BBC Continues Anti-Daily Mail Rant on QT

[Teddy Bear]

I predicted yesterday that true to form the BBC would be sure to continue their attack on the Daily Mail using Question Time and Any Questions.
Sure enough it was the second 'question' on Question Time last night and was allowed to continue for quite a while. You would think that people had no other greater concerns in the country at the present time. But for the BBC it's an attempt to demonize the Mail as much as possible before the upcoming decision on media restrictions, so never mind how important it is for most people.

There are numerous articles in The Telegraph, Mail, and Spectator relating just how hypocritical the left have been over this story. Here's one from Toby Young that captures the flavour very well, and shows too the BBC complicity fairly clearly.

(Numerous links available on webpage)

We must not let the Left's faux outrage over the Mail destroy our free press
By Toby Young

Is there a more revolting spectacle in British public life than the Left in one of its perennial fits of moral outrage? Watching Mehdi Hasan on Question Time last night, or seeing Alastair Campbell on Newsnight earlier in the week, or reading Polly Toynbee in the Guardian, you could be forgiven for thinking no Left-wing newspaper has ever punched a political opponent below the belt. They are appalled that the Daily Mail should have stooped so low as to dredge up a politician's dead father in an attempt to discredit him. Is nothing sacred?

But hang on a minute. Where was Mehdi Hasan's outrage when the Daily Mirror went through David Cameron's bins and accused him of not using organic nappies for Ivan, his handicapped son? And isn't the Alastair Campbell who is shocked – shocked! – by the Mail's "disrespect" towards the Leader of the Opposition the same ruthless spin doctor who spread dirt and poison about Tony Blair's political enemies for years and started the rumour that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants? As for that pillar of integrity Polly Toynbee – who rants and raves about "the Mail's despicable behaviour" in today's Guardian – she accused Cameron of faking his own sadness at his dead father's disability in the Guardian not six weeks ago.

The stench of hypocrisy emanating from these finger-wagging liberals is overwhelming. If it's a Labour politician getting a monstering in the press, then it's "hate-filled" this and "bile-spewing" that and God preserve us from the "gutter press". But if it's a Conservative politician, that's completely fine. That's just fair comment.

Of course, there's an agenda behind the Left's faux moral outrage. It's an orchestrated attempt to apply pressure to the Privy Council to approve the more draconian of the two Royal Charters on press regulation when it meets next week. For years, the bien pensant liberal Left intelligentsia has been campaigning against the tabloid press, doing everything in its power to try and eliminate its robust, no-nonsense contribution to British political debate, not least because it's so often directed against them and their neo-Marxist, Big State agenda.

With the Leveson Inquiry, they saw their big chance to finally achieve this ambition and, after months of delay, they are determined to deliver the coup de grâce. As Fraser Nelson points out in today's paper, if the charter cooked up by Hacked Off and Ed Miliband is given the green light next week, it will be the end of 300 years of press freedom.

We shouldn't let these self-appointed custodians of our public morals railroad the Privy Council into handing over control of the press to them and their political allies. It has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with wanting to muzzle their critics on papers like the Daily Mail and the Sun once and for all.

Anybody who watched Question Time last night would have been fairly disgusted by the behaviour of Mehdi Hasan. Naturally he used the opportunity to lambast the Mail in the extreme, as well as constantly interrupt everybody he disagreed with.

So one might be surprised to find out that he applied for work at the Mail, and turned down. Perhaps that would account for his especially obnoxious tirade against it.

Oh the hypocrisy - for so many reasons!

Mehdi Hasan and the Daily Mail: some context
By Will Heaven

Mehdi Hasan is second to none in his hatred for The Daily Mail, judging from his performance on Question Time last night.



But wait a minute! What's this? Read from the bottom up…

I'll see later if the BBC also continue their attack on Any Questions which has just started.

[Teddy Bear]

An observation on the other issues covered on last night's programme is also made by the Spectator.

Sketch: Question Time is no longer an honest debating chamber
Lloyd Evans


Last night's panel: David Dimbleby, Grant Shapps, Yvette Cooper, Kirsty Williams, Mehdi Hasan and Quentin Letts.


