Post by Teddy Bear on Nov 5, 2010 22:43:07 GMT
While evidence of BBC bias has been circulating for a very long time, sometimes it appears that it is not till it hits somebody directly that they become aware of just how blatant it is.
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By James Slack, Home Affairs Editor
Last updated at 8:02 PM on 5th November 2010
Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith made a plea last week that the ‘hysteria and scaremongering’ which had dominated the debate around the Coalition’s £81 billion spending cuts should stop.
Certainly, there was a need for calm after the BBC had led its bulletins with London Mayor Boris Johnson’s disgraceful suggestion that the possible effect of ministers’ plans to cap housing benefit payments at £400 a week could be compared with the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their homes, raped and murdered.
But when it came to the supposedly impartial BBC, there was to be no letting-up.
By Sunday morning its news bulletins had picked up on a report in a Left-wing, anti-cuts newspaper, supposedly based on an unpublished academic report for the housing pressure group Shelter, and was running hard with the story.
The report on the BBC website was headlined ‘Shelter’s “unaffordable London” fear over benefit cuts’, and it gave voice to concerns that the benefit cuts will ‘mean poorer people being forced out of expensive areas’.
It quoted the charity’s chief executive as saying ‘the cuts were being done too quickly and could change the “very nature” of London’.
The central claim of the report was that ‘most’ two-bedroom flats in central London would become unaffordable to welfare claimants if they were forced to survive on £400 a week — incidentally, a sum way beyond the means of many people with jobs in the capital.
Yet, when the short study (itself only a fragment of a still unreleased analysis) was officially published a few days later, its actual findings — illustrated by a coloured map of London — seemed very different.
Even where a district was shown to be ‘largely unaffordable’ for new housing benefits claimants, it still showed that up to a quarter of homes would be affordable. Large chunks of the capital were, in any case, coloured green, meaning they would still be affordable by 2016, after the supposedly savage cuts have been implemented.
Crucially, the report’s author, Cambridge University academic Alex Fenton, said: ‘The map . . . does not indicate anything about what the effects of the measures on tenants might be. In particular, it does not show that all HB (housing benefit) claimants in a neighbourhood will be forced to move to particular areas, or at all.’
So then, the published report contained no evidence to justify the claims that less well-off people would be ‘forced out’ of their homes.
Of course we should not be surprised by any of this since much of the BBC’s coverage is political posturing, part and parcel of the taxpayer-funded Corporation’s self-appointed role as defender of ever-greater public spending.
But there are human consequences of such scaremongering. Anyone living in London on benefits must already be profoundly worried that the proposed welfare cuts could mean they can no longer afford to live in the capital and will be forced to move out.
However, housing benefit claimants are not the only social group who will have been left alarmed by the BBC’s reporting.
There was also the extraordinary remark made by a BBC journalist called Colette Hume last month, when discussing the Coalition’s plans to get some — but by no means all — incapacity benefit claimants back into work. The BBC News Channel reporter said: ‘We are hearing a lot about the fact that people are going to be pressurised and really sort of pushed to go back into work even if they have an illness, even if they have a disability, because the thinking is everybody can do potentially something.’
She was utterly wrong. It’s not a ‘fact’ at all, and shouldn’t have been presented as such.
Such irresponsible scaremongering would have left disabled viewers on benefits very worried they would be stripped of their welfare payments, and be marched to the Jobcentre, capable or not, to find work.
Or take the broadcast on the BBC One O’Clock News a week earlier on October 8, which tackled the issue of what might happen to rail travel when transport spending is squeezed.
Accompanied by video footage of commuters queuing to get on to a packed train, the reporter declared: ‘Imagine this every day only worse and paying more for it. That’s the future of rail travel here in the UK.’
In recent weeks and months — at least until yesterday’s strike by BBC journalists (including presenters Fiona Bruce, Huw Edwards and Newsnight’s economics editor Paul Mason) in a row over their pensions brought some mild respite from the barrage of anti-cuts propaganda — every trick in the manual of manipulation has been deployed to make the Coalition’s spending programme seem unpalatable or, indeed, cruel.
When the budget for the Armed Forces was facing a reduction of a modest 7.5 per cent, schoolchildren were shown in a report writing letters to Defence Secretary Liam Fox arguing why defence jobs shouldn’t be cut.
The children did not appear to be older than nine or ten.
On Tuesday this week, in another piece of frenzied doom-mongering, the BBC’s morning news bulletins led with a report that the government’s spending cuts and the rise in VAT to 20 per cent due in January will result in more than 1.6 million job losses by 2016 — far outstripping official forecasts.
The claims, made by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, were treated as if chiselled into tablets of stone, with ministers given no opportunity to challenge their veracity on air.
