BBQ staffers are not feeling the love:

The thing I find strange about all this is that often people who write blogs, or contribute to them, somehow think that they are involved in a private forum.

Don’t be stupid. No one thinks this. What they fear is someone from that festering nest of lies and nepotism looking at their blog. They fear it beceause they know that it is possible that BBQ will read the words and take the ideas from their blog, link to them ro print them out of context, and then blatantly misrepresent them in one of their unauthored, unnatributed pay for insertion PR pieces. There is no avenue of redress; BBQ is the face of power, and since everyone (almost everyone) blindly trusts it, it is more dangerous than FOX news since they have ‘back door access‘ to shape opinion in the UK. This is changing however.

If you and your blog are attacked by BBQ, you are the victim. Bloggers are ‘the little guy’. You are the guys putting advertisements that threaten the public on TV. You are the guys calling Bittorrent a tool for perverts and criminals. The fact that you cannot sense this or understand it perfectly, and pretend to be ‘just another voice’ speaks volumes about you and the problem. That is why people think its ‘spooky’ that BBQ is reading their blog, and lets not forget that you are in the pocket of spooks, which in and of itself is ‘spooky’.

It wasn’t the confidentiality issue that bugged me, but that anyone would think that we as programme makers don’t have as much right as everyone else to read what you’re all writing, especially if you are writing about us. So, what do you think? Stick it on your blog and I’ll respond.

Once again, we are not journalists. We understand from the beginning that freedom of speech and freedom of the press is everyone’s right, and not just the right of journalists in the pay of the state. We feel the same level of pain no matter who is killed in a conflict; we don’t reserver our best words feelings and airtime just for people in our profession.

You go on TV every night and with foreknowledge, lie, spin and distort, knowing full well that you are doing so. ({insert Pre-Emption} this is the part where they say, “you pointed to a set of BBQ comments telling us of our error, see? we are unbiased!”. This is the logic of a villain. You deliberately lie, and then say sorry we were wrong, and think thats absolves you.) This is what ‘buggs’ us. You are unnacountable, and even when you are pulled up on your shenanigans, you are utterly unrepentant.

It has to be said that we find it astonishing that you can use Technorati to find all the blog posts about you ‘in seconds’, but you cannot use it or Google to find out the truth about any subject. Actually, we suspect that you can do this, but that when you do, you deliberately distort what you find anyway.

So spare us your ‘we have feelings too’ whining about porr wittle jewemy ‘slumped over his computer’; if you are not doing somehting right, you deserve to be roasted, and that is what you are getting, because you are habitually and deliberately perveyors of lies, distortion and spin, and to add insult to injury, everyone in the UK is forced to pay for the ‘service’.

Thankfully we have Technorati, Digg and the blogosphere in general to act as a vaccination to your lie virii. You can never again lie without being instantly caught, countered and castigated, and the only thing you can do about it is slump in front of your computers. It is going to get worse for you. As more people become computer literate (there is a person in your comments that doesn’t know what a blog is. An increasingly rare creature surely), your ability to spread lies will be curtailed to the point where you will either give up the lie game entirely or start to report only the facts, as you are meant to, but often actually fail to do.

The best part of this is that we are now seeing the end of the role of Editors. We do not need editors. We also don’t need moderators censoring out comments that go against the BBQ line. We have our own massively powerful network of free writers in a self correcting environment where the truth always comes out quickly and efficiently; all you have to do is look. Compared to the very small numbers of people who read the comments on your site this is a force you cannot possibly compete with or overcome. Speaking of the comments, this one hit the nail right on the head:

I think the amount of time you spend thinking about yourselves is totally grotesque and seriously unhealthy for you and for us. […]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/

Amen to that. The amount of stories decrying the lack or attacks on freedom of the press is amazing. Whenever ‘ordinary people’ are killed in a conflict, one tone, (similar to the one used when recounting the rainfall for the day) is taken, but when a journalist is killed, all of a sudden, the level of tragedty is 1000 times greater. It’s sickening, but now tolerable because you are on the wane, you know it, we know it, and we will all benefit from your permanent elimination.

The reporting we are seeing from the BBC and the other broadcasters is racist; there is no other word to describe it. The journalists’ working assumption is that Israeli lives are more precious, more valuable than Lebanese lives. A few dead Israelis justify massive retaliation; many Lebanese dead barely merit a mention. The subtext seems to be that all the Lebanese, even the tiny bleeding children I see on Arab TV, are terrorists. It is just the way Arabs are.

That is why the capture of two Israeli soldiers is more newsworthy to our broadcasters than the dozens of Lebanese civilians dying from the Israeli bombing runs that have followed. The eight Israelis killed on Sunday are worth far more than the 130-plus Lebanese lives taken so far and the hundreds more we can expect to die in the coming days.

