Gisteren op het blog van Stan van Houcke een artikel van the Canary, dat op 6 mei vorig jaar werd gepubliceerd. Het handelt hier over wie macht uitoefent via de BBC, de publieke Britse omroep, die intussen gerust een gezwel kan worden genoemd, als je alle aftakkingen in het buitenland ziet, zoals die in Canada.
Op dit blog heeft u al vaak kunnen lezen, over de propaganda die de BBC dag in dag uitstort over het Britse publiek, neem de Brexit of de enorme hoeveelheid leugens over de strijd in Aleppo (en het weglaten van feiten, zoals de terreur die de ‘gematigde rebellen’ uitoefende op de bevolking in Oost-Aleppo….)……..
Helaas voor diegenen die het Engels niet kunnen lezen is het een Engelstalig artikel (al kan je e.e.a. via het besturingssysteem van Microsoft laten ‘vertalen’), hier het volledige artikel:
The
sorry facts which show the BBC has moved beyond bias, into pure
propaganda
EDITORIAL
The
BBC and its political editor Laura Kuenssberg are under
fire this
week, following local election coverage which has been dismissed as
nothing short of propaganda by people across the country. But how did
we get here?
Who
runs the BBC?
Rona
Fairhead, Chair of the BBC Trust, and board member of HSBC (image
via BBC)
The
current abysmal state of BBC News and Politics makes much more sense
when you see who has been appointed to plot its editorial
course.
The BBC
Trust is
responsible for granting licenses to all BBC outlets and stations,
managing value for money on licence fee payments and ‘the
direction of BBC editorial and creative output’.
The Trust consists of 12 Trustees and is headed by Rona
Fairhead – who
also happens to have been a longtime board member of HSBC bank.
As The
Canary’s James
Wright reported earlier
this year:
Fairhead
has entrenched ties to the Tory government. In fact, she and
Osborne are
old friends.
Fairhead worked
for the
Conservative government as a cabinet office member, until being
appointed by the previous Conservative culture secretary – Sajid
Javid – as the new head of the BBC Trust. She is
still business
ambassador for David Cameron.
Fairhead
has also sat on the board of HSBC directors for a long time. And what
is even more shocking than her other Conservative links are claims
that she was actually appointed chairwoman of the BBC Trust to keep a
lid on Cameron’s involvement in covering up a
£1bn fraudulent HSBC scam on British shoppers.
Whistle-blower Nicholas
Wilson made
various freedom of information requests that confirmed that
Fairhead’s appointment did not follow proper procedure. She was
rushed to the position after the application date closed, with no
mention of her on any contemporary media shortlist.
Her
appointment does not coincide with the normal process, and many
questioned why
a business tycoon was right for the job. What
it did coincide with was
a string of interconnected visits from the BBC, HSBC, the Houses of
Parliament and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to Wilson’s
website where he details the scam and the FCA and Cameron’s
involvement in covering it up.
But
the conflicts of interest do not stop at Fairhead.
The
Director of News and Current Affairs at the BBC, James Harding, is a
former employee of the Murdoch Press. While Editor of The Times
newspaper, he was responsible for exposing
the identity of police blogger NightJack by hacking
the blogger’s email accounts –
which his legal
team then covered up during
a court case against the action. Harding has also gone on the record
as ‘pro
Israel’.
This
is the calibre of the figures responsible for hiring the news teams,
presenters and journalists who will report on matters of hacking,
privacy, and the Middle East.
These
are not trivial conflicts of interests. The two individuals primarily
responsible for driving the News and Politics agenda for the BBC, are
instead driving forward their personal and professional causes –
and the licence fee payer is footing the bill.
What
is the impact on reporting?
These
conflicts of interest affect the reporting of News and Politics at
the BBC in a very real way. In 2013, researchers at Cardiff
University undertook a major
content analysis of
BBC coverage – funded in part by the BBC Trust. They studied the
impartiality of BBC reporting across several areas,
including the Israel-Palestine conflict, the EU, business and
economics, and politics.
The findings revealed
that:
-
Whichever
party is in power, the Conservative party is granted more air time. -
On
BBC News at Six, business representatives outnumbered trade union
spokespersons by more than five to one (11 vs 2) in 2007 and by 19
to one in 2012. -
When
it comes to the Financial Crisis, BBC coverage was almost
completely dominated by stockbrokers, investment bankers, hedge fund
managers and other City voices. Civil
society voices or commentators who
questioned the benefits of having such a large finance sector were
almost completely absent from coverage.
