Year: 2011

The BBC Culture

Published by Papa Giorgio

(This is posted due to a conversation started on my LiveLeak account.) I have talked about the bias embedded in NPR previously, but few are aware of the embedded bias at the BBC. And so, I wanted to get a critique of their biases into the anals of PapaG. I often talk to people who see to think they are in am elite class of people when they mention they listen to the BBC. Don’t get me wrong, they bring stories about world events other news orgs miss. However, many people are not trained to get the bias behind their headlines. The Daily Mail, a UK newsdaily, has an interesting article from a while ago:

It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.

A leaked account of an ‘impartiality summit’ called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.

It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC’s ‘diversity tsar’, wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.

At the secret meeting in London last month, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley, BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians.

One veteran BBC executive said: ‘There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness.

‘Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC’s culture, that it is very hard to change it.’

…(read more)…

While the BBC admitted their bias and have tried to correct it, they still do not know what impartiality is — not to mention political correctness and multi-culturalism. Someone who worked at the BBC for some time (Peter Sissons, a 20 year veteran of BBC News) wrote in his memoirs about some of this culture of progressiveness at the BBC, to wit NewsBusters wrote on:

While liberal media bias is often easy to spot, it’s rare to see veteran journalists come clean on the biases of their own news outlets. But when one does, it’s hard to dispute the first hand account of the newsroom’s consistently leftist politics.

In his new memoirs, veteran BBC news anchor Peter Sissons details the startling depths of leftist politics that pervade coverage at Britain’s state-owned broadcaster. Leftism is “in its very DNA,” Sissions claims of the BBC.

In excerpts from the memoirs, titled “When One Door Closes”, published in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper, Sissons details the groupthink mentality at the BBC:

At any given time there is a BBC line on everything of importance, a line usually adopted in the light of which way its senior echelons believe the political wind is ­blowing. This line is rarely spelled out explicitly, but percolates subtly throughout the organisation.

Whatever the United Nations is associated with is good — it is heresy to question any of its activities. The EU is also a good thing, but not quite as good as the UN. Soaking the rich is good, despite well-founded economic arguments that the more you tax, the less you get. And Government spending is a good thing, although most BBC ­people prefer to call it investment, in line with New Labour’s terminology.

All green and environmental groups are very good things. Al Gore is a saint. George Bush was a bad thing, and thick into the bargain. Obama was not just the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House, he was the BBC’s. Blair was good, Brown bad, but the BBC has now lost interest in both.

Trade unions are mostly good things, especially when they are fighting BBC managers. Quangos are also mostly good, and the reports they produce are usually handled uncritically. The Royal Family is a bore. Islam must not be offended at any price, although ­Christians are fair game because they do nothing about it if they are offended.

In short, pick the default leftist position on any issue, and odds are it is the position held and espoused on air by the BBC.

And while leftist politics color the news at the channel, they also dictate its corporate structure and inner workings, according to Sissons. One’s politics, he writes, can dictate one’s success or failure in climbing the Company’s corporate ladder.

If Human Resources — or Personnel, as it used to be known — advise that it’s time a woman or someone from an ethnic minority (or a combination of the two) was appointed to the job for which you, a white male, have applied, then that’s who gets it.

But whatever your talent, sex or ethnicity, there’s one sure-fire way at a BBC promotions board to ensure you don’t get the job, indeed to bring your career to a grinding halt. And that’s if, when asked which post-war politician you most admire, you reply: ‘Margaret Thatcher’.

…(read more)…








In fact, there are whole blogs that deal with the bias at the BBC. Biased BBC for instance. In one forum this was posted in relation to the memoirs of Peter Sissons being released:

Very interesting complete article, I encourage you to read it:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti…r-Sissons.html

Originally Posted by Andrew Marr

“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”

Originally Posted by BBC Drama Commissioning Controller

“We need to foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking.”

Ben Stephenson. BBC Drama Commissioning Controller

Guardian, July 16th 2009

Originally Posted by BBC Internal Report

“An internal report from 2007 said it had to make greater efforts to avoid liberal bias. That report criticised the BBC for coming late to several important stories including euroscepticism and immigration, which it described as ‘off limits in terms of a liberal-minded comfort zone’.”

“BBC programmes are being undermined by the liberal culture of its staff”

BBC report on the BBC report on biased BBC reporting

Which is funny, as the BBC spends 86% of its recruitment budget on advertising in one unashamedly left-wing newspaper – The Guardian.

BBC spent a colossal:

1. Guardian £231,944

2. The Telegraph £32,535

3. The Times £6,159

The Guardian on itself: “…a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to its liberal tradition.” The Guardian is also has a miniscule readership, Telegraph is read by more than twice as many people, and the Times more.

…(read more)… (emphasis and stylization added)

A round table. Take note that the point Carol makes is one I make about NPR:

For instance, NPR: 18,321 words in pro-Arab only segments, 4,934 words in pro-Israel segments. Bias in number of Arab-only vs Israeli-only segments: 63-percent Palestinian/pro-Arab only segments, 37-percent Israel/pro-Israel segments. (SOURCE)

Read more: RPT What “Is” Fascism (Two Posts Combined & Imported from Old Blog)


 


Highway to Hell

Published by Papa Giorgio

 

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” – CS Lewis, God in the Dock

Don’t cry over spilled milk~Thomas Sowell

Published by Papa Giorgio

EPA now to regulate spilled milk — really

Despite the old saying, “Don’t cry over spilled milk,” the Environmental Protection Agency is doing just that.

