Is Rupert Murdoch the Biggest Purveyor of Fake News?

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.

New Book on BBC Bias

Looking through the Cheltenham branch of Waterstone’s today I found a new book on institutional bias at the BBC. It’s Tom Miller’s The BBC and the Myth of Public Service Broadcasting. I didn’t buy it, but glancing at the blurb on the back cover, it seemed to be about how the Beeb is biased towards power, and the establishment.

This really should come as no surprise to anyone. Despite the frothings of the right, which claims that the Beeb has a liberal bias, Edinburgh, Glasgow and I think, Cardiff University have studied the Beeb’s news bias, and found that it is significantly biased towards the Right. The two Scots universities found that it was far more likely to talk to Conservative MPs and businessmen, than to Labour MPs and trade unionists. The Kushner brothers, in their book, Who Needs the Cuts? state that they were prompted to write the book because of the way the Beeb and the rest of the media automatically accepted, quite uncritically, that the cuts were needed. When trade unionists appeared on the Today programme on Radio 4, and said that the cuts weren’t needed and were harmful, he was interrupted by the presenter. And then there’s Laura Koenigsberg, who is outrageously and blatantly biased. But you mustn’t accuse her of beings so, according to the Graoniad, because if you do you are only doing so because you’re a misogynist. Rubbish. People are criticising her because she is biased, and she’s a disgrace. It has nothing to do with her gender. Another of the Beeb’s reporters, who is also flagrantly biased is Nick Robinson. Remember how Robinson and his team careful cut footage of a question and answer session with Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP, during the Scots Referendum? Robinson asked Salmond about whether he was worried that the main Scots financial firms would move down to London if Scotland gained independence. Salmond said no, and explained why he believed they wouldn’t. The Beeb then edited the video, first to make it appear that he evaded the question, and then claimed he hadn’t answer it all. I’m not fan of the SNP and its attacks on the Labour Party, but Salmond had answered the question, calmly and fully. It was pure falsification, a lie of the type you’d expect from the state dominated media in eastern Europe under Communism, for example. But it didn’t come from a wretched totalitarian dictatorship. It came from the Beeb, which is constantly congratulating itself on how ‘impartial’ it is, and what a world leader in quality broadcasting it constitutes.

Well, it’s biased towards the right, and more and more people are waking up to that fact, as this book appears to show.

BBC Wants Even More Conservative Bias

This sounds like a joke, and it shows the corporation’s utterly dismissive attitude and contempt for the British Left, and those, who have rightly accused it of Conservative bias. I found a small piece in last Friday’s I (8th October 2016) reporting that the Beeb wanted to recruit for more Conservatives to its newsroom team, in order to correct a perceived left-wing bias.

Perceived left-wing bias? By whom? No, scrub that – no need to ask that question at all. It’s obvious who’s accused it of ‘left-wing bias’ – the Conservatives, in order to make sure that theirs is the only voice that’s heard. But the reality is the complete opposite.

The Corporation has been repeatedly criticised for its right-wing bias. In a study by academics at Glasgow and Edinburgh universities, it was found that the BBC was far more likely to interview and treat seriously opinions by Conservatives and businessmen over left-wingers and trade unionists. Barry and Saville Kushner, in their book Who Needs the Cuts, described how they were motivated to write it after seeing the way journalists covering the government’s austerity policies on the news time and again accepted without question the fact that it was all necessary. Those individuals and experts they had on their programmes, who dissented where either cut off or challenged. Another academic study a few years ago found that the Beeb was also biased in keeping very silent about the government’s privatisation of the NHS.

Tens of thousands of people signed an online petition against the egregious Tory bias of the Beeb’s head of news, Laura Kuenssberg. The petition was attacked and sneered at as ‘misogynist’. Kuenssberg couldn’t be biased. All these people accusing her of it just resented the fact that she was a woman in charge of news. It was all rubbish. As Mike pointed out in one of his articles, instead of the hundreds or thousands of misogynistic comments posted by the petition’s signatories, those going through it – all 33,000 odd posts – could find only one that could be reasonably said to be such. But that’s how this country’s corporate media deals with any accusations of bias.

Then, in the debate over the Scottish referendum a few years ago, there was another case of blatant censorship by the Beeb’s Nick Robinson. Robinson had asked the then leader of the SNP, Alex Salmond, a question about how independence would affect the Scottish financial sector. Would it result in the major Scottish banks and financial centres moving south to London. Salmond replied, but the Beeb edited the footage to make it first seem that he had evaded the question, and then edited his reply out altogether. Robinson intoned in a voiceover that Salmond hadn’t given him an answer.

