Search Results for: BBC Media Action

BBC media action ‘spends 500k on climate alarmism’.

BBC World, Climate Change | 1st July 2014 | by David Keighley

BBC Media Action has spent an astonishing £500,000 on a cod survey in Asia that is designed to spread alarm about climate change among some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. Its methodology is so laughably inept that it doesn’t bear a moment’s scrutiny: how can lay respondents know with certainty (as the survey asked them) how much local climate has changed?

For the uninitiated, BBC Media Action was set up in 2011 to work alongside the BBC World Service in delivering desirable change in developing countries. It claims to be an ‘independent body’, but is funded by taxes because much of its money comes from the Department for International Development and the EU. Further, at least half its board of Trustees is actually nominated by the BBC. The current chairman, Peter Horrocks (a former editor of Newsnight) is also in charge of the BBC World Service broadcasting operation.

News-watch has been investigating Media Action (and its predecessor body, the World Service Trust) for several years. News of the Asian surveywas posted two months ago on the News-watch website, and it has also been noted that its activities were likely to be intensified with the influx of £20m of funds from backers such as the EU – and also because the World Service is expanding massively. The goal is to double the audience in five years.

That may well presage more of the Asian style surveys. If so, it will amount to blatant climate change alarmism on an unprecedented scale.

Most appalling s is that Media Action is deliberately targeting vulnerable young people, with the effect of inculcating a hugely negative worldview and a deep loathing for capitalism. The Asian report is full of unmitigated gloom and threatens famine, drought and disease on a massive scale. Despite the mental damage it causes, targeting the impressionable young has always been regarded as legitimate by those with extreme political causes because – like Prince Charles – they believe they are ‘saving the world’ and that validates any tactics, no matter how repugnant or morally questionable.

John Whittingdale, the chairman of the Commons media and culture committee, the main parliamentary BBC watchdog, professes that he is ‘astonished’ that the survey was authorised and claims it is a waste of money. But with respect to this very fair-minded man, it seems that he and his committee colleagues have been fast asleep on their watch.

The reality is that Media Action works as it does because it has the backing of the highest levels of the BBC. Here’s the evidence:

Alison Hastings, the Trustee who chairs the editorial standards committee (ESC), the internal editorial watchdog, issued a Trustee statement four years ago which, in effect, said that those who disagree with climate change alarmism would get only very limited exposure because there was a ‘consensus’ that they were wrong.

Diana Coyle, the current Trustees deputy chairman, who is hoping to become the next chairman, is a stakeholder advisor to EDF Energy, a company which is working systematically to harvest as much cash as possible from the government for renewable and green energy provision.

Richard Ayre, a colleague of Ms Hastings on the ESC, was a career BBC journalist before becoming a quangocrat. He is also is a former chairman (2003-5) of a body called Article 19. This fights for freedom of expression, but like many such leftist organisations, also has a major climate change alarmist agenda. Its website declares:

At the national level, greening the economy will include improving fiscal policy reform, reducing environmentally harmful subsidies, employing new market–‐based instruments, and targeting public Investments to “green” key sectors.

Finally, the most recent recruit to the ESC and the Trustees.Is Nick Prettejohn, His career is in the financial services sector, and he has recently also been appointed chairman of Scottish Widows Group. His new company website states:

Fundamentally SWIP believes that strong climate policies from governments are the essential pre-requisite to addressing climate risk. Without strong climate policies we will fail to mitigate climate change.

So, to recap. The BBC has been caught red-handed spending half a million pounds on a project specifically designed to spread climate change alarm and panic among some of the world’s most disadvantaged communities.

But, chilling as this is, the evidence is not actually hidden, nor is it new. It is going on blatantly in broad daylight, aided and abetted by Trustees who are seemingly hell-bent on a climate change crusade.

So when is Mr Whittingdale, and his committee going to wake up and intervene? The BBC itself won’t change because the rot is in the inside from the very top downwards. The only hope is that Parliament will act with the teeth it sadly only sometimes bares. BBC Media Action has spent an astonishing £500,000 on a cod survey in Asia that is designed to spread alarm about climate change among some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. Its methodology is so laughably inept that it doesn’t bear a moment’s scrutiny: how can lay respondents know with certainty (as the survey asked them) how much local climate has changed?

That may well presage more of the Asian style surveys. If so, it will amount to blatant climate change alarmism on an unprecedented scale.

John Whittingdale, the chairman of the Commons media and culture committee, the main parliamentary BBC watchdog, professes that he is ’astonished’ that the survey was authorised and claims it is a waste of money. But with respect to this very fair-minded man, it seems that he and his committee colleagues have been fast asleep on their watch.

The reality is that Media Action works as it does because it has the backing of the highest levels of the BBC. Here’s the evidence:

Photo by ToastyKen

The BBC witch-finders are coming for YOU

BBC Bias, BBC Verify, Climate Change, Covid-19 | 4th July 2023 | by David Keighley

THE BBC has crashed to new lows of bias. Director-General Tim Davie, who assumed office three years ago in September, set as his priority the restoration of impartiality. But in the past few months he has presided over a huge campaign – conducted through the so-called Trusted News Initiative, which the Corporation orchestrated, and BBC Verify – to root out and shut down ‘disinformation’ spread by those who disagree with its flagrant anti-British agenda. Not just on the BBC’s own platforms but elsewhere too.

