The Aged P

The BBC, acting in its capacity of being the UK extension of Barack Obama’s “Palace Guard” (aka the US mainstream media) led on the website with an item headed

Romney and Republicans raise $100m in June

Under the headline the text confirmed that Mitt Romney, the likely Republican candidate in this coming November’s Presidential election, had raised more money than Obama. At first glance one could have sensed from this the possibility of a Damascene conversion at Beeb HQ…..that they might have actually decided to report a US election in a fair and balanced way by shedding the liberal/left blinkers that for over half a century have coloured their reporting.

But, true to form, as one’s eyes travelled down the page, it became clear that they were performing to the script posted out from the New York Times, Washington Post and the TV alphabets. The Obama campaign is firing all its guns on Romney’s wealth to characterise him as a gold plated fat cat who knows nothing about the everyday problems of ordinary people in a struggling economy – and the reason for harping on the success of the Romney/GOP fundraising was to associate the Republican Party with this fat cat image…

Look, folks, it’s Obama and the people v Romney and the fat cats – and the fat cats hope to buy the election…

Moreover, to darken the image even further, the BBC references a recent Vanity Fair article

And there were negative headlines this week over a Vanity Fair investigation reporting that much of Mr Romney’s personal fortune was hidden in a network of opaque offshore investment havens.

Yes, Vanity Fair, (the one that was so sympathetic to the Occupy “movement”)…..did a full scale investigation into Romney’s wealth (probably using the fifty fact checkers that AP sent to Alaska after Palin’s VP GOP nomination in 2008)…..yet somehow has never managed to send anybody to Chicago to find out more about Obama’s relationship with Tony Rezko, a key figure in his political transfiguration who was later convicted of money laundering and bribery.

But then, since VF is clearly the house magazine of the glitterati, the BBC didn’t spend too much time agonising upon the mixed messages being sent out by Obama’s hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite….

As for the tear stained pleas from Obama and his surrogates about being outspent – smoke and mirrors, anyone?

The only catch is that the actual spending by super PACs so far this year tells a quite different story. The truth is that the super PAC founded by top Obama staffers and its aligned “independent” groups are outspending groups that oppose the president by roughly two to one.

….and behind those pro Obama super PACs are some very shady figures….

But hey, whenever did an honest in depth probe of any liberal/left political structure figure particularly high on the BBC agenda? As for the piece itself just look at the subtle hints offered by the selection of photos……Romney holidaying on an expensive rich man’s toy while Obama is out there talking to horny handed sons of toil….

….and not a single mention of golf….

cross posted at Biased BBC

Obviously the BBC has not made much of this story…..I wonder why?

Oxford educated left wing Guardian hackette Marina Hyde (“one of the funniest and most admired journalists in the UK”) might be getting the smallest Oxfam charity Christmas card this year from her editor Alan Rusbridger who had to endure the humiliation of seeing his face spread over The Sun as the tabloid helpfully pointed out

The much hyped Ms Hyde, the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, blends in perfectly with the well born radical chic crowd at The Guardian burnishing their NW1 dinner party credentials by bashing the “rich” and the Tories. But it’s perfectly clear that this was a story that fitted so neatly into the Guardian’s Murdoch manic obsession she didn’t even bother to check it out.

Epic fail.

But her career will not suffer. Socialist hacks live in a risk free environment when it comes to peddling untruths because the golden rule of left wing journalism is that truth = what ought to be true rather than what is true. There will be no explosion of indignation from media colleagues for this shoddy piece of gimcrack “journalism”. No thundering broadsides from the BBC for it is now open season on Murdoch, not because of the hacking and blagging that anyway was probably par for the course for all tabloids, including the left wing Mirror – but because Murdoch and The Sun switched their support from Labour to the Conservatives in the final months of Gordon Brown’s tenure at No. 10 – and the many years of Murdoch supporting Labour were immediately conveniently airbrushed out of history.

Hence the lack of BBC interest in this story.

But imagine the outburst from the BBC if it had been a Sun reporter inventing stuff up about The Guardian. …..

Aaaaahhhhh….the sweet sense of liberal left hypocrisy in the morning…..

It’s a tough job, trundling through BBC’s Editors Blog (did Goebbels have something similar at his Propaganda Ministry?) but two items are worthy of note.

Firstly a tear stained piece from Jeremy Hillman, editor of the BBC News business and economics unit. Jeremy was soooooo upset about George Osborne suggesting

the BBC’s approach to reporting the economy was relentlessly to focus on the bad news and the most gloomy statistics.

Hillman went on to produce a fistful of examples in an attempt to derail Osborne’s case, par for the course for any BBC suit when faced with accusations of bias. Then he sits back smugly thinking he has proved his point.

Actually Sarah Montague, despite Hillman’s spin about consciously downplaying Padoan, did indeed home in on the Padoan remarks so obviously she didn’t get the memo.

But we all know what Osborne was really getting at – not that they ignored positive items about the economy from third parties but the whole question of tone and emphasis which is why he used the word “relentlessly”. Ever since the Coalition took office the BBC’s overarching leitmotif has been CUTS rather than savings and one only has to watch any QT audience to see how successful that campaign has been.

However the good news is that Osborne’s comment touched a nerve. I guess that this issue has been raised at several North London dinner parties recently because Hillman and his pals realise that Charter Renewal is beginning to appear on the horizon and they cannot afford to upset a senior cabinet figure. Let’s hope that other government big cheeses start getting under sensitive BBC skins on a regular basis.

Then this abject apology re the Israeli Dog Stoning story from Nathalie Malinarich, world editor of the BBC News website

We failed to make the right checks. We should never have written the article and apologise for any offence caused.

Don’t worry, luv – we know why you failed to make the right checks…..while you were all busy filling in your expenses forms a breathless young graduate trainee rushed in and blurted out “those crazy religious bigoted Jews – as well as murdering helpless innocent Palestinians they are now going after helpless dogs…”

It fitted into the BBC’s anti Israeli narrative so perfectly you just couldn’t resist it…c’mon, Nathalie…is the Pope catholic? Those Jews, aren’t they evil?

cross posted at Biased BBC