Media In Focus

Following on from my previous post about how, in a time of great financial crisis, many in the media have got their focus and priorities entirely wrong, another fantastic example of such wings its way to us via the ever-relevant BBC website.

The BBC are reporting that porn protesters have hit Westminster to complain about new laws that will ban the possession of extreme images showing ‘a threat to life or serious injury to a person’s genitals’. Wonderful stuff as you can imagine.

Now, the protest consisted of a mere twenty people and it would seem that as a consequence the BBC felt the issue of violent pornography and yesterday’s march warranted an entire news article on their website with an accompanying video.

However, compare this with the level of coverage two other past protests held outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster gained that concerned calls for the Government to honour its manifesto commitment to give a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

The first was back in October of 2007 and the second in February of this year, both of which I was in attendance. Now, the Referendum rallies were not mass protests on the scale of the million strong Countryside Alliance or Stop The Iraq War coalition marches – but they were still pretty sizeable with a couple of thousand people in total, and very many more than the twenty individuals at yesterday’s ‘porn protest’. Yet did the BBC (or any other news agency for that matter) cover the Referendum protests? The answer is of course, no – they did not. Not once.

Calling for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty did not just concern a few sick and depraved individuals wanting to photograph one another performing bizarre sexual acts, but the freedom, liberties and democratic rights of an entire nation of millions of people.

Yet, it is apparent that the BBC and most other news corporations hold the discussion of the laws on violent pornography more important than whether we wish to be a sovereign nation. Even the professional photographer and ringleader of the porn protesters, Ben Westwood (son of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood) acknowledged that:

There are more important issues to be debated than this.

In that Mr Westwood is entirely correct, but it would seem that large swathes of the media would disagree. Sadly, some things it would seem never change.

Media Priorities

Sam Tarran makes the point (first noted here) that while our banking system undergoes massive regulatory failure, the media busy themselves with the massively important issue of whether George Osborne has been receiving donations.

To put things into perspective, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King recently admitted that:

Not since the beginning of the first world war has our banking system been so close to collapse.

Compare such an alarming statement on the state of our banking system and economy with the BBC’s Political Editor, Nick Robinson and his account of George Osborne’s trip to Corfu. Someone’s journalistic priorities in the wrong place, wouldn’t you say?

Expanding Horizons

The BBC is set to spend £25m of taxpayers’ money every year on funding the creation of a new Arabic television station which it claims will provide news ‘without fear or favour’. Yeah right.

If the BBC’s own domestic coverage is anything to go by, the new Middle East station will not be impartial, independent or authoritative. Instead it will be instilled with the BBC’s usual anti-Israeli, anti-Western sentiments.

Only the BBC and those that support its liberal-left, politically correct worldview desperately continue to claim that the corporation is without bias. Surely if the BBC were so impartial they would have had no reason to spent £200,000 of license fee money last year in an attempt to suppress an internal report on bias against Israel?

At the time as the BBC attempted to deny public access to the report through the courts, Labour MP Louise Ellman commented:

There has been a bias and lack of context with the BBC reporting of Israel. Problems are related to citing individual acts of Israeli aggression by failing to put them into context or explaining the reasons. It makes them look like unprovoked acts, when in fact they were reaction to a terrorist act. I would certainly like to see what’s in the report.

Much like the BBC’s coverage of the European Union, this is an example of what Lord Pearson of Rannoch recently referred to as ‘bias by omission’. Does the Middle East really need yet another news network when it already has so many other commercial broadcasters? Should the Foreign Office really be funding this undertaking? Of course not, but this Middle Eastern adventure will still go ahead nonetheless.

Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense

Recently a Gfk NOP survey of a thousand people commissioned by the historian Peter Hennessy on behalf of the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme suggested that almost eighty percent of British people still believe in our Monarchy.

As with all opinion polls, exactly which questions are asked and how they are presented (in this case by telephone) is of paramount importance in ascertaining whether a survey is of any justifiable significance.

Unfortunately however, it would appear that the data for this latest poll on the Monarchy commissioned for the BBC seems to still be held privately with no indication of whether it will become publicly available in the future.

In any case, at face value I think we can safely presume that this survey confirms what most people already knew; that the Monarchy is still popular in Britain among the general public - though certainly not among our governing elites, grandees and the liberal media.

The poll comes, not by accident, at a time when Her Majesty recently made history by surpassing Queen Victoria as the longest serving British Monarch, and also coincides with the annual release of the Royal accounts officially detailing precisely how much the Monarchy has cost the taxpayer.

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