Post by Teddy Bear on Feb 19, 2014 18:34:29 GMT
Dan Hodges has just written an article in the Telegraph about the BBC, which I don't agree with, but it's worth looking at just to see how illogical those of the left can be, even those that think of themselves as 'emancipated.
To be fair, Dan Hodges can write some good articles, but on this one I believe he's wide of the mark.
His profile tells us: Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation.
I'll post my comment I left on this article below.
The premise of this article is completely illogical.
The claim that since the BBC launched a scathing attack on Blair's Labour because of false WMD evidence shows they also have no pro-Labour bias is nonsense. It sounds like the same logic that AGW greenies use to justify their claims. When their initial premises are found to be rubbish, they just move the goalposts so it fits whatever is the present reality.
Does it occur to you that the BBC have quite a few agendas, for their own hegemony and power? Where one interferes with another they will make a choice as to what best suits their purpose. In the case of the West taking on Islamic terrorism the BBC knows which side it wants to be seen on, and it ain't ours.
The BBC is the equivalent of the Ministry of Thought as laid out by Orwell, and the government desired by the BBC follows the same lines. I suppose you'll be telling us next that the BBC don't really support the bureaucracy and further extension of the EU.
To be fair, Dan Hodges can write some good articles, but on this one I believe he's wide of the mark.
His profile tells us: Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation.
I'll post my comment I left on this article below.
The BBC isn't anti-Tory. It's anti-government
By Dan Hodges
Today has seen yet another significant drop in unemployment; down 125,000. The trend is clear. The war against unemployment is being won.
Which of course isn’t what’s supposed to be happening. Only yesterday I became involved in a round of Twitter handbags with former MPC member David Blanchflower, who had confidently predicted “Tory public spending cuts 'could push unemployment to 5 million'”. According to Blanchflower “If spending cuts are made too early and the monetary and fiscal stimuli are withdrawn, unemployment could easily reach four million. If large numbers of public sector workers, perhaps as many as a million, are made redundant and there are substantial cuts in public spending in 2010, as proposed by some in the Conservative Party, five million unemployed or more is not inconceivable”.
To be fair, he was hardly alone in foreseeing central government cuts would be the catalyst for lengthening dole queues. But he was wrong, and so was everyone else.
The fall in unemployment at a time of significant fiscal consolidation is a surprising story that has turned a lot of conventional economic wisdom on its head. It’s also a real success story for George Osborne and the government.
So how does the Today programme choose to cover this dramatic fall in unemployment? With a feature on the scourge of youth unemployment.
You can of course argue youth unemployment is a legitimate news story. But yesterday a man rescuing his pet goldfish from the floods was deemed a legitimate news story. The bar here is rather low.
To many people the youth unemployment item will simply have provided fresh evidence of the innate Left-wing bias of the BBC. Actually, those people don’t really require any further evidence. To them BBC political prejudice is already an established fact. The earth revolves around the Sun, and the BBC want Ed Miliband in Downing Street.
But this charge of “Left-wing bias”, or more accurately “pro-Labour bias” is too lazy. It’s true there is a small “l” liberal culture which dominates the Corporation. The BBC has itself acknowledged as much, over issues such as its coverage of immigration. It’s also true that a programme such as Benefits Street would never have a hope of appearing on the BBC, whereas a gritty documentary charting a disabled mother's fight against a cruel and unyielding welfare bureaucracy would fly into the schedules.
But the idea of overt “pro-Labour” bias just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Cast your mind back a few years to the last Labour government. The BBC and Downing Street were at war. The front line was, of course, Iraq and the infamous “sexed-up dossier”. Yet long before that crisis detonated Labour and the broadcaster were at constant loggerheads.
John Humphrys was the first journalist to begin to ask the nagging question “So where are these weapons of mass destruction then?”. The BBC, in particular Newsnight and the Today programme, lead the scrutiny of plans for detention without trial. And they also became a persistent thorn in the government’s side over public service reform. I know because at the time I was working for the GMB union, plucking the thorns from the rose bush, and handing them to the BBC’s correspondents.
Now, you can cite all this as further evidence of the BBC’s instinctive liberal leanings. But you can’t cite it as evidence of “pro-Labour” leanings.
