Skip to main content

BBC News Omissions in the Past 2 Weeks

To fulfill its Charter the BBC is charged with offering "a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers".  Does the BBC fulfill its Charter obligation?

I have heard so many people say of news items "no-one is telling us what it is really about", "we have not been given enough information".  This was a frequent complaint during the Referendum but still continues.

We are seeing the same problem with the recent race demonstrations. The demonstrations are focused on the USA but racism in the EU is almost as bad.  Given that the protestors are upset about racism abroad as much as at home shouldn't the BBC be enlightening them?

Racism in USA, UK, and EU
It seems that the BBC is deliberately suppressing any depth of analysis. 

When talking about historical public figures the BBC again fails to mention that slavery was not officially illegal within England until the late 18th century, by suppressing this context the journalists are deliberately setting the mob on all statuary from before 1800.  Indeed, pushing historical Black Slavery down the throats of black people with no mention of White or Chinese etc. slavery is flagrant racism and seems to be designed to cause division and strife..

White slavery was rife in England about 400 yrs ago and Black slavery was banned throughout the British Empire almost 200 years ago.  These events are deeply historical yet the historical perspective is never mentioned by the BBC. This failure to mention the historical context that Whites and Blacks were both, a very long time ago, once slaves is deliberately fanning the protests.

On the subject of racism in the UK the BBC has omitted the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which measures the actual incidence of crime, and focused on "reports to the police" of Hate Crime.  There is clear evidence that reported racism is affected by political events even when the underlying rate is scarcely changed. ( See Black Lives Matter).

According to John Humphrys BBC News Suppression and omission is the result of casual bias in the BBC editing rooms.  The editors and journalists seem to be allowed to select the news that suits their political bias.  This was especially evident in the Referendum when the BBC mainly covered "predictions" rather than the current state and trends of UK-EU trade and finances.

This BBC pro-EU bias is still continuing with videos being suppressed that showed that the EU negotiators were acting in bad faith with the objective of punishing the UK for leaving being more important that a fair deal. (See Do not extend the Transition Period ).  One of these videos is actually a clip from a BBC documentary but the BBC has suppressed it.  In the Autumn of 2016 the news media, including the BBC, were full of tales of how the UK should be punished for leaving (See Guardian article).   The fact that, as the videos show, this has been happening is highly relevant.  How can viewers make informed decisions about extending the transition period without being informed of the facts and context?

The BBC has merged its Global and National news desks.  As a result it treats the UK as just another country.  This is unacceptable for a national broadcaster. World events should be related to our national position, for instance when the murder of George Floyd was reported it might have been noted that recently the UK has only 14 or so deaths in custody a year compared with about 1000 in the US. Without this national context the door is open for any events from any place and time to be blown up into reasons for demonstrations in our UK streets.

Will Tim Davie, the new BBC Director General, put procedures in place to increase contextual reporting and monitor bias by omission?

8/6/2020










Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Practical Idealism by Richard Nicolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi

Coudenhove-Kalergi was a pioneer of European integration. He was the founder and President for 49 years of the Paneuropean Union. His parents were Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, and Mitsuko Aoyama, the daughter of an oil merchant, antiques-dealer, and huge landowner family in Tokyo. His "Pan-Europa" was published in 1923 and contained a membership form for the Pan-Europa movement. Coudenhove-Kalergi's movement held its first Congress in Vienna in 1926. In 1927 the French Prime Minister, Aristide Briand was elected honorary president.  Personalities attending included: Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud. Figures who later became central to founding the EU, such as Konrad Adenauer became members . His basic idea was that democracy was a transitional stage that leads to rule by a new aristocracy that is largely taken from the Jewish "master race" (Kalergi's terminology). His movement was reviled by Hitler and H

The Falklands have always been Argentine - Las Malvinas son Argentinas

"The Falklands have always been Argentine" is taught to every Argentine child as a matter of faith.  What was Argentina during the time when it "always" possessed Las Malvinas?  In this article I will trace the history of Argentina in the context of its physical and political relationship with "Las Malvinas", the Falkland Islands.  The Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands dates from a brief episode in 1831-32 so it is like Canada claiming the USA despite two centuries of separate development. This might sound like ancient history but Argentina has gone to war for this ancient claim so the following article is well worth reading. For a summary of the legal case see: Las Malvinas: The Legal Case Argentina traces its origins to Spanish South America when it was part of the Viceroyalty of the Rio del Plata.  The Falklands lay off the Viceroyalty of Peru, controlled by the Captain General of Chile.  In 1810 the Falklands were far from the geographical b

The Report on Racism

The " Report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities " has just been published.  The Commissioners were nearly all from BAME backgrounds and have produced a robust and fair Report. The Report identified a class divide in which the cycle of advantage maintains a section of the population in wealth and leaves the large bulk of the population in relative poverty.   The wealthy class is largely white British but the poorer class consists of large numbers of white British and other ethnic groups.  This class divide causes a bias in the crude statistics on disadvantage so that majority, poor white British are labelled as "white supremacists" etc. when it is the small wealthy class that actually creates the disparity that causes this analysis. The most striking finding is that different ethnic groups had very different experiences and outcomes.  Educational outcomes demonstrate this at a glance: Red text added for this article Most ethnic groups had better outcome