After David Cameron criticised the BBC for its attempt to define the recent outbreaks of looting and vandalism as a reaction against public spending “cuts” that will not actually take place until 2012/2013 (for quite a while their reports were describing the rioters as “protesters”) the BBC reacted with sorrow rather than anger….

Responding to his comments, a BBC spokesman said its coverage had been “impartial and balanced.”
“The BBC’s coverage and analysis of the recent riots endeavoured to explore all aspects, as our audiences would expect. We also sought to reflect a range of views as to the reasons behind the riots,” he said.
“We are confident we did this in an impartial and balanced manner.”

A BBC Spokesman....

Bill Nighy, wooden, crinkled and oozing bus pass angst, meets up with earnest young woman (Rachel Weisz, born 1970!). Nighy, as per usual, autocues his lines in a monotone to nobody in particular, is hardly ever out of his overcoat and sacrifices his career and pension to flag up the evil Americans.

You’ve guessed it – “Page Eight” (BBC2 28/08/11) another glossy drama of beautiful people in NW1 (and weekend rural retreats) pumping out a subliminal version of the eternal and unchanging BBC philippic against capitalism, America (pre Obama, of course) and those vicious, conniving Je…whoops….Israelis.

Written by Richard Curtis David Hare, the storyline is as predictable as a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Public School/Oxbridge educated MI5 boss hands Public School/Oxbridge educated MI5 agent (Nighy) a file fingering UK PM as the The Evil One Covering Up US Rendition. Said agent discovers his next door neighbour had a boy friend killed by Israeli soldiers while innocently protecting defenceless Hamas protestors. This has also been covered up by the same UK PM.

Usual ending of any Nighy drama….he forces UK PM to publish the truth about the evil Israelis in return for remaining schtum about rendition. Nighy then heads off into the sunset until the next BBC drama.

Production values – AAA+
Characterisation – pure unadulterated cardboard
Message – BBC Goebbels TV at its most blatant

Martin Kettle, an associate editor of The Guardian, is deeply saddened by the fact that in the UK we align politicians with car salesmen and estate agents as the least trustworthy of all professions.

He blames – the satirists.

Today’s satire is deeply cynical, depicting British politics as a nest of fools. It may make us laugh, but its impact is not funny

Moreover he fingers the two faces who, he claims, are most to blame for this sorry state of affairs, “Private Eye” editor and HIGNFY panelist Ian Hislop and political blogger Guido Fawkes.

Without them, no doubt, we would be seeing our politicians in a different light – even on a par with doctors who are perceived as the most trusted of professionals ,regarded as truthful and public spirited.

Yeah, right…..naturally Kettle, as a journalist, makes the assumption that Joe and Jane Public are too dim to draw conclusions from their own observation and experience so they must have someone else to tell them what to think.

What is truly fascinating, however, are the names he did not include – Mark Thomas, Ben Elton, Alexei Sayle et al. Hear these and any other TV or radio comedy with a political edge and you soon discover that to a man or woman they are left wing, pseudo marxist, rainbow and unicorn preachers of political correctness. They were weaned on Thatcher hatred and transferred their bile towards Blair because he recognised that Labour could only gain power by suppressing the student union leftism that drives their “comedy”. Luckily for them their views were and are shared by those in the upper reaches of BBC programming – hence the absence of any right wing comedy on mainstream TV/radio.

Hislop and Guido are great mockers of Cameron, Osborne and the Tories, just like Thomas and co. But – and here is the key to Guardianista Kettle’s discomfort – they also mercilessly lampoon the left wing media/political/cultural elite. What is more, they regularly shine a light onto the cant, hypocrisy and mendacity displayed by many editors and journalists in the smug, self satisfied world of the media……Martin Kettle’s world. For what he forgets to tell us is that our regard for journalists is as low as our view of politicians and estate agents….

Crocodile tears, Mr Kettle, crocodile tears…..

Obviously over the last few days the great and the good at the BBC have become rather unsettled as control over the urban mob violence and looting narrative began slipping through their fingers.

Shocked by the tsunami of contempt that hit them when they tried to frame the discussion in terms of “protestors”, poverty and/or race the Beeboids and their allies in the left wing media/academic cultural elite have been desperately searching for a way of regaining control of the issue by shifting the parameters of the debate.

The initial attempt was laughably unsubtle. Making much of a bevy of leading police officers, spearheaded by ACPOs big cheese Sir Hugh Orde, the aim was to portray the Cameron government as being out of touch. “Leave it to the boys in blue” became the watchword.

Unfortunately the evidence of a lack of leadership and control from the higher echelons at the Met over the first 2/3 days of mob rule in parts of London was so overwhelming that the utterances of Orde and Co. had a very hollow ring.