Yet closer inspection of the methodology for this so-called ‘study’ revealed it was based merely upon anecdotal ‘soundings from public sector managers’ (who clearly had a vested interest in the issue), rather than any sophisticated analysis of Treasury figures.
Nor did the BBC think it worth noting that the report’s author, the institute’s chief economist John Philpott, had been proved wildly wrong in the past when he predicted unemployment would reach three million by the end of the recession. The true figure came nowhere near.
Of course, the BBC is not the only organisation guilty of vested-interest, anti-cuts whingeing.
The police, when informed they would have to reduce their budgets in line with the efficiencies being demanded across the public sector, immediately predicted a ‘Christmas for criminals’ — with the number of burglaries, thefts, rapes and even murders inevitably rising.
Councils, who have taken vast sums from taxpayers over the past decade, say that, now the good times are over, potholes will have to go unfilled (doubtless as they divert public money to protect their large armies of staff performing politically correct, non-jobs).
Universities have joined the bandwagon, saying standards will plummet, and less prestigious institutions will have to close, thereby ‘harming social mobility’.
Some NHS hospitals, despite having their budgets ring-fenced, say they will be left so penniless they will have to cancel non-emergency surgery, such as fertility and hip operations.
None of these people seem prepared to contemplate that the austerity measures are, in fact, an opportunity to become more efficient, and provide the public with the same service, but for less money.
More worryingly, even the private sector has joined the Jeremiahs. The employers’ organisation the CBI had initially welcomed the cuts in George Osborne’s emergency Budget in the summer. Yet last week it was complaining: ‘Everyone knows that we cannot cut our way to prosperity. So where are we going to create the jobs to offset the cuts in the public sector?’
Many of the predictions of woe I have listed above, you won’t be surprised to learn, became headline news on the BBC.
The BBC has a crucial role in debating the government’s spending cuts, which will affect this country for many years to come.
But that debate must be based on the facts. Not distorted, special interest bleating seemingly designed to distress and inflame a public which, so far, is dealing with the prospect of the cuts with a stoicism and perspective that is so absent from the BBC airwaves.
The Corporation — which is effectively the flagship of the public sector — needs to be aware that it is laying itself open to charges of bias by indulging in special pleading for state workers.
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[url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1327085/JAMES-SLACK-Scaremongering-distortion-anti-cuts-BBC-laying-open-charges-bias.html
]Scaremongering, distortion and why the anti-cuts BBC is laying itself open to charges of bias
]Scaremongering, distortion and why the anti-cuts BBC is laying itself open to charges of bias
By James Slack, Home Affairs Editor
Last updated at 8:02 PM on 5th November 2010
Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith made a plea last week that the ‘hysteria and scaremongering’ which had dominated the debate around the Coalition’s £81 billion spending cuts should stop.
Certainly, there was a need for calm after the BBC had led its bulletins with London Mayor Boris Johnson’s disgraceful suggestion that the possible effect of ministers’ plans to cap housing benefit payments at £400 a week could be compared with the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their homes, raped and murdered.
But when it came to the supposedly impartial BBC, there was to be no letting-up.
By Sunday morning its news bulletins had picked up on a report in a Left-wing, anti-cuts newspaper, supposedly based on an unpublished academic report for the housing pressure group Shelter, and was running hard with the story.
The report on the BBC website was headlined ‘Shelter’s “unaffordable London” fear over benefit cuts’, and it gave voice to concerns that the benefit cuts will ‘mean poorer people being forced out of expensive areas’.
It quoted the charity’s chief executive as saying ‘the cuts were being done too quickly and could change the “very nature” of London’.
The central claim of the report was that ‘most’ two-bedroom flats in central London would become unaffordable to welfare claimants if they were forced to survive on £400 a week — incidentally, a sum way beyond the means of many people with jobs in the capital.
Yet, when the short study (itself only a fragment of a still unreleased analysis) was officially published a few days later, its actual findings — illustrated by a coloured map of London — seemed very different.
Even where a district was shown to be ‘largely unaffordable’ for new housing benefits claimants, it still showed that up to a quarter of homes would be affordable. Large chunks of the capital were, in any case, coloured green, meaning they would still be affordable by 2016, after the supposedly savage cuts have been implemented.
Crucially, the report’s author, Cambridge University academic Alex Fenton, said: ‘The map . . . does not indicate anything about what the effects of the measures on tenants might be. In particular, it does not show that all HB (housing benefit) claimants in a neighbourhood will be forced to move to particular areas, or at all.’
So then, the published report contained no evidence to justify the claims that less well-off people would be ‘forced out’ of their homes.