It was a flat-out lie.

The Beeb is scared of the Tories, as they keep on threatening it with privatisation, all on behalf of their sugar-daddy, Rupert Murdoch. And since the rise of Accuracy In Media, the Republican organisation devoted to detecting liberal media bias in America under Ronald Reagan, the Tories over here too have joined in accusing the BBC and anyone else, who doesn’t toe their wretched line of having a similar bias. It’s got to the point where there are even jokes about this constant, resentful complaining from Conservatives. There’s a joke that if you go into a room, in which there are 99 Republicans and 1 liberal, those 99 Republicans are all moaning about the left-wing bias in the room.

There’s also another one about how many Republicans it takes to change a light-bulb. 10 – one person to screw in the bulb, and another nine to complain about the left-wing bias of the screw.

The Beeb’s already extremely biased towards the Tories. How long before its quest to become even more biased leads to it becoming an object of ridicule? Unfortunately, this is no joke. It’s another campaign to produce even more Tory propaganda masquerading as balanced news. And it all shows how massively biased against the Left the Beeb already is, and it’s craven prostration before the demands of the Tories.

UKI Left on Possible Collusion between Dimbleby and Anna Soubry against John McDonnell on Question Time

Mike last week posted up a piece stating that John McDonnell, Corbyn’s second-in-command, did an excellent job of defending both himself and the Labour party leader on last Thursday’s Question Time, when all the panelists, including Alistair Campbell, Anna Soubry for the Tories, and someone from the SNP, decided to pile into criticise the Labour leadership. Strangely, the quietest of the panel was Quentin Letts, the parliamentary sketch writer for the Heil, who usually has much to say for himself. Amongst those piling in was Dimbleby himself.

Michelle, one of the great commenters here, posted this observation

The actual clip of Mcdonell on BBCQT is shown in this blog which also points out that there seemed to be a collusion between David Dimbley and Soubry re the Marxist accusation: https://ukileft.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/evidence-of-collusion-in-plain-site-between-bbc-and-anna-soubry/

The above blog came to my attention via the comments on The Canary’s post about the same programme ‘Last nights meltdown on BBC Question Time has provoked abdolute outrage.’

The piece linked to is at UK & International Left, which blogs on issues about a variety of left-wing organisations across the spectrum, from the Labour party to the Greens, to various forms of anarchism. The piece is a detailed analysis, with the relevant clip from the show, of the point where Soubry calls him a Marxist and insults him as ‘a nasty piece of work’ or some such. But she does so reading from a slip of paper, and after Dimbleby has commented on McDonnell being a Marxist. McDonnell states instead he’s a Socialist, but Dimbleby keeps on. And then Soubry joins in.

The piece argues that Dimbleby and Soubry had some kind of meeting beforehand, at which Dimbleby told Soubry he was going to raise the issue of McDonnell’s ‘Marxism’, and Soubry wrote it down, to use later.

Unfortunately, this is all too plausible. The Tory bias at the Beeb is becoming increasingly obvious, despite the bluster and denial by the corporation. Laura Kuenssberg, BBC news’ political editor, is the most blatant regular offender, but Nick Robinson and Andrew Neil have also been responsible for twisted reporting that would have delighted Goebbels. Way back in the debate over the Scottish referendum, for example, the Beeb cut the footage of Robinson asking a question of the former SNP leader, Alex Salmond. Salmond answered the question, but this was gradually cut in subsequent reports, until it vanished completely with Robinson stating that Salmond hadn’t answered his question. As for Andrew Neil, the former editor of the Economist and Sunday Times, Mike has put up a piece commenting on how the spectacular resignation of one of the Labour rebels from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet occurred on his Sunday Politics show, after Brillo had secretly prompted him beforehand.

I’ve already commented on how one Beeb journo wrote a piece in the Radio Times pondering whether the Corporation should try to keep its ratings by copying Fox News, the very blatantly right-wing news network in America. It looks like this is becoming very much their business model, despite their protestations of impartiality. As for Dimbleby, he comes from a line of newspaper proprietors, who, according to Lobster, did not allow unions at their papers. So you can’t really expect impartiality there, then.

Whatever the facts behind this episode of Question Time, the BBC is showing itself increasingly biased, as shown by the documentaries which have appeared, and no doubt are yet to appear, attacking the Labour leader and Momentum. If they think it will let them retain their viewers, they’re wrong. The majority of the audience of Fox News are late 60s +. Younger viewers are increasingly switching off and turning to the net. Just as they are and will with the corporation.

