BBC Bias Digest

06:39 am
18 October 2024

Search Results for: BBC Media Action

Does Fairhead departure presage May action against BBC bias?

Does Fairhead departure presage May action against BBC bias?

BBC Bias, BBC Trust | | by David Keighley

The abrupt and unexpected departure of Rona Fairhead from her post as BBC Chairman is interesting indeed.

David Cameron had appointed her Chairman for the first, crucial phase of the new Charter covering the abolition of the Trustees and their replacement by a souped-up executive board – but suddenly, seemingly as a result of intervention by Theresa May, she’s toast.

Could it presage that the May government – as Brexit gathers pace – has woken up to that something urgent and radical needs doing to curb BBC bias?

This is a Corporation that is still treating Brexit as a major mistake, looking for every opportunity to rubbish the idea, and to link it with racism.  Martha Kearney, for example, on Radio 4’s World at One on Wednesday, chose to pick up with relish Jean-Claude Juncker’s malicious claims that the Brexit vote was linked to a huge upsurge in race hate, including the murder of a Polish man in Harlow – when no such linkage has yet been established by the police.

David Cameron’s approach to the Corporation, from the moment he took office in 2010, was both lenient and laissez-faire – largely, it now seems most likely, because he saw the Corporation as a key ally in his battle to remain in the EU.

Lord Patten, Fairhead’s predecessor as chairman, was (and is) a EU-zealot of the most extreme kind. He was appointed by Cameron in 2011. Patten predictably and obdurately resisted strongly any suggestion that the BBC’s coverage of the EU was biased, most notably by refusing repeated summons to appear before the Commons European Scrutiny Committee in connection with their inquiry into whether the Corporation was adequately covering EU affairs.

After Patten suddenly stepped down because of ill-health, high-flying executive Fairhead,  who had no broadcast experience, was parachuted in.  Precisely why remains a mystery, especially as there were huge question marks about her conduct as a director of HSBC. Some have claimed a link with George Osborne, perhaps via her husband, a former Tory councillor.

The newly-appointed Fairhead did appear before the European Scrutiny committee, under duress. It became clear immediately that she had gone native. Under her regulatory regime, there would be no change in the dead-bat approach to any complaints about EU reporting. She sat smug-faced as her fellow Trustee –a former BBC employee of 30 years – Richard Ayre intoned nonsensically that he knew coverage of the EU was not biased because, well, he said so; his experience told him that it was impossible that his BBC colleagues could ever be biased.

Pardon? Ayre is a past Chairman of the Article 19 ‘journalists’ rights’ organisation which under an alleged ‘neutral’ banner campaigns vigorously for Palestinian rights, against Israel, and to ensure that women’s voices are heard in the ‘climate change’ debate. Here is an example of their ‘unbiased’ approach, to which Ayre presumably subscribed:

‘The threats from climate change are not gender-neutral and it is essential that gender be incorporated into strategies to address climate change. In order to reach adaptation strategies and policies that are truly gender-sensitive, women’s voices need to be heard. To make their voices heard, women need information about their rights and the policies that affect their daily lives. This ARTICLE 19 project seeks to foster the exercise of communication rights to challenge women’s vulnerability to climate change.’

The BBC defence against EU bias (and everything that went with it at the hearing) amounted to similar baloney and obfuscation on a huge scale. The subsequent ESC’s report, written immediately before the 2015 General Election, was excoriating.  Bill Cash, the chairman, concluded in his report about the BBC:

“Accountability to Parliament and proper impartiality must be a key factor in the forthcoming review of the BBC Charter.”

Since then, John Whittingdale – whose appointment as Culture Secretary’s was a huge surprise because of his known antipathy towards the BBC – prepared his Green paper on the BBC’s Charter Renewal.  The predictions were initially that the licence fee could be replaced by subscription.

But then George Osborne intervened. The licence fee would be set in aspic for another decade. That meant Whittingdale’s plans for major reform were in totally scuppered.  What emerged was a messy compromise: the abolition of the Trustees, their replacement by a new executive board with powerful outside, independent directors, and some elements of complaints handling handed to the ‘independent’ Ofcom.

Yet this will solve nothing. The left-leaning Ofcom content board is drawn from the same cadre as the BBC Trustees, and is chaired by the arch-Europhile Bill Emmott,who makes even Patten look tame.

In reality, the changes were only a rearrangement of the deck chairs, and a continuation of the status quo. Cameron’s appointment of Fairhead to oversee the so-called transition period confirmed that.

Today (Thursday), the unknown and untested new Culture Secretary Karen Bradley, an accountant with no previous experience of the broadcasting industry, is due to announce the main details of Charter renewal, following the White Paper in May. The key issue is whether she and the May government will grasp that until there is genuine rigorous, independent scrutiny of BBC content, heavy, left-leaning bias will continue.

And that could well derail Brexit.

 

 

 

Photo by Ashley Pollak

BBC snooping intensifies in pursuit of iPlayer licence-fee dodgers

BBC snooping intensifies in pursuit of iPlayer licence-fee dodgers

Licence Fee | | by David Keighley

Watch out!  Are you about to be packet-sniffed by the BBC?

The prospect of millions of viewers being snooped upon by Corporation licence-fee collectors in unprecedented ways is firmly on the agenda.

The BBC has denied that the actual ‘packet-sniffing’, which (for the uninitiated) involves breaking into private wi-fi networks using special software, and is illegal if used privately, will be involved in their collection activities, but their protestations are not fully-convincing.

Even their friends on The Guardian smell a rat.  And definitely being deployed the length and breadth of the land by collection agents Capita from September 1 in order to catch miscreants who dare to access the BBC iPlayer via their computers – even if they don’t also have a TV set – are a range of new snooping measures that put the licence evasion operation even more firmly into the Big Brother league.

The BBC won’t reveal what these measures are, or what equipment they will actually use, but they have been granted extra enforcement powers under the Investigatory Powers Act, which was passed by the Blair government in 2000, and enables eavesdropping by authorised bodies using a vast array of sophisticated equipment.

Why is this deemed necessary in the run up to Charter renewal? Because despite pressure on the Conservative government to find new, less repressive and more modern ways of funding the Corporation – and dozens of well-argued options being out there – former Chancellor George Osborne decided instead to cave in to Corporation pressure.

Perversely, the BBC, an organisation that goes into indignation overdrive at the very mention of state intrusion in other arenas, thinks that mass-spying and the criminalisation of 153,000 people a year is both justified and essential in pursuit of its own reservation and ends.

No matter that tens of thousands of these offenders are the least well-off, Osborne ruled in 2015 – despite the advice of then culture secretary John Whittingdale – that the licence fee would not only continue but would be extended to viewing of catch-up services on the BBC iPlayer.

All this interference would be completely unnecessary if the BBC’s totally outmoded financing system, dating from an era when the broadcast spectrum was a scarce resource, was scrapped and replaced by subscription funding.

Audiences would then be able to choose which programmes and services they wanted to buy. This is a consumer model which applies to almost every other product, and which works perfectly well as a revenue model for Sky, Netflix, HBO and legions of other broadcasters.

Instead, the government has gone completely the opposite way, and the UK is saddled with this regressive and repressive regime from September 1 until the next Charter review in ten years’ time.

The statistics on licence enforcement make for fascinating reading and underline that the agenda here is not at all straightforward. Nuts and sledgehammers come to mind. Is such massive intrusion actually required?

And the suspicion emerges that in play also might also be the government’s desire to protect some of its own revenues rather than to open up broadcasting to normal competitive pressures.

Facts (gleaned from a variety of sources, including here):

The BBC, through Capita and the magistrates’ court system, pursues each year 170,000 cases a year of licence evasion.

The number has been rising at the rate of 4% per annum.  They (and Capita) are thus becoming increasingly intrusive.

Of these, 153,000 prosecutions a year are successful.  The vast majority of ‘evaders’ are from low-income households, often those headed by a single parent.

This volume amounts to 11.5% of total cases in magistrates’ courts, but the combined workload takes up only 0.3% of court time because cases are rarely contested and hearings are en masse in special courts. This means that the cost per prosecution is only £28.

The average fine plus surcharges for non-payment (with offenders having to pay the licence fee on top) is £340.  This means that the total yield of licence evasion to the Ministry of Justice is around £52 million. Astonishingly, that’s approximately 10% of the total fines revenue imposed in UK courts (£550m). Put another way, licence fee evasion is a cheap cash-cow for the Ministry.

And yet, conversely, licence fee non-payment adds up to only a small fraction of the Corporation’s £3.7 billion n licence-fee revenues. The £3.7 billion equates to 25.5 million licence fees – roughly in line with the number of UK households. Evasion is only £22.3m, or roughly 0.5% of the total.

