I posted this on Twitter moments ago:
I am shocked that the BBC reported in this way.
An explanation is needed, and very urgently.
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I could not agree more with your horror about this.
The BBC just don’t seem to be able to think anymore.
What is measured about reporting such details?
Maybe the BBC feels that it can only compete for air time by being populist?
Thank you and well said, PSR.
PSR: “The BBC just don’t seem to be able to think anymore.”
Another exhibit: Sending Romesh Ranganathan to Uganda and have him mock the locals. Does the BBC know what led to the expulsion by Idi Amin Dada of empire’s settler foot soldiers? One hopes Sara Lanier reads my comments and chimes in as Sara knows what I’m talking about.
Colonel Smithers, I have no idea who Sara Lanier is or what it is that she knows you’re talking about, but based on what you post here I think YOU do.
I’m deeply suspicious of the BBC ‘news’ agenda. And they don’t even produce serious arts content or comedy these days …..well not on a regular basis in mitigation of the license fee.
Of course there’s ‘Strictly’. (Yawn)
Thank you, PSR.
I would say that there are many Reform sympathisers at the BBC.
So we had a protest outside a mosque despite only 2% of the population of Rwanda being Muslim, the figures I have seen say that its majority religion is Catholicism.
You just cant make this stuff up………….
Thank you and well said, Richard.
I was thinking the same before coming to your blog.
It’s been going on for decades and has also featured West Indians, to divert attention from racism, corruption and brutality in the police, and East Europeans, to build up support for Brexit.
Last autumn, I attended a talk by a former BBC producer turned filmmaker, currently filming a history of migration which will be of interest to everyone, and writer. He worked for over twenty years at the BBC and reported the racism at all levels. This echoed what I read by a former BBC contributor, who Richard may know as Rutland’s Marxist economist.
The BBC’s latest outrage is part of the MSM attempt to attack a source of support for Palestine. A few weeks before the election, a Labour official called that community “fleas”.
King Charles, born in London to a Greek father and a mother of German descent.
Rarely mentioned though, is it?
Thank you, Andrew.
Is there any truth to that rumour that she met his dad when she was on holiday?
I have always read Elizabeth, then 13 years of age, meet Philip for the first time at a Dartmouth naval review.
Her whole adult family was against her marrying Philip except for Queen Mary who supported the marital match 110%.
I was once told that the Royal London Yacht Club had to change its rules so that Prince Philip could be a member.
… Royal Yacht Squadron, I believe, was reluctant to admit him.
@CLIVE PARRY. I stand corrected.
Well said ‘Andrew @ 8:36am’. Brilliant riposte !
I have not followed the BBC coverage – this is the first I have heard about where the perpetrator came from. Certainly not mentioned in the Guardian.
There can be no doubt, to state where this young man came from would be wrong when reporting on the murders. Full stop.
However, when reporting on the riots at a mosque it becomes quite difficult for reporters. Why have a bunch of thugs gathered to riot and attack a mosque? Very hard to explain that without reference to the murder’s background. Not saying it’s right…. merely that it is difficult.
Did the BBC report the origins of the murderer at the outset? (Very wrong)… or when reporting the riots? (more nuanced).
Before the riot
They have since said he has no connection with Islam.
Rwanda is at least notionally 98% Christian so any link is unlikely, albeit not impossible.
Thanks. That is terrible from the BBC.
Was he an illegal immigrant ?
He was born in the UK, apparently
Stop asking stupid questions.
Apparently there was a lot of social media traffic naming the perpetrator (wrongly, according to the police) and stating that he arrived in the UK on an illegal boat last year.
In view of that I can understand the BBC reporting that he was born in Cardiff, although stating he was born in the UK would have been equally true. However to then describe the country of origin of his parents is appalling.
Agreed
It was widely reported on Social Media by a far right fake news US website that the murderer was a fairly recent (muslim?) asylum seeker known to the police. It even made up a name for him.
