ruck:0 Guardian: 1… but what next?
It is a happy thought that the finest legal minds at Carter-Ruck solicitors will have spent most of today explaining to the equally well-renumerated suits at Trafigura why their tried and tested writ happy playbook has overnight caused the firm even more reputational damage even than dumping that waste off the Ivory Coast and trying to avoid making any settlement for ages did.
And given how blogosphere versus mainstream media debates so often go around in circles while missing the point, it is good to see us all working together on the side of the angels this time.
So I not sure whether it is Carter-Ruck 0 Guardian 1 (own goal; blogosphere assist) or Blogosphere 1 Trafigura 0 but its pretty clear that they are lucky to get nil.
Now, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger tweets:
Now support BBC Newsnight which is being sued by #Trafigura and #carterRuck over toxic waste expose.
Good thinking! Let’s get those writs flying again. But at least we’re all watching closely now. But, more broadly, wouldn’t it be a good idea to use this enjoyable moment of consciousness-raising to think about how we might sustain our attention and sort out a few deeper issues out too. Others may have a range of ideas. Here are three modest proposals of my own:
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Why was Radio 1’s BNPgate ignored earlier?
Why did the BBC’s soft BNP interview take so long to become a national story? – asks Roy Greenslade at the Guardian.
A bit of background. Last week or so Radio 1 ran an amazingly soft and pathetic interview with two BNP members. It was helpfully titled ‘Young BNP members explain beliefs‘, but later hurriedly changed to ‘BNP members challenged on beliefs‘, once it became a bit obvious the first headline wouldn’t do them any favours (h/t Sarah).
There was outrage on many blogs over the interview, and the editor of the programme published a pathetic defence of the show which was further taken apart.
Greenslade has, helpfully, a good run-down of how the story slowly evolved until it went all over the press once the Mail on Sunday picked it up and ran a three-page splash. So why didn’t it happen earlier?
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High Court in Contempt of Democracy (Updated)
If you’ve been anywhere near Twitter or any one of numerous high profile British political blogs this morning then you’ll already know that the blogosphere is uproar over the gagging of the Guardian by law firm Carter-Ruck.
Out of deference to Sunny’s blood pressure, I’ll leave it to him to decide exactly how far LibCon will go into the detail of this story, but if you’re at all confused as to what this is all about then try try searching Google or Twitter for the words/hashtags ‘Trafigura’, “Guardian’ and ‘Carter-Ruck’, or just head over to any one of number of established blogs including my own Ministry of Truth, Chicken Yoghurt, Iain Dale, Guido, Mr Eugenides, Devil’s Kitchen, Longrider, Lib Dem Voice, NextLeft, LeftFootForward, Matt Wardman, Spyblog…
…and those are just the one’s I can recall off the top of my head.
What’s got everyone steamed up here is that the injunction served on The Guardian by Carter-Ruck prevents it from reporting the contents of a parliamentary question, tabled yesterday by a member of parliament, as it appear on the order papers published on the parliamentary website.
The injunction, as it stands, prevents The Guardian from:
…identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
It’s also not allowed to tell us why its been gagged in this fashion, or identify the company that instructed Carter-Ruck to obtain this injunction:
Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
We’re not even allowed to know exactly who the judge is who handed down this injunction, but for brevity we’ll refer to him/her here as Justice Kafka. continue reading… »
How to make excuses for your nasty friends
So, you’ve gone and formed a new grouping in the European Parliament, forsaking your moderate allies in a desperate attempt to stop haemorrhaging votes to frothing right-wing lunatics in the Home Counties (led by a nonsense-spouting twit).
But there’s a catch! Your new alliance is full of frothing far-right loons, and if this becomes a point of mainstream discussion, people might stop moaning about the guy your grassroots keep smearing as “mental” and start to wonder if they really want you in power after all.
But never fear! There are 5 easy steps that your party can take to make this all go away! Do it right and you’ll be laughing all the way into Downing Street…
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Is the BBC buying into global-warming denialism?
BBC Online published an article on Friday titled, What happened to global warming?, which has already been picked up by esteemed scientists such as the Drudge Report, the Telegraph’s Damian Thompson and Benedict Brogan. The Spectator won’t be far behind I bet.
