Mike over on Vox Political has reproduced a series of tweets showing a video produced by EL4JC. This is a graph showing the cumulative proportion of left, right and centre guests on various Beeb news and politics programmes. The columns in the graph increase as the figures for each day and programme is added to the sound of Greig’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ from the Peer Gynt suite. This ends by showing how massively biased the Beeb is in its selection of guests. Here’s a shot of the last image.
As you can see, the Beeb is massively biased in favour of the Right. Those guests, who are not from the Right are drawn far more from the Centre than the Left. One of those, who retweeted the image, Julie Houghton, commented
this is appalling. Retweet everyone and share. Sick of seeing right wing nutters having such a biased platform. Handed to them on a plate by the BBC & don’t get me fucking started on right wing lying newspapers, distorting the truth. Something has to change.
Yes, it does. And this analysis of Beeb bias won’t surprise anyone – not on the Left at least. Barry and Saville Kushner in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, tell how the Beeb on its news programmes always featured people supporting austerity to the exclusion of trade unionists, Labour politicos and protesters arguing otherwise. When these dissenting voices were allowed on, they were quickly silenced, or in some cases actually shouted down by the presenters. The media research departments at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff universities have also produced reports into Beeb political bias. They concluded that the Beeb is far more likely to have speaking on their programmes Conservatives and spokesmen from the City than Labour politicians and trade unionists.
But why this massive bias now? Mike also reproduces this image, containing a tweet from a former BBC newsman, Marcus Moore, and a graphic about the career of Sarah Sands, now editor of the Radio 4 Today programme.
Moore’s statement that this all follows Cameron’s decision to appoint John Browne, formerly of BP, to the government department responsible for recruiting management and senior executives from private business to reformed government departments also deserves comment. I don’t doubt that Moore’s absolutely correct in that the ultimate responsibility for all this lies with Cameron. But Tony Blair was also keen to have the BBC parrot lines spouted by New Labour. And the appointment of private business people to the heads of government departments was not only a New Labour corporatist policy, but also that of the Nazis in their promotion of private industry. Not that the Beeb wasn’t biased in favour of the Tories long before that.
So where should people go for proper information?
Mike suggests that people would be better served taking it from social media, and the independent sources that so terrify the establishment media. So much so that there are now groups like Stop Funding Fake News, who adopt a spurious concern to prevent people getting their news from extremist sources. By which they mean websites like The Canary, which supports Jeremy Corbyn, but is not ‘extremist’ nor does it retail false information. The establishment claim that people taking their information from online sites like The Canary is not only fueling extremism, it is also destroying the ideological consensus built by people all reading and watching the same newspapers and news programmes. In other words, they’re afraid that people are moving away from them and their influence is being undermined by their online competitors.
Good.
The lamestream media are all pushing, to a greater or lesser degree, the same Thatcherite policies that have done so much damage to our country, and have destroyed so many lives – of the unemployed, the poor, and the disabled. It deserves nothing but our contempt, and people are far better advised looking at excellent left-wing blogs and sites like The Canary, The Skwawkbox, Novara Media, Evolve Politics, Vox Political, Zelo Street, Another Angry Voice, the Disability News Service and so on.
But Mike’s piece also concludes with a tweet from Mike Smart, warning people only to take their anger out on Beeb news programmes. Otherwise they will play into the hands of the right-wing and corporate shills wishing to privatise the Beeb altogether.
The American internet news show, The Young Turks, has been running ads and sequences asking for people to support them financially by becoming members. This is one of those, a three minute or so video in which they appeal for members to support them in their attack on the mainstream media. I’m putting it up here not because I intend to become a member, although I do watch many of their videos. I’m putting it up here because they call and show mainstream news for what it is: propaganda. They say so in the video’s title, and the video consists of speeches and pieces by Cenk Uygur and the other hosts, intercut with montages from Fox news and the other channels making extremely mistaken predictions, or simply blatant lies.
The Young Turks aren’t the only left-wing or progressive internet news show. There are a number on the other side of the pond – The Jimmy Dore Show, Secular Talk, the David Pakman Show, Sam Seder’s Majority Report, Thom Hartmann all of them are taking on and providing a corrective to the fake news pumped out by the mainstream media.