I suspect that this played its part in stirring up the EDL
I wonder whether this is due to the make-up of the BBC Board:
Richard Sharp – Chairman BBC
Former Goldman Sachs banker, where he worked with Rishi Sunak Under investigation for being appointed to the role by Boris Johnson after securing Johnson a £800,000 loan. A major Tory party donor (£400,000). Board member of right-wing think-tank, the Centre for Policy Studies. Donor to controversial Quilliam Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sharp_(banker)
Tim Davie – Director-General BBC
Former PepsiCo Exec. Stood as a councillor for the Conservative Party in Hammersmith. He was a former chairman of Hammersmith and Fulham
Conservatives in the 1990s. As Director-General, he warned BBC staff to avoid ‘virtue signalling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Davie
Robbie Gibb — Board member for England
Former Tory aide and head of communications for Theresa May. Brother of Tory MP Nick Gibb. An ardent Brexiteer who said the BBC is “culturally
captured by the woke” Accused by Emily Maitlis after she had left Newsnight of being a ‘Tory agent’ who had actively influenced editorial policy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Gibb
John McAndrew — Director of News
Former Editorial Director and Director of News Programmes at right-wing media outlet GB News. The channel hosts five shows presented by Tory MPs and was found guilty by Ofcom of materially misleading the audience” during McAndrew’s tenure.
It seems that the curtains are twitching behind the Wizard BBC and the other lame stream media – when the very few who own and run the majority of ‘news’. So we are finally noticing?
Maybe too little and probably too late.
The BBC has still not retracted the 40 headless bablies and is not doing anything about the mass rape of Palestinian detainees using sticks and even trained dogs supposedly in retaliation by their prison guards!
Never mind all the dead children and civilians.
As the world is dragged to the long planned war by the targeted with a highly advanced missile, of Hamas leadership attending a forum to agree a peace in Tehran – a peace that NuttyYahoo cannot afford .
We are being dragged into a ‘civilisational war’ through such incidents and their framing. It won’t matter to the punters that they are mainly Christian in that colony Rwanda,, all they will remember is that he was foreign and there was some association with ‘Islam’ (that it was fake won’t register just as the fake headless babies don’t) and that the foreigners and Muslims are atttacking poor defenceless wholly innocent Apartheid colony in the Levant because … religion!
So prepare parents and grandparents, our, YOUR, young are going to be dragged to be forever little corners in the dirt of foreign lands that we claim for our imperial masters.
And never forget that there were years when we could have averted this but put our heads in the sand and ignored anyone who tried to stop this as being AS or Terrorist Lovers.
Self deludedly believing that it was nothing to do with what was going on in our Little Britain, as we smugly tried to tell the world how it can be saved!
Thank you, Ian.
One could add former Tory student officials and still members Laura Kuenssberg, Fiona Bruce and Nick Robinson, Kuenssberg’s husband, who was seconded from a big consultancy to advise the Cabinet Office on austerity during the coalition, and Bruce’s husband, whose firm advises the Tory Party.
I forgot to add that Robbie Gibb, William Shawcross and the BBC’s John Ware and one other person, none Jewish, own the Jewish Chronicle and use the paper to attack the left and stoke up the sentiments deplored above.
Sharp and Sunak also worked together at a hedge fund which included Brexiteer Crispin Odey, former son in law of Murdoch, as fellow shareholder. Odey had his own eponymous firm and was an investor in Somerset Capital, co-owned by Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose wife is a big landowner in Sunak’s constituency and influenced his selection after the local party preferred a local candidate, and another Tory supporting fund called Ruffer.
Good Lord.
It’s worse than I thought.
Thank you, PSR.
I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Well, this thread has accumulated quite a list of the Conservative network of tentacles embedded in our institutions, often through a very old British disease; family influence.
And the public, misled to the end, believe they managed to boot out the Conservatives, comprehensively.
Not even close …….
I understand Scotland’s reluctance to cut the tie; but there is no evidence that anything can be done with the festering carcass for vultures to which Britain has long been reduced. The stench is overpowering.
@John S Warren
“I understand Scotland’s reluctance to cut the tie….”
I don’t. I find it totally inexplicable and I’m English by birth and upbringing though I’ve been living in Scotland for more than a decade now. I find the Scottish ambivalence towards independence positively craven.
I covered this, I think yesterday for the umpteenth time. Money, in the form of the currency is the critical issue. The Union is held together by sticking plaster, but one thing of critical importance to Scots; is Sterling. The SNP have failed to produce a convincing case for solving the currency issue; and they can’t push independence over the line without it. Salmond was badly wrong about this in 2014, and it was a fatal error. The SNP know all this very well. The Scots have used Sterling for three hundred years, and they made a large contribution to the success of Sterling as the world’s leading reserve currency for much of it (a Scot founded the BoE, and then even devised the plan for England to pay Scotland to accept its share of England’s national debt, and compensate for the Darien disaster). The Scots need a really good reason to give up something of such significance to them; their savings for something they know nothing about, doesn’t exist, that has no track record, and is -so far – a poorly developed, unconvincing abstract hypothesis – and they just don’t trust it; and the SNP have failed to deliver a persuasive case.