The BBC’s Paul Hudson does that classic media trick of pretending there are two equally valid sides to a debate and confusing readers further. In fact it’s so lame that even a lay person such as myself can easily take it apart.
The central thesis to the article is that global temperatures have fallen recently, atmospherically and in the oceans (which absorb most of the heat), therefore the denialists must have a point!
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Investors complain about insufficient corruption
The couple of times I’ve ventured on to LibCon turf to have a rant about international credit rating agencies, I’ve been told I had no idea what I was on about, what with not working in financial markets, and then that I am a nutjob conspiracy theorist who think the world’s controlled by white cat-stroking evil dudes.
To be fair to the second commenter (Giles), it was very funny and he has since softened his line commendably. He now suggests that, while I may not be a total nutjob, I’m wrong to see what the credit rating agencies have been up to as a systematic abuse of power, rather than occasional rank incompetence.
Since those little contretemps, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government reform has been investigating what the credit rating agencies have been getting up to for the last 70-odd years, and has discovered that for the last thirty five years of those they have been tailoring their credit ratings so as to maximize income from the very people whose financial products they are rating. (backstory here)
That is, they have been acting corruptly.
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Obama speaks out on gay rights
There’s been a surge in the number of articles slamming Barack Obama for his allegedly disappointing record on progressive causes in recent weeks. Only a few days ago, Mehdi Hasan wrote in the New Statesman that:
The distance between Obama and Bush on a host of policies is not as great as many people might hope or have expected – and it appears to get narrower by the day. [...] It was inevitable that even the slightest sense of continuity in policy, personnel or practice would disappoint, as it has. Obama, however, has gone further, adopting his predecessor’s positions on a wide variety of issues, from the parochially domestic to the grandly geopolitical.
Although such attacks fit in comfortably with the Left’s long history of sado-masochism, they’re also remarkably ingenerous.
When Obama spoke last night at the Human Rights Campaign he reminded us of the abyss between his administration and his predecessor’s.
Remember that only four years ago, George W Bush was publicly stating that “marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society”.
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Exclusive: Second celebrity ‘terror threat’ story is fake
On January 7th 2009, The Sun newspaper published a now notorious front page article, which alleged that Islamic extremists were using an online forum at Ummah.com to compile a ‘hit list’ of prominent British Jews. Less than 48 hours later, Tim Ireland exposed Glen Jenvey, the self-styled ‘anti-terror expert’ behind The Sun’s story as a fraud who’d deliberately fabricated the evidence on which the entire story was based.
Four days later, The People newspaper ran its own ‘exclusive’ celebrity terror threat story, claiming that Madonna had been targeted by ‘Muslim fanatics seeking revenge for Israel’s attacks on Gaza’ on two British-run internet forums.
Today, after a detailed investigation, the results of which are published in full over at the Ministry of Truth, we can reveal that this story was also fabricated in a near identical fashion to that used in The Sun’s ‘Jewish hit list’ story and:
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The global spread of Christianity
The Muslim-obsessed Daily Mail is currently making a big deal out of a recent report claiming that “almost one in four people in the world are Muslim”.
“The project”, the article continues, “presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For example, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon”.
Accompanying the “revelation”, Paul Dacre’s paper is also sporting a picture of a group of ladies wearing black niqabs, the equivalent of sticking a picture of an Orthodox monk onto an article about “Christianity”.
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Little Lolitas?
[This entry comes with a trigger warning for mention of rape and abuse involving young girls. A longer version is online at Penny Red]
Thanks to a new book, ‘The Lolita Effect’, a kiddy-sized pole-dancing kit marketed to six year olds that got attention on both sides of the pond and, of course, Miley Cyrus, the ’sexualisation of young girls’ is in the press again. Cue a great deal of handwringing and think-of-the-children-isms in the same international press that, this same week, gave a good deal of coverage to child-rape apologists.
All of these stories are just begging, just laying back like the wanton little semiotic nymphets they are and begging to be illustrated with faux-naive photos of young girls in suggestive states of undress – or, more frequently and legally, parts of young girls. Merely, of course, to demonstrate how awful it all is.
Western society has a curious doublethink going on over young girls and sex.