This is the kind of material that is getting the BBC and Rupert Murdoch very worried indeed, as it attacks their position as opinion leaders. I’ve blogged before about how one of the hacks writing in the Radio Times said they were worried about public opinion becoming increasingly polarised as people turned away from mainstream news and its ability to shape the consensus view on this side of the Pond. The same hack in the very same hack mooted the possibility that, in order to win back viewers, the BBC could abandon any pretense at balance or objectivity for opinion, following the example of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. Which would mean, in the Beeb’s case, changing from subtly right-wing, with the occasional liberal exceptions, into very definite unsubtle, indeed screamingly blatant extreme right-wing coverage. But it would be what the corporate establishment – the business and political leaders with whom people like Laura Kuenssberg and the Beeb’s head of news, James Harding – live amongst and mix with. Hence the rage and angry retorts when the BBC is accused of Conservative bias. Its senior staff are drawn from the same social class and probably the same families as the industrialists and financiers they regularly interview, to the point where they can’t see that there is a class and political bias in their programming. And it’s because they’re afraid of losing their influence that the Beeb has decided to launch a ‘Reality Check’ team to take on fake news. But only on the internet. The material pumped out by the mainstream press, run by Paul Dacre, Rupert Murdoch and the Barclay Twins, isn’t going to be touched. Because some of the staff might want a job with these companies later. They also don’t want to annoy these media moguls any more than they have to so that they’ll go round to the Tories and start demanding the Corporation’s privatisation again. And besides, the mainstream media needs to stand together against these outsiders.
This shows how craven and biased the Beeb and the mainstream media is. And how much we need the alternative news source on the internet to check and correct the propaganda and sheer fake news of the mainstream media.
Yesterday, I put up a piece commenting on a report in the I newspaper that the BBC had decided to set up a special team, Reality Check, to rebut fake news on the internet. James Harding, the head of BBC News, said that this wouldn’t be about policing the internet, and it wouldn’t attack the mainstream press.
This all rings very hollow, as at least in America, faith in the mainstream news outlets is at an all-time low. More people are turning to alternative news sources on the internet as a reaction to the bias and misreporting of the established news outlets and broadcasters. And the Beeb certainly has plenty of form when it comes to bias. Like editing the footage of the battle between the strikers and the police at Orgreave colliery during the Miners’ Strike, so that it appeared to show the miners attacking the police. The reality was the complete opposite. Barry and Savile Kushner in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, point out that the Beeb rarely allows a dissenting voice to be heard against austerity. When one is heard, they are interrupted or shouted down by the presenter, keen to maintain the government, establishment view at all costs. And Nick Robinson himself did a piece of deliberate misreporting worthy of TASS or Goebbels during the Scots referendum. He asked a question Scottish independence might have on the financial sector north of the border. Salmond answered it fully. This was then gradually edited down over successive news programmes, until it vanished altogether, with Robinson claiming that Salmond hadn’t answered the question.
So there’s plenty of very good reasons why you can’t trust the Beeb.
Now there is a considerable amount of fake news on the Net. The American elections have thrown up any amount of pure rubbish. In addition to the usual weirdness from the Ufolks, which claimed that Putin had told the Russian armed forces to prepare to defend the motherland against extraterrestrial invasion, there were the tin foil hatted claims of Alex Jones. Jones, the head of the conspiracy news site, Infowars, had come out with some truly barking, and very dangerous comments about Hillary Clinton. He claimed that she was part of some Satanic cult, which was abusing children from a pizza parlour in Philadelphia. She was also supposed to be demonically possessed, like Barack Obama, and may have been an alien or robot, at least in part. It’s entirely bogus, along with the reports others put up claiming that she suffers from a neurological illness contracting from eating children’s brains.
But the mainstream media has also produced bogus news. And one of the worst offenders is Fox News. Someone analysed how many of the stories Fox reported were actually true, and came out with the statistics that about three-quarters of the time they were rubbish. Put simply, if you watch Fox, you will be less informed that someone who doesn’t. There’s a reason why the network’s earned the nickname of ‘Faux News’. It’s very much like the old clip sometimes added to pieces on the internet, in which a man upbraids another for making an answer so stupid, that it’s lowered the IQ of everyone in the room, and the other needs to apologise. Well, that’s Fox writ large.