Provide the persuasive case for Scots, and give them something they will trust with their savings, and it will be different; but that fact is, whether craven or shrewd; this is hard-headed, and about money, and trust in money. Everything else leads only to devolution. It has always been exactly that. It was money and currency that brought Scotland into the Union, and only money and currency will take us out. Those who think other matters are more important always fail. They failed to keep us out in 1707; and they failed in 2014. And they will fail again, until the currency issue is fixed.
Repetition is necessary
Sharp is no longer the chairman. He resigned over facilitating the loan to Boris Johnson from Boris Johnson’s cousin.
Samir Shah is the chairman now: https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/whoweare/samir-shah. He has right-wing links, too. Andrew Neil thought he was an excellent appointment, which I think doesn’t require any additional comment.
Agreed
It is said that the BBC were trying to counteract the misinformation that this was a small boat Syrian muslim immigrant,
But the Merseyside police website just says the ,
“officers arrested a 17-year-old male from Banks and he remains in police custody.
A name has been shared on social media in connection with the suspect in the incident in Southport. This name is incorrect and we would urge people not to speculate on details of the incident while the investigation is ongoing. ”
BBC could just thave relayed police announcement – why didnt they?
And further this morning they have platformed Farage – suggesting the police are covering up by saying its ‘not terror related’, which comment Brendan Cox has condemned out of hand.
BBC have a decades-long record of platforming far right ‘opinion’ to ‘balance’ the science – Nigel Lawson – in particular which helped to delay climate action for twenty years. And every day they break their own editorial guidelines ‘not to mislead’/. Their guidelines should be monitored and enforced by an independent body. Despite their own denials – ‘balance’ is stilll their overwhelming principle – whereas ‘finding the truth’ using investigative journalism is almost completely absent – re ‘covid is over ‘ and ‘there is no money’
.
Thanks
The Farage comments and coverage are dire
Does Farage make any comment or perform any action which is not dire?
Farage really is a “Chicken Little” type chap.
Do we know that the suspect and his parents are British citizens? Your post implies that we do.
What business is it of yours?
What can be said corruption is rife in the UK as ever. Scammer & Co an obvious continuation of it!
I repeat. The BBC should have lost its Charter after Savile (and others). Read the Dame Janet Smith Report. There was really no way back for the management and it s culture, after that.
And here we are. Casting eyes over multiple BBC problems, wondering yet again how we arrived here, because nothing ever appears to be fixed, or is transparent about how it all goes wrong. It seems to me the BBC has always had a deficient management culture; obsessive about what is termed the “talent”. This doesn’t mean the end of public service; that is what the apologists for the BBC want people to think. Start fresh, and provide a modern service that reflects 21st century conditions, technology, and issues. The BBC is fit to deal with none of them.
Agreed, I have not watched any BBC content for many years. But let’s remember not only Savile but now also Edwards who is charged with a serious crime yet was still highly paid with a 40k uplift while suspended. I don’t believe his or Savile’s behaviour wasn’t noticed by close colleagues.
I really wish that the new administration would have the courage to take action.
Oh come on. Saville, I agree, was in full view. Hie Edward’s phone was not, I suspect. I think we need to have some perspective when commenting.
Richard,
It wasn’t just Savile. The BBC has a problem with managing what it terms the ‘talent’, because there are recurring problems with behaviour on programme productions, over decades. Here is what Dame Janet Smith wrote about one case she examined. It came back to management: “A further impediment to staff complaints was the perception held by the staff about Management’s unapproachability and inability to deal with the harassment of those they managed”.
Here are Dame Janet Smith’s list of failings in the BBC, post Savile and Hall (it was never one isolated incident, or even a single miscreant):
1. The lack of an effective complaints process (paragraphs 2.96 to 2.108 of my Report);
2. The need for stronger lateral relationships across the BBC encouraging the sharing of information (paragraphs 2.42 to 2.56 of my Report);
3. The lack of an effective investigations process (for example, paragraphs 9.61 to 9.65 and 9.74-9.75 of my Report);
4. The need for stronger audience controls and protection (for example, paragraphs 9.12-9.14 and 9.23 (in relation to Top of the Pops) and 10.26-10.28 (in relation to Jim’ll Fix It); and
5. The need for an effective human resources department providing proper support to employees as well as the employer (paragraphs 2.99 to 2.108 and 2.126 of my Report).
Dame Janet smith goes on to propose this:
“My recommendation is that within, say six months of this report, the BBC should set out its official response to all the reports and should explain what its current rules, policies and procedures are in respect of each of the areas which have been open to criticism and demonstrate that these apply current best practice.
