BBC bias. Boris 51.5%: "tight margin". Hollande 51.7%: "clear victory"

'Now which is the better piece of reporting?'

The Daily Mail, no contest!

That was in response to your previous post, Poulay.

But to some, Poulay, the BBC agenda is too establishment, too right-wing, so maybe it's actually in the middle - as said before on the thread.

I can remember recently being annoyed with the BBC because it lets the govt set the agenda, and says things like NHS 'reforms'. For example, how important to the majority of people - the ones who didn't vote - were the recent elections? Yet the BBC (rightly imo) decided that they would be widely reported. Not all of us agree that the best way out of our financial situation was to make so many cuts, but the BBC just seemed to accept the idea as if it were a universal truth.

Some people even think the BBC is a tool of the government. Try showing a BBC (or ITV/CH 4) news programme to a group of people from abroad. Suddenly it becomes apparent just how biased it is, just how eurocentric, ethnocentric, WASP ish it really is! And it does have a distinctive approach to news that is reported completely differently elsewhere.

Yet it is quite highly regarded abroad. Maybe not as highly regarded as we like to think, but it has a relatively good reputation. So it must be doing something right.

'gets smuggled from here to the US.' sorry

NovackNGood

'What does the mans religion have relevance to a smuggling story. Hw do the BBc know what religion he is. Have they sen him got mosque get on a prayer mat 5 times a day....NO they have not. He is from Somalia. UK is a supposedly christian country but we don't report stories as..John Smith (catholic) is an alleged rapist do we?'

Firstly they don't even say that he's from Somalia, secondly we are only nominally a Christian country whereas Somalia is certainly a Muslim country, and finally and most importantly, it's not primarily a smuggling story, khat is legal in the UK and I doubt people could care much in this country if it gets smuggled from here to the UK. The point is, and the BBC do tell us this much, that the smuggling was financing terrorism.

Now as I've said I don't really care if khat makes its way to the US, but I AM worried about terrorism.

Here's a foreign media report:

news.nationalpost.com/2012/05/01/british-police-arrest-seven-for-exporting-khat-to-canada-u-s-to-finance-terrorism/

which makes it very clear the relevance of the religion.

"Khat is illegal in Canada but remains popular among émigrés from East African nations such as Somalia, where chewing the leafy stimulant is a ritual for some, although conservative Muslims forbid it."

"British media reports linked the arrests of the six men and one woman to Al Shabab, the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group that has been fighting to impose its intolerant version of Islamic law on Somalis."

This story is from CNN, a liberal-owned media outfit

edition.cnn.com/2012/03/07/business/khat-kenya-somalia-al-shabaab/index.html

As you can see, Somalia, Khat, and 'Al Shabaab' are the keywords in the URL.

The bullet points here are, that would actually inform the reader of the article:

• khat is consumed by Somalis, and imported from Somalia
• khat is legal in the UK but illegal in most of the West
• khat is smuggled from the UK to those other countries
• Al Shabaab is an Al Qaeda cell active in Somalia and controlling parts of the country under sharia (Muslim/Islamist) law
• khat smuggling is alleged to be funding Al Shabaab

The BBC article says that khat smuggling is maybe funding terror, but it doesn't say where, or what kind of terror.

Now we've heard that the Daily Mail are all evil bigots, etc., yet somehow they manage to tell us:

linkl

fourth sentence 'Police suspect the money was channelled to Al Shabaab, an Al Qaeda-inspired group whose members are fighting in Somalia and Yemen.'

Now which is the better piece of reporting?

People point out that the tabloid press, including the Daily Mail, sometimes take liberties with the facts to suit their agenda, and I've no doubt that's true, but if the BBC repeatedly refuse to report certain key facts, people are forced to rely on what might be unreliable news outlets.

The BNP are able to peddle their bullshit by pointing out, quite rightly, that the BBC do NOT report things like this, so many people are convinced that the BNP are more reliable than the BBC, and therefore the BNP can easily spread outright lies, on the basis that the BBC don't report the full story and are therefore the real liars. I don't think the BBC do report untruths, but they play into the hands of the BNP by consistently omitting detail such as this.

So is the Director General, possibly primus inter pares or whatever it is

Andrew Marr is one of 20,000 employees

Novack, we are discussing whether there is bias, not who is teh most dangerous. Andrew Marr says that the BBC has a "liberal bias".