The BBC’s problem isn’t that it’s “anti-Tory”. It’s that it’s “anti-government”. Any government.
Take the broader economy. Unemployment is falling. Inflation is falling. Interest rates are low. Wages are rising. GDP is rising. Growth predictions are rapidly being revised upwards.
Yet I can’t think of a single major BBC news feature examining how this positive economic environment has been constructed. Every time I hear an economic analysis it is along the lines of this morning. The fall in unemployment becomes the scourge of youth unemployment. Falling inflation becomes the peril of rising house prices. This year’s low interest rates become next years impending interest rate hike. Rising wages become a deepening cost of living crisis. Positive growth becomes an unsustainable bubble.
The nation is in a much stronger economic position than it was 12 months ago. That’s just a fact. But if I went solely by the analysis of the national broadcaster I genuinely wouldn’t be aware of that. I’d get the impression the economy was still flatlining.
When faced with accusations such as this, the BBC deploys two standard defences. The first is that news reporting is by its nature critical. “We report on the planes that crash, not the planes that land safely.” And there is some legitimacy in that argument. It is the exceptional that is newsworthy, not the mundane.
The problem with the specific issue of the economy is that, from where I’m sitting, the economic upswing is exceptional. Not necessarily in terms of historic growth levels. But if you look at where all major independent economists were predicting the economy would be this year and next, and where it actually will be this year and next, that’s quite a dramatic turnaround. And I’d be genuinely interested to know how that shift in our economic fortunes has been brought about.
The second standard BBC argument is “It’s our job to hold the government of the day to account.” But it isn’t. It’s the voters' job to hold the government of the day to account. It’s the BBC’s job to give them the facts – in an even-handed and unbiased way – to enable them to make an informed judgment when they do.
I don’t see how the BBC can do that when its starting point is “we will focus on those areas where the government is getting things wrong, not getting them right”. On that basis, how do we judge what is good governance and bad governance, and make a rational choice between the two? Because as far as we can make out – or as far as we can make out if we consume our news analysis primarily from the BBC – there is no such thing as good governance. Whatever ministers – of whatever political persuasion – do, they must be doing it wrong. Because all we ever see are their failures, rather than their successes.
Those who think the BBC lives to attack David Cameron’s government are right. It does. But it will act in exactly the same way if Ed Miliband finds himself in government in 15 months time. It will attack him mercilessly as well.
The BBC thinks this is what constitutes a public service. I’m not so sure it is.
By Dan Hodges
Today has seen yet another significant drop in unemployment; down 125,000. The trend is clear. The war against unemployment is being won.
Which of course isn’t what’s supposed to be happening. Only yesterday I became involved in a round of Twitter handbags with former MPC member David Blanchflower, who had confidently predicted “Tory public spending cuts 'could push unemployment to 5 million'”. According to Blanchflower “If spending cuts are made too early and the monetary and fiscal stimuli are withdrawn, unemployment could easily reach four million. If large numbers of public sector workers, perhaps as many as a million, are made redundant and there are substantial cuts in public spending in 2010, as proposed by some in the Conservative Party, five million unemployed or more is not inconceivable”.
To be fair, he was hardly alone in foreseeing central government cuts would be the catalyst for lengthening dole queues. But he was wrong, and so was everyone else.
The fall in unemployment at a time of significant fiscal consolidation is a surprising story that has turned a lot of conventional economic wisdom on its head. It’s also a real success story for George Osborne and the government.
So how does the Today programme choose to cover this dramatic fall in unemployment? With a feature on the scourge of youth unemployment.
You can of course argue youth unemployment is a legitimate news story. But yesterday a man rescuing his pet goldfish from the floods was deemed a legitimate news story. The bar here is rather low.
To many people the youth unemployment item will simply have provided fresh evidence of the innate Left-wing bias of the BBC. Actually, those people don’t really require any further evidence. To them BBC political prejudice is already an established fact. The earth revolves around the Sun, and the BBC want Ed Miliband in Downing Street.
But this charge of “Left-wing bias”, or more accurately “pro-Labour bias” is too lazy. It’s true there is a small “l” liberal culture which dominates the Corporation. The BBC has itself acknowledged as much, over issues such as its coverage of immigration. It’s also true that a programme such as Benefits Street would never have a hope of appearing on the BBC, whereas a gritty documentary charting a disabled mother's fight against a cruel and unyielding welfare bureaucracy would fly into the schedules.