Fox News is also on the internet, along with many other newspapers and channels. So you can watch Bill O’Reilly tell lies about his career there. O’Reilly’s one of the channel’s veteran anchors. He was caught out claiming that he was actually in the Falklands or nearby parts of Argentina reporting during the Falklands War. He also witnessed a sectarian riot in Northern Ireland, and was present outside the house of one of the witnesses of the JFK assassination when he committed suicide. In fact, this was all shown to be bilge. In the Falkland’s conflict, for example, he was safely several thousand miles away in Buenos Aires.
Will the Beeb try and rebut some of the barking stories reported by Fox? No, of course they won’t. Fox is a mainstream news source, and is part owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the Times and the Scum over here. The Scum is notorious for its bias and mendacity, but somehow the Times and its sister paper, the Sunday Times, has managed to avoid this. Sometimes you wonder why, as the Sunday Times has also carried bogus stories.
Like the time it claimed Michael Foot was a KGB agent called Comrade Boot, for which the former Labour leader successfully sued for libel. And then there were the ‘Clinton Crazies’. These were a group of journos around the Sunday Times and the American Spectator, who believed that Bill Clinton was a violent mobster. The former governor and US president was supposed to be importing cocaine from South America through an airfield in his state. He was also responsible for ordering the deaths of 20 + aids and other figures, who had displeased him. One of the journos responsible for this nonsense was so paranoid, that during an interview with another journalist he kept the curtains closed, and anxiously peered out into the street at various intervals, in case ‘they’ were watching him from a parked car. One of the hacks, who produced this tripe later saw reason, and appeared on one of Adam Curtis’ documentaries stating very clearly it was all crazy nonsense. But the Sunday Times published it.
But the Beeb very definitely isn’t going to tackle Murdoch’s rubbish, because Murdoch is the favourite of the various parties that have occupied No.10 in recent years, both the Tories and New Labour. In exchange for favourable publicity for the Murdoch press, they’ve been very happy to concede greater advantages to the media mogul, despite numerous conflicts of interest and the construction of a near monopoly in private broadcasting.
Murdoch hates the Beeb with a passion. He’s been demanding its break up since the 1980s, publishing stories attacking the Beeb at every opportunity in his papers, including the Times. And so with the threat of privatisation now made extremely clear by the Tories, the BBC will very definitely not want to show how mendacious Fox is.
So you can expect the Beeb to crack down on the alternative news outlets on the Net, under the pretext that it’s fighting the rubbish put out by Jones and co., while doing nothing about the fake news churned out by the establishment. Like the Murdoch press, and the Beeb itself.
There’s a piece in the I today reporting that the Beeb intends to set up a ‘Reality Check’ news team to correct the fake news on the internet. The article, by Kim Sengupta, states
The BBC is to create a dedicated team which will identify and expose “fake news” stories being shared on Facebook and other social media.
The corporation said it was not seeking to “police the internet”. But its Reality Check team will identify and correct the most egregious examples of fabricated stories and outright “lies” circulated by fake news sites.
James Harding, the BBC director of news and current affairs, told staff: “The BBC can’t edit the internet, but we won’t stand aside either. We will fact check the most popular outliers on Facebook, Instagram and other social media.”
He added: ” We are working with Facebook, in particular, to see how we can be most effective. Where we see deliberately misleading stories masquerading as news, we’ll publish a Reality Check that says so.”
The BBC believes it can employ the credibility of its news organisation to assist Facebook. However, the corporation said it would not target stories published by “mainstream” media such as UK newspapers. (p. 13).
There are several aspects to this story. First of all, it shows the fear the mainstream media have of the internet. The newspapers, television and radio stations and moguls are being increasingly abandoned as more people, particularly the young, prefer to take their news from the Net, feeling that it’s more trustworthy. Journalists writing in the Radio Times and elsewhere have already whined about this threat to their ability to shape consensus opinion. One of them stated that the different news sites on the internet, with their various biases, was a danger because it meant that people were only looking at the news sources which agreed with their personal biases, and so opinions and views were going to become increasingly polarised. He made it very clear that he wanted the mainstream opinion to continue to shape consensus opinion.
This is obviously an attempt by the Beeb to try and exercise its position as a purveyor of respected, supposedly objective news, to combat the threat posed by the internet.