It is tempting to invoke loose parallels between how they are now mobilising to crush dissent with the reign of terror instigated by self-declared Witch-Finder General Matthew Hopkins during the latter part of the English Civil War. He became convinced that battalions of witches were infecting and perverting the body politic in rural East Anglia. Hundreds of innocent women were tortured and at least 100 of them hanged.

The modern-day perceived evildoers are ‘conspiracy theorists’ or ‘deniers’. It is now emerging that those miscreants in the BBC’s sights are ‘right-wing’, are anti-lockdown, have reservations about the safety of vaccines, do not accept that climate change is a major existential threat, do not believe gender is a matter of elective choice, or that the British Empire was not a malevolent influence on the world.

A BBC ‘disinformation’ witch-finder called Marco Silva – a part of their massively resourced ‘fact checking’ operation Verify announced by news chief Deborah Turness in May – leapt into indignant action last week. He appeared on the Today programme and posted online on Friday.

His primary target? An American businessman and ‘success coach’ residing in Scotland called Dan Pena. His crime? He apparently said in 2017 that he believed that ‘people with money’, the financial institutions and banks, knew that ‘climate change is not going to happen’. Further, that this was ‘the greatest fraud that has been perpetrated on mankind this century’. His quote went viral and has attracted 9million views on and via the social media platform TikTok.

Cue outrage from Silva. He thundered: ‘The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence has found that world temperatures are rising because of human activity, leading to rapid climate change and threatening every aspect of human life.’

How this high priest of the BBC climate religion cult arrived at such certitude is not evidenced, though his Muck Rack account shows he is engaged in a major propaganda exercise against fossil fuels and all those he sees as ‘climate deniers’.

As part of his duties to shut down such ‘disinformation’, Silva detailed on Today how he was making strenuous efforts to have the Pena statements removed, and for TikTok and other social media platforms to ‘clamp down’ on climate change denial and prevent ‘false climate change information from spreading’. He has also detailed how he has found another 365 different videos in English ‘denying the existence of man-made climate change’, and how he has persuaded TikTok to non-platform them.

In parallel with Silva’s efforts, 27-year-old Marianna Spring, rejoicing in the title of BBC ‘disinformation and social media correspondent’, is in full cry searching for ‘conspiracy theorists’. Ms Spring is a former Guardian reporter who specialised in stories about perceived oppression, and so her credentials for working under the Verify aegis are immaculate.

As already noted on TCW by Niall McCrae, she has completed her first BBC magnum opus, a ten-part podcast series grandly called Marianna in Conspiracyland. News-watch has transcribed the full series and is in the process of writing a full survey of its shortcomings. It is chilling reading, not least because of its cub-reporter crassness in believing that differences in opinion can so easily classified and identified as wrong-headed.

Is she another witch-finder, or maybe rather – despite seeing herself hubristically as an innocent Alice – the Red Queen?

Her targets, as she repeats endlessly in the series, are those she perceives to be right-wing conspiracy theorists. She believes these sinister, potentially murderous folk are beavering away in towns such as Totnes and Stroud to foment revolution in the shires. Their off-with-their-heads crimes? These villains are not convinced that anti-Covid vaccines work, are opposed to future lockdowns, do not believe in climate alarmism and dare to talk to people in other countries who have similar beliefs.

Further, it is arguable that the main purpose of her series is to demonise as a conspirator-in-chief Darren Nesbit, the publisher of an alternative newspaper called The Light. As Niall McCrae observed, her treatment of him was massively unfair, and arguably an attempt by the megabillions BBC to shut down a rival operation which operates on a meagre advertising income from local businesses.

Trust in BBC News has suffered a catastrophic collapse, and these developments making the BBC a campaigner for its own worldview illustrate vividly some of the reasons. Everyone who watches the BBC is forced to pay for the privilege, but its core programming no longer serves vast swathes of licence fee-payers.

An organisation without a guaranteed income would be forced to take heed of customer complaints, but the smug BBC – which serves largely as its own judge and jury on matters of impartiality – does not.

BBC shrugs off report from the echo chamber

BBC Bias, Thematic Reviews | 2nd February 2023 | by David Keighley

A MUCH-trumpeted BBC-ordered report into the Corporation’s coverage of economics by erstwhile BBC presenters Andrew Dilnot and Michael Blastland – who, it is said, are economic ‘experts’ – has been published after almost a year in gestation.

The 50-page document was commissioned as part of Director General Tim Davie’s desperate attempt to prove that the Corporation is impartial and thereby avoid any significant changes being made by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in the BBC’s mid-term review, due in May.

The BBC are very good at wasting licence fee income – witness the millions spent in their quest of diversity and support of propaganda exercises such as their membership of the sinister Trusted News Initiative – and this is another prime example of money down the drain.

Reading it confirms that while Dilnot and Blastland dish out some stinging negative observations, they are BBC sycophants. Further, the vast majority of the 50 or so people they consulted in preparing their report also inhabit the BBC echo chamber of liberal-left bias. The list is here. Fewer than ten could be seen as leaning towards alternative views.