But the idea of overt “pro-Labour” bias just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Cast your mind back a few years to the last Labour government. The BBC and Downing Street were at war. The front line was, of course, Iraq and the infamous “sexed-up dossier”. Yet long before that crisis detonated Labour and the broadcaster were at constant loggerheads.
John Humphrys was the first journalist to begin to ask the nagging question “So where are these weapons of mass destruction then?”. The BBC, in particular Newsnight and the Today programme, lead the scrutiny of plans for detention without trial. And they also became a persistent thorn in the government’s side over public service reform. I know because at the time I was working for the GMB union, plucking the thorns from the rose bush, and handing them to the BBC’s correspondents.
Now, you can cite all this as further evidence of the BBC’s instinctive liberal leanings. But you can’t cite it as evidence of “pro-Labour” leanings.
The BBC’s problem isn’t that it’s “anti-Tory”. It’s that it’s “anti-government”. Any government.
Take the broader economy. Unemployment is falling. Inflation is falling. Interest rates are low. Wages are rising. GDP is rising. Growth predictions are rapidly being revised upwards.
Yet I can’t think of a single major BBC news feature examining how this positive economic environment has been constructed. Every time I hear an economic analysis it is along the lines of this morning. The fall in unemployment becomes the scourge of youth unemployment. Falling inflation becomes the peril of rising house prices. This year’s low interest rates become next years impending interest rate hike. Rising wages become a deepening cost of living crisis. Positive growth becomes an unsustainable bubble.
The nation is in a much stronger economic position than it was 12 months ago. That’s just a fact. But if I went solely by the analysis of the national broadcaster I genuinely wouldn’t be aware of that. I’d get the impression the economy was still flatlining.
When faced with accusations such as this, the BBC deploys two standard defences. The first is that news reporting is by its nature critical. “We report on the planes that crash, not the planes that land safely.” And there is some legitimacy in that argument. It is the exceptional that is newsworthy, not the mundane.
The problem with the specific issue of the economy is that, from where I’m sitting, the economic upswing is exceptional. Not necessarily in terms of historic growth levels. But if you look at where all major independent economists were predicting the economy would be this year and next, and where it actually will be this year and next, that’s quite a dramatic turnaround. And I’d be genuinely interested to know how that shift in our economic fortunes has been brought about.
The second standard BBC argument is “It’s our job to hold the government of the day to account.” But it isn’t. It’s the voters' job to hold the government of the day to account. It’s the BBC’s job to give them the facts – in an even-handed and unbiased way – to enable them to make an informed judgment when they do.
I don’t see how the BBC can do that when its starting point is “we will focus on those areas where the government is getting things wrong, not getting them right”. On that basis, how do we judge what is good governance and bad governance, and make a rational choice between the two? Because as far as we can make out – or as far as we can make out if we consume our news analysis primarily from the BBC – there is no such thing as good governance. Whatever ministers – of whatever political persuasion – do, they must be doing it wrong. Because all we ever see are their failures, rather than their successes.
Those who think the BBC lives to attack David Cameron’s government are right. It does. But it will act in exactly the same way if Ed Miliband finds himself in government in 15 months time. It will attack him mercilessly as well.
The BBC thinks this is what constitutes a public service. I’m not so sure it is.
The premise of this article is completely illogical.
The claim that since the BBC launched a scathing attack on Blair's Labour because of false WMD evidence shows they also have no pro-Labour bias is nonsense. It sounds like the same logic that AGW greenies use to justify their claims. When their initial premises are found to be rubbish, they just move the goalposts so it fits whatever is the present reality.
Does it occur to you that the BBC have quite a few agendas, for their own hegemony and power? Where one interferes with another they will make a choice as to what best suits their purpose. In the case of the West taking on Islamic terrorism the BBC knows which side it wants to be seen on, and it ain't ours.
The BBC is the equivalent of the Ministry of Thought as laid out by Orwell, and the government desired by the BBC follows the same lines. I suppose you'll be telling us next that the BBC don't really support the bureaucracy and further extension of the EU.