Okay, there’s an awful lot of rubbish put out by some websites. You only have to look at the content of much of Alex Jones’ Infowars show, which is real tin foil hat conspiracy theory material. Jones’ stock in trade is very loud allegations that the secret rulers of the world are Satanic aliens. Just before the election he was screaming that Hillary Clinton was either an alien, or a cyborg. Other sites on YouTube have ludicrously claimed that Killary has kuru, a degenerative neurological condition caused by eating human brains, contracted from cannibalistic orgies in which she has consumed the brains of children. It’s rubbish, and clearly fake news.
But there is a lot of news on YouTube, which isn’t fake, and which very much is a threat to the establishment. Like the reporting on the real Fascism of the Ukrainian government, and its persecution of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians. The same is true of the information on what is really going on in Syria, which isn’t about freeing the enslaved Syrian people from a dictator, but about ousting a genuinely popular president in order to break Russian power and enrich the western allied oil companies and states still further. Oh yes, and we’re using al-Qaeda and ISIS, the very organisation we’re supposed to be fighting, to overthrow a secular government.
This alternative news is also under threat from the internet companies. I’ve put up a piece from The Jimmy Dore Show in which the American comedian reports how his pieces and those of others about the real nature of the Syrian conflict have been demonetised by Google in an attempt to discourage people from posting them.
And the Beeb itself has plenty of previous when it comes to bias and fake news. That infamous piece of film of the striking miners at Orgreave, which was shown backwards so that it appeared to show the miners attacking the cops when the opposites was true is a particularly notorious piece. Academics from Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities have reported how the Beeb is far more likely to report the views of Conservative politicos and businessmen, particularly from the financial sector, over those from the Labour party and trade unionists. The Kushner brothers in their book Who Needs the Cuts describe their anger at the way the Beeb automatically accepted the need for austerity, and consistently refuses to allow a dissenting voice onto their news shows. When one does appear, the presenter immediately gets annoyed and tries to cut them off or interrupt them. Nothing must stop the proles from accepting that the government is right in taking away more of their rights and destroying the welfare state in favour of corporate profit.
This isn’t just about combating the real, poisonous fake news. This is the mainstream media trying to suppress a danger challenge to the right-wing consensus. It’s about maintaining the credibility of establishment bias and fake news in the face of alternative reporting.
Yesterday I put up a couple of pieces about items on New Labour and its connections to the Israel lobby. One of these pieces discussed James Purnell and James Harding, former Labour politicos and now directors of the BBC, who were involved in attempts to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn when they were councillors in Islington in the 1990s.
Robin Ramsay’s ‘View from the Bridge’ column in Lobster 58 for winter 2009-2010 has further information on the connections between Blair and Brown’s entryist clique and the Israel lobby. He reported that Grim Gordon had appointed Ivan Lewis as the responsible minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for Israel and the Middle East. Lewis was the vice chairman of Labour Friends of Israel. (pp. 109-110).
In the same issue he also reports that Channel 4 had broken one of the last great taboos of British journalism, and broadcast a documentary on the Israel lobby. He states that the accompanying booklet is ‘seriously good’ and should demonstrate that the Israel lobby is ‘real and significant’. It was available from as a download from and .
I don’t know whether it’s still available after all these years. Probably not. But it could still be worth a look. (pp. 110).
The Blairites were deeply entwined with Labour Friends of Israel, and the current anti-Semitism allegations, which have now resurfaced again with Liverpool MP Louise Ellman, are all about preserving their influence, against opposition from both gentiles and Jews.
That issue is Lobster is available free online. Go to Lobster’s webpage and select it from the numbers listed.
More information from Lobster about the Israel lobby. And it’s directly relevant to the Corporation’s glaring bias against Jeremy Corbyn. Tom Easton’s ‘Tittle-Tattle’ column in number 68 of the parapolitical magazine, Lobster, for Winter 2014, discusses the various high-flyers and senior media figures and their very dodgy connections to intelligence and various covert political attending that year’s Media Society’s annual dinner. The dinner’s joint host was James Harding, the Beeb’s director of news and current affairs. One of his colleagues in the Beeb’s upper echelons is James Purnell, the corporation’s director of strategy and digital. Purnell’s a form a Labour politico. He started off as a councillor for Islington, alongside Stephen Twigg and Tal Michael, two senior Blairites. The Simpering Scrounger and his circle found them ‘winnable seats’, and they both went on to join Labour Friends of Israel. Both Twigg and Purnell served the organisation as chairmen, beginning with Twigg. Purnell headed it from 2002 onwards, also becoming an MP for Liverpool, where he was joined by Louise Ellman and Luciana Berger, who were also leading members.
