h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

S'ok - the hype in certain quarters about the Cottage guy died away very quickly once the facts about what he actually had emerged. The media quickly lost interest and the judge gave him a (relatively) light sentence.

Funny that the BNP are presented as the arch-bogeymen and a threat to the civilised world when they are an open, democratic party who publically state their aims - however distasteful. Yet the deobanis and hizb ut tahrir are regarded as isolated loonies. How many people have the BNP killed lately?

The BNP are an easy target precisely because they set themselves up to be shot at and, having absolutely no chance of ever gaining power, they serve as a release valve for a section of the electorate.

WRT to the original question, this article might be of some interest:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sunny_hundal/2007/09/liberals_abandon_the_bbc.html

SWL what would you be saying if a party committed to the separate treatment of Mus;ims and non-muslims got 200,000 votes?

Moreover that amount of votes in a democratic system where the voters are notoriously idle when it comes to getting their ass' down tot he ballot box reflects a bigger groundswell of opinion. Lets not forget that Indeed Mr Cottage was not an active or current member of the BNP or particulary effective at killing people in this sense his story is all the more serious. It shows that within the party their arelkely stillothers with murderous intentions and that if any of thsoe are not as inept we could be looking at another Admiral Duncan.

The BBC was being fair and balanced but they just dont hold your paranoid prejudices.

one love

There's a party committed to different treatment of people due to where they come from - the Labour Party. An immigrant has a different status depending upon whether he comes from Poland or Romania. So it's fallacious to insinuate that all political parties are non-discriminatory. It all depends what flavour of discrimination is in vogue at the time.

How does the story show that within the BNP there are people with murderous intentions? Are you extrapolating the behaviour of one person onto others? My oh my.

Personally, I don't view 200,000 votes for the BNP as an endorsement of them at all. I think it's 200,000 votes cast in absolute disgust at the behaviour of the mainstream parties. These people are so disenfranchised by the political process that they would prefer to vote for the unthinkable than register any support for Lab/Tory/Lib-Dem.

As you point out, most people are too apathetic to vote with the system we currently have, so those 200,000 votes are probably only the tip of the iceberg. Marketeers work with the formula that for every 1 complaint, there are another 8 - 15 people equally unhappy. If that can be applied to voting, it might indicate that 1.8 - 3.2m voters are extremely unhappy with the main parties.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/09/trust_and_values.html

makes pretty interesting reading I think.

Comments anyone?

It makes truly comical reading if you go onto the comments at the bottom "I think to see Mark Thompson not even wearing a tie says it all"

This article might be of some interest after the debate between me and Zagreb:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2172881,00.html

"Britons are now more suspicious of Muslims than are Americans or citizens of any other major western European country, including France. According to an international Harris poll last month, nearly 30% of British people believe it's impossible to be both a Muslim and a Briton (compared with 14% who think you can't be French and a Muslim); 38% think the presence of Muslims in the country is a threat to national security (compared with 21% in the US); and 46% believe that Muslims have too much political power in Britain, far above the level of any other surveyed country."

It goes on to say some things about media involvement in this state of affairs.

More interesting than the article is the heated debate below it.

Ah, haven't had time yet. I noticed that the slider on the side of the web page was minute - suggesting there were an awful lot of comments...

There are I've got half way through them and it's starting to develop into a backbiting session, but some good points are made on both sides before that point.

My housemate, a Jewish Londoner, doesn't watch BBC News* because he says it's "anti-Israel." What does the panel think about this?

*He watches Sky Sports News instead

Hmm, that's a difficult one. I myself feel that Israel is worthy of a fair bit of criticism, so perhaps I don't notice it. The Beeb does tend to give more time to the Palestinians. That said, if you take the Palestinian rocket attacks as an example, they kill a couple of Israelis. Israel retaliates with their arsenal and kills dozens of Palestinians. So, on the crude scale of number of deaths = importance, they are kind of about right.

All the academic studies and independent reports I've seen have suggested that the BBC is slightly biased in favour of Israel. Not because the staff at the BBC are necessarily on the side of Israel, but because of the lack of reporting of history and context, and the fact that whereas Israel is a modern state with people employed to deal with the media at any point, the Palestinians are not and so cannot tell their side of the story so effectively.

With regards to the role of the media dictating affairs of state, anyone else get the sinking feeling the media may decide when the next general election will be?

I was watching BBC Breakfast this morning and saw a report speculating on whether GB will call the election early. What made me was the emotive language being used (I wish I could remember some examples but I've gone blank) which tends to get used just as saturation coverage is about to begin. It's a bit like the storm surge before a hurricane.