A good honest debating chamber. That’s how Question Time is billed. In fact it’s an unseemly gold-rush for applause. The panelists are a set of needy egos with semi-fictionalised hairdos. And the audience is composed of wonks and party activists posing as disinterested voters.

Last night’s episode was particularly fractious. The crowd was keen to hear about the Daily Mail’s attack on Ralph Miliband ‘as the man who hated Britain.’ But the first question concerned benefit reductions for the under-25s. Quentin Letts, of the Mail, seemed uncharacteristically nervous. He said his ‘prejudice’ would be to target cuts on the young rather than the elderly. He meant ‘preference’. Rather a shaky start.

Then the ghost of Red Ralph rose from the grave. Letts chose to defend his paper with playful and ironic subtleties. ‘Tabloid headlines,’ he said, ‘are not known for their understatement.’ True enough but the audience was in riot mode. It wanted to hear itself baying for blood. And Letts failed to feed the beast. ‘Ed Miliband’s father was an intellectual philosopher and Marxist,’ he rambled, ‘at a time of the Cold War when Marxism was the code and creed of the Soviet Union, and it’s difficult to analyse someone’s beliefs without coring into their personality.’

He paused. ‘Was it out of order?’ he mused.

‘Yesss!’ yelled the crowd before Letts could supply an answer.

In stepped Mehdi Hasan, a left-wing enthusiast whose contribution to recycling includes a biography of Ed Miliband. Hasan knows how to conduct an angry mob like a maestro. He got their juices flowing with a reminder that the Mail’s owners had ‘sucked up to the Nazis’ during the 1930s. He then reeled off a check-list of prejudices penned by Mail columnists over the years. Finally he let fly with an express train chock-full of adjectives. ‘Who hates Britain more?’ he shouted. ‘It isn’t a dead Jewish refugee from Belgium who served in the Royal Navy. It’s the immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail.’

The applause nearly took the roof off.

On press regulation, Letts accused the BBC of campaigning for harsher rules. And he queried the impartiality of Question Time itself.

‘That is a severely loaded question from the chair,’ he said. ‘The BBC has an agenda here.’ The chairman – hereditary TV anchor, David Dimbleby – took umbrage at this. His jowls turned the colour of fresh steak.

‘Don’t accuse me of having an agenda chosen for me by the BBC, thank you very much.’

‘David, you’re part of the establishment,’ Letts said emolliently, ‘and I’m not.’

Letts is more adept at the soft swipe than the hard sell. When the topic moved to economics, he blamed Britain’s debt crisis on Ed Balls and his borrow-and-blow-it policies. ‘But I have to be careful here,’ Letts added mischievously, ‘I’m sitting next to Mr Balls’s beloved.’ He turned to Yvette Cooper like a sympathetic uncle discussing a relative with a gambling problem. ‘Do you trust him with the family finances? Do you sent him out shopping? I dread to think how much money he spends.’

Ms Cooper went on the attack and claimed that One Nation Labour would create full employment by taxing City bonuses. The audience greeted this as if it were a dazzling breakthrough. Jobs for all. Dole queues gone. Idleness and need consigned to history forever. Odd that Labour never tried it while in office.

Dimbleby wanted more detail. He asked if every employer would hire every available candidate, ‘at the government’s behest.’ ‘We’ve done this before,’ said Cooper, ‘with the Future Jobs Fund.’ Crikey. What a claim. Labour, it turns out, terminated unemployment while they were in power. Why did no one spot that at the time?

[Teddy Bear]

First question on Any Questions:
Should the Daily Mail apologize for its profile of Ralph Miliband?

First comment from panellist Lisa Holdsworth
'Unsurprisingly I wouldn't line a hamster cage with the Daily Mail...'
Cheers and applause from the audience - clearly the majority there.

One wouldn't believe that the Daily Mail is one of the most successful and widely read newspapers in the country listening to the BBC.