The law is the law, of course…but a central question here is whether ever-expanding intrusion, with all the unpleasant elements such snooping entails, can be justified? Is it right that tens of thousands of the UK’s poor continue to be criminalised in this way? Netflix and Sky simply cut people off.

Whichever way you look at it, the system is outmoded, Orwellian and in some respects, plain ridiculous. George Osborne has a lot more than extreme Europhilia to answer for.

Photo by dan taylor

Can new Culture Secretary Karen Bradley Sort Out BBC Bias?

Can new Culture Secretary Karen Bradley Sort Out BBC Bias?

BBC Bias, EU Referendum | | by David Keighley

These are frustrating times for those who want an end to BBC bias.

Post-Brexit, there has been a concentrated deluge of pro-EU, anti-Brexit broadcasting. The primary intent seems to be to force a second referendum and keep the UK in the EU. Evan Davis, as ever, is among those leading the charge.

The highly biased coverage of post referendum affairs shows that the Corporation is totally out of touch with the 17m who want out. Their version of ‘understanding’ them is to go to backstreets in the most deprived areas of the country and patronise the locals.

But the malaise goes much deeper. The reporting of Hinckley Point saga last week showed that yet again, their only agenda in the thorny issue of energy supply is that of the Green Blob.

In the BBC universe, fantasy ‘climate’ targets (espoused by the High Priests of EU-funded Greenpeace) to keep temperature rises below 1.5 degrees centigrade are considered far more important than the urgent need to keep millions of pensioners and young families warm at affordable prices.

Add to that their extreme reluctance to attribute terrorism to anything other than ‘mental illness’, and the BBC’s bloody-minded drive to undermine whenever possible British culture and tradition, and the overall picture of bias reaches crisis proportions.    There is a rot at the heart of the Corporation’s outlook that only an Augean cleansing will achieve.

John Whittingdale’s White Paper on BBC reform was published back in early May. Thanks to George Osborne’s meddling over the licence fee, it was sadly a fudge. Instead of effective change, including funding by subscription, which as an Institute of Economic Affairs paper has adroitly pointed out, would have genuinely opened the Corporation up and made it sensitive to viewers’ needs, it perpetuated the licence fee for another decade.

The other changes were thoughtful and significant but nowhere near enough. There was scrapping of the failed Trustees, budgetary scrutiny by the National Audit Office, and the creation of a new, souped-up Executive Board made up of a mixture of BBC executives and independent directors (including the chairman).

Further changes involved overall regulation by Ofcom on the performance and delivery of services, and as the body of appeal in matters of impartiality. This was the most glaring mistake. An end to BBC bias will only come about when the Corporation content is opened up to genuinely independent scrutiny. Ofcom is run by former BBC staff, with their same outlook, and so in this respect the White Paper was a total dud.

All this was thrown into turmoil after Brexit when Whittingdale was unceremoniously fired in the Cabinet shake-up. In his place Karen Bradley – elected as an MP (for Staffordshire Moorlands) for the first time only in 2010 – was elevated to Cabinet level from her previous (and only government) role as ministerial support for May in the Home Office.

There’s nothing wrong with injection of new blood, but it means that the Culture department is now being run by an accountant with no experience of media management at all and very little too, of what Bill Clinton called ‘change-making’ at government level. She is an ingénue when it comes to the Gormenghast-politics of the BBC.

The BBC, by contrast, has years of experience of seeing off challenges to its so-called independence, and indeed has battalions of staff trained to pursue that end. This does not bode well at all. Director General Lord Hall and his main henchman in this department, James Purnell – himself a former Culture Secretary – must currently be feeling like cats who have found the cream.

Bradley, of course, may turn out to be a tough cookie, and there is no rule that says a minister of state must have previous experience of the subject matter of his or her portfolio. Indeed, a fresh eye and an outside perspective can be a catalyst for genuine change.

However, broadcasting is not just any brief, and the BBC not just any adversary. Politicians of every stripe are star-struck and mesmerised by the Corporation. They are terrified that saying the wrong things will incur Auntie displeasure and disfavour.

This, disappointingly, became sharply apparent this week when the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee published with very little fanfare its report on its reaction to the Whittingdale White Paper. The findings? They have tamely accepted most of the fudged changes, turning their fire only on a relevantly minor issue, the high level of pay of some BBC talent.

Most tellingly, there’s not a peep about complaints handling.

On that basis, as things stand, the Corporation could well be off the hook yet again (unless Bradley surprises us all). It looks that for another decade the BBC public will be saddled with the licence fee, the deckchairs will be re-arranged slightly. And BBC bias will carry on relentlessly.

Photo by Foreign and Commonwealth Office

BBC CONTINUES PROJECT FEAR OVER EU SCIENCE

BBC CONTINUES PROJECT FEAR OVER EU SCIENCE

BBC Bias, EU Referendum | | by David Keighley

On yesterday’s Today programme, Sarah Montague spoke to BBC science editor Tom Feilden about what Brexit would mean to the scientific community.  She said the scientific community was not exactly unified but there was ‘very overwhelming support’ for the EU, ‘not least because they argue the UK gets out more than it puts in.

Feilden said that with ‘one or two’ notable exceptions, the community was devastated with the result of the referendum, and threw in that there were ‘no two ways about that’. He ad,ded that he had spoken to Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse who was shortly to be director of  the Francis Crick Institute. He had described Brexit  as the worst disaster for UK science.  Feilden stated:

…the real underpinning behind that is . . . these days, science is not about one bloke in a garret, you know, thinking away about a problem, like Einstein did, and coming up with a solution, it’s a collaborative venture. And the UK has thrived and played a leading role in this wider collaborative, cooperative atmosphere within the European Union. Erm . . .

Montague asked if it was therefore the freedom of movement that was the principle concern. Fielden agreed and said it boiled down to that the UK had been able to attract the best brains to the best universities, so that the UK had become a ‘scientific powerhouse’ and a ‘leading light for science in Europe’.

Montague suggested that they were also worried about money. Feilden again agreed with her. He responded:

They, they, they, basically the two concerns come down to: we pay in quite a lot of money into the scientific kitty, if you like for Europe, but we get out a lot more in terms of the grants, and that’s because we’re doing so well at science. And the second is this idea of free movement. Those are the two key things, that it is a collaborative venture and people have to be able to move around and come and share their ideas and do their good science here at universities here.

Montague finally asked if anyone had any ideas in the new world, whatever it looked like. Feilden responded:

Well, that’s part of the problem. I mean (fragments of words, unclear) and I spoke to Sir Paul, he talked about a political vacuum, about nobody being in, nobody knows what the plan is, there was no preplanning ahead of the referendum result. And I think, you know, we’re going to hear some initial thoughts from Jo Johnson later today, because there isn’t a plan and the plan depends so much on what deal we can strike with the European Union over the coming two years.

At 7.49am, Montague  said that Sir Paul Nurse, the Nobel laureate, had said that research in the UK was facing its biggest threat in living memory. She explained that UK universities and research centres received billions from the EU and relied on the free movement of people; a quarter of the scientists working at Cambridge ‘were from the EU’. Montague said the science minister Jo Johnson  would be making a speech setting put what would happen next.  She added that Dame Anne Glover had told her of her fears. Glover said that exit would affect funding streams such as Horizon 2020 and would limit the ability to get the best minds to come to the UK and to contribute to science, technology and engineering. Montague said that countries like Turkey had access to the money even though they were not in the EU. Glover said that they had to pay for access and were the poor relatives – they could not influence anything. Montague asked if we were getting more out of the EU than was put in. Glover replied that this was substantially the case, the UK put £5.4bn in and got £8.8bn out. Montague asked if the funding could be protected and free movement of people to get better control of immigration that would satisfy scientists. Glover replied:

Not really, because . . . we want free movement of people, that’s what we rely on to get the best possible advantage from Horizon 2020. And there’s a precedent here in that Switzerland was a full associated country of Horizon 2020, as soon as they voted in a referendum to restrict immigration in Switzerland, overnight they became a non-associated country, and could no longer have access.

Montague suggested that she was doing down Britain’s brilliant scientists and asked what would really happen. Glover said that they would still be here, but the problem was that science was ‘truly global’ and if papers were published with only British scientists on the by-line they would not have the same impact – papers needed international co-authors. Montague suggested that if the UK was out of the EU it could still work with European partners and others from the rest of the world. Glover replied that a funding mechanism would have to be found. She declared:

We have a perfect system at the moment, and that’s going to be undermined or denied to us as part of leaving the European Union.

SM: And on that costing, how much would the UK government need to put in to make up for the loss?

DAG: I think that UK government would have to fund UK science just shy of an extra £1 billion per annum. Now, we could provide that funding, but we still wouldn’t have the minds, so that won’t be addressed just by the UK government putting in a lot of funding.

