Some thoughts about #BBCBias. First, I don't believe there's any kind of conscious, intentional favouring of 'the right' by BBC journalists or editors. But they do over-represent a metropolitan, liberal elite demographic 1/
That translates into an institutional paranoia of being seen to be 'anti-right' and creates a degree of over compensation in both the sources and issues that gain most prominence, and sometimes in the relative treatment of sources 2/
And most importantly which sources are 'trusted' or seen as inherently credible (eg senior Tories or rt wing Labour versus 'the left') 3/
That paranoia/pressure is hugely intensified by hard right government and a predominantly hard right press, poised to jump on the BBC and threatening the license fee at every turn 4/
Another issue is that journalists just don't understand how to implement impartiality in a post consensus world. In the EU referendum they adopted a 'X claims A, Y claims B' approach to balance which proved to be disastrous in allowing falsehood to spread unchecked 5/
in GE19 they took the approach of 'scrutinise claims on both sides equally' but ran into a problem. The vast majority of falsehoods were spread by the Tories and Lib Dems but 'presentational' impartiality meant that Labour had to be presented as equally culpable 6/
But the biggest problem is a herd-like group think about 'what the story is'. When IFS attacked Labour manifesto, that was a far more of a 'story' than the equally scathing IFS response to Tory manifesto. It just somehow 'made sense' 7/
When antisemitism allegations surfaced in the Tory party it just didn't seem like much of a headline (in spite of ticking every box of news value criteria) 8/
None of this meant that the BBC was wholly or explicitly towing the Tory line. But then explicit, conscious propaganda is never that effective 9/
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20 years ago the US and UK governments launched an illegal war which claimed the lives of nearly a million innocent civilians. They did so on a pack of lies which served to cover up the oil profiteering and conspiracy leading up to the invasion..
Those lies were the culmination of a political culture that became closely associated with Tony Blair's New Labour government and the incestuous ties that were cemented with the Murdoch media empire...
Blair came to power off the back of nearly two decades of Tory rule and a previous election defeat that went against all polling and pundit predictions, and which became infamously associated with last minute dire warnings on the front page of the Sun newspaper...
Starmer's self congratulations on the handling of antisemitism within the Labour Party is built on one of the most comprehensive cover ups in modern British politics, and a litany of lies that makes Boris Johnson look like an oracle of truth telling...
the principle lie is that the previous leadership 'interfered' in order to undermine the proper handling of antisemitism complaints. As anyone with the slightest relationship to facts will know, that is not just a lie, it is an Orwellian inversion of the truth...
here's just one of countless examples where the Corbyn leadership was trying to get a hostile, right wing party bureaucracy to act on antisemitism complaints, disclosed long before the EHRC report or even Panorama's widely discredited episode on the topic..
John Ware claims he declined to sue me because I have a "young family". I'd love to believe such an act of benevolence. But I wonder why, in that case, he has steadfastly refused to answer the sort of questions I've been putting to him for 2 years:
In the above article Ware laments that his rebuttals have been 'ignored'. I have a similar frustration, beginning more or less when he refused to address my pre-publication questions for this article in 2020:
In particular, the article revealed that in spite of the BBC's repeated claims that it offered a 'full right of reply' to Labour, aspects of that reply - which spoke directly to key sequences in the programme - were ignored...
He repeats that an interview with @schneiderhome forms the basis of the ‘central allegation’ made against him. Yet, somewhat incredulously, again avoids any mention of the main thrust of that interview..
which is quite clearly concerned with the way in which his programme appeared to carefully select 2 phrases/10 words from an email by Seumas Milne that was querying Jewish Labour members being ‘more than occasionally’ the subject of disciplinary action over antisemitism...
Just like the Forde Report, #LabourFiles has exposed the complete collapse of basic journalistic standards in @BBCPanorama's episode 'Is Labour Antisemitic?'
AND YET...
1) The BBC rejected every single complaint at every stage, claiming Labour was given a "full right of reply" in spite of the fact that it ignored key parts of this reply including one that was emboldened and underlined for emphasis...
Euan Phillips, non-Jewish spokesperson for @LabourAgainstAS, has been exposed as the individual behind 'David Gordstein'...
On behalf of LAAS he claimed to have submitted a "dossier of evidence" about me to @UKLabour during my membership, but strangely refused to disclose this and no record of it according to @uklabour's subject access response...
Whilst many of us were aware of the willful deceit and dishonesty of groups like LAAS, the #LabourFiles still contains jaw dropping revelations of just how depraved these people were...