BBC

Journos' Biggest ClimateGate Regret: Getting Scooped, Not Getting it Wrong
By Lachlan Markay | November 9, 2010 | 6:10 AM EST

Nearly a year after leaked emails from the University of East Anglia revealed scientists manipulating data to embellish the case for anthropogenic global warming, journalists are finally starting to learn a few lessons. Unfortunately, few, if any, of those journalists are Americans.

Margot O'Neill of the Australian Broadcasting Company reported last week:

[A] key BBC news manager has declared that climate science "isn't quite a settled question"; and the BBC Trust is investigating the impartiality of science reporting including on climate change and including whether sceptical views are given due airing.

BBC’s Katty Kay: Cheney ‘Hoodwinked the American Public’ into Believing Saddam Hussein Behind 9/11
By Brad Wilmouth | November 8, 2010 | 8:48 AM EST

 On Sunday’s syndicated Chris Matthews Show, panel member Katty Kay of the BBC claimed that Vice President Dick Cheney had convinced 70 percent of Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, and that he "hoodwinked the American public." Kay’s accusation came as host Matthews had turned the discussion to the topic of how President Obama might have handled the response to the 9/11 attacks differently than President Bush.

Bob Woodward of the Washington Post asserted that "there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq until we invaded, and then they came." But, as previously documented by NewsBusters, before the 2003 invasion, varous news sources - some American, some from other countries - were already citing the governments of several countries as they reported that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, not only was already in Iraq plotting attacks against targets in Europe, but that he already had an association with Osama bin Laden and had spent time in Afghanistan.

Kay then chimed in, as she suggested that Cheney had convinced most Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, although she seemed to mistakenly use the word "Iraq" instead of "9/11." Kay: "But the, sort of, political ‘extraordinaryness’ of the Bush administration was that Cheney managed to convince 70 percent of American people that Iraq was, that Saddam Hussein was directly behind Iraq and hoodwinked the American public."

Matthews responded: "In the polling, you’re right, it’s in the polling."

U.K. Independent Columnist Tells BBC Suffering Children Should Be Smothered
By Jeff Poor | October 4, 2010 | 7:21 PM EDT

Chalk this one up to things that make you go, “What?!?”

In an interview with the BBC on Oct. 4, Virginia Ironside, a columnist for the U.K. Independent made a jaw-dropping statement – that abortion and euthanasia could somehow be considered to be acts of kindness. (h/t Scott Baker, theblaze.com)

“[I] think that if I were a mother of a suffering child, I would be the first to want I mean a deeply suffering child I would be the first one to put a pillow over its face, as I would with any suffering thing and I think the difference is that my feeling of horror, suffering is many greater than my feeling of getting rid of a couple of cells because suffering can go on for years,” Ironside said.

Never Forget - But Have We?
By Rusty Weiss | September 11, 2010 | 7:53 PM EDT
Never forget.

Those are the two most prevalent words uttered or typed on this tragically historic day. 

Never.  Forget.

For many, September 11, 2001, was a day that will forever be seared into the minds of those who were witness.  On that day, the nation was awoken by a harsh reality that some people want nothing more than to destroy our freedom, our way of life.  It was a day that 19 hijackers, four airplanes, two towers, and one deranged ideology brought the threat of terrorism to the forefront in our country.

But a mere nine years after 9/11, has the leadership of this nation, both administrative and media related, already forgotten?

Yesterday, on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, the President of the United States of America had the tone deaf audacity to ignore the concept of time and place, choosing to defend the building of the Ground Zero victory mosque.  In his news conference, President Obama said that the proposed New York City mosque has run up against the "extraordinary sensitivities around 9/11."  In other words, he hears the sensitivities, he simply does not care. 

Obama elaborates:

Telegraph Columnist: BBC Treats Tea Party as Cross Between Nazis and KKK
By Lachlan Markay | September 8, 2010 | 1:45 PM EDT
UK Telegraph columnist Janet Daley blasted the BBC on Tuesday for treating the tea party movement "as if it were a cross between the Klu [sic] Klux Klan and the German neo-fascist brigade."

While Daley's piece is a stirring and hard-hitting indictment of the BBC's coverage, she seems to believe that its disdainful approach to the tea party movement stems from a failure to understand the American political tradition. But by that logic, American reporters, who presumably do understand that tradition, would refrain from such coverage.

Let's see: Nazi comparisons? Check. KKK comparisons? Check. The fact is the American media elite are more akin to their British counterparts than to the tea party protesters they all cover. Liberal elitism knows no borders.

BBC Chief Admits 'Massive' Left-wing Bias, Vows to Remedy Imbalance
By Lachlan Markay | September 2, 2010 | 5:19 PM EDT
BBC Director General Mark Thompson admitted to the UK Daily Mail in an article today that Britain's state-run news outlet has had a "massive" left-wing bias. He insisted, though, that the network is taking steps to remedy the ideological slant.

BBC has a history of promoting the ultra-leftist agenda on most issues. But to see the channel's top dog admit it in an interview with the Daily Mail was quite a sight.

Now if only some television outlets on this side of the pond would do the same.

While Thompson pleaded guilty to a liberal slant, he insisted that a new crop of journalists is changing the political face of the BBC.

The Daily Mail's Paul Revoir reported today:

Time Publishes Melting Arctic Scare Piece As Ice Levels Dramatically Rise
By Noel Sheppard | April 4, 2010 | 3:09 PM EDT

On the same day that Time magazine published a scare piece about the melting Arctic seas, a British paper reported recent findings that the amount of ice in northern waterways has dramatically increased to levels not seen in almost a decade.