Montague then introduced Professor Angus Dalglish, who she said was a spokesman for Scientists for Britain’ which had campaigned for Brexit’. She asked him if damage would be done to scientific research by removing free movement of people and limiting funding. Dalglish said this was hysterical. Science was not restricted by borders and leaving the EU would not limit the collaboration that had always gone on.  He added:

What they’re talking about here is the funding which is the money that we pay in and get out, and it’s very focused on, that sum of money which was mentioned there, which is for the peer-reviewed funding. They’ve . . . she didn’t mention the fact that there’s a large structural fund thereto, which we pay a fortune into and get very little out. And the Scientists for EU freely admit that an enormous amount of that money cannot be traced, it just goes on corruption and waste, which I think largely defines . . .

Montague interrupted to ask what size it was and what it was for. Dlaglish said it was 57 billion and Britain got 2 billion out, of the 57 billion, the UK contributed about eight billion. Montague asked if therefore there was a net gain of six billion that could be spent across the board. Dalglish replied: .

Yes, I do. And that, that’s just a part of the budget that goes on scientific related issues, and there’s all the other budget money, erm, that we put in, that we don’t get back. And as you quite rightly say, a lot of other countries participate in these programs without being in the EU, and really, can you tell me that in the European Union, the top ten universities, the top eight are UK, er, one of them is Switzerland, not in the EU, so in the top ten universities.

Montague pointed out that Glover had suggested that when Switzerland had tried to restrict immigration, they had been excluded from the fund. Dalglish said the next step would be to negotiate. Britain was the fifth biggest economy and there would and had high scientific standing. Montague interrupted to say that there was issue of free movement of people. Sir Paul Nurse and probably the majority of senior scientists in this country of all the universities thought ending that  would be bad not just for funding but free movement itself, ‘the ability of people to come and work here’.  Dalglish said people would still want to come – there would be freedom of labour as opposed to people, and there would be no restrictions on people who came for jobs Montague riposted:

Why not, why are the rules about freedom of movement not going to apply to scientists, if they apply to everybody else?

Dalglish said the subject would be settled by negotiation, the UK would not stop essential workers from the EU such as doctors coming to the country, and suggested there had been a confusion between the movement of people and the movement of labour. Montague replied:

. . . so, on the numbers, because a lot of people would say, ‘Look, the numbers have to come down’, you would say, from what you’re suggesting, numbers don’t necessarily have to come down, it’s just who we get in?

PAD:      No, we’ve always suggested that one way round this is a points-style system, like they have in Australia, and then people come immediately back and say that’s to increase immigration, but the same thing can be used here to decide the quality of people who you have, in. And I think that this idea that we won’t get the best brains if we’re outside the European Union is clearly not true.  I can think of half a dozen really top people who are here from Australia and New Zealand, and they’re not in the European Union, so I do not think that for people of really high calibre it’s going to make any difference to [them] at all.

ANALYSIS: Today’s approach assumed from the outset that there was massive support for remaining in the EU from the scientific community.  In doing so, yet again, the BBC was amplifying to the maximum extent the dangers and negativities of Brexit.

But how strong was support for ‘remain’ in the academic community? Professor Dalglish in his comments above underlined that at least some scientists and academics think strongly that Brexit will not affect funding or the range of research.  The organisation he represents, Scientists for Britain, has a website which explains why and also challenges the numbers that think EU support is vital for the science community.   It specifically claims that numbers supporting ‘remain’ have been exaggerated.

Tom Feilden, in his overview report (broadcast at 6.10am), seemed to totally reject this. He said that with ‘only one or two exceptions’ academics supported staying in the EU.

He did not say how he had arrived at this conclusion. One possibility is that the Times Education Supplement published about a week before the poll a survey of the views of academics about the referendum.

If so, Feilden was on dubious territory. Of the 403,385 staff working in higher education in 2014-15, only 1,082 responded to the survey. That equates to around 0.27% (fewer than one in three hundred) of the target group. More than 99% of academics did not feel motivated to vote or were not consulted. It could therefore be argued that the vast majority of academics do not actually care about the EU’s role in research.

Feilden might also have drawn on a release by the formal ‘remain’ organisation British Stronger in Europe, which claimed that 5,000 scientists supported ‘remain’. This was based on that the 5,000 had written to newspapers outlining their concerns. Thus undoubtedly happened and indicated that some of the scientists were militantly concerned.

But the question here is how representative or typical this grouping was. The initiative was pushed by BSE.  Those who signed the letter were clearly politically motivated, and for example, Sir Paul Nurse, one of the key figures behind the letter, is an active member of the Labour party.  These are important caveats which should have been pointed out to the audience.

But Feilden did not do so. He gave the impression instead that the scientific community was devastated and that this, that it was believed, was ‘the worst disaster’ for UK science.  He emphasised this by stating the claims expressed in the BSE letter (and later by Dame Anne Glover) that this was because their research was a ‘collaborative venture’ which would now come to an end.

Sarah Montague compounded the negativity by asking Feilden if (the possible ending) of ’freedom of movement’ was also a ‘principle concern’. Feilden asserted that such movement had allowed the UK to become a ‘scientific powerhouse’. Montague’s then asked if the loss of EU money was also a problem. Feilden noted that the UK paid money into the EU, but ‘got a lot more out’ because the UK was doing so well in terms of science.  Winding up, Feilden pointed out that Sir Paul Nurse, had also warned there was now a ‘political vacuum’  and there was no plan for what happened next.

Thus overall, Feilden put forward that Brexit would be deeply damaging to scientific research in the UK, said all but one or two researchers wanted to remain in the EU, and pushed hard Sir Paul Nurse’s agenda that this was a disaster without a plan of repair or way forward.

At 7.49am, in her interviews with Glover and Dalglish, Sarah Montague in effect picked up where Feilden had left off, and amplified his negativity about Brexit further. She first noted that Sir Paul Nurse, ‘the Nobel Laureate’ – thus emphasising his credentials – had claimed research was facing its biggest threat in living memory. Next she stressed that UK universities received ‘billions’ from the EU, and repeated the claim that this research activity relied upon the ‘free movement of people’ – further emphasising its importance by also pointing out that a quarters of research staff at Cambridge were from the EU.

In the pre-recorded interview with Dame Anne Glover, Montague put a couple of mildly adversarial points – such as that Turkish researchers received money even thought they were outside the EU – but the main aim of the sequence appeared to be to let Glover push that almost everything in this domain was now at risk, that Britain got far more from the EU than it put in; that the free movement of people was essential because science was ‘truly global’; and that Switzerland, which was outside the EU, could not have access to the EU funding because it did not accept free movement. Glover concluded – without challenge from Montague – that the current system was ‘perfect’ and it was now threatened by Brexit.

Montague moved on to Dalglish at this point. She did not tell the audience anything about him (unlike with Sir Paul Nurse) other than he was a spokesman for Scientists for Britain. She could easily have dug out that he is a leading oncology with a distinguished international career and sits on the European Commission Cancer Board, making him especially knowledgeable about the EU, but did not do so. She could also have explained more about Scientists for Britain in terms of its potential credibility but did not. The editorial effort was entirely the other way in underlining that the credentials of those who challenged Brexit were high and impressive.

That said, she allowed Dalglish to put across clearly that he believed that the EU money was not as crucial to scientists had had been claimed, that the UK did not get much money out of the structural research fund, and that reaction to the potential changes was ‘hysterical’; that the EU administration of the research budget was inefficient and even corrupt; that free movement of people was not actually the issue – what counted was that free movement of labour would continue after Brexit, allowing academics to come to the UK. Montague pushed the discussion towards the critical importance of the ending of free movement of people issue, but Dalglish was able to put across his counter views.

The main issue here overall was therefore the undoubted bias of Feilden and Montague in their explanation and determination of the issues being considered. They both in different ways underlined the strength of the scientific community’s concern about Brexit and the related allegations that the UK was going to suffer to disaster level. Dalglish vigorously disputed this, but by the time he appeared the potential importance of what he said had already been undermined – it seemed from the set-up that he was a lone voice against the undoubted and incontrovertible weight of academic opinion.

This was thus another part of the BBC’s continuation of Project Fear about Brexit – greater credibility and weight was given to those who were warning of the consequences, and arguably this was a continuation of the BSE fight against Brexit.

 

Transcript of BBC Radio 4, ‘Today’, 30th June 2016, Scientists and the Referendum, 6.12am

SARAH MONTAGUE:      The Science Minister, Jo Johnson will be speaking to leading scientists today, not least to consider what Brexit will mean for the scientific community and research.  Tom Feilden is our science editor, and Tom, the science community in a way, not entirely unified, but very overwhelming support for the EU, not least because they argue that the UK gets out more than it puts in?