But, as David Vance at Biased BBC noted yesterday, a new editorial line had been adopted by the BBC suits and programmed into the robotic Sarah Montague as she fed the appropriate cues to the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, over sentences handed out to looters. Naturally he came back with the appropriate response – “a collective loss of proportion” This triggered Sarah’s circuitry and produced the key phrase we shall be hearing over and over again at this weekend’s North London dinner parties.

Moral panic.

It’s all out of proportion, you see. There’s no real threat but a lot of opportunists have jumped on this bandwagon to further their own political agenda.

Moral panics allegedly arise when an event is perceived as a threat to society and its values. Those who foment the panic are said to be motivated by a fear of losing control. They therefore attempt to channel potentially disruptive energy by portraying another person or group – “folk devils” – as more of a danger than they actually are. So the Sarah Montague/BBC line appears to be that Cameron is using the riots as an opportunity to demonise the disenfranchised and divert attention from his austerity drive and, strangely enough, that was the angle recently taken by The New York Times…..surprise, surprise….

Heavy stuff, indeed…

But wait a minute – “no real threat but a bandwagon to further an agenda”……”folk devils”…..that seems to ring a bell….

Rupert Murdoch, Anders Breivik, bankers, EDL, AGW deniers, Israelis – now there is a collection of folk devils for you, always presented as the symbols of dark forces ever ready to take us back to some Thatcherite nightmare away from sweetness and light.

Moral panics? At the BBC it’s what we do…..

The New York Times, the house journal of the Obama administration, has obviously been given the nod from the White House to convey an important message to UK Prime Minister David Cameron from the Presidential golf course.

You have got it so wrong on the causes of those riots.

Mr. Cameron…..has blamed the looting and burning on a compound of national moral decline, bad parenting and perverse inner-city subcultures.

That is so naive.

It’s about being POOR, man. The rioting and looting was a cry for help from the blackberries of the penniless, starving hordes of England’s shanty towns as well as a political protest against Cameron’s savage budget cuts.

What’s that? These are scheduled cuts for 2012-2015? Spending for 2011 is still much the same as previous years?

Irrelevant.

It’s the perception,stupid…..the masses trust only the BBC and the BBC has, since May 2010, been constantly warning them about THE CUTS.

That is why the “protesters” (as the BBC preferred to call them) needed all those flat screen TVs. They were to be used as COMMUNITY SCREENS so that the downtrodden could bypass government propaganda and hear the truth from the BBC.

Fortunately President Obama from his years of executive experience in Chicago can redirect Mr Cameron back onto the path of righteousness.

You don’t solve these problems with “draconian punishments” and “excessive sentences”

Britain’s urban wastelands need constructive attention from the Cameron government, not just punishment. His government’s wrongheaded austerity policies have meant fewer public sector jobs and social services……..What Britain’s sputtering economy really needs is short-term stimulus, not more budget cutting.

That is how it was done in Chicago by Obama – and it is now, presumably, one of the safest cities in the western world.

So there you have it, Mr Cameron. The NYT is telling you to spend more money and ignore the debt and those scaremongers at the credit rating agencies. I am sure they could put you in touch with the Chinese bankers who have been so helpful to President Obama.

On the other hand…..perhaps you could just tell the NYT to STFU……

The BBC’s Jonny Dymond has been sounding out some of the usual suspects from the US liberal left over their reaction to the News of the World phone hacking affair.

The top brass at the Beeb have obviously got the nod from their friends at the New York Times (“the Democratic Party at prayer”) that the Obama machine is very interested in the possibility of slipping a knife between Murdoch’s ribs and defenestrating Fox News. Dymond, therefore, was temporarily withdrawn from the Tea Party=militias=KKK =racism desk at AgitProp HQ and ordered to link up with the planners at Operation Fox Hunter.

Washington correspondent Jonny Dymond reports on whether any “bad habits have slipped over to the Atlantic”

Jonny isn’t talking about his own bad habits of slipping things across borders… Lithuanian customs officers still have him on file. Nor was he talking about CNN’s Piers Morgan’s habits because, so far, the BBC doesn’t appear to be too interested in a left wing tabloid not owned by Murdoch.

No – we are now reaching what I predicted was the most important item on the agenda…..the preparation of a full frontal attack on Fox News.

Others with noses closer to the DC beltway have also been sniffing the air, particularly the UK Telegraph’s Toby Harnden. He tried for ages to get a feel on the Murdoch/USA issue from Obama apparatchiks in Congress and the White House but kept on getting blanked.

They were all waiting for Valerie Jarrett to tell Obama what his decision would be.

It was a go.

Straight away Sen Jay Rockefeller had new batteries inserted and was wheeled out to transmit the official party line.

SEIU is almost certainly being fed more Soros money to add to it’s taxpayer funded coffers in order to organise “spontaneous” demonstrations of anger outside Fox properties. “Independent” op-ed scribblers at NYT and WaPo have received templates for their thoughtful “fairness” pieces.