The conclusions of the report include:

· Many BBC journalists lack understanding of basic economics;

· Output suggests too much that public spending is good;

· Reporters should exercise more caution in making sweeping statements such as that governments ‘will have to’ (carry out prescribed tasks);

· Output does not make clear that fiscal political decisions are also political choices;

· The perspectives of low-paid people are under-reported;

· Contributors do not come from a wide enough spectrum of opinion and interests;

· Output does not give enough information to those who are poorly informed and did not understand fiscal stories.

It has not been disclosed how much the authors were paid for their efforts, but these are all arguably subjective judgments which anyone could arrive at in a matter of days through watching and listening to BBC programmes. Dilnot and Blastland claim to have combed through 11,000 items to reach their ‘expert’ conclusions, but they at no point provide sufficient evidence to justify claims of objective superiority.

Further, it is clear from their methodology (outlined in an appendix) that they regard properly detailed analysis of content as ‘useless’.

Their report can thus also be seen as an exercise in laziness. On the subject of whether economics coverage might be skewed politically, they say: ‘We didn’t find evidence that BBC coverage of fiscal policy is overall too left or right – because we can’t. Others might think the answer obvious, we do not. We doubt the methods available are equal to the task, not with any statistical robustness. These methods would, without a truly vast amount of time and expense, themselves be at risk of bias. In any case, we think it more useful if we’re specific.’

With an approach like this, the BBC will wriggle off the hook of any of the criticisms contained in the report and will carry on regardless. The process is already under way. The official BBC Board response is: ‘We note that the reviewers found widespread appreciation for BBC coverage of tax, public spending, debt and borrowing and they conclude that they did not find evidence of political bias in this output. However, they also concluded that significant interests and perspectives in these areas could be better served by BBC output and the review as a whole provides clear indications for how we can improve editorial standards and audience impact as a result.

‘We have asked the Director General and his Executive team to address the issues presented in this review and to return to the next Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee of the Board (EGSC) with a proposed action plan to fully address these challenges. We will then review that plan at the following Board meeting before implementation. We have also asked the EGSC to consider the lessons learned from this thematic review to inform our approach to the next reviews,’

In other words, move along, nothing to see here. The BBC commissioned the report and are deigning to pay some lip service to the conclusions. By contrast, they have never considered in detail the much more thorough work carried out by News-watch.

The BBC at 100: Leading the push for totalitarianism

BBC Bias, BBC Centenary | 20th October 2022 | by David Keighley

As the BBC marks its centenary, how is ‘Auntie’? Not the benign figure the Corporation likes to portray, but perhaps more like Peter Sellers’s chilling comic creation Auntie Rotter?

As Culture Secretary, Nadine Dorries appeared to be preparing the old girl for genuine surgery in the Charter Mid-term Review. But as the Tory party and our democracy itself spectacularly implodes, don’t count on it. Auntie is too useful to our new totalitarian ruling class as a vehicle for the liberal-left propaganda it disseminates on a gargantuan scale.

True to form, the Corporation commissioned its own self-congratulatory centenary ‘official’ history in 2016 and the author, a former BBC producer and don at Sussex University, duly obliged with a volume which trashes British history and values and risibly claims with Marxist zeal that from its inception the BBC has championed the British working class against the forces of the right. In that projection, those who dare criticise the BBC are enemies of the people.

The reality is that BBC audiences were high only when the Corporation was a state monopoly funded by a compulsory licence fee. As soon as competition entered the frame, people looked elsewhere for their entertainment. BBC services are now declining precipitously in the ever-fragmenting media environment, trust in the BBC’s journalism is in freefall, and, according to Reuters Institute research, it has become the least trusted public service broadcaster in the world.

A key to the mentality and current drive of the BBC can be found the latest annual report (2021/2). There are pages and pages devoted to self-righteous tosh on ‘environmental sustainability’ (and commitment to Net Zero agenda) and gender and racial diversity. But in terms of how popular (or rather unpopular) BBC programmes are, the report waffles only about audience ‘reach’. To find out how bad BBC audience figures actually are, you have to scour the internet. An example is BBC2 Newsnight, the flagship news and current affairs programme, which had more than 1million viewers in around 2000, but is now down to fewer than 300,000.

The current director-general, Tim Davie, claims he is sorting out impartiality but his plans for doing so are designed only to keep the BBC as its own judge and jury in virtually everything it does, with the fig-leaf Ofcom to conduct appeals against the BBC’s own industrial-scale rejection of millions of complaints. A measure of his feebleness is that, on his appointment, Davie promised a crackdown on presenters who posted politically biased tweets. But it has taken two years, till last week, for BBC football presenter Gary Lineker to be held to any form of account for the deluge of left-wing propaganda he spews out – and then for only one tweet. His punishment? A docking of his obscene £1.35million-a-year contract? No, Mr Davie thinks he is a ‘brilliant presenter’ and instead has had a ‘good chat with him’. He believes Lineker now understands impartiality. That’s okay then.