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Miliband shouldn’t back down over Cameron’s EU friends
It annoys me about lefties that they get scared too easily by the media. David Miliband is likely to be the latest victim of Tory faux-outrage and he shouldn’t back down. He said in a speech:
Last week on the BBC, and you should go through the transcript, Eric Pickles, the Chairman of the Conservative Party, explained without a hint of shame that we should not condemn one of their new allies, the ‘For Fatherland and Freedom’ party, who every year celebrate the Latvian Waffen SS with a march past of SS veterans, because they were only following orders.
It makes me sick. And you know what makes me sicker? No one in the Tory party batted an eyelid. What do they say? All you need for evil to triumph is for good men to remain silent. I tell you conference, we will never remain silent.
All this is factually true. But the Tories have gone on the offensive, calling it an anti-semitism row.
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The BBC is good for household debt
The financial crisis suggests there’s a strong argument for the BBC remaining state-owned and not carrying adverts.
Yes, this claim looks bald. But the reasoning’s simple.
Let’s start from the assumption (which might be questionable) that high levels of personal debt were a contributory factor to the recession, and/or that a desire to pay down this debt might hold back the recovery.
The question then arises: why is debt so high?
TV advertising, that‘s one reason. A new paper by Matthew Baker and Lisa George establish this very cleverly. They exploited the fact that TV’s spread across the US in the 1950s was uneven, with some areas getting it earlier than others. They show that, in those areas where TV reception arrived earlier, households were more likely to take on debt.
In other words, TV – and TV advertising – contributes to household borrowing.
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Power without responsibility
Much excitement over the fact that a right wing newspaper owned by a wealthy foreigner will be urging its readers to vote Tory at the next election.
But I thought this was the most interesting report to come out of it:
It is rumoured that The Sun had made it clear that it would not back the party as long as Dominic Grieve remained Shadow Home Secretary. The previous Sun Editor, Rebekah Wade had made that clear after an unhappy dinner she had had with the man now moved to the Justice portfolio.
That’s not a rumour started by bitter Labour activists, but comes from Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home. And it isn’t a complaint – Tim seems to think it is perfectly normal that David Cameron would move his ministers if they upset Murdoch’s minions over dinner.
Exclusive: journalists criticise Andrew Marr for ‘pills’ question
Many politicians and journalists were united yesterday in criticising the BBC’s Andrew Marr for asking Gordon Brown whether he had been taking any pills.
While most politicians were happy to go on the record to criticise him, journalists were more reticent – preferring not to criticise a colleague. And yet, such was the strength of opinion against Marr, that a few did go on the record.
Cathy Newman, political correspondent for Channel 4 News, said: “journalists should be dealing in facts, not rumours”.
David Hencke, the Guardian’s Westminster correspondent said: “that was below the belt”
Another senior journalist and commentator, at the Observer, who wished to remain anonymous, said, “I thought it was completely the wrong thing to do. … The BBC has a duty to not just peddle internet rumours.”
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BBC’s Andrew Marr legitimises right-wing smears
I was pissed off with this yesterday and I remain just as furious today. On his show on the BBC yesterday Andrew Marry asked Gordon Brown:
A lot of people in this country use prescription painkillers and pills to help them get through; are you one of those people?
[hat/tip @GaryDunion].
This is bloody outrageous. Andrew Marr legitimised a smear that unscrupulous right-wing bloggers have been pushing for years.
It worked like this: right-wing bloggers kept questioning Gordon Brown’s sanity and calling him ‘bonkers’, demented and other names for partisan reasons. They justified this on the basis that some others within the Labour party had apparently also started these rumours. But no evidence is offered.
Then some national journalists referenced ‘internet rumours’ to repeat that smear, which was then used by the same bloggers to declare that they were justifed in their smears because it had reached national press and so it must be true. And so the BBC’s Andrew Marr bought into that feedback loop and asked a classic variation of: ’so when did you stop beating your wife’.
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Questioning the BNP
Well, it’s happened. The BBC has announced that British National Party leader Nick Griffin MEP will appear on political discussion show Question Time on 22 October. Facing him (among others) will be Justice Secretary Jack Straw, a man believed by frequenters of far-right web forums to be a key part of the International Jewish Conspiracy.
I mention this partly because it will be interesting to see if Nick Griffin manages not to mention it when he faces Straw. Griffin, of course, is the author of the 1995 pamphlet Who Are The Mindbenders, which catalogues in some detail how Jewish (and in many cases “Jew-ish”) people control the media.