Of course we should not be surprised by any of this since much of the BBC’s coverage is political posturing, part and parcel of the taxpayer-funded Corporation’s self-appointed role as defender of ever-greater public spending.
But there are human consequences of such scaremongering. Anyone living in London on benefits must already be profoundly worried that the proposed welfare cuts could mean they can no longer afford to live in the capital and will be forced to move out.
However, housing benefit claimants are not the only social group who will have been left alarmed by the BBC’s reporting.
There was also the extraordinary remark made by a BBC journalist called Colette Hume last month, when discussing the Coalition’s plans to get some — but by no means all — incapacity benefit claimants back into work. The BBC News Channel reporter said: ‘We are hearing a lot about the fact that people are going to be pressurised and really sort of pushed to go back into work even if they have an illness, even if they have a disability, because the thinking is everybody can do potentially something.’
She was utterly wrong. It’s not a ‘fact’ at all, and shouldn’t have been presented as such.
Such irresponsible scaremongering would have left disabled viewers on benefits very worried they would be stripped of their welfare payments, and be marched to the Jobcentre, capable or not, to find work.
Or take the broadcast on the BBC One O’Clock News a week earlier on October 8, which tackled the issue of what might happen to rail travel when transport spending is squeezed.
Accompanied by video footage of commuters queuing to get on to a packed train, the reporter declared: ‘Imagine this every day only worse and paying more for it. That’s the future of rail travel here in the UK.’
In recent weeks and months — at least until yesterday’s strike by BBC journalists (including presenters Fiona Bruce, Huw Edwards and Newsnight’s economics editor Paul Mason) in a row over their pensions brought some mild respite from the barrage of anti-cuts propaganda — every trick in the manual of manipulation has been deployed to make the Coalition’s spending programme seem unpalatable or, indeed, cruel.
When the budget for the Armed Forces was facing a reduction of a modest 7.5 per cent, schoolchildren were shown in a report writing letters to Defence Secretary Liam Fox arguing why defence jobs shouldn’t be cut.
The children did not appear to be older than nine or ten.
On Tuesday this week, in another piece of frenzied doom-mongering, the BBC’s morning news bulletins led with a report that the government’s spending cuts and the rise in VAT to 20 per cent due in January will result in more than 1.6 million job losses by 2016 — far outstripping official forecasts.
The claims, made by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, were treated as if chiselled into tablets of stone, with ministers given no opportunity to challenge their veracity on air.
Yet closer inspection of the methodology for this so-called ‘study’ revealed it was based merely upon anecdotal ‘soundings from public sector managers’ (who clearly had a vested interest in the issue), rather than any sophisticated analysis of Treasury figures.
Nor did the BBC think it worth noting that the report’s author, the institute’s chief economist John Philpott, had been proved wildly wrong in the past when he predicted unemployment would reach three million by the end of the recession. The true figure came nowhere near.
Of course, the BBC is not the only organisation guilty of vested-interest, anti-cuts whingeing.
The police, when informed they would have to reduce their budgets in line with the efficiencies being demanded across the public sector, immediately predicted a ‘Christmas for criminals’ — with the number of burglaries, thefts, rapes and even murders inevitably rising.
Councils, who have taken vast sums from taxpayers over the past decade, say that, now the good times are over, potholes will have to go unfilled (doubtless as they divert public money to protect their large armies of staff performing politically correct, non-jobs).
Universities have joined the bandwagon, saying standards will plummet, and less prestigious institutions will have to close, thereby ‘harming social mobility’.
Some NHS hospitals, despite having their budgets ring-fenced, say they will be left so penniless they will have to cancel non-emergency surgery, such as fertility and hip operations.
None of these people seem prepared to contemplate that the austerity measures are, in fact, an opportunity to become more efficient, and provide the public with the same service, but for less money.
More worryingly, even the private sector has joined the Jeremiahs. The employers’ organisation the CBI had initially welcomed the cuts in George Osborne’s emergency Budget in the summer. Yet last week it was complaining: ‘Everyone knows that we cannot cut our way to prosperity. So where are we going to create the jobs to offset the cuts in the public sector?’
Many of the predictions of woe I have listed above, you won’t be surprised to learn, became headline news on the BBC.
The BBC has a crucial role in debating the government’s spending cuts, which will affect this country for many years to come.
But that debate must be based on the facts. Not distorted, special interest bleating seemingly designed to distress and inflame a public which, so far, is dealing with the prospect of the cuts with a stoicism and perspective that is so absent from the BBC airwaves.
The Corporation — which is effectively the flagship of the public sector — needs to be aware that it is laying itself open to charges of bias by indulging in special pleading for state workers.
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