I remember when there was the issue over Railtrack, which received saturation coverage for about a fortnight, and Steven Twigg (?) being at fault one commentator said "It's hard for a politician to stand this pressure for more than a couple of weeks" and sure enough, less than two weeks later Twigg was gone. It made me profoundly worried.

I just wonder whether Gordon Brown would be a strong enough leader to defy such coverage if he defied the press and wanted to call an election later.

Anybody notice the pro-Turkey picture being painted by the BBC? In addition to a few holiday programmes and property re-location shows, Michael Palin's New Europe programme the other night was a breathtaking piece of propaganda. It focussed entirely on how European the country seemed and totally ignored the human rights abuses and corruption.

And the fact that they've never offered a word of apology for committing genocide against the Armenians...

A good example of the BBC slanting the news was on a news analysis programme this morning.

A few days ago a police chief said her force needed more funds to cope with changing crime patterns linked to immigration. News 24 reported her speech without analysis. Over the course of the day, the blathering crept in. By 6pm, immigrants were causing crime. By 10pm, there were statistics singling out Romanians.

This triggered a wave of complaints and the BBC Editor was apologising profusely this morning.

It was quite clear that the police chief was being very careful in choosing her words. She knew full well that even alluding to the facts was likely to leave her open to charges of racism so she checked her figures, considered her case and presented it calmly and without hysteria. News 24 - doing it's job of reporting the news rather than reporting on the news, was accurate and concise. As the day wore on, we saw various editors each trying to make their report different from the preceding one. By 10pm the police chief's speech was distorted and the important message she was trying to convey was lost.

I have said from the outset of this discussion that I want the BBC News to report the facts without bias or favour. This is what News 24 did and what subsequent news programmes singularly failed to do.

"Let's review. I originally made the point that the BBC doesn't do much in the way of good investigative journalism and that it did little in the way of criticising the government. You said it did do good investigative journalism, and gave the recent newsnight programme on HuT as an example. I said: that's not investigative journalism because it's easy to do programmes on stories you've covered before (as I've now shown), and that it was also not critical of power because elevating the significance of this minor group by repeatedly running stories on them supports the government's position on terrorism. This was in support of my previous statement that the BBC is not critical of power."

It's one thing to cover a story quite another to make it a major feature of an important show like Newsnight. I'm a casual watcher of the news and I've never heard *anything* about HuT on the BBC before *at all* until the Newsnight thing. Compare and contrast with the BNP who get a lot of coverage (including a pointless BBC investigative programme revealing that they are, in fact, a far-right fascist party). It's not just coverage it's getting the story *out there* and this seems to be the first time the BBC has done this properly with this particular group. Well done, them.

As for the BBC not being "critical of power" I confess I've no idea where you get this impression. Have you watched any BBC TV recently? Listened to any BBC radio (especially comedy and satirical shows)? There's plenty of it. I also think their news reporting challenges the governments position on many things quite adequately. They don't always go into enough detail (and their "experts" on some issues are often pretty lame) but I don't think you can level not being critical of power at them.

"Well, interesting that you should say that. When ex-BNP candidate Robert Cottage was caught with his enormous haul of explosives and other weaponry, there was no comment by a government apparently obsessed with terrorism, and bombs in particular. The BBC did almost no reporting of this. Compare with the saturation coverage of instances of Muslim individuals caught with such deadly items as 22 castor oil beans (the ricin plot) - an issue the government made a very big deal of. Notice any pattern in the BBC's behaviour?"

I see a pattern you're insinuating but not one that exists. The BBC *did* cover the ex-BNP candidate being found with explosives extensively (I know because it was through them I learned about the story). They do also cover Muslims arrested under suspicion of terrorism but that tends to happen more often (and isn't always just down to castor oil beans).

Incidentally, Al-Quaida has declared war on us whilst the BNP haven't so I think there's a reason why the government is jumpy about one lot and not about the other. Also the Islamists have managed to kill a whole lot of people in London and attempted the same in Glasgow and outside a nightclub. The BNP on the other hand have had one nutty ex-councilor arrested whose planning was in preparation for a race war which almost-certainly isn't going to happen rather than a specific terrorist attack. Sorry, but there's clearly not the same level of threat at all. Hence the government's response.

>Michael Palin's New Europe programme the other night was a breathtaking piece of propaganda. It focussed entirely on how European the country seemed and totally ignored the human rights abuses and corruption.

It's a travelogue not an investigative documentary. On all of his travel shows Palin takes in the local scenery, people, traditions, food etc and reports it as a tourist. He's always done this. Sorry, but the idea that Palin and the BBC have conspired to make Turkey look whiter than white is nonsense.

>All the academic studies and independent reports I've seen have suggested that the BBC is slightly biased in favour of Israel.

Where and by whom?