In case you forget it was ideas from the RIGHT that created nazi tyranny that lead us into the 2nd world war that lead us into the Falkands war that lead us into Irag and Afghanistan that threaten war against Iran.

The left is not dangerous like that the right is.

Well they are living there illegally. But it is only about lemons. Perhaps yu prefer them asking why the Israelis use banned phosphorus munitions against civilians.

It's the parents responsibility to stop THEIR children from accessing porn on the internet not a nanny state.

The BNP has hijacked the Union Flag for their racist views/ Like the UKIP calls it self the Independence party when the UK is already Independent. Incidently what will UKIP call themselves when Scotland becomes Independent?

Geroge Orwell.... He worked at the BBC in 1941 to 1943, you really are clutching at straws here.

I don't think the BBC strives to be impartial at all. It has certain agendas that it actively pursues.

This is a recent story:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16654390

It's dressed up as a lifestyle story (in the Magazine section) about growing lemons, expensively, title is 'Growing the world's most expensive lemons'.

Perfect reading for a food snob like me, right, maybe something to do with Sicilian lemons, or some variety that only produces one, delicious, fruit per year?

Think again, it's actually devoted to slagging off Israel.

"A French parliamentary report, for example, recently concluded that the 450,000 Israeli settlers who live on the West Bank of the River Jordan, in defiance of international opinion, use more water than the 2.3 million Palestinians whose home it is."

The BBC has plenty of agendas, liberalism is one.

E.g., this story: www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17826515

'Could teenagers be stopped from looking at porn'

They actually meant 'Could children be stopped from looking at porn', because it is only children that will lack the agency to disable the filters (a 19 year old teenager, in his own home, would be completely unfettered), but because the journalist has a (perhaps unconscious) bias against the proposal they, absurdly, use 'teenagers', because 'teenagers' looking at porn sounds less frightening than 'children' looking at porn.

It's my view that the BBC world view, supposedly unbiased, but actually with many built-in prejudices, is many times more influential on our society than the likes of the Daily Mail, which openly advertises its bias. The BBC will poison almost any kind of right wing idea with hostile questioning, accusations of racism, etc. (as applicable to the individual issue), while they don't display the same hostility to ideas from the left, and in the long term these ideas become a part of the political settlement and therefore 'unbiased', and unworthy of questioning.

what does the mans religion have relevance to a smuggling story. Hw do the BBc know what religion he is. Have they sen him got mosque get on a prayer mat 5 times a day....NO they have not. He is from Somalia. UK is a supposedly christian country but we don't report stories as..John Smith (catholic) is an alleged rapist do we?

'Political pundit Andrew Marr said: 'The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.'
Washington correspondent Justin Webb said that the BBC is so biased against America that deputy director general Mark Byford had secretly agreed to help him to 'correct', it in his reports. Webb added that the BBC treated America with scorn and derision and gave it 'no moral weight'.
Former BBC business editor Jeff Randall said he complained to a 'very senior news executive', about the BBC's pro-multicultural stance but was given the reply: 'The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and it promotes it.'
Randall also told how he once wore Union Jack cufflinks to work but was rebuked with: 'You can't do that, that's like the National Front!'
Quoting a George Orwell observation, Randall said that the BBC was full of intellectuals who 'would rather steal from a poor box than stand to attention during God Save The King'.'

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-411846/We-biased-admit-stars-BBC-News.html

Poulay, if you start mentioning the cultural, religious and racial identities of everyone in the news - and you would have to do that with everyone - things would become very cumbersome, and you'd only get through half of the news.

Sorry, but am about to be fatuous again; 'A headteacher of Nigerian extraction, Christian but hasn't been to church recently, XYZ; 'So and so (Govt minister) Muslim, originally from Turkey but has lived here for twenty years, says XYZ'. Don't you see?

The reason people's origins aren't always mentioned is that they usually aren't relevant.

However, I agree with you that there are some social problems that are caused by the fact that people of different origins sometimes don't get on. I don't see how not mentioning the nationality or religion of people in the news makes that worse. I don't see how it could help the situation if they were mentioned.