With the benefit of hindsight, the BBC became unashamedly socialist in support of the Attlee government in 1945, and has never deviated from that campaigning zeal. Margaret Thatcher was the only PM who genuinely tried to reform the bloated state propaganda organisation but even she did not have the power to dismantle it.

The BBC erupted with fury after the Brexit referendum confirmed that the British people did not share its values, as this News-watch report confirms. But perhaps the defining characteristic of the BBC in its centenary year is its climate alarmism and its chilling insistence that the ‘science is settled’. Shamefully, the Corporation accepted this was the case at an internal meeting in 2005. Thereafter, instead of objective reporting, it has peddled climate activism. There is a daily deluge of programme and news features and stories. Turn to the climate pages of the BBC website and you discover the real agenda – a total fanaticism about the climate emergency, a burning desire to force British people to change their evil carbon-generating ways and a complete adherence to Net Zero fanaticism.

Exhibit A is the BBC Media Action site – the so-called ‘charity’ arm of the Corporation which used to be the World Service Trust. Its purpose now is to promote the UN and IMF world government agenda. In this domain – funded by huge grants from Bill Gates and the EU, and in partnership with a host of woke corporations including Twitter and Facebook, – it now actually has training courses for journalists to learn how to become climate change propagandists.

In the Media Action worldview, the only cause for changing weather is ‘climate change’. Basic geography has been abandoned for a one-dimensional fear agenda. Flash floods in Africa are not the result of the sun’s heat and volatile tropical atmospheric forces but rather burning too much fossil fuel.

George Orwell’s statue has dominated the entry to the £1billion BBC HQ in Portland Place since 2017. Its presence is deeply ironic. BBC staffers are reminded every day of the man who showed with terrifying accuracy in Animal Farm and 1984 what totalitarianism is like. Yet every day, they are pushing on a massive scale the propaganda Orwell expressed. Current political developments suggest that nothing will now stop them.

The BBC, skewered through its rotten core

BBC Bias, BBC History | 16th August 2022 | by David Keighley

Few readers of News-watch will need convincing that the BBC is biased. The Corporation’s track record of hating Britain and its values in a helter-skelter quest for ‘diversity’, and as a political campaigner against conservative values and in favour of liberal-left causes such as climate alarmism, lockdowns and much more, has been chronicled voluminously in these pages.

Now university lecturer David Sedgwick’s latest book, Is That True Or Did You Hear It On The BBC? brings a series of fresh and meticulously researched insights into the gargantuan scale of the bias. It shows that without doubt the BBC complaints system is rotten to the core.

The book has been published at an opportune moment. Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries is assembling her Mid-Term Review of the Corporation. The public consultation phase has closed (July 29). Of course, her tenure in office may be short, but she has at least taken steps in the framing of the review to attack BBC bias head-on. Her appointment rattled the BBC, and executives are fighting tooth and nail to thwart her ambitions.

Meanwhile, Director General Tim Davie – despite a deluge of evidence to the contrary after almost two years in office – risibly continues to claim that his top priority is restoring impartiality. He has ordered a raft of measures allegedly to tackle the problems, including a politburo-style ‘10-point plan’.

Close scrutiny of the measures, however, reveals that they are little more than all-too-familiar BBC window-dressing and an exercise in kicking the can down the road. There is, for example, an acceptance that output should be subject to independent (non-BBC) review. To deal with this, four consultants have been appointed by the BBC, so the idea that they are truly ‘independent’ is yet more BBC flannel.

The peerless BBC blogger Craig Byers explains the inadequacies of the 10-point plan in further detail here.

Sedgwick has already written two books about the BBC, and a review of one of them is on TCW Defending Freedom here. In 21 illuminating case studies of BBC bias at its most flagrant, his latest title nails exactly why Davie’s measures are the equivalent of tackling a petrochemical blaze with a water-pistol. His key line of argument is that throughout its 100-year history, the BBC has blindly supported the social and economic objectives of ‘society’s wealthiest and most powerful entities’, and does not report news but rather ‘news narrative’ and is therefore ‘a hugely valuable asset of global power’.

Some might disagree with his suggestion that the 1984 miners’ strike was part of a popular uprising against the establishment, but his main point, that the BBC in 2022 has swallowed the World Economic Forum ‘Build Back Better’ agenda and is thus supporting undemocratic political agitation against the interests of the British people who are forced to pay to receive it, is strongly made.

The book begins with the BBC’s current main activist hobby horse: fanning alarm about the climate. The Corporation’s so-called environment ‘reporters’ trumpeted in 2004 that the Maldives were a ‘paradise facing extinction’ and that the 360,000 inhabitants would soon be forced to evacuate. Eighteen years on, says Sedgwick, the population and tourism have both doubled, and more than $800million is being ploughed into expanding the main airport to meet the mushrooming demand. A survey of atolls worldwide has shown a growth in landmass of 8 per cent over the past 60 years.

Another example is a forensic dissection of the so-called Harlow ‘race-hate murder’ of Arkadiusz Jozwik, a Polish man, soon after the Brexit vote in September 2016. Daniel Sandford’s television news reports trumpeted it as a race killing, and BBC2 Newsnight embellished the sensationalism by including claims that Nigel Farage had ‘blood on his hands’. Eventually it emerged that Jozwik had provoked a gang of youths by himself being racist and was punched in retaliation. One youth was convicted of manslaughter. The outrageous BBC reporting was also covered on TCW Defending Freedom, for example here.