There is no excuse for this asymmetry of coverage. BBC reporters are in Lebanon just as they are in Israel. They can find spokespeople in Lebanon just as easily as they can find them in Israel. They can show the far vaster scale of devastation in Beirut as easily as the wreckage in Haifa. They can speak to the Lebanese casualties just as easily as they can to those in Israel.

But they don’t – and as a fellow journalist I have to ask myself why.

My previous criticisms of British reporters over their distorted coverage of Israel’s military assaults in Gaza a few weeks back appear to have struck a raw nerve. Certainly they provoked a series of e-mails – some defensive, others angry – from a few of the reporters I named. All tried to defend their own coverage, unable to accept my criticisms because they are sure that they personally do not take sides. They are not “campaigning” journalists after all, they are “professionals” doing a job.

But the problem is not with them, it is with the job they have to do – and the nature of the professionalism they so prize. I am sure the BBC’s Wyre Davies cares as much about Lebanese deaths as he does about Israeli ones. But he also knows his career at the BBC demands that he not ask his bosses questions when told to give valuable minutes of air time to an Israeli police spokesman who offers us only platitudes.

Similarly, we see James Reynolds use his broadcast from Haifa at noon to show emotive footage of him and his colleagues running for shelter as Israeli air raid sirens go off, only to tell us that in fact no rockets landed in Haifa. That nonevent was shown by the BBC every hour on the hour all afternoon and evening. Was it more significant than the images of death we never saw taking place just over the border? These images from Lebanon exist, because the Arab channels spent all day showing them.

Matthew Price knows too that in the BBC’s view it is his job as he stands in Haifa, after we have repeatedly heard Israeli spokespeople giving their version of events, to repeat their message, dropping even the quotes marks as he passionately tells us how tough Israel must now be, how it must “retaliate” to protect its citizens, how it must “punish” Hezbollah This is not journalism; it’s reporting as a propaganda arm of a foreign power.

Can we imagine Ben Brown doing the same from Beirut, standing in front of the BBC cameras telling us how Hezbollah has no choice faced with Israel’s military onslaught but to start hitting Haifa harder, blowing up its oil refineries and targeting civilian infrastructure to “pressure” Israel to negotiate?

Would the BBC bother to show prerecorded footage of Brown fleeing for his safety in Beirut in what later turned out to be a false alarm? Of course not. Doubtless Brown and his colleagues are forced to take cover on a regular basis for fear of being hurt by Israeli air strikes, but his fear – or more precisely, the fear of the Lebanese he stands alongside – is not part of the story for the BBC. Only Israeli fears are newsworthy.

These reporters are working in a framework of news priorities laid down by faceless news executives far away from the frontline who understand only too well the institutional pressures on the BBC – and the institutional biases that are the result.

They know that the Israel lobby is too powerful and well resourced to take on without suffering flak; that the charge of anti-Semitism might be terminally damaging to the BBC’s reputation; that the BBC is expected broadly to reflect the positions of the British governmment if it wants an easy ride with its regulators; that to remain credible it should not stray too far from the line of its mainly American rivals, who have their own more intense domestic pressures to side with Israel.

This distortion of news priorities has real costs that can be measured in lives – in the days and weeks to come, hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives in both Israel and Lebanon. As long as Israel is portrayed by our major broadcasters as the one under attack, its deaths alone as significant, then the slide to a regional war – a war of choice being waged by the Israeli government and army – is likely to become inevitable.

So to Jeremy Bowen, James Reynolds, Ben Brown, Wyre Davies, Matthew Price, and all the other BBC journalists reporting from the frontline of the Middle East, and the faceless news executives who sent them there, I say: you may be nice people with the best of intentions, but shame on you.

[…]

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=9320

The fact of the matter is we don’t need BBC, FOX or anyone else to tell us that the artic is cold. As soon as you understand this, then you won’t care about wether or not the BBC is spinning ID cards on the behalf of contractors, uncritically spreading lies about ‘the middle east’ or any other despicable shenanigans that they are getting up to.

I wish Aljazeera had english subtitles….then we could actually get some perspective.

Britons face 11 ID checks a year

Passports are commonly used to prove identity

UK adults are asked to prove their identity (ID) 11 times on average each year, research from Manchester Business School has found. Laws meant to combat money-laundering and terrorism mean Britons are increasingly being asked to produce ID.

Buying an airline ticket, leasing a property, opening a savings account and registering with a doctor require ID.

And according to the research, by 2010 Britons will be asked to produce ID an average of 17 times a year.

Consumer burden

Most [consumers] are frustrated to be asked to produce documents such as passports and driving licences, often a number of times by different departments of the same business Rob Laurence, GB Group

Technology firm GB Group, which commissioned Manchester Business School to undertake the research, said UK firms and government agencies were making up to half a billion identity checks on customers each year.