TOM FEILDEN:   Well, I certainly think it’s fair to say that the scientific community, with, as you say, one or two notable exceptions was devastated by the result of the referendum, there’s no two ways about that.  I spoke to Sir Paul Nurse yesterday, that’s the Nobel laureate, he’s going to be boss of the new Francis Crick Institute, former president of the Royal Society.  He described it as ‘the worst disaster for UK science . . . ever.’ Erm, and (short laugh?) (fragments of words, unclear) the real underpinning behind that is . . . these days, science is not about one bloke in a garret, you know, thinking away about a problem, like Einstein did, and coming up with a solution, it’s a collaborative venture.  And the UK has thrived and played a leading role in this wider collaborative, cooperative atmosphere within the European Union.  Erm . . .

SM:       So it’s freedom of movement is their particular concern?

TF:         Yeah. I mean, basically, what it comes down to is we’ve been able to attract the best brains to the best universities, some of the best universities in the world and have really been able to become a scientific powerhouse here in the UK, a leading light for science in Europe.

SM:       They’re also worried about money though, aren’t they?

TF:         They are. They, they, they, basically the two concerns come down to: we pay in quite a lot of money into the scientific kitty, if you like for Europe, but we get out a lot more in terms of the grants, and that’s because we’re doing so well at science. And the second is this idea of free movement.  Those are the two key things, that it is a collaborative venture and people have to be able to move around and come and share their ideas and do their good science here at universities here.

SM:       And does anybody have any ideas as to how to address those concerns in the new world, whatever the new world looks like?

TF:         Well, that’s part of the problem. I mean (fragments of words, unclear) and I spoke to Sir Paul, he talked about a political vacuum, about nobody being in, nobody knows what the plan is, there was no preplanning ahead of the referendum result.  And I think, you know, we’re going to hear some initial thoughts from Jo Johnson later today, because there isn’t a plan and the plan depends so much on what deal we can strike with the European Union over the coming two years.

SM:       A story we’ll be returning to, not least at ten to eight this morning, Tom Feilden, thanks very much.

 

Transcript of BBC Radio 4, ‘Today’, 30th June 2016, Scientists and the Referendum, 7.49am

 SARAH MONTAGUE:      The Nobel Laureate and former president of the Royal Society, Professor Paul Nurse has said research in this country is facing its biggest threat in living memory.  UK universities and research centres receive billions from the EU, and the scientific community relies on free movement of people.  A quarter of the scientists working at Cambridge from the EU.  The science Minister, Jo Johnson, will be speaking to scientists today who want to know what happens now.  Dame Anne Glover was the first and last scientific adviser to the President of the European Commission, she is now at Aberdeen University.  And she told me about her fears.

DAME ANNE GLOVER:   My concern will be that a negotiation to leave the European Union will somehow affect our ability to be able to access both the funding stream, which is Horizon 2020, to influence the strategy of what that funding is focused towards, and will limit our ability to get the best minds in the world to come to the UK and to contribute to science, engineering and technology here.

SM:       But there are countries like Turkey and Israel who have access to Horizon 2020 funding, and they’re not part of the EU.

DAG:     They have to pay for what they get, they cannot influence anything done in Horizon 2020, so they’re really poor relatives.

SM:       And the argument is that . . . what, as things stand we get more funding out of the EU than we put in?

DAG:     Substantially, when it comes to research.  So, if we look at the last funding programme, we got about €8.8 billion out of that program, and our proportional contribution was €5.4 billion.

SM:       If there was some way to protect that, but to change freedom of movement, so we have better control of immigration, would that satisfy scientists?

DAG:     Not really, because . . . we want free movement of people, that’s what we rely on to get the best possible advantage from Horizon 2020.  And there’s a precedent here in that Switzerland was a full associated country of Horizon 2020, as soon as they voted in a referendum to restrict immigration in Switzerland, overnight they became a non-associated country, and could no longer have access.

SM:       Okay, say the worst happens, and we lose these things you’re talking about, what difference would it really make, because a lot of people would say, ‘hold on a second, you’re doing the UK down here, we have brilliant scientists, we’ll still have brilliant scientists.’?

DAG:     Yeah, and you’re absolutely right, we still will be able to science.  But science is unusual, because it is truly global, and so if I publish a paper but just with other UK scientists, all the evidence says that that paper will have less impact than if I publish with international co-authors.

SM:       But you absolutely made the point, science is global, sites will still be global if we are out of the EU and we can still work with European partners as well as the rest of the world, surely?

DAG:     But we have to find a funding mechanism to allow us to do that.  We have a perfect system at the moment, and that’s going to be undermined or denied to us as part of leaving the European Union.

SM:       And on that costing, how much would the UK government need to put in to make up for the loss?

DAG:     I think that UK government would have to fund UK science just shy of an extra £1 billion per annum.  Now, we could provide that funding, but we still wouldn’t have the minds, so that won’t be addressed just by the UK government putting in a lot of funding.

SM:       Dame Anne Glover, talking to me earlier. Well, here in the studio is Professor Angus Dalglish, who’s a spokesman for Scientists for Britain and campaigned for Brexit, good morning to you.

PROFESSOR ANGUS DALGLISH:  Good morning.

SM:       Do you accept these arguments about the damage that would be done to scientific research by removing free movement and limiting the funding?

PAD:      No, I don’t.  I think it’s rather hysterical actually, because science . . . er, scientists are rather like fish, they don’t really know where the waters are, territorial boundaries, etcetera, and er, I really don’t think it would interfere with the collaboration that we’ve always done.  What they’re talking about here is the funding which is the money that we pay in and get out, and it’s very focused on, that sum of money which was mentioned there, which is for the peer-reviewed funding.  They’ve . . . she didn’t mention the fact that there’s a large structural fund thereto, which we pay a fortune into and get very little out.  And the Scientists for EU freely admit that an enormous amount of that money cannot be traced, it just goes on corruption and waste, which I think largely defines . . .

SM:       (interrupting) Structural funding, how much? What sort of . . . what size is it and what’s it for?

PAD:      The size is about 57 billion (no denomination given) and we get less than 2 billion out of it.

SM:       How much do we put into it?

PAD:      About 8 billion, as far as I (word unclear due to speaking over)

SM:       (speaking over) So you’re saying there’s a net gain of £6 billion that we could get from that, which we could spend on, on, across the board?

PAD:      Yes I do. And that, that’s just a part of the budget that goes on scientific related issues, and there’s all the other budget money, erm, that we put in, that we don’t get back. And as you quite rightly say, a lot of other countries participate in these programs without being in the EU, and really, can you tell me that in the European Union, the top ten universities, the top eight are UK, er, one of them is Switzerland, not in the EU, so in the top ten universities . . .

SM:       (speaking over) But she made a point about Switzerland, which is that the mo— . . . when they voted to restrict immigration . . .

PAD:      Hmm.

SM:       . . . overnight they were effectively excluded from this fund?

PAD:      Well, one of the things I think we have to negotiate, we’re not Switzerland, we are the fifth largest trading organisation in the world, we’re probably the most important scientific voice in the world, we have more Nobel Prize winners, etcetera, and they impact on the rest of Europe, so I don’t see why we’re not going to have a voice if we just participate as we’re doing, and I don’t see (fragment of word, unclear due to speaking over)

SM:       (speaking over) (fragments of words, unclear) I mean, (fragments of words, unclear) there’s the funding, there is also this question of free movement, you have Professor Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Laureate, you have the majority, probably of senior scientists in this country, all the universities saying that this would be bad, and if not just for the funding but also for the free mood (sic) movement. That ability for people to come and work here.

PAD:      The ability for people to come and work here has always been the case, and I don’t think it’s going to be affected by this.  What we’re talking about is freedom of labour, as opposed to freedom of movement of people, and if we don’t . . . we will not have restrictions on people to come here for jobs, and for basically (fragments of words, unclear due to speaking over)

SM:       (speaking over) Why not, why are the rules about freedom of movement not going to apply to scientists, if they apply to everybody else?

PAD:      Well, they’re not going to apply, this is one of the things that’s going to be thrashed out in Brexit, they’re not going to apply to people who you really need.  You’re not going to stop people from the EU coming to be doctors or nurses etcetera here, when there’s a job to go to.  That’s not going to change. I mean, half the people who come here aren’t even in the EU, and that’s not going to change if they’re needed. So I think that that’s . . . there’s been a big confusion about movement, freedom of movement of people and freedom of movement of labour.

SM:       So can I . . . so, on the numbers, because a lot of people would say, ‘Look, the numbers have to come down’, you would say, from what you’re suggesting, numbers don’t necessarily have to come down, it’s just who we get in?