Having appropriate policies is only part of the answer. In addition to publishing and explaining its policies, the BBC should, in my view, commission an independent audit of the operation of those rules, policies and procedures. It should set out the timeframe in which each of these areas will be subject to audit, how the audit will be undertaken and should confirm that the results of each audit will be made public. Further, it should undertake now to make any changes to procedures recommended by those audits to ensure that it maintains best practice in these extremely important areas.”
I am not going to make suppositions about current events. But I am entitled to be concerned about the demonstrated track record of failure. I would be interested to know what recent audits have revealed; I certainly do not recall them being widely reviewed in the public realm.
@ John S Warren
“… the BBC has always had a deficient management culture…”
I picked-up a copy of John Reith’s (auto?) biography some considerable number of years ago and concluded that he was a ‘nutter’. Certainly he displayed dangerously, and fortunately for him not fatally, reckless behaviour resulting in a serious head injury on the Western Front. But even HE would, I’m sure, have balked at the state of our national broadcaster now and in recent years.
I gave up watching BBC TV news some 30 years ago and found the BBC overseas service more balanced, that has now been switched off. I generally watch channel 4 news although I have been switching it off in disgust more and more.
I moved to Ireland for work many years ago and have retired although I have been doing some consultancy work. Irish TV news although very local seams more balanced.
My preferred watching is Sky now – the best polotical team there is
BBC America is balanced. It is more straight reporting of world events with great film coverage than op-ed.
Very much agreed. There’s also a lack of understanding about how privacy and anonymity work at play here. The whole point of not naming people involved in a case is to protect their privacy and of those around them. I can’t imagine there are a whole lot of Rwandan families in Cardiff, at least compared to the general population, so by releasing this they’re potentially outing the individual anyway, and certainly putting that whole minority group at risk as people try to speculate.
I was watching the late news last night and they were showing a statement by Yvette cooper after the rioting had started. At one point someone off camera (presumably the bbc) asks her what she thought of all the speculation. And that struck me as really odd. If the bbc hadn’t released and spread this info, then the speculation which always tends to happen after events like this might have remained fractured/unfocused and not galvanised to the point of rioting.
Much to agree with
The media is observing reporting restrictions due to the boy’s age: he is 17.
But they might be revealing enough to identify him.
Hardly anonymity when the police at the outset revealed his age and named the local village where he lived with a population of under 5,000. Coupled with the BBC release, it’s too much information
The anti BBC attitudes on here are becoming ridiculous. The BBC certainly has faults like any other organisation, but it can hardly be blamed for the lies and islamophobia spread on social media, and the reaction to this garbage by moronic right wing thugs. I’d trust the BBC over social media every time.
The BBC has, like just about every area of public life, been the victim of 14 years of appalling Tory government. That’s seen in the appointment to it’s board of far too many Tories (e.g. the odious Gibb). They need to be got rid of by this new government and replaced by non political figures.
It’s also seen in the fact that it’s had a 1/3 cut in it’s budget since 2010 due to the Tories deliberately freezing the licence fee under Murdoch’s instructions and lately out of sheer spite and vindictiveness e.g. the moronic Nadine Dorris when she was culture minister (!!!) and your own utterly useless ex MP Lucy Frazer Richard.
I could go on for ages about this, but I’ll just conclude that if the Beeb goes this country will be poorer for it.
Sorry – but in this occasion the BBC git things horribly wrong
Its attitude to racism is ‘Racism, is it right or wrong? Let’s have a debate’ and that’s unacceptable.
Thank you and well said, Richard.
One could add global warming, migration, Northern Ireland, employee protection and Brexit to that list.
As far as I’m aware Richard the BBC has pretty strong rules against expressions of racism, sexism or homophobia and sticks to them. One of the reasons it’s enemies on the right are always making their stupid accusations of it being a hive of ‘wokery’. As for reporting the origin of the family of the killer, you have a point, because in today’s social media fed frenzy of idiocy, the fact that the killer was born in Rwanda is used by the racists. Sad times, but that is the fault of social media and the cynical use made of it by people like Farage.
I have to disagree.
The BBC is still today highlighting this, almost with a shrug as if that explians the riots
It has got this one wrong.
“They need to be got rid of by this new government and replaced by non political figures.”
Be carful what you wish (political or non-political) for from any government. In the 1950s Winston Churchill selected Lord Cadogan to chair the BBC Board of Governors for the wonderful reason that Cadogan did NOT own a television set and rarely listened to the wireless. Cadogan preferred in-depth reading of Hansard and White Papers.