Sedgwick chronicles how the BBC rejected all claims of bias over the case, but three years later broadcast a programme intended to put the record straight. It was titled The Brexit Murder? thus compounding the original Sandford claims and confirming that even when seemingly trying to correct errors, the Corporation is so mired in its own confirmation bias that it cannot do so.

For its 100th anniversary celebrations, the broadcaster appointed as an ‘official BBC historian’ Sussex University media studies don (and former BBC producer) David Hendy. He has written The BBC: A People’s History, which is best described as pro-BBC propaganda, and an extension of how the BBC attacks all those who criticise it. Hendy, in essence, argues that those who criticise the BBC are mainly right-wing, malicious axe-grinders. I hope to review it for TCW soon.

Sedgwick’s clear analysis is a valuable counter-balance to Hendy’s flummery.

James Townsend: Challenging the BBC’s Covid Project Fear narrative

BBC Bias, Covid-19 | 19th July 2021 | by News-Watch

This post by James Townsend originally appeared on The Conservative Woman

YOU may have seen some of my recent threads which have slowly been gaining traction in the Twittersphere. They have covered a range of topics, including defending TV presenter Beverley Turner from unwarranted attacks on Good Morning Britain and the Jeremy Vine Show, to questioning Sage scientist Susan Michie and exposing the government’s approach around mandatory vaccinations.

Nothing prepared me, however, for the reaction I would get following a Twitter thread published on Thursday afternoon questioning a BBC headline report into an apparent ‘third covid wave’ in the North East, specifically within the North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust (NTHNFT). In the days that followed it had tripled my Twitter following, attracted 1.5million views (impressions), and was amplified to audiences in Dutch, Spanish and Arabic, among others.

I’ve been followed by scientists, blue tick celebrities, political commentators, teachers, business owners, concerned parents, and everyone in between. It was also the lead item on Friday’s UK Column news where they discussed it at length. And now I find myself writing in a publication which I’ve long been an admirer of. The reaction has been overwhelming.

Why did it resonate with so many people, I wondered? Before I answer that question, here’s a recap. It’s a long read but please do follow it to the end.

Now a predictable few have tried rubbishing the thread by claiming either ‘there’s a lag on deaths, so it’s too soon to see an uptick in fatalities’ or ‘a lack of deaths doesn’t mean a hospital is not overwhelmed’. The former point neglects to mention that cases have been rising for weeks and the latter fails to consider the context of the supposedly deadly pandemic we’re living through. Both of these arguments have, of course, an element of truth in them but they deliberately sidestep the central point of the thread.

The reason it resonated with so many people is because British citizens have become totally fed up with the relentless fear-based propaganda espoused by the UK government, the NHS, and the mainstream media. It’s a narrative so strong and underpinned by a poisonous culture of cancelling those we disagree with, that professionals like myself feel that writing under a pseudonym is the only viable option. It’s a conundrum I eventually hope to overcome. As we get to winter, when deaths from respiratory viruses naturally rise, we will no doubt have ‘deaths with/of covid’ plastered all across our television screens once again. Until that time, whilst deaths are negligible over the summer months, cases are used to sustain the fear despite it not necessarily translating to sick or infectious people. No context is ever given to the viewer that, yes, from an extremely low base cases and hospitalisations may be rising, but that still isn’t translating into many (or, any, in the case of NTHNFT) deaths.

There has been a long and palpable silence from Hugh Pym since my thread challenged his impartiality although if I had been the press officer advising him, I may well have come to the same conclusion. Why? Well, there is simply no justification for a supposedly balanced health editor not to give the context of mortality figures, whilst running a segment which would terrify many of your average viewers through its hyperbole and emotional, fear-based rhetoric.

As I said in conclusion to a previous thread, if the mainstream media won’t do their jobs by offering context and balance then I will have to keep shining a light on these shoddy examples of journalism.

Photo by CDC from Pexels

David Keighley: A star line-up for the new BBC theme park. Russell Brand despatches figures of hate 15/12/2014

BBC Bias Archive | 5th July 2021 | by David Keighley

In this satirical piece hinged on plans announced in 2014 by BBC Worldwide to build a BBC theme park on the Thames estuary, it was imagined that a BBC ‘hero’ – the comedian Russell Brand – should act as Lord High Executioner in despatching BBC ‘figures of hate’ such as Nigel Farage and other supporters of Brexit.

December 15, 2014

Roll up, roll up…the BBC’s commercial arm Worldwide has signed a deal that could mean BBC programmes becoming part of an entertainment park being built in Ebbsfleet and due to open in 2020.

This has triggered inevitable speculation about which programmes would achieve star-billing – Doctor Who is top of the list. Another hot tip is an Eastenders theme ride where everyone shouts at each other.

In fact, BBC ideology is now so well-defined that it won’t take much adaptation to get the crowds flocking to the park. The blueprints are already on the management board’s desks with former Labour minister James Purnell, the BBC’s head of strategy, in charge of making sure everything fits with Corporation rules about partiality and diversity.