Harding himself is also pro-Israel. The Guardian, discussing his appointment at the Beeb, commented:
‘Harding, who is Jewish, will also have to leave behind the pro-Israeli line of The Times. In a debate at the Jewish Community Centre For London in 2011, he said: “I am pro-Israel” and that in reporting on the Middle East, “I haven’t found it too hard” because “The Times has been pro-Israel for a long time.”’
Purnell, Twigg and Michael also tried to oust Jeremy Corbyn from his seat in Islington, but were unsuccessful. They were able, however, to smear Liz Davies.
Given the history of these senior managers at the Beeb, it’s no wonder that the Corporation’s coverage of the Labour leader is so horrendously, blatantly biased.
Mike over at Vox Political has also reported that a former chairman of the BBC Trust, Sir Michael Lyons, has said that he believes that the BBC has been under political pressure from the government to be biased against Labour and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Mike writes
The former chairman of the BBC Trust, Sir Michael Lyons, has admitted what some of us have been saying for years – that political pressure has been exerted on the Corporation to bias its news coverage in favour of the Conservatives and against Labour.
Sir Michael Lyons was chair of the BBC Trust from 2007 to 2011. He spent much of his career in local government, in chief executive posts, but he was also briefly a Labour councillor in the early 1980s.
He said on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One that political pressure was making the BBC biased against Labour and Jeremy Corbyn:
“I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that the BBC has sought to hedge its bets of late. There have been some quite extraordinary attacks on the elected leader of the Labour party, quite extraordinary. I can understand why people are worried about whether some of the most senior editorial voices in the BBC have lost their impartiality on this.”
Mike states that this could apply just to Laura Kuenssberg, who has been the subject of a petition to remove her because of her blatantly overt bias against Corbyn. But the comments could just as well refer to those further up, such as Kuenssberg’s boss, James Harding. He also states that several kites have been flown, by people he believes are close to John Whittingdale.
Naturally, this has been rejected by the Beeb’s head, Tony ‘Head Prefect’ Hall.
I really don’t take the Beeb’s protestations of impartiality terribly seriously. Not after academics from, I think, Edinburgh University showed that the Beeb was far more biased towards the Tories and business leaders, and was more likely to invite them to speak than Labour or the trade unions. As for Dave Cameron’s cruel and disgraceful austerity programme, Barry and Saville Kushner were moved to write their book, Who Needs the Cuts, because the very people, who should have been challenging the government’s line on austerity, weren’t. That includes BBC broadcasters, who uncritically accepted the government’s assertion that the debt was nearly insurmountable and that savage cuts were needed to bring it down to a manageable level.
Years ago, when the Beeb was under the control of John Birt, the Conservatives were constantly attacking it for being biased against them. They have been particularly annoyed about Jeremy Paxman, whom they regularly accused of bias. These claims seem somewhat risible now that Paxman has admitted being a ‘One Nation’ Tory. Private Eye attacked this claim of Labour influence at the Beeb with a story from one of their readers, who had been shooting in the Scots highlands. A party led by John Birt was also shooting not far away. And after shooting had ended at that location, as well as Birt they saw a whole party of leading Tory politicos, including Peter Lilley, scurry out of the undergrowth.
The Tories regularly accuse the BBC of having a pro-Labour bias, rather in the same way that Accuracy in Media would have Americans believing that the American broadcasters are overwhelmingly liberal with the only exception being the ‘fair and balanced’ Fox News. In fact, you can expect the opposite. The BBC is part of the establishment, and so the most common voice on it is that of the establishment – the upper and upper middle classes, represented politically by the Conservatives. And the BBC probably genuinely believes it’s impartial, because it shares the Tories’ class background, and so considers that their views, or views like them, are really the only views that matter. And so working class and trade unionist political views points are not given the same airtime or consideration, as these are still considered, after a over a century of the Labour party’s existence, as still somewhat outside what the serious classes believe. And so runs the bias, conscious or unconscious, at the heart of the Beeb’s attitude to Labour.
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