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ConHome paranoia about ‘liberals’ at the BBC
Recently, Mike Smithson questioned the reliability of ConservativeHome’s polling of Tory grassroots members. He suggested that the site ought to join the British Polling Council if it wants to be taken seriously as a pollster. “Otherwise”, Smithson wrote, “shouldn’t we be dismissing each new finding as just another voodoo survey?”
On Friday, ConservativeHome links from its front page to yesterday’s Guardian story about Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s outrageous political meddling in the BBC’s hiring practices. Hunt had argued that the corporation ought to be actively seeking more Tories to be part of its news team, in order to counteract supposed liberal bias.
Directly below its link to the story, ConservativeHome alerts readers to a shocking discovery about the BBC that it had made on a previous occasion:
ConservativeHome discovered two years ago that there were eleven times as many liberals at the BBC as conservatives.
Er, actually, what they found was that, among BBC employers who were members of Facebook, eleven times as many recorded themselves as having ‘liberal’ political views as self-identified as ‘conservative’.
And not only is the sampling technique they employed a joke: there’s no attempt to analyse what parts of the corporation these liberal covert operatives were working in, or how senior they were, or what was the likelihood that they could influence BBC output. Just another voodoo survey then…
The terrorism story that keeps getting bigger
Tim Ireland’s take-down of the Sun’s front-page story through lots of investigation and persistence, forcing it to retract and apologise twice was a shining example of how bloggers can also have a big impact. Forget McBride and Draper – this is the real meat. But the saga hasn’t ended yet.
The Guardian’s Hugh Muir wrote yesterday:
…Last week we raised the question of Patrick Mercer, who chairs the parliamentary counterterrorism subcommittee, and had endorsed Jenvey as a man “who needs to be listened to”. The MP strongly condemned Jenvey’s deception, which occurred in January. “My office certainly received information from him but never worked with him,” he said. And that’s fine with us. But not with Mr Ireland’s site, Bloggerheads, for now it publishes an email sent by a Mercer aide to the People newspaper. “I have been in touch with Mr Jenvey about a number of things, but most of all the following, which in my view would combine well to make a very good Sunday story,” it says.
All quite collegiate then, but it comes down to the definition of “working” together, say sources close to the MP. Mercer himself had no further dealings with Jenvey, though his officials occasionally received information from him. Sometimes it checked out. Sometimes not. Two months after doubts were raised about Jenvey’s dodgy activities, the link between the fabricator and Mercer’s aides had yet to be broken. A shadowy world, this counterterrorism.
Tories already politically interfering with the BBC
Outrageous. The Media Guardian reports:
The shadow culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said today that the BBC should recruit more Tories to its news division in order to counter an “innate liberal bias”.
Hunt, speaking at a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch today, said the BBC had acknowledged that those who wanted to work there had centre-left views and quoted its former political editor, Andrew Marr, who in 2007 described the corporation as having an “innate liberal bias”.
They may like to offer a cuddly image but the new Tories really are frothing-at-the-mouth conspiracy theory wingnuts.
Andrew Marr made one comment, which is contradicted by a whole bunch of other comments showing right-wing bias at the BBC, and yet the keep trotting out this rubbish.
And just to be clear:
When Marr was asked about his liberal bias comment by the House of Lords select committee on communications in November 2007, he said: “Every time I talk about this I get into terrible trouble. I think if there is a bias, it is cultural and not party political.”
Clearly when Tories read ConservativeHome they agree with the commenters that immigrants make up 60% of the country, asylum seekers get all the housing and Damian McBride is sitting behind every BBC programme pulling the strings. But the rest of the country isn’t stuck in the 1970s any more. It’s socially liberal now – get over it.
What Jeremy Hunt is doing here is trying to use Marr’s comments just so he can pressure the BBC to recruit more politically friendly frothing-at-the-mouth Tories. It’s meddling – plain and simple. If the Prime Minister had said he wanted the BBC to employ more Labour biased journalists to interview him these people would be screaming blue murder. But this is alright because the BBC is apparently run by revolutionary Marxists.
More reading
Duncan Stott: Jeremy Hunt: BBC-Bashing Coward
Sarah Ditum: Jeremy Hunt and the BBC: your ballot or your job
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