The plans have been leaked exclusively to TCW. Here’s the list:

CHOP-CHOP: Following the rip-roaring success of choosing Hilary Mantel’s fantasy about murdering Margaret Thatcher as the latest Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, Ms Mantel has devised a theme park special game, inspired by her Thatcher fantasies and also based on the BBC 2014 adaptation of her Thomas Cromwell novel Wolf Hall. Each afternoon, in the Thatcher memorial arena – with the centre area lovingly recreating Tower Green – a BBC figure of hate will be publicly ‘decapitated’ by Corporation hero Russell Brand using the latest BBC £100m special effects techniques to make each despatching look as realistic as possible. Already on the list are, of course, Nigel Farage, Mark Reckless, Theresa May, Lord Lawson of Blaby (for being both a Thatcher chancellor AND daring to challenge the BBC orthodoxy of climate change), and – the most popular – a legion of nasty City bankers.

NOT SO FROZEN PLANET: Here, the BBC – inspired by David Attenborough’s nature programmes – invites its public to experience what it knows for certain (because Ed Miliband, Christopher Huhne, scientists and computer models say so) how the world will be in 2100. Modelled partly on the geodesic structures in the Eden project, this exciting Epcot-style attraction will feature melting ice, endless storms, flooding and searing temperatures – all of which, it will be explained, were once foolishly called weather but are now known by Corporation correspondents and presenters to be certain evidence of impending disaster. The most exciting feature is at the end – the BBC vision of what must be done to save mankind: the destruction of capitalism and industry, and a reversion to the Stone Age.

QUESTION TIME: In line with focus-group findings that the public now find political debate too boring and must be spiced up, this attraction is set in a re-creation of the Coliseum in Rome. Rival gangs of politicians, aided and abetted – and sometimes led – by their celebrity backers, are invited each afternoon to devise ever-more-gruesome methods of combating each other. Consultants for ensuring maximum visual impact and unpleasantness are Jeremy Clarkson and the team from Top Gear. At the end, the crowd (hand-picked, of course, by the BBC from among Labour supporters) will be invited to decide who among the survivors should be spared.

NO MINISTER: supported by the EU’s diversity and public information fund, this attraction holds nothing back in showing how wonderful the EU is. With lots of polyglot singing. aerial gymnastics and illusionism, there are a series of tableaux demonstrating how uncontrolled movement of people and endless new regulation benefit everyone. A special feature, drawing on the ever popular Yes Minister programmes (but without the humour, of course), illustrates how the EU is run without any democratic input at all, but is nevertheless entirely democratic. The second phase of this feature – intended when it is built to be star of the park – will allow the public to participate in a whole series of cross-European experiences showing how nationalism must wither and be replaced by a borderless Socialist Utopia.

Photo by Angie from Pexels

Daily Mail jumps on the BBC climate zealots’ bandwagon

BBC Bias, Climate Change | 5th July 2021 | by David Keighley

HOW much further into the mire of hard-line prejudice can the MSM – particularly the BBC – go in its blatant, militant anti-scientific and anti-free-speech perversion of climate science?

In Saturday’s Daily Mail, under the headline ‘Green fury as BBC tells kids climate change isn’t all bad’, reporter Jim Norton said the BBC had come under strong attack from climate alarmist zealots.

The Corporation’s crime? It had dared to suggest in the GCSE revision section of BBC Bitesize (dedicated to educational content for children) that increased global temperatures and the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’ might generate benefits such as more vigorous plant growth (fired by rising levels of carbon dioxide), and healthier outdoor lifestyles.

Norton said the offending item had been removed after Guardian writer George Monbiot, ‘a lifelong environmental activist’, had declared that such suggestions were an ‘absolute disgrace’. Such is the power that the BBC house organ the Guardian now wields over the so-called ‘impartial’ Corporation.

Norton larded his Mail article with equally disapproving comments from an array of other outraged climate activists such as the lofty heights of ‘Extinction Rebellion’s southeast group’ and ‘the chief executive of a group of schools in Bedfordshire’. For good measure to drive his alarmist message home, he said the Queen had on Thursday accepted that tackling climate change meant we would have to change lifestyles, and that ‘government advisers’ had last month stated that the UK was woefully unprepared to deal with the climate emergency.

Nowhere in the torrent of greenie outrage and indignation is included a quote from anyone who disagreed with Monbiot, who has no qualifications in climate science.

Norton said the BBC had responded to the onslaught by ‘amending the content’ to be in line with current curricula, and to twist the knife, he also pointed out that the Corporation allegedly had form in terms of not reporting climate alarmism with sufficient disdain.

He stated: ‘In 2018, [the BBC] accepted failures in its coverage of climate change after a series of apologies and censures for not challenging sceptics during interviews.’

So there we have it. The Daily Mail hath spoken, and the BBC coverage of ‘climate change’ in all its alleged manifestations is simply not alarmist enough.

TCW readers will need no reminding how risible and far from the truth this is. The BBC’s reporting of climate change has since 2005 – when it held a meeting of climate and environmental activists who dictated its stance – been militant hardline propaganda. How this was decided is detailed in a book by Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Forum The Propaganda Bureau.