PAD:      No, we’ve always suggested that one way round this is a points-style system, like they have in Australia, and then people come immediately back and say that’s to increase immigration, but the same thing can be used here to decide the quality of people who you have, in. And I think that this idea that we won’t get the best brains if we’re outside the European Union is clearly not true.  I can think of half a dozen really top people who are here from Australia and New Zealand, and they’re not in the European Union, so I do not think that for people of really high calibre it’s going to make any difference to [them] at all.

SM:       Professor Angus Dalglish, thank you very much.

Photo by Trondheim Havn

Sir Cliff saga shows BBC is ‘impervious to criticism of its journalism’

Sir Cliff saga shows BBC is ‘impervious to criticism of its journalism’

BBC Bias | | by David Keighley

The BBC’s sensationalist coverage of the South Yorkshire police ‘investigation’ of Sir Cliff Richard over alleged sexual impropriety stank to high heaven from the beginning. Now that the 75-year-old singer has been totally exonerated, it stinks even more.

The Richard saga began in August 2014, when – according to an official report by retired Chief Constable Andy Trotter, one of the country’s leading police experts on press relations – the Corporation pressured the South Yorkshire force to make a preliminary search of Sir Cliff’s home into a major primetime television news event.

It should be noted here that although Trotter was as thorough as he could be in reaching his findings, he was handicapped heavily by the conduct of the BBC. Though it had milked to maximum extent the high drama footage of the ‘raid,’ Corporation news chiefs refused point blank to give evidence to his inquiry.

When the report was published in February, this stonewalling was compounded. The only trace on the BBC website of the report is in the South Yorkshire section; in their eyes, therefore it had only local significance.

In his report, Trotter said the BBC had, in effect, misled the police about the amount of information about the investigation it had, and had thus duped the press office into putting pressure on officers to allow them to witness – and, in effect, be part of –  the raid.

The way the two organisations acted together was, according to Trotter, totally unwarranted, and outside proper police procedures.  Leading leftist human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson – normally a natural ally of the Corporation – said the nature of the BBC’s coverage amounted to a ‘conspiracy to injure’ the singer.

In the aftermath of the raid, the Corporation’s then deputy director of news Fran Unsworth justified the massive intrusion into the singer’s life by blaming the pressures of the news agenda. In other words, an insolent ‘Not us, guv, we were only doing our job’. BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw compounded this by alleging that if anyone was to blame, it was South Yorkshire police in ‘a deliberate attempt to engineer maximum coverage’.

Part of the Corporation’s stonewall response – and refusal to tesify to Trotter – was that it claimed that a hastily-convened Commons home affairs committee hearing held a few weeks after the raid by the pro-BBC chairman, Keith Vaz, had exonerated its conduct.

It did no such thing, because Vaz, in his haste to finger the police and let the BBC off the hook, reached his conclusions long before the full facts were known. It was Trotter, reporting the following February after a thorough forensic investigation, who – despite the BBC’s refusal to cooperate with him – brought to light the correct picture of collusion, incompetence and misinformation.

After this this sorry, obstructive saga, how did the BBC report this week’s exoneration of Sir Cliff?

To be fair, they have published prominently on the BBC website the singer’s statement about the investigation which included his claim that he had been ‘hung out like live bait’ by the police investigation and his anguish over that his ordeal had last almost two years.

That said, the Corporation’s official reaction to its own role in the events was this:

“We applied normal editorial judgements to a story that was covered widely by all media and have continued to report the investigation as it developed including the CPS’s decision today – which is running prominently across our news output.”

Normal editorial judgments? If this is so, then the BBC inhabits a different moral universe. The reality is that, as the Trotter report found, they deliberately chose from the outset to exaggerate the significance of the raid, and used their immense clout to manipulate and hoodwink an incompetent South Yorkshire police in their efforts.

What it boils down to is that in the pursuit of this story, the BBC did not give a damn for Sir Cliff or the laws and journalistic conventions that are designed to protect the innocent from being unfairly presumed guilty.

Why? Probably because, unlike the BBC’s rock-star heroes such as David Bowie – whose recent death was treated as a world tragedy in the Corporation’s coverage – Richard does not flaunt his sexuality, has never espoused drug use as an essential part of the creative process, and now appeals principally to a middle-of-the road, aging, white, middle England audience. In other words, everything that the BBC abhors. That’s what made him fair game for this in-the-gutter journalism.

A principal issue here is that it illustrates yet again the BBC is impervious to criticism of its journalism and is a law only unto itself. Its guaranteed, lavish funding by a regressive tax allows it to be.  In similar vein, as the EU referendum poll fast approaches, it continues to churn out biased pro-‘remain’ coverage for exactly the same reasons. The Corporation is a menace to both the democratic process and moral decency.

Photo by Music News Australia

Bias by Omission? BBC under-reports latest EU assault on Internet freedom

Bias by Omission? BBC under-reports latest EU assault on Internet freedom

BBC Bias, EU Referendum, European Union | | by David Keighley

BBC bias comes in many forms. One of the most insidious is bias by omission, when the Corporation chooses not to report key developments or perspectives in areas of major controversy.

It is a major issue in the referendum campaign. For example, the Corporation barely touched the story about a poster – ostensibly designed to encourage ethnic minorities to vote – which crassly depicted those who oppose immigration as a bullying skinhead thug.

The reason? Covering the story would have unavoidably opened a can of worms in the ‘remain’ strategy.

Front-line presenters John Humphrys and Nick Robinson have both admitted that such bias has been particularly evident in BBC coverage of the immigration debate. The views of opponents of the unprecedented levels of mass immigration into the UK since 2004 have routinely been ignored by the BBC or, just as bad, dismissed as racism or xenophobia.

It has also applied for decades in the BBC’s general reporting of the EU. Until forced to change by the EU referendum rules, the BBC vastly under-reported the withdrawal perspective, and anything to do with the case against the EU, as Brexit The Movie so vividly confirms. Emphatically, you did not hear those arguments first on the BBC.

Although the BBC is now reluctantly giving the opponents of the EU some airtime, it is mostly through gritted teeth. The default-position is still almost invariably Brussels good, Westminster bad.

Evidence of this? As Andrew Marr illustrated vividly at the weekend ‘remain’ figures such as Sir John Major – who was given a platform to attack viciously his perceived opponents – often get much better treatment than ‘leave’ supporters.

Such negativity to the ‘leave’ case is abundant elsewhere. For example, Today presenters Justin Webb and Mishal Husain filed three-part special reports (from Cornwall and Northern Ireland respectively) about what were said to be the local ‘facts’ in the referendum debate. Both, it turned out, injected a central theme: the cardinal importance of ‘EU money’ to the deprived economies in each area.

Neither bothered to tell the audience in their relentless focus on EU benevolence the simple but vital fact that, in reality, ‘EU money’ is actually from the British taxpayer.

Compounding the glaring omission, Justin Webb seemed conveniently not to know that a recent official report commissioned on behalf of local ratepayers in Cornwall had found that the spending of £500m of this ‘EU money’ had been so questionable and inefficient that, for example, it led to the creation of only 3,300 local jobs at a staggering cost of £150,000 per job.

Such blatant bias by omission by the BBC in the EU’s favour extends heavily into other areas.

Take for example, the reporting of one of Brussels’ latest highly controversial initiatives: to combine with Microsoft and other web giants in rooting out what the European Commission calls ‘hate speech and xenophobia’.

The BBC web story about this enthusiastically declared:

‘Microsoft, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have pledged to remove hate speech within 24 hours, in support of a code of conduct drafted by the EU. The freshly drafted code aims to limit the viral spread of online abuse on social media. It requires the firms to act quickly when told about hate speech and to do more to help combat illegal and xenophobic content. The firms must also help “educate” users about acceptable behaviour.’

What’s not to like? But hang on.  Did no-one in the 8,000-strong BBC newsroom think to check out the potential threats to civil liberty and journalistic freedom involved in such a move? Seemingly not. There’s not a peep about such issues in the web story.

The reality – as the Spiked! Website eloquently explains – is that phrases as vague as ‘hate speech and xenophobia’ and ‘acceptable behaviour’ are a legal nightmare and a lawyer’s paradise. They can be interpreted with deeply sinister intent, and, for example, can be used by the EU to attack and attempt to silence those who disagree with its free movement of people and immigration policies. Indeed, that may be the central agenda here.

The background of this new move also speaks volumes about how undemocratic and insidious the EU is.  The loosely-phrased laws against hate speech and xenophobia were first enacted by the European Commission in 2008. Has anyone ever been seriously consulted about them? No.

Yet since then, a vast continent-wide operation has gradually been set up to root these twin perceived evils out, including a European Commission against ‘racism and intolerance’.

The latest initiative with a Microsoft, therefore, is arguably a very substantial intensification of the Commission’s assault on those who disagree with its policies towards free movement, as the reams of explanation in the press release about the development clearly show.