I called this Dan Rather’s revenge not because it was Fox that pulled that neat little trick. Fox is too timid to operate behind enemy lines like the right blogosphere. Fox’s importance is to act, like the UK’s Mail and Sun, as a counter balance to the distortion of the news as it is passed through the left wing filters of the establishment media. The right blogosphere’s role is to dig up the evidence for the lies, corruption and hypocrisy of the left’s mouthpieces in New York, Hollywood and elsewhere.

Unlike Chappaquidick and the NYT/Guardian Wikileaks campaign nobody has been killed as a result of News of the World phone hacking. Yes it was unsavoury and seedy – but that is the nature of journalism. It’s a competitive dog eat dog world where you are only as good as your last story – just like Hollywood, politics and drug dealing. So the key to fighting the forthcoming onslaught is not to excuse the activities that took place several years ago under the Blair/Brown Labour government that refused to take action because at the time they were supported by the Murdoch press.

The line to take is to condemn all dirty tricks then follow up with just a representative sample of nefarious activities undertaken by the Democrats and their surrogates over the last ten years….you’ll be spoiled for choice.

Then, as was once suggested by a certain Chicago Light Bringer, get in their faces.

The big question is – what will the GOP political/media”leadership” do over this? Surely it won’t bolt for cover and hide under the table with its thumb in its mouth while the mob is baying outside the door….will it?

Surely there will be someone who will run to the fight – with a smile and a rapier….

In the old Soviet Union one tool Kremlinologists used to forecast shifts in the political climate was to peruse the inside pages of Pravda and spot the apparently insignificant article that they could identify as a marker for any forthcoming reconfiguration.

The articles were placed as signposts for mid level Communist Party members to prepare for changes in direction in their party “work” which, for the CPSU, as with any other totalitarian party, was almost exclusively agitprop –agitation and propaganda.

The BBC in very many ways can be seen as an agitprop arm of the British liberal/left cultural elite, a group which usually manages to direct the UK’s political and social agenda even though much of it (EU membership, unrestricted immigration, political correctness etc etc)is deeply unpopular with the majority of the population.

Moreover, with the globalisation of information media ,the lack of any patriotic affinity in the mindset of this elite allows it to integrate seamlessly with its equivalents in the USA and elsewhere

So the appearance of this article by Tom Geoghegan on the BBC website “Rupert Murdoch:Could his US empire be affected?” should be ringing alarm bells for conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. For this is not really about the rather shady ethics of a few phone hacking tabloid journalists. Indeed, while the story only appeared to involve celebrities and politicians it never really gained traction. Moreover, because the hacking took place several years ago under a Blair/Brown Labour government that at the time was very cosy with Rupert Murdoch and his tabloids meant that it remained low key with Milliband, Balls and co. Besides News of the World staff had been jailed and the editor at the time had resigned so heads had rolled.

But what has given it legs in New York and London is the revelation that the paper’s staff had hacked into a murder victim’s mobile phone. This has, quite rightly, created immense public anger – and given the liberal/left media elite, so often out of tune with popular opinion, a golden opportunity to spearhead a lynch mob.

It’s not about Murdoch and his papers – after all the dead tree press as a vehicle for news is a dinosaur on its way to extinction. The real target is Murdoch the TV baron with Fox News in the USA and Sky News in Britain. Note how Geoghan slips “right wing” into the mix. It’s a standard adjective that is permanently attached to any comment about Fox News in the UK and, it must be admitted, a brilliant example of the effectiveness of well organised agitprop. The fact that every other US network/cable news platform is imbued as deeply as the BBC in the liberal/left metro mindset is always studiously ignored.

It is no accident that the long buried phone hacking story was disinterred by the New York Times last autumn and quickly picked up in Britain by the Guardian and the BBC just as Murdoch’s bid for the whole of Sky. the BBC’s only meaningful TV competitor was about to go under public scrutiny. All three have a keen interest in undermining Murdoch and emasculating Fox because they know that Murdoch is the only player in the game who threatens the dominant position of the liberal/left cultural elite in the UK and the USA.

A perceptive piece in The Commentator reads the runes with chilling accuracy. This is not about journalistic ethics. It’s a fight to protect the authority of the great and the good against the upstarts of the new media – and, at the moment, the right wing establishment is doing what it does best….running for cover.

It’s the revenge of Dan Rather.

Nothing at all at the BBC website about Guardian contributor Kia Abdullah’s crass and heartless twitter comments on the tragic death of three British students in a road accident in Thailand.

‘Is it really awful that I don’t feel any sympathy for anyone killed on a gap year?’
‘I actually smiled when I saw that they had double-barrelled surnames. Sociopath?’

All across the twitterverse and blogosphere within hours and hitting the dead tree press by Sunday even the Guardian had to do a nifty piece of sidestepping.

But the BBC obviously felt the story wasn’t worth covering.

I wonder why?