Far from being balanced, the Corporation condemns all those who disagree with alarmism as ‘deniers’ irrespective of their qualifications or the strength of their analysis. To the BBC they are, in effect, foaming-at-the-mouth, dangerous imbeciles, the equivalent of flat-earthers or Creationists.

James Stephenson, news editor of BBC News and Current Affairs, summarised the Corporation approach on BBC Radio 4 Feedback in 2018:

‘We will not have the kind of discussions that you’ve heard occasionally in the past, where you have someone who is outlining the scientific position on man-made climate change and someone else who says that’s not the case. We’ve moved away from that and beyond that, on the basis that while they’re entitled to their opinion, and those opinions definitely still exist, they are to the margins of the scientific consensus, and we don’t want to be giving the audience the impression that it’s a sort of 50/50 arm-wrestle between those two positions.’

As the miasma that is the world climate change industry prepares to descend on Glasgow on October 31, and as Boris Johnson doubles down on his efforts to reverse the industrial revolution by forcing us all into a new form of fuel and food poverty, it is of massive concern that the MSM, including the Daily Mail, are reporting with all guns blazing this brand of intolerant, anti-scientific propaganda.

The pandemic has put us all at the mercy of technocratic dictators who have dangerously tampered with the foundations of our democracy and Western civilisation itself. Behind them, ready to take over the reins, are battalions of climate zealots. And instead of seeking to debunk their delusion, Great Britain’s fourth estate is firing it up to new heights of alarmism.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

Bashir wasn’t the first BBC royal interview scandal

BBC Bias, Martin Bashir | 29th June 2021 | by David Keighley

DIGGING into the Martin Bashir affair for TCW has reminded me of another huge scandal about BBC integrity in 1985 in which I was centrally involved. It showed that then, as ten years later, nothing would stop senior BBC management from flagrantly breaking editorial guidelines if these got in their way. On that occasion it cost them a rumoured £750,000 in civil damages, equivalent to at least £2.3million today.

In a High Court ruling, the Corporation were adjudged to be guilty of a ‘scandalous breach of copyright’ against the ITV breakfast channel TV-am, which was at that time trouncing the BBC’s Breakfast Time in the ratings, much to senior management’s chagrin.

The fulcrum of the case was the BBC’s piracy of an interview secured by TV-am presenter Nick Owen with Princess Michael of Kent concerning her father’s alleged involvement with the Nazi SS during the Second World War. News of the connection was a huge national story and everybody wanted to get the princess’s reaction.

Owen had known her for some time, and he said at the time that she decided to talk him exclusively to avoid a media scrum and to get the ordeal over in one go.

The BBC were having none of that.

I had joined TV-am as head of the press office from the BBC, where I had been head of news and current affairs publicity, just two weeks earlier.

TV-am boss Bruce Gyngell put me in charge of all external relations in connection with the interview, one of the first major news exclusives secured by TV-am. The station had been through a disastrous launch – to a significant extent because the BBC set out to sabotage it – and in early 1985 was beginning a determined and successful fight back under Gyngell’s expert leadership. In that context, the interview was ratings gold dust, and Bruce was determined to keep it as an exclusive.

The BBC argued however that because Princess Michael was a royal, the material should be made available to other stations under established pooling arrangements which applied on royal events to limit the size of the media pack.

Our legal advice was that this interview was emphatically not pool material because Princess Michael had decreed otherwise. So when, as the hours ticked down to transmission, the editor of BBC Breakfast Time rang me and asked for a copy of the interview for their programme the following day, my answer was an emphatic ‘no’.

He was not happy, and during the evening there followed a series of calls to me from BBC executives of escalating seniority, culminating with the overall boss of BBC News.

They used every trick in the book from honeyed words to outright threats to try to crack my defences, but my instruction from Bruce Gyngell against the onslaught was to stand firm.

At 11pm came the final weapon in the BBC’s arsenal. It was an Exocet. That evening the Queen was hosting a state dinner at Windsor Castle for Hastings Banda, the president of Malawi. Still on duty, I picked up the phone. ‘Are you David Keighley?’ a cut-glass voice inquired. When I replied that I was, the voice continued, ‘Well, I am Michael Shea, the Queen’s press secretary.’ He told me he was rather displeased with TV-am because he been called out of the banquet and acidly continued, ‘And I am telling you, no, ordering you, to give the Princess Michael interview to the BBC because the royal rota rules apply.’

Somewhat shaken, I responded that I disagreed and told him that our legal advice was that it was our exclusive. Shea’s tone turned icy. He told me in very direct language that (a) I was wrong, and (b) there would be ‘consequences’.

We stuck to our guns, but the following morning at 6.50am BBC Breakfast Time showed the interview almost in its entirety. We had started broadcasting 25 minutes earlier and they simply recorded it and re-ran it. As brazen as that. Aware of the possibility that the BBC would try this, we had made our TV-am strapline at the foot of the screen double the usual size. The BBC blanked out the lower half of the screen to obliterate our ID, so on their version it looked as if Nick Owen and the princess were peering over a wall! There was no attribution whatsoever of how the interview had been obtained. In their arrogance the BBC had indulged in an act of major copyright piracy.