On
top of this, BBC reporting of Israel-Palestine has been woefully
partisan – and in 2013, we found out one reason why.
In
2013, a devastating report by Electronic
Intifada,
revealed that Raffi
Berg,
online editor for BBC News, was instructing journalists to skew
reports on Israel-Palestine in favour of Israel. While hundreds of
Palestinians were losing their lives during Israel’s eight day
assault on the Gaza strip in 2012, Berg was emailing
journalists with ‘guidance’ to maintain a pro-Israel tone in
their reports.
This from the report:
In
one, he asked BBC colleagues to word their stories in a way which
does not blame or “put undue emphasis” on Israel for starting the
prolonged attacks. Instead, he encouraged journalists to promote the
Israeli government line that the “offensive” was “aimed at
ending rocket fire from Gaza.”
This
was despite the fact that Israel broke a ceasefire when it attacked
Gaza on 14 November, a ceasefire which the Palestinians had been
observing — firing no rockets into Israel.
In
a second email, sent during the same period, Berg told BBC
journalists:
“Please
remember, Israel doesn’t maintain a blockade around Gaza. Egypt
controls the southern border.”
He
omitted to mention that the United Nations views Israel as the
occupying power in Gaza and has called on Israel to end its siege of
the Strip. Israel’s refusal to do so is a violation of UN Security
Council Resolution 1860.”
Berg
is still in his role.
All
that’s left is propaganda
Recently,
these two vested interests – pro-neoliberalism and pro-Israel –
converged on an area of common interest: opposition to Jeremy Corbyn.
This
united bitter Blairites, Conservatives and pro-Israel groups – who
ran perhaps the most
toxic smear campaign against
the Labour party and its leader in living memory. In the run up to
the local elections on May 5, the headlines across the BBC and wider
media’s flagship television and radio programs was not the 1
million people in
the UK reliant on food banks to eat, but the intrigue of the smear
campaign.
Prior
to the elections, the reporting by Kuenssberg was dominated almost
exclusively by claims of crisis within Labour, providing a platform
to a minority of bitter Blairites, and applying pressure on Corbyn to
stand aside – or at the very least prepare to.
On
Friday morning – when Corbyn’s vote had not collapsed, but
increased, compared to Miliband’s general election performance of
2015 – there was no apology for the wrongful prediction.
Instead, the narrative wheeled on regardless. While the SNP lost
their majority in Scotland, and Labour advanced in England and Wales
– this was the BBC website’s response.
The
situation brings to mind the moment when the BBC’s Andrew Marr
interviewed Noam Chomsky about the role of the mainstream media as a
propaganda service. Chomsky was discussing the role of
self-censorship by journalists, and Marr repudiated the claim,
asking:
“How
can you know if I am self-censoring?” Arguing he had never been
censored, or told what to think.
Chomsky
calmly responds, as if he were explaining the non-existence of Santa
Claus to a child:
“I’m
sure you believe everything you’re saying, but what I’m saying is
that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting
where you’re sitting.”
And
therein lies the rub with the role of the BBC, and the wider
mainstream media, as a vehicle by which to advance the causes of
those who own and run them. There is a monopoly of wealth and power
in our society which translates directly into a monopoly of the
media. The result is a staggering lack of diversity and pluralism of
voices and opinions in the mainstream space. The media has
become little more than a monotonous, relentless monologue – when
as a country, and a world, we need to be having a conversation.
Read
more in our recommended book:
Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media Paperback–
20
Apr 1995
by Edward
S Herman (Author), Noam
Chomsky (Author)
===============
Zie ook: ‘BBC World Service ontkent gekleurde informatie over Brexit te hebben verstrekt….. AUW!!‘
en: ‘BBC World Service bol van EU propaganda……..‘
en: ‘Why The British Said No To Europe‘
en: ‘Aleppo, de BBC krijgt de deksel op de propaganda neus!!‘
en: ‘BBC kan maar niet ophouden over de Brexit…….‘
en: ‘BBC: propaganda-orgaan voor het neoliberalistische beleid van de conservatieven‘
en: ‘BBC heeft met angstzaaien en propaganda de Schotten hun onafhankelijkheid ontnomen………‘
Voor meer berichten n.a.v. het bovenstaande, klik op één van de labels, die u onder dit bericht aantreft, dit geldt niet voor de labels: Fairhead, Harding, HSBC, Javid, Kuenssberg, N. Wilson en R. Berg.
Nog toegevoegd: link naar originele bericht, dit vanwege onduidelijkheid getoonde statistieken (al is het daar niet veel duidelijker).