"Reports about the melting ice caps are distressing" frantically began Time's "Putting a Price Tag on the Melting Ice Caps" Saturday.

Yet, moments earlier, Britain's Daily Mail reported:

NBC's Brian Williams Knocks 'Hatred,' 'Venom' in Health Care Fight, Touts Objectivity
By Scott Whitlock | April 1, 2010 | 4:54 PM EDT

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams appeared on the BBC podcast Americana on Sunday and asserted that "hatred" and "venom" were part of the health care debate. He then hyperbolically claimed, "I would sooner jab my hand into a food processor than take a side." [MP3 Audio available here.]

The NBC journalist seriously trumpeted, "In my line of work I never engage in opinions, anyway." BBC presenter Matt Frei interviewed Williams for the podcast. (H/T to DB from the Biased BBC website.)

After Frei asked if the health care battle was for the "soul of America," the news anchor oddly replied, "It might well be. We've had a lot of anger building in this country. A lot of it goes back to Bill Clinton's affair with an intern, then from the attacks of 9/11."

BBC: Former Guantanamo Prisoners Nothing More Than Charitable Potheads
By Rusty Weiss | January 12, 2010 | 10:10 PM EST
The media has frequently made the deplorable decision to present prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as innocent choir boys, wrapped up in the evil that is a U.S. prison system run by blood thirsty prison guards. Such is the case of a recent piece by the BBC, covering a love-fest reunion between the former Guantanamo guard who has seen the light, repenting for his evil ways, and two ex-inmates whose only goal in Afghanistan back in 2001 was to provide aid work, sight see, and smoke dope.

The BBC interview with the three individuals - former prison guard Brandon Neely and former inmates Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul - asks the question: "But what were the pair doing in Afghanistan in 2001?"

Ahmed's response goes unquestioned (emphasis mine throughout):

Mr Ahmed admits they had a secret agenda for entering Afghanistan, but it wasn't to join al-Qaeda.

"Aid work was like probably 5% of it. Our main reason was just to go and sightsee really and smoke some dope".

Indeed, a true to life Harold and Kumar.

But what were the benevolent ones, Ahmed and Rasul, really doing at the time that the BBC would rather whitewash in their reporting?

Ted Koppel: Obama ‘Psyched Into’ Overreacting to Undie Bomber by ‘Yapping’ Media
By Rich Noyes | January 8, 2010 | 12:35 PM EST
The latest media buzz is that longtime Nightline anchor Ted Koppel, who left ABC News back in 2005, might soon return to the network to replace George Stephanopoulos as host of This Week. Here’s a hint of the perspective Koppel might bring with him to his potential new job: appearing last night as an analyst on BBC’s World News America, Koppel insisted that President Obama’s first (non)reaction to the attempted bombing of a U.S. airline on Christmas Day “was the right one,” but media “yapping” and “24-hour cable channels going at it, hour after hour after hour” pressured Obama into an “overreaction.”

Of course, the successful smuggling of a bomb onto a U.S. passenger jet — by an al-Qaeda operative who was already known to intelligence officials — exposed significant problems in the government’s security process, a fact which even Obama himself now concedes. “This was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had,” the President confessed yesterday.

But rather than scrutinize the government’s failing, Koppel apparently prefers that nothing happened: “Doing something is exactly what the terrorists want. They want to feel as though they control our actions, rather than we controlling them ourselves.”
Scarborough: Rahm Fired as White House Chief of Staff 'Over the Next Year'
By Jeff Poor | December 21, 2009 | 8:26 AM EST

What politicians say to get elected can come back to haunt them and vilifying the lobbyist profession to score campaign points is going to do that to President Barack Obama, according to MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-anchor Joe Scarborough.

Scarborough appeared on BBC Radio 4's Dec. 20 broadcast of "Americana" with host Matt Frei and explained how Obama's 2007 pledge to not hire lobbyists isn't necessarily a good policy.

"Listen, the Obama administration is in trouble right now," Scarborough said. "We got a lot of friends in the Obama administration right now and they're in trouble because Barack Obama made promises during the 2008 campaign that he would not allow lobbyists to work in his White House. Well sometimes you want lobbyists working in your White House. You want lobbyists working in Congress. You want lobbyists working for the city of Houston, Texas, because you don't get that job as lobbyist because you got a good smile. You get the job as lobbyist because you understand an issue better than everybody else."

BBC Admits Climate Deal 'May Not Halt Warming'
By Julia A. Seymour | December 17, 2009 | 5:06 PM EST
The Copenhagen climate conference is nearing its end -- so far without reaching a deal involving the many nations gathered in Denmark. And even if they get a deal, it might not come close to their own expectations.

The BBC reported on Dec. 17 that a deal "looks more likely following a frantic day of behind the scenes diplomacy," but made a startling admission about the actual impact on temperatures.

BBC's Richard Black wrote that "a leaked document from the UN climate convention indicates the best deal likely here will not keep the temperature raise below 2C (3.6F)."

So if the climate deal won't actually stop climate change what's the point again? A very different kind of green altogether.

"In the context of a strong accord in which all major economies pledge meaningful mitigation actions and provide full transparency as to those actions, the U.S. is prepared to work with other countries towards a goal of mobilising $100bn a year to address the needs of developing countries," Sec. of State Hillary Clinton said, according to BBC.