Vox Political: Anti-Labour Bias on Question Time Prompts Mass Outrage

The pro-Tory bias at the BBC becomes every more blatant. Mike over at Vox Political has this story, http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/01/15/bbc-question-times-right-wing-panel-sparks-anger-from-viewers-and-labour-mps/ about a report in the Mirror that the bias in the selection of the panel on Question Time was so right-wing that the Beeb has received a storm of criticism from the public, and the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour MP, Cat Smith, was the only left-wing member of the panel. The others were a Tory cabinet member, someone from UKIP, and two journos from the Murdoch press.

So no bias there, then!

It’s interesting reading the comments to this post as well. Most are from people, who stopped watching it because of the right-wing bias. The last time I blogged about the Beeb’s bias, I received some very interesting comments, which added further information and background to this issue.

One of them, Nosuchthingasthemarket, posted:

All good points – but you could also mention the salient fact that the political editor at the BBC is a former head of the Young Conservatives and was first accused of bias (over and above the BBC norms) as early as 1995; when he was working on Panorama.

Further information was added by the commenters over on Mike’s blog, who posted their response to his reblogging of my article on the Corporation’s bias. I know this is convoluted, and slightly incestuous, but the comments are worth repeating here.

Daniel Margrain wrote:

The BBC was founded by Lord Reith in 1922 and immediately used as a propaganda weapon for the Baldwin government during the General Strike, when it was known by workers as the “British Falsehood Corporation”. During the strike, no representative of organised labour was allowed to be heard on the BBC. Ramsay McDonald, the leader of the opposition, was also banned.

In their highly respected study of the British media, Power Without Responsibility, James Curran and Jean Seaton wrote of ‘the continuous and insidious dependence of the Corporation [the BBC] on the government’. (Routledge, 4th edition, 1991, p.144)

John Pilger has reported:

‘Journalists with a reputation for independence were refused BBC posts because they were not considered “safe”.’ (John Pilger, Hidden Agendas, Vintage, 1998, p.496)

In 2003, a Cardiff University report found that the BBC ‘displayed the most “pro-war” agenda of any broadcaster’ on the Iraq invasion. Over the three weeks of the initial conflict, 11% of the sources quoted by the BBC were of coalition government or military origin, the highest proportion of all the main television broadcasters. The BBC was less likely than Sky, ITV or Channel 4 News to use independent sources, who also tended to be the most sceptical. The BBC also placed least emphasis on Iraqi casualties, which were mentioned in 22% of its stories about the Iraqi people, and it was least likely to report on Iraqi opposition to the invasion.

http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=639:bbc-bombast-propaganda-complaints-and-black-holes-of-silence&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=9

Joan Edington also commented on their bias towards privatised hospitals, and against Scots Independence.

It’s taken a long time for a lot of people to realise this bias. So many simply refused to believe that the good old BBC could be anything but impartial. Sadly, it has been obvious to me, and anyone who pays attention to the detail of news, that it has been getting worse for several years.

I first really noticed it in 2012 when the Welfare Reform Act came into play. There were interviews with patients at new PPI hospitals saying what wonderful treatment they had, while similar interviews of patients at traditional NHS hospitals always highlighted the negatives.

Up to this point I was ALMOST giving the benefit of the doubt about bias, thinking that maybe it was because they had sacked so many journalists that they could no longer carry out their own research.

However, since then, virtually all reports have claimed an event as true rather than saying “according to the government”. This is no more than propaganda.

The final nails in the coffin, to me and many Scots, was their blatant backing of Better Together during the Scottish Referendum in 2014 and a totally discredited “Scottish Labour” during the GE in May 2015. Mind you, these were probably not noticed by 90% of the UK population.

I am extremely sad about this situation since the BBC does make some very good programmes. It’s sports coverage used to be by far the best, back in the days before it had to compete with the money available to the commercial channels. It seems that we are to lose all that, simply because their once trusted and respected News Department can no longer lives up to that title.

My guess is that the BBC behaves with this bias because it is the British Broadcasting Corporation. It is the official, established state broadcaster, and so represents the views of the Establishment. It is supposedly impartial, and my guess is that many of its staff genuinely believe they are, but as the official state broadcaster the establishment bias is at the very core of its ethos and raison d’etre.

Hence the Tory party political bias, and the pro-War agenda. The upper classes have always been the backbone of the armed forces, ever since the feudal warriors of the Middle Ages. And the war in the Middle East is being ostensibly waged to protect Britain and defend and export her values of democracy and civil government. The opposite is true, of course. It’s done to for the interests of multinational industry, and the freedom of western capitalism to steal and exploit the resources of the Middle East. And so when the Beeb decides that its going to discuss the contemporary war on terror, it all becomes very establishment and official.