And the BBC accepts this without a murmur. Why? Because, it still instinctively supports the EU, and will publish derogatory views about Brussels only if forced.

In this referendum, the BBC should be grasping every opportunity to explore EU-related issues, and especially the controversy surrounding them. Andrew Marr will call Boris Johnson ‘abominable’ for daring to raise Hitler in connection with EU operations, but he and his colleagues ignore EU actions that are patently and blatantly a threat to our fundamental, hard-won freedoms.

John Wilkes? He will be surely turning in his grave.

 

 

BBC Bias – A Progress Report

BBC Bias – A Progress Report

EU Referendum, Newsnight, World at One | | by David Keighley

News-watch’s monitoring of the BBC’s EU referendum coverage has now been underway for three months and this is a progress report.

In one sense, tectonic plates have moved.  Speakers who support British exit have invited on BBC news programmes to discuss the topic. For years anyone who was an ‘outer’ was completely ignored, or – in their rare appearances, as Ukip spokesmen regularly were – treated as xenophobic, or crassly inept, or worse.

But, as always with the BBC, the devil is in the detail.  The reality is that the Corporation has no choice; it has had to change. Research so far indicates there is a very long way to go before anything approaching genuine impartiality is achieved, and the exit case treated with respect.

Exhibit A is from Radio 4’s World at One starting on Monday.  Presenter Martha Kearney introduced a new series which she said would explain how the EU ‘actually works’. The first two were presented by Professor Anand Menon, who, Ms Kearney said, is Professor of European Politics at King’s College, London.

What she did not say is that her guest is not neutral about the EU. Far from it. He is also director of a think-tank called  The UK in a Changing Europe which contains a raft of papers that, to put it mildly, are hugely critical of the Brexit case. The one about the Norway option, for example, is headed: ‘Norwegian model for the UK; oh really.’

Further digging yields that back in 1999 – when the entire European Commission of Jacques Santer was forced to resign because of a financial scandal – Menon wrote a long article for the London Review of Books defending the importance of the Commission and claiming that, in effect, the impropriety involved was inconsequential.

Menon’s first talk was about the Commission set in the wider context of the governance of the EU.. Basically, he argued that the EU – despite claims to the contrary – is no more complex than any other system of governance; that the Commission is not made up of ‘unelected bureaucrats’; that the Parliament and the Council of Ministers acting in concert are a model of democracy in action; and that – although the Commission is the sole originator of EU legislation – this is a perfectly legitimate form of operations because it has the interests of Europe as its main objective. Europe.

In other words, he completely rubbished the ‘exit’ case and presented the Peter Mandelson view of how the EU works.

Exhibit B is a Newsnight special – one of six focused on the EU referendum – on Monday night which examined the issue of sovereignty. A full analysis of this programme will follow in due course,  but one factor immediately stood out.   Someone in the production team decided that the best illustration of what Brexit might look like was Sealand.

Where? Well it’s a very ugly pair defence towers built illegally by the British government during the Second World War in North Sea international waters near to the Thames Estuary. Back in the 1960s the huge ‘fortress’ was stormed and occupied by an ex-army major called Roy Bates and he and his family have since turned it into what they claim  is an ‘independent country’.

Presenter Evan Davis was duly winched down to Sealand, and used this as a subtle-as-a-brick metaphor for how the UK would  look if it was outside the EU: battered, totally isolated, totally eccentric, if not downright batty, completely on its own, a decaying hulk battered by the North Sea and outside the law.

That editor Ian Katz could not see that this was totally negative and totally inappropriate illustrates how far away from understanding the Brexit argument he and his senior BBC colleagues are. Light years.

Exhibit C was Sunday’s The World This Weekend. The presenter was former BBC ‘Europe’ editor Mark Mardell, and he chose to mount the programme from a rather select conference  in Lake Como organised by a strongly pro-EU think thank called The European House – Ambrosetti.

They had  gathered there, it was said, to discuss global economic problems including the possible impact of Brexit. Mardell produced an Obama adviser, a Chinese economist, a German government minister and the president of huge global investment fund (Allianz), all of who, with differing degrees of stridency, attacked the effrontery of such a ‘stupid’ (as one contributor said) prospect. In their collective eyes, membership of the EU was unquestionably absolutely vital to the UK’s future.

This carefully-edited sequence of pro-EU frenzy was followed by a live interview with Labour donor John Mills, who Mardell introduced as ‘the founder of a mail order company’.  Mardell’s tone and approach changed immediately. With his Ambrosetti guests, he had politely elicited their views. With Mills, he became sharply interrogative and sceptical.

To be fair, Mills was given a far crack of the whip in answering the points raised – and gave credible answers – but it was in a much narrower channel, and under far deeper scrutiny. And Mardell’s careful editing meant that every element of the pro- EU side appeared more authoritative and more polished.

Overall, the BBC may have upped its game in terms of the breadth of coverage in in some respects. News-watch analysis has revealed big problems not only in the examples above, but also serially and cumulatively in programmes such as Newsnight and World Tonight. The referendum campaign enters its final stage this week. The BBC is not yet mounting properly balanced coverage, and seems blind to its shortcomings.

Photo by octal

BBC NEWS CHIEFS CLAIM THAT MONITORING FOR POLITICAL BIAS ‘IS VERY UNHELPFUL’

BBC NEWS CHIEFS CLAIM THAT MONITORING FOR POLITICAL BIAS ‘IS VERY UNHELPFUL’

BBC Bias, European Scrutiny Committee, News-watch | | by Craig Byers

This is a guest post from Craig Byers of Is the BBC Biased?

One of the big BBC-related stories of the past week has been the appearance of Lord Hall, James Harding and David Jordan at parliament’s European Scrutiny Committee discussing the BBC’s policies in the light of the upcoming EU referendum.

Two parts of the discussion have dominated the media’s reporting of it:

The first was that “all BBC journalists” will be sent for “mandatory training” so that they become “as well-informed as possible of the issues around the workings of the institutions of the EU and its relationship to the UK”.

(So that’s John Humphrys, James Naughtie, Evan Davis, Kirsty Wark, Katya Adler, Jeremy Bowen, etc?)

The second concerned the meeting’s most heated moment – when Jacob Rees-Mogg confronted David Jordan (director of editorial policy and standards) over EU funding for the BBC – the reporting about which has been somewhat confusing (to my mind).

Mr Jordan began by replying that the BBC “doesn’t take money from the EU” and that the organisation that does take money from the EU (£35 million), Media Action, is “owned by the BBC” but “independent”.

On being pushed further (over a FoI request by The Spectator into EU funding for the BBC), however, things got murkier and Mr Jordan and Mr Rees-Mogg began to fall out:

David Jordan: There are two things you were referring to – the question that you asked last time, which was in relation to Media Action, so I answered…

Jacob Rees-Mogg: Well, I wasn’t actually. Last time I was asking about EU funds broadly, not Media Action.

David Jordan: Well, it’s that £35 million figure which you quoted which relates to the Media Action…

Jacob Rees-Mogg: But you replied about Media Action when I was asking about all EU funding….

Having watched their earlier exchange again, Mr Rees-Mogg is correct. He didn’t ask about Media Action or “quote” that £35 million figure earlier. Here’s how their discussion started:

Jacob Rees-Mogg: I just want to go back to a question we came to the last time you came to the committee, on the money that the BBC receives from the EU, which I know isn’t huge in your overall budget but which is still some tens of millions. One of the standard contractual terms when the EU hands out money is that those receiving money won’t say or do anything damaging to the interests of the EU. Does the BBC agree to those standard contractual terms and will they take money from the EU between now and the referendum?

David Jordan: The BBC as a public service broadcaster doesn’t take money from the EU. The organisation to which you’re referring that take money from the EU is an organisation called Media Action and that’s an independent part of the BBC with independent trustees……..

The committee’s chairman, however, only added to the confusion here by wrongly ascribing that “quote” about the £35 million to Mr Rees-Mogg himself shortly after, so maybe Mr Jordan’s apparent confusion on that point is more understandable:

William Cash: Why do you need to receive the £30 million I think that Jacob referred to…?

The disagreements continued, however, and David Jordan, in answer to pushing on that Spectator FoI request, said that independent companies who make programmes for the BBC also receive some EU funding and that the EU also funds some other things, such as translating programmes made in English into other EU languages (as seemed to have been the case with the highly controversial pro-EU mockumentary The Great European Disaster Movie).

Jacob Rees-Mogg: Look, you are now giving me a really different answer from the one you gave before. I never mentioned Media Action. I only mentioned EU funding. You gave an answer about overseas aid and now you’re saying the BBC does receive money to help with some of its programming and does receive money to translate some of its programming and you are therefore signed up to the contractual agreements from the EU that require you not to damage its interests. Why didn’t you give the full answer the first time.