This could place a great burden on individual consumers who had to produce passports or driving licences to prove who they were, the group said.

For example, those moving house may have their identity checked more than five times throughout the process by different organisations such as estate agents, solicitors, financial advisers, lenders and the Land Registry.

“Most [consumers] are frustrated to be asked to produce documents such as passports and driving licences, often a number of times by different departments of the same business,” Rob Laurence, GB Group spokesman, said. […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5193986.stm 

A vigilant BLOGDIAL lurker points us to this flagrant piece of PR being hosted free of charge at the BBQ (free of charge apart from the fistful of fivers it took to get it published.)

This story has no author. That is the most telling thing about it. It is a pure regurgitation of a press release from GB Group, who used the cover of Manchester Business School to produce this thinly veiled call for an ID Card to ‘make peoples lives easier’. You will note that there is no link to N02ID in the ‘related links’ sidebar.

The BBC should always be forced to divulge how these ‘stories’ or ‘pieces’ have come to be published in a ‘story audit trail’ so that we can see who the biased writers are, and identify the PR companies that have priveledged access to the BBC.

In fact, if they won’t do it, we can do it ourselvs in a Web 2.0 mashup style, where people can report PR injected BBC URLS in a database, so that we can correlate the authors, businesses and PR firms who are squirting stories into BBQ. Hmmm, “Will someone do it” is the question we ask aloud.

It’s been a while since I noticed the magic 3bn in the news, and had thought sense had prevailed so it’s a bittersweet sensation to notice that it is BBQ that has caused it to rear its ugly head again. No doubt to celebrate the summertime roster of whey faced and shiny voiced underlings that are reporting the ‘news’ at the moment – but I digress.

The BBC today revealed that licence fee income has topped £3bn for the first time, as the board of governors unveiled its final annual report before being replaced by the BBC Trust.

The corporation’s annual report for the 12 months to March 31 2006 revealed that licence fee revenue for the period was £3.101bn – up £160m year on year.

The rise was attributed in part to the fact that the cost of collection and evasion was at its lowest level since the BBC took over direct responsibility – at 9.6% of income. Another factor was the £185m cash – a 28% increase – returned to the BBC by the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. […]

From the Guardian, so It Must Be True™

It’s Your Money™!

Law lords have ruled against 20 anti-war campaigners who claimed they were right to take action aimed at preventing the Iraq war.

The group had asked if a valid defence was available to peace activists who allegedly broke the law to prevent an even greater “crime of aggression”.

The case centres on action taken near Southampton docks, and at RAF Fairford in the run up to the war in 2003.

The five law lords unanimously dismissed the appeals.

‘Not a crime in domestic law’

Fourteen of the group, known as the Marchwood 14, are Greenpeace volunteers who say they should not have been convicted of aggravated trespass near Southampton docks because they were trying to stop an “illegal war”.

The same argument was also offered by five people who entered RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and allegedly tried to immobilise American B52 bombers which were later involved in “shock and awe” attacks on Baghdad.

A charge of aggression against an individual in a British court “would involve determination of his responsibility as a leader but would presuppose commission of the crime by his own state or a foreign state”, he said.

This would in turn call for a decision on the “culpability in going to war” of the UK government or a foreign government, or both if they had gone to war as allies.

He argued that the courts would be “very slow” to review the exercise of the government’s prerogative powers in relation to the deployment of the armed services.

He said it was “very relevant” that Parliament had not considered whether the international law crime of aggression should be adopted into British law.

‘Dangerous precedent’

Taking that step “would draw the courts into an area which, in the past, they have entered, if at all, with reluctance”.

Lord Hoffmann said that to allow “the use of force in such cases would be to set a most dangerous precedent”. […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4855872.stm

Greenpeace have got it totally wrong. You cannot use force against the army to stop them going to war. Its like a mosquito biting an elephant in the hopes that it will stop it trampling a village.

There is no way that they could have imagined that their actions would have stopped the war. If they belived that, they are completely delusional and need to pack up and go home.

Did they really imagine the courts, which are an aparatus of the state, would side with them, when these very same courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute the mass murderer Bliar and the Cabal? Are these people really that naïve?

I have said this before; what Greenpeace, StopWar^† and all those other 70’s style protest groups need to do is understand the problem, and then deal with it appropriately. Kicking the tyres of a B52 is innapropriate. Gathering togerther 7 million taxpayers and getting them to withdraw their services in a co-ordinated economic attack, now THAT is appropriate.