'For 20 years I was a front man at the BBC, anchoring news and current ­affairs programmes, so I reckon nobody is better placed than me to ­answer the question that nags at many of its viewers ? is the BBC biased?
In my view, ?bias? is too blunt a word to describe the subtleties of the ­pervading culture. The better word is a ?mindset?. At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left.
By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are The Guardian and The Independent. ­Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on ­running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover. In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ?it?s all in there?.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1349506/Left-wing-bias-Its-written-BBCs-DNA-says-Peter-Sissons.html

You probably don't read the Mail, so you won't have seen the many articles in the Mail that mention these type of things.

Here is Sissons and something on climate catastrophe.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1349506/Left-wing-bias-Its-written-BBCs-DNA-says-Peter-Sissons.html

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1350206/BBC-propaganda-machine-climate-change-says-Peter-Sissons.html

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1349871/Peter-Sissons-BBC-bosses-ordered-downplay-Queen-Mothers-death.html

Solopower, I don't see what people's eye colour has to do with anything.

However if you take a story like this:

www.bellanaija.com/2012/04/27/victoria-osoteku-nigerian-teenager-who-organised-brutal-killing-of-schoolboy-in-uk-on-facebook-is-sentenced-to-12-years-in-prison/

You see that a gang of Nigerian teenagers stabbed a Moroccan boy.

Now I appreciate that all concerned might have British passports, but it really doesn't take Hercule Poirot to notice the Nigerian identity of the perpetrator:

2.bp.blogspot.com/-o8sDdVrqZQQ/T0-gP7GVdwI/AAAAAAAAI2c/PVNUIPSfU_E/s1600/Naija2.jpg

If you want to make fatuous points about eye colour, then go ahead, the rest of us I think would benefit from being open and not choosing to ignore these issues.

How are we as a society going to tackle these social problems when we are too scared (or at least our national broadcaster is) to utter words such as 'Nigerian' or 'Muslim'.

There are numerous articles about this case on the BBC website, for instance this one:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-17850995

It features a shot of eight convicted over the deaths, all plainly of identical racial background, and sporting Nigerian names, and yet, somehow amid all the 'analysis' fails to mention the word 'Nigeria' anywhere.

Why? It's 3000 miles to Nigeria, yet even from that distance their media is quite plain that a gang of Nigerian teens killed someone in London. Do we need to rely on foreign news reporters to get this perspective?

It's ludicrous to ignore the fact that people have a cultural, religious and racial identity.

edam, do you think that CNN has no agenda and no bias?
Do you think that France 24 has no bias and that Russia Today has no bias?
Is it only the BBC that has no bias?

I think the Mail has bias and Murdoch has bias and the Guardian has bias, and yes, I also think that the BBC has bias.

What is that bias? I think it is left bias, and teh Director General said that in teh past it did have left bias. It doesn't come as a surprise, because lots of people think that too.

edam, I agree that the Mail spins its stories. But it mentions his quotes and they are about "recent times" etc. "broader church", "honourable tradition" and it mentions teh BBC's internal study in 2007.

This is not the only story about BBC bias in teh Mail or Telegraph or in lots of other places on teh internet, as Poulay has shown.

Have you read Peter Sissons' book? Of course, we need to treat some of it with a pinch of salt because he may be a disgruntled ex-employee. But it only says what many other people also say.

Even the Director General admitted there was left wing bias. Why did he do that?

Or have I misunderstood you? Hope so.

The BBC doesn't have a proprietor who demands a certain take on the news, nor one overall editor who is a bit of an, um, character like Dacre (did you see him at Leveson?). It strives to be impartial. Unlike the Mail which strives very keenly to present a certain view of the world, and which will kill stories if it can't twist them into supporting that view.

Do you honestly think the BBC should say ' A man, 46, of joint Australian and Ghanaian extraction, has just won the lottery.' Or 'Mrs X, white, with green eyes, has been prosecuted for drug smuggling'?

edam, you're right, they merely omit the word 'Muslim'. I should have copied the biased-bbc story more carefully.

'Your only source is the Mail for how the Mail is better than the BBC.!!

Well the BBC is probably in the best in the world for not being biased as it has no string pulling editor with an agenda. Daily Fail's editor has a well known agenda using involving him smearing anyone or thing that he disagres with.'

Novack, my source was teh Guardian and Roy Greenslade, a very respected journalist.

The Daily Mail has an agenda, but so does the BBC. It would be naive to believe anything else, just because the BBC might say it has no agenda. We are dealing with politics, of course there is spin.