Photo by Euro Realist Newsletter For 16 years, News-watch has been monitoring in interviews by the BBC of Ukip leader Nigel Farage. It’s the broadcasting equivalent of painting by numbers. With wearying predictability, each one has been essentially the same. Question one usually suggests they are racist by wanting immigration controls. Question two posits the party is a flash in …
Bias by Omission as Romania and Bulgaria Influx Rises
Happy New Year – it’s the anniversary of when, courtesy of the EU’s Free Movement of Peoples directive, restrictions were lifted on the numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians entering the UK. Latest figures released by the Oxford Migration Observatory show that 250,000 are now here and 47,000 arrived during 2014. That’s equivalent to a city the size of Wolverhampton – …
Humphrys Mea Culpa – More Hot Air from the BBC
John Humphrys ‘admission’ behind a paywall in the Sunday Times that the BBC has botched and skewed coverage of immigration – and failed to reflect genuine concern and genuine cultural and infrastructure issues, not to mention the malign influence in the equation of the EU – is a classic and totally meaningless Corporation mea culpa. Why? Well Humphrys produces not …
BBC ‘ignores key immigration reports’
The BBC keeps telling of us that its coverage of the immigration debate is getting better and fairer. Remember, for example, when, back in January, political editor Nick Robinson uttered a solemn and very public apology and swore that Auntie was mending her ways? No longer, he suggested, should opponents of the EU’s ‘free movement of peoples’ directive be branded …
Selective Leaking: BBC knocks down its own UKIP Aunt Sally
One of the ways that the BBC defends itself against criticism is to say that viewers have complained in ‘record numbers’ against particular aspects of programming. It’s particularly effective because it creates a smokescreen of the Corporation’s own making and largely within its own control that generates newspaper headlines in the BBC’s favour. And here, the BBC’s house organ, the …
Humphrys: ‘BBC Not Sceptical Enough on EU’
Update: Autonomous Mind has made an invaluable contribution following up John Humphrys’ remarks about EU coverage, reported in full below. The core of his story is that when questioned further on the BBC’s Feedback programme about the problems, Mr Humphrys added to his Radio Times interview by saying categorically that there had been systematic ‘bias by omission’ – essentially by ignoring key stories …
Immigration: Anything but the truth.
BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson has announced that the BBC was once – at an unspecified period in the past – biased in its reporting of immigration issues. He is reported as saying (in connection with pre-publicity for a programme he has made) that the corporation made a ‘terrible mistake’ in not reflecting the public’s concerns about the numbers and …