What happened in Southport was, thankfully, a rare event but so shocking that perhaps it is unreasonable to imagine that our immediate responses could be totally measured. Southport will be remembered alongside Lockerbie, Hungerford and Dunblane and will scar our psyche for years.
Only a few days earlier a road traffic accident resulting in the deaths of six, including two children and orphaning another, was reported and forgotten in a matter of a few days. The Police asked the public for information about a Porsche 911 and an adult male was arrested and later bailed in connection with the incident. Tears were shed, heads shaken and tuts uttered, but the news cycle is so rapid and the event sufficiently common that it is probably only a matter of a few weeks before it will be of little interest to most. Nobody rioted, few if any suggested banning sports cars from our roads, nobody suggested that the religion sometimes known as petrolmania be outlawed and its promoters removed from their pulpits, despite it contributing to thousands of deaths every year, many of them premature.
So what’s the difference? Why does one event shake us our core and the other wash over us?
Undoubtedly the rarity of the Southport assaults, the very nature of the event, children playing and carefree, and the senselessness of the loss of life hit us hard, but there must be more at play for the two tragedies to receive such different reactions. Aren’t the victims of the traffic accident deserving of our sorrow and outrage at the senselessness of the loss?
Our response to any event is determined by context and naturally this includes the public mood. Public mood is affected, perhaps even determined, by reporting around topics. Many commentators tell us that the current topic at the very core of most public discussion is immigration and mass movement of peoples. The consequences for many is an almost involuntary response to any terrible event to want to understand it’s connection to migration. No matter how tenuous. The BBC operates in this environment and has the choice to say nothing, that always works out well or to report the facts as they are known without sensation, apparently that isn’t an option either.
So what role should news journalists play when informing their audience? Especially when the facts are so sparse and there are hours of airtime to fill. As far as I am aware no sane person identified ‘24hr rolling news’ as the missing element in their life, but here we are. Countless channels on multiple platforms all vying to be exclusive and all claiming to be hard hitting and truthful. Journalists have descended to the level of ‘ambulance chasers’, a most pejorative term if you consider the importance of the profession and the risks many take.
Against a different background Kamala Harris has recently pronounced “We’re not going back” but it’s as true of journalism as many other aspects of modern life. We aren’t going back but if we don’t figure out how to go forward then we must be prepared for more of the same. I think that the emasculation of a state broadcaster is not part of a better news ecosystem and the motives of some that wish to undermine the BBC are mostly malign. The corporation has many faults, but seeking to divide and promote unrest isn’t one of them. The same cannot be said for all organisations or individuals that purport to be news broadcasters.
Thanks
Thank you Michael, and very well said, especially ” I think that the emasculation of a state broadcaster is not part of a better news ecosystem and the motives of some that wish to undermine the BBC are mostly malign. The corporation has many faults, but seeking to divide and promote unrest isn’t one of them. The same cannot be said for all organisations or individuals that purport to be news broadcasters.”
Too damn right. A lot of the criticism of the Beeb is driven by our increasingly fractured news ‘ecosystem’ of which social media is a massive part, and in my opinion a mostly malign one. So now if the BBC say something people don’t agree or that conflicts with their perception of an issue, it is dismissed as biased. Whereas the social media echo chamber is full of people who share the same opinion, so no need to think about something or question your own views.
I didn’t know that awful accident was caused by someone in a Porsche 911. Some lunatic petrolhead driving at some crazy speed on a public road has killed six people but that’s not worthy of outrage, whereas the Southport horror is? Presumably the driver was white and not from a family from another country so the rabble rousers and fools who allow themselves to get used by them don’t care. God, how stupid.
Regarding the A61 crash, I don’t know the cause. That is to be determined by a thorough investigation. I referenced that tragedy as an example of how easy it is to be devastated by the loss of one human life and so indifferent over the loss of another. We cannot grieve for everyone but it pains me that we are so easily manipulated. And that includes me.
Col Smithers at 9:03am wrote: “One could add global warming, migration, Northern Ireland, employee protection and Brexit to that list” . You could also add Scotland to that list. BBC Scotland conducts a daily denigration of the prospect of Scottish independence. Regular contributor here John S Warren clearly has a strong constitution: he listens to BBC Scotland’s morning radio programme ‘Good Morning Scotland and occasionally rails against it here. I found that shouting at the radio before breakfast isn’t good for the digestion or state of mind and John’s reviews of the programme content keep me informed and confirm my judgement. Thank you, John.
Pharmacies have various preparations for digestive problems.