Post by charmbrights on Aug 19, 2014 16:53:29 GMT
Today (19.viii.2014) on the PM programme on BBC Radio4 there was a superb example of the Corporation's bias.
Several minutes were devoted to George Pitcher, Editor in Chief of International Business Times, Industrial Editor of The Observer and Religion Editor of the Daily Telegraph giving a long exposition recommending the nationalisation of all mobile telephone networks, broadband ISPs and railways. This was aided and abetted by sycophantic questions by the "interviewer" Eddie Mair. These re-nationalisations are, of course, the oft-stated policy of the left wing of the Labour party and the party's owners, the Trade Unions.
To provide "balance" a smaller amount of time was allowed to Philip Booth, Editorial and Programme Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs, who was at best rather incoherent and clearly was talking off the cuff with no advance knowledge of the topics concerned. His offering, weak though it was, was interrupted several times in mid-sentence by Mair's favourite ploy, interrupting to repeat the exact question a speaker is already answering, sometimes twice, without ever allowing the speaker to finish a sentence.
The older readers of this site may remember the halcyon days of the nationalised GPO and British Telecom providing a telephone service if you have waited two years in the queue, and today's BT which thinks the country still owes it a living and will only investigate a failed landline if the customer promises to risk paying £120+ for its investigation, even if it is clearly BT's problem, for instance a cable has fallen down, or a whole street of telephones has failed simultaneously. The wonderful service that BT gives on broadband is legendary on the complaints sites on the internet, worse even than Talk Talk.
As to the railways, it was British Railways that closed thousands of miles of track and over 650 stations on the spurious grounds that bus services would be an adequate replacement.
Several minutes were devoted to George Pitcher, Editor in Chief of International Business Times, Industrial Editor of The Observer and Religion Editor of the Daily Telegraph giving a long exposition recommending the nationalisation of all mobile telephone networks, broadband ISPs and railways. This was aided and abetted by sycophantic questions by the "interviewer" Eddie Mair. These re-nationalisations are, of course, the oft-stated policy of the left wing of the Labour party and the party's owners, the Trade Unions.
To provide "balance" a smaller amount of time was allowed to Philip Booth, Editorial and Programme Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs, who was at best rather incoherent and clearly was talking off the cuff with no advance knowledge of the topics concerned. His offering, weak though it was, was interrupted several times in mid-sentence by Mair's favourite ploy, interrupting to repeat the exact question a speaker is already answering, sometimes twice, without ever allowing the speaker to finish a sentence.
The older readers of this site may remember the halcyon days of the nationalised GPO and British Telecom providing a telephone service if you have waited two years in the queue, and today's BT which thinks the country still owes it a living and will only investigate a failed landline if the customer promises to risk paying £120+ for its investigation, even if it is clearly BT's problem, for instance a cable has fallen down, or a whole street of telephones has failed simultaneously. The wonderful service that BT gives on broadband is legendary on the complaints sites on the internet, worse even than Talk Talk.
As to the railways, it was British Railways that closed thousands of miles of track and over 650 stations on the spurious grounds that bus services would be an adequate replacement.