The astonishing lack of imagination, dearth of oblique thinking, these are the true problems with Greenpeace and all organizations like it. When they have in the palm of their hands, literally millions of people who are willing to work with them to prevent an illegal war, the only thing they can think of is to march away the soles of their shoes on a Saturday, waste paper by sending out pointless status reports instead of doing what they need to do; dismantle the war machine at source; the taxpayer.

†Those idiots at StopWar are at it again:

Protests outside BBC studios nationwide

Tuesday 4th April at lunchtime

The Stop the War Coalition is calling for protests outside BBC studios and offices accross the country, at lunchtime on Tuesday 4th April.

This is to respond to the BBC’s failure to cover the huge troops home demonstration on March 18 on national news and also to protest the general pro-government bias of much of their reporting on the war.

We are asking groups to organise protests at every BBC office. We will be leafletting the offices with a copy of a letter addressed to Mark Thompson. […]

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/new/beebdemo.htm

I have some words for StopWar.

1. BBQ is a wholley owned arm of the state. Get used to it.
2. No matter what BBQ says or transmits, the venal government of mass murderers will not pay it any heed, even if it shows exactly what you desire.
3. It’s the internet STUPID. You can reach all the people of this country by using the internet; forget BBQ as a way to reach into the minds of the people – we have a new, frinctionless tool to use that works brilliantly, if you are creative, honest, and have somehting worthwhile to offer to people in the first place.
4. For the n^th time; DEMONSTRATING IS TEH STUPID
5. GO AWAY AND THINK ABOUT IT YOU MORONS.

BBC in product placement shock
[….] ‘We would never knowingly insert the product of any company and try to pass it off as a news story’, said a source. ‘The BBC is an independent service for the British license payer. The only way a story like this could get onto our news site would be if there were internal corruption – someone taking massive backhanders.’ he continued. ‘Unless the story comes from Arslikhan PR, of course.’ […]

The Hyshot III was attached to the front of a conventional rocket

A new jet engine designed to fly at seven times the speed of sound appears to have been successfully tested.The scramjet engine, the Hyshot III, was launched at Woomera, 500km north of Adelaide in Australia, on the back of a two stage Terrier-Orion rocket.

Once 35km up, the Hyshot III fell back to Earth, reaching speeds analysts hope will have topped Mach 7.6 (9,000 km/h).

It is hoped the British designed Hyshot III will pave the way for ultra fast, intercontinental air travel.

An international team of researchers is presently analysing data from the experiment, to see if it was a full success.

The scientists had just six seconds to monitor its performance before the £1m engine crashed into the ground.

Rachel Owen, a researcher from UK defence firm QinetiQ, which designed the scramjet, said it looked like everything had gone according to plan.[…]

‘We’d hoped to get some coverage, but to be placed so highly on the BBC site is exactly what we needed, what with the recent share price slide. The BBC reports give us an air of respectability one just doesn’t get with the Queensland Daily Sheepskinner, for example. No disrespect, of course.’ […]

With Bittorrent of course. Licence payers should not have to pay AGAIN for programmes they have already funded through the licence. As for people with IPs outside of the UK, our culture and content is the best ambassador Britain could possibly have, and measured against what it costs each licence payer, cheap.

While most media organisations are cutting back frantically to compete with the internet, the BBC is demanding “inflation plus two and a half per cent” from the government to prop up its ratings. The claim is absurd. The licence fee already yields a stunning £3bn. The BBC recently said it could lose 3,700 staff with no loss of broadcast quality; so who hired these useless people? The BBC bureaucracy is the common agricultural policy of the air, filling silos with overheads to cushion its eventual collapse into one gigantic pension fund. Come the digital revolution in a few years, the Cotswolds will be settled entirely by wealthy BBC pensioners all listening to Classic FM.

Simon Jenkins

Who would have thunk it? A supremely great paragraph methinks, “the CAP of the air” wonderful.

Relatedly it seems that the BBQ is thinking of localising it’s free online content, now it would seem perfectly reasonable to give UK resident’s the choice of accessing online content via the license fee or on the same terms as overseas browsers – in fact any system that doesn’t introduce a BBQ tax on the sale of computers or broadband connections

The BBC is set to begin commercialising traffic to bbc.co.uk, two strategies the company is considering are charging overseas users to access the site, and running commercials on the site. David Moody, director of strategy ad new media at BBC Worldwide has asserted that “Now is the right time to look at commercialising international traffic to bbc.co.uk.”

The BBC has also used the services of consulting firm Accenture to investigate ways to “make money from people who use its services but don’t pay the license fee.”

Mr. Moody has hinted that even license fee payers may have to pay an extra fee for certain types of online content, for example they might have to pay to view video material after the expiry of the current seven day window period offered by the online interactive media player.

http://www.editorsweblog.org/news/2006/03/bbc_may_charge_for_web_access.php