[Teddy Bear]

As I turned on Radio4 today about 9:15am I heard the BBC using its current affairs programme to continue its campaign against the Daily Mail. It's 10 days since the Daily Mail first ran the article on Ralph Miliband, and regardless of ones views on the rights or wrongs, it is small fry compared to just a few of the transgressions the BBC has been involved in that have come to light over the last year.

In fact, even on this one issue they continue their own disregard for the charter that gives them their status, having neither balance, impartiality, or fairness, in their pursuit to discredit the Mail and promote Miliband.

The Commentator runs an article concerning last weeks Question Time

BBC Question Time only wants answers from the very far Left

Millions watch the BBC's flagship "debate" programme Question Time every week. It's almost always dominated by the Left. This week was a study in shameless bias

Watching Question Time on the BBC last night must have been one of the saddest and most dispiriting experiences one could have about the state of public awareness and understanding of the political and economic issues facing Britain today.

The BBC—Question Time in particular—is regularly accused of left-wing bias; a charge the BBC denies. Yet one could point to the presence, yet again, on the panel last night of the leftist Muslim Mehdi Hasan as a good example of such left-wing bias.

After all, Mr Hasan is not a publicly elected official. He is the UK political editor of the Huffington Post, a relatively minor player in the British media. Yet he is a regular contributor on Question Time. And when Mr Hasan for the umpteenth time on QT might be an embarrassment, the BBC have a left-wing stand-in for him in the person of Will Self, the self publicist who a week ago on QT incredibly tried to contextualise and explain why terrorists attacked the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi killing women and children.

The point about Mehdi Hasan and Will Self is that they are both strongly and ideologically hard left. They are both far to the left of the Labour Party and have no public mandate. So why does the BBC invite their views? After all, the BBC does not invite non-elected far right characters. When did Question Time ever invite a non-elected BNP member to air his opinions?

However, such BBC panel bias does not explain the almost fanatical audience support last night for the unelected Mehdi Hasan. Virtually without exception, the Question Time audience whooped and cheered as Mr Hasan denounced the Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts. [This was in relation to the running story in the UK about Labour leader Ed Miliband's totalitarian Marxist father. The Left is in angry denial about its past over this.]

They cheered as Mr Hasan claimed that Britain ought to spend less on defence than it does on welfare, even though Mr Hasan has written of his “understanding” that Iran would want to develop a nuclear bomb as a counter to Israel and the West. They cheered as Hasan condemned the Daily Mail for what he falsely claimed was its anti woman and anti-gay stance, even though Mr Hasan is a committed Muslim.

This largely white British audience lacked any sense of political realism and British self-interest. Mehdi Hasan had them on a string. When one lone dissenting voice in the audience—a white working-class male UKIP supporter—spoke about the need to get real about the failures of socialism and the need for Britain to earn its way in the world, he was met with silence, then ridicule. The audience simply did not want to hear uncomfortable truths.

It was sad to witness such self delusion, but was that Question Time audience representative of British society? Many claim that the BBC deliberately vets the audience and excludes those of a conservative leaning. But that, surely, is unlikely. A simpler explanation is that British society has gone soft.

Largely because of social welfare affluence and the self-blame ethos of our now debased Christian culture, British society has absorbed a soft left sentimentalism whereby all opinions are judged by their contribution to the socialist welfare Utopia where the world can come and live and Britain has no enemies.

Did that British Question Time audience actually know anything about Mehdi Hasan? Did they know he is on record referring to non-Muslims as “cattle” and “Kaffar”, what the journalist Douglas Murray calls a bigoted slur-term? Did they know that Mr Hasan has referred to non-Muslims as animals: “Once we lose the moral high-ground we are no different from the rest, of the non-Muslims; from the rest of those human beings who live their lives as animals, bending any rule to fulfil any desire.”

Mr Hasan didn’t say anything like that last night on Question Time. It wasn’t the right gathering. Instead he played to the gallery and had the sentimentalised British audience eating out of his hands.

How sad and predictable it all was. The only hope is that the Daily Mail and that lone UKIP supporter stand their ground.