We all understand why the EPA was given the power to issue regulations to guard against oil spills, such as that of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska or the more recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But not everyone understands that any power given to any bureaucracy for any purpose can be stretched far beyond that purpose.

In a classic example of this process, the EPA has decided that, since milk contains oil, it has the authority to force farmers to comply with new regulations to file “emergency management” plans to show how they will cope with spilled milk, how farmers will train “first responders” and build “containment facilities” if there is a flood of spilled milk.

Since there is no free lunch, all of this is going to cost the farmers both money and time that could be going into farming– and is likely to end up costing consumers higher prices for farm products.

It is going to cost the taxpayers money as well, since the EPA is going to have to hire people to inspect farms, inspect farmers’ reports and prosecute farmers who don’t jump through all the right hoops in the right order. All of this will be “creating jobs,” even if the tax money removed from the private sector correspondingly reduces the jobs that can be created there.

Does anyone seriously believe that any farmer is going to spill enough milk to compare with the Exxon Valdez oil spill or the BP oil spill?

Do you envision people fleeing their homes, as a flood of milk comes pouring down the mountainside, threatening to wipe out the village below?

It doesn’t matter. Once the words are in the law, it makes no difference what the realities are. The bureaucracy has every incentive to stretch the meaning of those words, in order to expand its empire.

The 1099 Repudiation

Published by Papa Giorgio

Wallstreet Journal:

Democrats now claim that the infamous 1099 business reporting mandate that the Senate repealed this week was an accident, as if they were as surprised as everyone else to learn that this destructive provision had crept by itself into law. The truth is that the 1099 rule emerged from the same core ideology as ObamaCare, and its overwhelming repudiation by Democrats may be an important inflection point in the health-care debate.

The 1099 rule is the first of the ballast to go over the side, and Democrats hope that such “improvements” will be enough to ride out the public storm. Then again, they also claimed that voters would learn to love ObamaCare once it had been stuffed through Congress, among many other misjudgments. The political history is revealing and instructive.

Less than a year ago, liberals couldn’t see how anyone could possibly object to a rule requiring businesses to file 1099 tax forms with the Internal Revenue Service every time they spent more than $600 with a single vendor. Yes, this would result in a vast new paperwork and accounting burden for 30 million businesses and hit start-ups hardest, not to mention farms, charities and churches. But Democrats saw IRS surveillance of nearly all business-to-business transactions as merely an exercise in good government.

The point was to close the “tax gap,” the largely mythological difference between the estimated taxes due under the business tax code and what the IRS actually collects. During the Bush years, Democrats and more than a few Republicans convinced themselves that businesses were cheating the government out of revenues through deliberate under-reporting and various tax shelters.

This notion prevailed at the Senate Finance Committee under both Democratic Chairman Max Baucus and Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley. Budget Chairman Kent Conrad was another evangelist. In its first budget, the Obama White House promised “robust” tax compliance enforcement “to narrow the annual tax gap of over $300 billion,” in contrast to the lethargy of its predecessor.

The 1099 ObamaCare footnote thus received no scrutiny at first because it was so mundane. Everyone in Washington agreed that corporations were stealing billions of dollars every year that rightfully belonged to Congress to spend. (The issue only blew up when the IRS’s National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, followed by the GOP and the business lobby, made it a priority last summer.)

…(read more)…

Serious Saturday-Susan Haack

Published by Papa Giorgio

1. Using the words “science,” “scientific,” “scientifically,” “scientist,” etc., honorifically, as generic terms of epistemic praise.

And, inevitably, the honorific use of “science” encourages uncritical credulity about whatever new scientific idea comes down the pike. But the fact is that all the explanatory hypotheses that scientists come up with are, at first, highly speculative, and most are eventually found to be untenable, and abandoned. To be sure, by now there is a vast body of well-warranted scientific theory, some of it so well-warranted that it would be astonishing if new evidence were to show it to be mistaken – though even this possibility should never absolutely be ruled out.

Always remember that Ptolemy’s model of the solar system was used successfully by astronomers for 1200 years, even though it had Earth in the wrong place.

2. Adopting the manners, the trappings, the technical terminology, etc., of the sciences, irrespective of their real usefulness. Here, Hack cites the “social sciences”, quite justifiably, but evolutionary psychology surely leads the pack. Can anyone serious believe, for example, that our understanding of public affairs is improved by the claim that there is such a thing as hardwired religion or evolved religion? No new light, just competing, contradictory speculation.

3. A preoccupation with demarcation, i.e., with drawing a sharp line between genuine science, the real thing, and “pseudo-scientific” imposters. The key, of course, is the preoccupation. Everyone wants real science, but a preoccupation with showing that a line of inquiry is not science, good or bad – apart from the evidence – flies in the face of “The fact is that the term ‘science’ simply has no very clear boundaries: the reference of the term is fuzzy, indeterminate and, not least, frequently contested.”

4. A corresponding preoccupation with identifying the “scientific method,” presumed to explain how the sciences have been so successful.“ we have yet to see anything like agreement about what, exactly, this supposed method is.” Of course, one method would work for astronomy, and another for forensics. But both disciplines must reckon with evidence, to be called “science”.

5. Looking to the sciences for answers to questions beyond their scope. One thinks of Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker’s recent claim that science can determine morality. Obviously, whatever comes out of such a project must be the morality of those who went into it.

6. Denying or denigrating the legitimacy or the worth of other kinds of inquiry besides the scientific, or the value of human activities other than inquiry, such as poetry or art. Or better yet, treating them as the equivalent of baboons howling for mates, or something. It discredits both arts and sciences.

(Source)