David Jordan: I gave a very full answer about Media Action and now I’m giving a very full answer about how other funds are occasionally available for other programmes to make use of…

Jacob Rees-Mogg:…which you denied in response to my first question.

William Cash then told them to calm down and moved the discussion on – which is unfortunate, I think, as many issues were still left dangling in the air over the EU money that isn’t spent on Media Action. Mr Rees-Mogg still seemed unclear about that. I’m certainly unclear about it.

And does the BBC sign up to that contractual agreement with the EU when it accepts the funding for innocuous-sounding tasks like translations and those other aspects of programming (whatever they may be exactly), apparently always involving independent companies?

And what if those independent companies only produce pro-EU programmes for the BBC (like The Great European Disaster Movie?) How would that free the BBC from charges of pro-EU bias? Does their independence’ and the apparent fact that the EU money they get goes on things like translations really get the BBC off the hook here?

Such questions need a lot more scrutiny.

Why the BBC doesn’t monitor itself for bias

One of the less-reported things about the European Scrutiny Committee’s encounter with the three top BBC bosses was that it discussed something close to our hearts: monitoring bias.

What I took away from it was that after the Wilson Report into the BBC’s (pro-) EU coverage, the BBC had pledged to put some form of monitoring into place but that, having tried doing so, has now abandoned monitoring again and won’t be re-introducing it in the run-up to the EU referendum.

Sir Bill Cash, repeatedly citing News-watch’s close monitoring of the BBC’s EU coverage, argued that the BBC ought to be carrying out such monitoring and making its finding publicly available for people to check. He wants a Hansard-style logging system, comparable to News-watch’s extensive archive of transcriptions, and, given its huge budget and sheer size, wanted to know why the BBC isn’t doing so?

The most concise statement of the BBC’s position came from David Jordan, the BBC’s head of editorial policy and standards:

I think we gave up the monitoring that the chairman is talking about at the time because we found it to be actually very unhelpful and not helpful at all in even deciding and defining whether we were impartial.

And I think in the context of other appearances and elections we’ve discovered the same thing. For example, if you’re covering an election how do you define somebody who’s on a particular party but it opposing something that party is doing at the time they were appearing on the radio? Are they, as it were, in that party’s column or are they in another column that tells you what they were doing? It becomes very, very confusing and doesn’t necessarily sum up the nuances and differences that exist in election campaigns in our experience.

So that was the reason I think why we gave it up.

It was also very, very expensive and time-consuming too.

And we thought that allowing editors to be essentially responsible for impartiality in their output and having an overall view which we get through a series of meetings and discussions which take place in the BBC, were a better way to ensure we achieved impartiality that through simple number-counting.

I have to say I laughed when he said that such monitoring had proved to be “actually very unhelpful and not helpful at all”. Cynically, I thought, “I bet it wasn’t – especially if it came up with the ‘wrong’ results” (a bit like the Balen report?)

I didn’t buy his example either. For me, it’s hardly rocket science to, say, note in one column that Kate Hoey is a Labour Party representative and in another column to note that she’s anti-EU. I can’t see why that would be “very, very confusing”.

Also, I don’t buy the it’s “very, very expensive and time-consuming too” argument either. If a small number of people at News-watch can monitor and transcribe every EU-related interview on major BBC programmes over many, many years then surely an organisation of the size and resources of the BBC can run something similar for its major news bulletins and flagship programmes too. It’s not that difficult. I work full-time and still managed to monitor every political interview on all the BBC’s main current affairs programmes for nine months (in 2009-10) – and at no expense whatsoever!

Also, if you simply rely on editorial judgement – on both the small and large scales (in individual programmes and at senior editorial meetings) – then many individual biases could result and multiply. In an organisation containing so many like-minded people as the BBC, those biases would doubtless head in the same direction and become self-reinforcing. Therefore, they probably won’t be spotted as biases at all – merely sensible, impartial BBC thinking. Who then would be able to point out that it isn’t being impartial after all?

Given that many people think that this kind of groupthink the problem and that, as a result, the BBC are blind to their own biases, asking us to trust the judgements of BBC editors en masse isn’t likely to reassure us….

….which is where what David Jordan derisively calls “number-crunching” comes in.

If over a year of, say, Newsnight there are 60 editions that deal with the UK-EU relationship in some way. Say 55 of those editions featured a pro-Stay guest but only 35 featured a pro-Leave guest, then number-crunching surely would surely raise a serious question about the programme’s impartiality?

If, say, 9 of those pro-Leave guests came from UKIP and the other 26 came from the Conservatives but no pro-Leave Labour or Green guests appeared then that would also surely indicate a serious bias?

Is it really beyond the ability of programme editors to count and record such figures – and to then make them publicly available?

If their figures show exceptional impartiality (45 pro-Stay, 45 pro-Leave guests), then they will surely win more people over, wouldn’t they?

What would they have to lose?

The full transcript of the committee meeting is available here.

BBC PLUMBS NEW DEPTHS OF CLIMATE ALARMISM IN EMMA THOMPSON ‘INTERVIEW’

BBC PLUMBS NEW DEPTHS OF CLIMATE ALARMISM IN EMMA THOMPSON ‘INTERVIEW’

BBC Bias, Newsnight | | by David Keighley

An interview on Newsnight of the actress and Labour-supporter Emma Thompson has taken the BBC’s handling of climate alarmism to new depths of shoddy and biased journalism.

Under the editorship of ex-Guardian man Ian Katz, this type of celebrity interview – in which the subject is given virtual carte blanche to put across highly questionable leftist views – has become a regular feature. Here, for example, it was Russell Brand.

For years, the Corporation’s approach to climate reporting has been deliberately and systematically skewed against those who are sceptical about alarmism.

The grossly biased stance was decided by the BBC Trustees and became official editorial policy back in 2011. Since then, the output in all programmes, from news and current affairs to drama, has been hinged to a massive extent upon the mantra that unless we massively curb carbon dioxide output we are doomed.

The policy is so absolute that one appearance by a ‘sceptic’, such as that by the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts, when he dared to question elements of the prevailing orthodoxy, is met with an internal inquiry and fits of apoplexy by those – such as the BBC’s former ‘environment’ correspondent , Richard Black, now a prominent eco-campaigner- who claim to know with certainty that we are all going to fry.

Meanwhile, as another indicator of how deeply alarmism is engrained in BBC reporting, the Corporation’s overseas aid charity arm,   Media Action, is engaged in extensive operations throughout the world to spread climate alarm in every way it can, while at the same time encouraging developing countries to resent Britain and the West generally for causing the alleged problem.

The latest example of this BBC worship at the altar of climate alarmism was the appearance last Wednesday by Ms Thompson.

Thompson, it should first be said, has become one of the most prominent media supporters of the law-breaking ‘charity’ Greenpeace, as is evidenced here in the pages of the Guardian. She is also a declared life-long member of the Labour party, supports Action Aid, a development charity that is as strident as Greenpeace in its climate alarmism, and is also strongly pro-Palestinian (and thus anti-Israel).

The peg for her appearance was an event that was scarcely reported elsewhere, the decision by Greenpeace to place a giant polar bear outside the HQ of Shell in London in their bid to try prevent the company from drilling for oil in the Arctic.   She did not deign to come live into the Newsnight studios, and rather, presenter Emily Maitlis treated her throughout the recorded exchange as if she was a highly respected dignitary with immense status.

The full transcript is below.

The first question was if Thompson thought she could negotiate with the ‘oil giant’. The essence of Thompson’s answer was that Shell were liars, there was no point in negotiating and ‘if you look at the science’ their drilling for oil would lead to a 4C rise in temperature by 2030.

Maitlis then asked whether there was a path for Thompson ‘to the president of the US’. She replied that she could try, but it would be pointless because governments were in the pockets of big oil.

Next was whether it would help the Greenpeace Arctic campaign if she got arrested. Thompson agreed that arrests were useful publicity for Greenpeace. But she was sure it wouldn’t happen because the legions of Shell PR people ‘in their big buildings’ would bust a gut to prevent it.

Ms Thompson didn’t say it, but she clearly believed they had battalions in the wings ready to do anything to avoid the ruinous impact of a ‘Thompson arrest’ pic.

Finally (in questions about climate), Ms Maitlis wondered how she could choose to demonstrate for Greenpeace when the refugee ‘crisis’ was so pressing. Thompson said the two topics were profoundly connected. She asserted that if climate change was allowed to ‘go on as it’s going’, the current refugee crisis would soon look like a tea party because ‘there are going to be entire swathes of the Earth that would become uninhabitable, and where are those people going to go? We are looking at a human disaster of proportions we can’t imagine’.

