The Blind Broadcasting Corporation
How the BBC buries bad news about minority communities and puffs them up beyond what the demographic would reasonably demand.
I recently posted about bias in the mainstream media but I felt there is still room for a more thorough, graphics based one. The format is simple; take a screenshot of the BBC’s news front page. I shall also compare it to how other news outlets do the same story. So, here goes.
The first protocol is to sort out three basic story types into Heroes, Victims and Villains. You will almost never see the latter.
Using this rough criterion it is now fairly easy to spot how the BBC manages the news that you see and how it is biased to avoiding, sometimes absurdly, pictures of ethnic and other minorities doing bad things.
The above picture was not on the front page. In fact it was nowhere near the front page. I found it under England/Regions/Derby. This rather pointless picture, of a police van in a back yard is their depiction of a serious disturbance at an outdoor event. The only clue you might get, if you are really interested, is the use of the word, ‘kabaddi’ - a contact sport popular on the Indian subcontinent.
This is how the Daily Mail reported it on its front page:
This is the moment 'gunshots' were fired during a terrifying brawl at a Derbyshire sports contest where three people were injured and a man was attacked with a sword.
Armed police rushed to the horror incident, said to be sparked by rival gangs, at the Derby Kabaddi grounds in Alvaston at around 4pm on Sunday afternoon.
An eyewitness described a man being shot and then attacked repeatedly with a sword. Other witnesses claimed two gangs caused the violence and said it ruined their tournament.
Apart from the appalling overuse of adjectives like terrifying and horror - which appears on every DM story even if it is ‘man discovers mouldy sausage roll’, the DM has given a comprehensive and pictorial account of the incident. The BBC have not and I wonder why? The BBC does not mention gang violence or the use of a sword, or gunshots, merely a ‘large scale disturbance’
This is what you will see on the front page of the BBC’s news website:
Apparently the editor at the BBC decided that ‘chip shop owner overhwhelmed by £1 meal demand’ was worthy of a place on the front page of the nation’s broadcaster, as was two victim stories about minorities. Keep a tally! This is the core point of this post. Further reading reveals that one story is about a cold case from 1959, and is essentially a puff for one of their own radio programmes, and the other is a story from the Middle East. Interestingly, when I went back to check this, the photograph had been replaced by what you might call a less disturbing image. It is not unusual to alter a story after online publication. I do it for reasons of clarity, but if the edit substantially alters the meaning of the piece, I will tell you. The BBC is well known for stealth editing if their original story is challenged by eagle eyed critics, such as Guido Fawkes. Guido regularly takes screenshots of web pages to prove the point.
And just as a by-the-way, a story in the Guardian made me smirk:
Of course, I had to read it, in the interests of research, you understand. The Guardian loves to celebrate perversity and denigrate religion. The rights and wrongs of this particular piece are nuanced and fair comment, but The Guardian regularly features material about people who, let us put it this way, do not represent anything other than their individual narcissistic hobbies. Probably because their journalists are at it themselves. It too loves a minority victim. I shall deal with The Guardian, however, in another post.
Sometimes it goes from bad to worse. Not content with manipulating the news it has now been revealed that the BBC has actually ‘blacked up’ a seemingly stock picture of a hand placing a vote into a Welsh ballot box.
The usual anodyne, non-apology was spewed out in response, after they were caught at it:
It appears that the photograph used as part of this graphic has been altered, which, although there is no intention to mislead, should not have happened and is not acceptable BBC practice. We will be reminding our staff of this.'
They say it is not acceptable BBC practice, but it has happened before. Remember this?
This picture is from 2013. Some will have forgotten it, some will have conveniently forgotten it. At the time it was written off as a ‘glitch’.
The BBC has almost become a parody of itself. I will leave you with a final graphic from today. Minority heroes 2, or 3 if you count being black and gay.
The BBC is telling a long low pernicious lie about our society by leaving out the salient facts and disproportionately foregrounding others to suit a twisted agenda. It is time to defund it and let it sink or swim.