After we came off air at 9am, the TV-am news director Bill Ludford and I hurried from Camden Lock to the Inner Temple where we instructed our legal team in seeking a High Court injunction to stop further showings of our interview and return the pirated copies of it. We also applied for substantial damages for breach of copyright.

Two hours later, the injunction and return order were granted with Mr Justice Walton in the Chancery Division calling it a ‘scandalous breach of copyright’. The BBC, again in its arrogance, and with flagrant disregard for licence fee cash, appealed. Another hour later, that too was turned down in equally forthright language.

The subsequent damages case was resolved out of court in TV-am’s favour.

The episode showed in spades that when it comes to journalistic integrity, the Corporation has the morals of an alley cat. TV-am at that stage, thanks to the BBC’s blunderbuss attempts to sink it, was a struggling minnow which had only recently been on the edge of bankruptcy. But BBC news chiefs could not bear the idea of being outflanked or told they were wrong. Their flagrant act of copyright piracy, as with the Bashir and Cliff Richard cases, illustrates that in pursuit of their interests their editorial guidelines are little more than a window-dressing sham.

Photo by Anthony from Pexels

BBC BIAS DIGEST 22 NOVEMBER 2020

BBC Digest | 22nd November 2020 | by David Keighley

MPs DEMAND PM REINS IN BBC ‘WOKE’ BIAS: Glen Owen (Mail 21/11) said that Conservative MPs had written to prime minister Boris Johnson demanding that he launch a fightback against the ‘politically correct woke agenda of institutions including the BBC. Mr Owen reported that the letter, from 60 MPs and peers in the Common Sense group, chaired by senior backbencher Sir John Hayes, was asking for a number of ‘drastic’ measures including decriminalising non-payment of the BBC licence fee on the basis that it was time ‘to defend British traditions and values’ as well as standing against ‘the senseless woke whingers and the soulless militants who despise the best of Britain’. Mr Owen quoted from the letter, written in the context of the BBC’s decision to remove the word ‘faggot’ from the The Pogues’ Christmas song Fairytale of New York in deference to the LGBTQ+ lobby:

‘In light of the BBC’s repeated refusal to address its organisation’s undoubted liberal bias, illustrated most recently by its bizarre decision to censor a well-known Christmas song (perhaps, similarly, the whole canon of popular music is to be reviewed by a highly paid zealot!), we believe it is now time to decriminalise the licence fee, so enabling ordinary Britons to choose whether or not to pay for the BBC’s content.’

Mr Owen noted that the BBC had said Fairytale Of New York would be played with its full lyrics on some stations, but not Radio 1, whose young listeners ‘are particularly sensitive to derogatory terms for gender and sexuality’.

MANGOLD ‘ASTONISHED’ BY OMISSION IN BBC PRINCESS DI PROBE: An article in the Mail (22/10) said that veteran BBC investigative journalist Tom Mangold had ‘expressed astonishment’ that the BBC panel set up by the corporation ’s management board to investigate whether the BBC Panorama interview of Princess Diana by Martin Bashir in 1995 had been properly set up and conducted would not investigate as part of its remit whether there had been a ‘cover-up’ within BBC ranks. The piece quoted Mr Mangold, who had been a ‘leading light’ on Panorama when the interview occurred:

‘I am somewhat baffled by the complete absence of any reference in Lord Dyson’s (the former judge chairing the inquiry) brief to investigating the events within the BBC after the story of the forgeries broke.’

It was also stated that Mr Mangold has previously spoken about his conviction that executives on the programme had ‘conspired, lied, deceived and cheated’ to hush up the scandal, adding: ‘The true story is much bigger than Bashir.’

It was further reported that Mr Mangold had outlined the points he believed Lord Dyson must address in investigating the (alleged) use of faked bank statements and other ruses which led to Diana agreeing to the world exclusive interview.

He suggested the questions should be: ‘1. What steps did the BBC and, in particular, Martin Bashir take with a view to obtaining the Panorama interview in 1995?

‘2. Were those steps appropriate, particularly in regard to the BBC’s editorial standards at the time?

‘3. To what extent did the actions of the BBC and, in particular, Martin Bashir influence Diana’s decision to give an interview?

‘4. What knowledge did the BBC have in 1995 and 1996 of the relevant evidence, such as the forged bank statements?

‘5. How effectively did the BBC investigate the circumstances leading to the interview?’

BBC ‘MUST DIVERSIFY AWAY FROM WHAT WHITE PEOPLE THINK’: Jemma Carr (Mail 20/11) reported that Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s head of newsgathering, speaking at a Creative Coalition conference and Media Masters podcast, had said that the BBC should ‘diversify’ its senior news staff because editorial meetings tended to be dominated ‘by what white people think’. Ms Carr said that Mr Munro had noted that when he had joined the BBC in 2014, every member of his team had been a Caucasian male, and a consequence of the lack of diversity had been that in the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire of 2017 – which had killed 72 people – the BBC news teams had not understood the gravity of issues faced by council house tenants. Ms Carr also reported that Mark Mardell, who had retired as presenter of the BBC World This Weekend programme, had warned the BBC against ‘annoying and dismaying’ its basic audience in its pursuit of the diversity agenda.

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