Even by the BBC standards this was bad journalism:

In summary, the BBC’s self-declared flagship television news and current affairs programme broadcast inaccurate preposterous propaganda from a woman who is a self-declared activist. There was no effort to challenge her views even though they were obviously extreme.

Of course, the BBC has a duty to give voice to all parts of the sides of public debate. The reality in the climate alarmism stakes, however, is that those in favour are given free rein – to the point of absurdity – while those who think differently are simply not invited to take part.

A ruling last year by the BBC complaints department said that Lord Lawson should not be allowed to discuss climate change on an equal footing to ‘experts’ who believed in alarmism because he himself was not a climate scientist. On which grounds was Emma Thompson, an English graduate from Cambridge, allowed on Newsnight to spout utter nonsense?

Because her views chime with those of Ian Katz?

Transcript:

 

EMILY MAITLIS:     Well, one voice unambiguous in her support of this country bringing in more refugees is the actress, Emma Thompson, whose own adopted son was a refugee from Rwanda. She was about 4 o’clock this morning helping bring life to a giant polar bear, Aurora, who she and some 60 other Greenpeace campaigners took to the Shall Centre on London’s South bank to protest against Arctic drilling. I caught up with her earlier and asked whether she believed she could negotiate with the oil giant.

EMMA THOMPSON:            No, because we’ve been negotiating with Shell for years, and there’s been so much obfuscation and so many lies actually, and so much green-wash, they’ve absolutely put lip-service to ‘Yes, yes, we’re interested in renewables, yes, yes, yes’, but they’ve continued without cessation to extract, and they’ve continued their plans to drill in the Arctic. They have plans to drill until 2030, and if they take out of the earth all the oil they wanted to take out, you look at the science, our temperature will rise 4°C by 2030, and that’s not sustainable.

EM:         Is there a path for you straight to the president of the US?

ET:           Well, I could try ringing him . . . I suppose. But I don’t think that that would help, I think that successive governments including his have been too much in the pockets of the big oil companies. I think it’s very difficult for governments to break away from that.

EM:         Would be useful for you, on a matter of the Arctic for example, to get yourself arrested? Does that sound useful?

ET:           It depends I suppose, I mean, today, I would have been, I suppose, a good news story Greenpeace, and arrests are useful to them. I could just hear the sort of distant sound of all the PR people in the shell offices in the big buildings, going ‘Don’t arrest her, do not arrest the big mouth, please don’t (words unclear) don’t do that.’ So they didn’t.

EM:         How do you choose? I mean, there will be people watching this saying there are currently thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean, what odds timing to go and talk about Arctic and oil, and the environment?

ET:           Hmm.

EM:         As opposed to, you know, what Britain has to do about the refugee crisis.

ET:           No, I’m really glad that you’ve brought that up, because of course it’s profoundly connected. Our refugee crisis which, let me tell you, if we allow climate change to go on as it’s going, the refugee crisis we have at the moment will look like a tea party compared to what’s going to happen in a few years’ time, because if we allow climate change to continue, there are going to be entire swathes of the Earth that will become uninhabitable, and where are those people going to go? Where do we think they’re going to go? We are looking at humanitarian disaster . . . of . . . proportions we simply can’t imagine.

EM:         So, is that still the answer to the refugees drowning in the Mediterranean today, this week?

ET:           Today, this week, the answer to the refugees drowning in the (slight laughter in voice) Mediterranean is that, is not that, no, it’s to do with bringing in, we have to open our doors certainly to more refugees. The idea of 3000 people in Calais you’ve been through unspeakable things, I mean, makes me feel very ashamed.

EM:         So why do you think we’re not doing it, (words unclear, ‘this time round’?) I mean, you’ve got Germany who seems to be opening its doors and you’ve got . . .

ET:           (interrupting) 800,000.

EM:         The UK . . . that isn’t.

ET:           No. It’s not good enough. And also where not even meeting our quotas, that’s really shaming. Erm, so . . . I think it’s got a lot to do with racism. I think if these people were white, Europeans, that were coming from some dictatorship in Bosnia or somewhere where . . . if they were coming, turning up, I think we would feel quite differently about it. And I think that it is the mark of a civilised and . . . a skilful and humane society, and I use the word ‘skilful’ advisedly because we’re so unskilled in our responses to strangers on our shores.

EM:         Who needs to be the powerful voice that says, erm, what’s happening now . . . is not working?

ET:           Well, you know, it’s a very good question, but I mean, I would hope that there were statesmen and women out there with the kind of . . . sense of decency . . . of common humanity out there, who would find it possible and indeed incumbent upon them to stand up and say ‘We need to help these people’, they’re not just . . . coming over here because they want an easy ride, they’ve been through hell. There’s 3000 of them in Calais – that’s nothing. We’ve got plenty of room for them.

EM:         You’re on record as being a Labour supporter, clearly your heart is with a lot of green issues, is this a moment where you feel more pulled towards the Labour Party than the Green Party?

ET:           I’m very torn . . . I mean the Labour Party have been . . . useless actually on green issues, but I think Corbyn’s quite, quite sound on them. We can’t open the mines again, sorry about that, but it’s the dirtiest energy there is, but, but I think he is very sound and that he would be very, erm, intelligent and face . . . he would be willing to face the transition that we are all going to have to face.

EM:         And do you think Labour could get into power with Jeremy Corbyn?

ET:           Erm . . . yeah. I do.

EM:         Emma Thompson, speaking to me earlier.

 

 

BBC Reform? Don’t Hold Your Breath

BBC Reform? Don’t Hold Your Breath

2015 General Election, BBC Bias, BBC Trust | | by David Keighley

Is the government planning radical reform the BBC? Don’t hold your breath.

Despite a bit of high-profile sabre-rattling, and intensifying speculation in the press based on ‘government leaks’ that this is on the cards, the answer is probably a huge resounding ‘no’.

Figures close to new culture secretary John Wittingdale have clearly been the source of the recent rumours about reform. It has now emerged that a green paper on the subject is due within the next few weeks.

Sounds good, but dig deeper and all that is on the agenda, it seems, is a bit of tinkering: minor reform of and continued pegging (not abolition) of the licence fee, together with privatisation of BBC Worldwide and of some production facilities.

Also mooted is the scrapping after only eight years of the useless BBC Trustees. Even Sir Michael Lyons, the Labour- supporting former BBC chairman, now wants shot of them.

The end result of this limited fudge? The BBC will soldier on a bit bruised – and maybe slightly slimmer and smaller – but essentially the same: an arrogant, corpulent and reactionary presence at the heart of a media landscape that is otherwise fizzing with ideas that could energise our culture and our democracy.

If this really is the scale of the Conservative vision for the reform of public service broadcasting, it’s deeply depressing.

Point One: Nothing short of complete abolition of the current fee and a change to subscription funding will alter the outlook of the Corporation and cease the flow of propaganda. They need to be subject to the disciplines of the market-place.

Point two: Abolishing the BBC Trustees and handing regulation to Ofcom – the route apparently also favoured by George Osborne, who declared his support back in March – won’t change a thing. Key figures on the Ofcom board, the chairman (Dame Patricia Hodgson, who spent thirty years at the BBC before being forced to jump ship by Greg Dyke in 2000) and the man in charge of content regulation (Tim Gardam) are both BBC veterans who spent decades at the Corporation before acquiring their current cushy posts. They will staunchly defend the lefty propaganda emanating from the BBC in exactly the same way the Trustees do because they are wilfully blind to it.

What is needed instead is genuinely independent, robust regulation that forces the BBC to be properly independent in its outlook, and to make sure that every penny of spending is properly focused on generating creativity and content that is in tune with British culture, audience tastes and interests.

Point three: Privatising BBC facilities won’t dilute the massive stultifying influence the Corporation exerts over the UK’s media scene. What is needed is genuine competition so that creativity can flourish. A lion’s share of the money that the public have for television entertainment goes directly and automatically to the BBC coffers; until this changes, innovation from independent players in the business is stifled. For its part, the BBC remains a massive feudal-style dispenser of cash and patronage.

The only conclusion to draw from this half-hearted menu is that in reality, the government does not want real reform. The renewal of the BBC’s Royal Charter due in 2017 is a once-in a-decade opportunity, but what’s apparently so far on the drawing board is only a pathetic fudge that will, in effect, maintain the status quo for yet another ten years.

Why? Well David Cameron and George Osborne desperately want a ‘yes’ vote in the forthcoming referendum. So why would they plan to hobble the best propaganda channel they have?

Research by News-watch indicates that their relentless deluge of pre-EU sentiment – and patronising denigration of anyone who puts an alternative view – continued unabated during the General Election. With Cameron’s attempts at renegotiation hitting the buffers this week, he will be praying for all the help he can get – especially from the experts, the BBC.

 

Photo by m0gky