Less than 24 hours since the Tories won, the reaction from the BBC is truly sinister
The dust hasn’t even begun to settle from the catastrophic Tory victory. Many of us are grieving. Many of us are regrouping and working out how we fight back, and how we defend ourselves, our friends, and our loved ones from a vicious racist government devoid of any morals.
But we don’t have time to rest. The vultures are gathering. The centrists who lost this election with their morally bankrupt politics as much as anyone else, are crying crocodile tears at the Labour vote while rubbing their hands in glee at the opportunity they’ve been trying to manufacture for years.
I want to rest. I don’t want to write. But there’s no choice. I’ve broken a bone in my back so I can’t be with friends on the streets fighting back. But I can write. And I need to. Because BBC‘s director general Tony Hall’s response to critics of the broadcaster is truly sinister to anyone who believes in a free and fair society – and if we don’t start the fightback right now, it may be too late.
The clampdown begins
Hall labelled criticism of the BBC as “conspiracy theories”. And he wants to limit the ability of all of us to call out what BBC journalists are doing on social media:
Elections always put the BBC’s impartiality in the spotlight. Social media offers a megaphone to those who want to attack us and makes this pressure greater than ever. The conspiracy theories that abound are frustrating. And let’s be clear – some of the abuse which is directed at our journalists who are doing their best for audiences day in, day out is sickening. It shouldn’t happen. And I think it’s something social media platforms really need to do more about.
Heaven forbid we have a public that’s actually allowed to hold our taxpayer funded state broadcaster to account. But read that again. Slowly. Let every single word sink in. This is the director general of the BBC arguing that our voices should be suppressed. That’s the BBC’s director general claiming that every one of us who’ve dared to call out the total hatchet job it did on Corbyn is a ‘conspiracy theorist’.
The BBC’s record
The BBC‘s record during this election has been appalling. Here are just a few of its lows:
Read on...
- Broadcasting the wrong footage of Boris Johnson on Remembrance Sunday.
- Deciding to make ‘not politicising’ the NHS its top story.
- Broadcasting Jeremy Corbyn’s interview with Andrew Neil before Johnson agreed to do a similar interview. Something Johnson refused to do throughout the campaign.
- Its Twitter account promoting puff pieces such as how Johnson eats scones.
- Its political editor Laura Kuenssberg using her Twitter account with millions of followers to promote Johnson on numerous occasions. But perhaps her lowest point was tweeting the lie, fed to her from Tories, that Matt Hancock’s aide had been punched by a protester.
- Editing out the audience laughing at Johnson during a leadership debate in one of its lunchtime news bulletins.
- On the eve of the election, it was accused of electoral fraud after Kuenssberg broadcast comments about the number of postal votes looking “grim” for Labour.
Meanwhile, the BBC promoted lie after Tory lie. Yes, its fact-checking service did go into overdrive. But people saw the headlines and the tweets, not the fact-checker. And those headlines and tweets promoted lies.
And as I’ve previously written:
bias can also be nuanced. As The Canary previously reported, this was recently highlighted in the way it treated two stories on the Today programme about MPs saying they wouldn’t vote for their former political parties.
Oh, it’s okay, we all make mistakes
Hall’s excuses for the ‘mistakes’ the BBC made are truly pathetic:
In a frenetic campaign where we’ve produced hundreds of hours of output, of course we’ve made the odd mistake and we’ve held up our hands to them. Editors are making tough calls every minute of the day. But I don’t accept the view of those critics who jump on a handful of examples to suggest we’re somehow biased one way or the other.
I edit – it’s a job full of tough calls. But if your excuse is “hundreds of hours of output”, then maybe the decision is simple. Stop putting out so much coverage and concentrate on quality rather than quantity. Stop tweeting. And this wasn’t a “handful of examples” – the ones listed above are the tip of the iceberg. This is systematic.
Meanwhile, the “we’ve held up our hands” is woeful. The BBC eventually admitted it made a mistake in editing out the audience’s reaction. And its excuse for broadcasting the more flattering footage of Johnson on Remembrance Sunday was utter pitiful.
At other times, it was just defensive. This was the response, in full, the BBC gave The Canary when even the Electoral Commission questioned its broadcast of Kuenssberg’s comments about the postal votes – footage it deleted from its website:
Our freedoms are under attack
These comments, that we should censor critics of the BBC and its journalists, would be sinister at the best of times. But they become doubly so in the context of an announcement by John Mann, the government’s advisor on antisemitism, on the morning of the results. Mann stated he’ll be leading an investigation into The Canary and other left-wing outlets over antisemitism.
Mann, who is not Jewish, is coming after a publication that was co-founded by a Jewish woman and regularly publishes Jewish voices, mine included, who want to speak out against the smears about Corbyn, and who support the rights of Palestinian people. Meanwhile, he’s ignoring the tabloids who were blamed by the UN for the rise in hate crime after the Brexit referendum, let alone investigating the very real antisemitism in the Conservative Party. The Canary has not published a single article that is antisemitic. This is nothing more than an assault on the independent media.
In 24 hours we’ve seen attacks on our freedom of speech begin. And make no mistake, this is just the start. So I may be tired, I may be in pain, but I’m not resting. Because I’m not going to watch this descent into fascism without fighting back with every bone in my body, including the broken one. And that fight starts right now.
Featured image via Flickr/Tim Loudon
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Keep up the good work Emily and get well soon.
Great article. You wrote quantity instead of quality, painkillers I imagine.
just seen that the the government’s anti-semitism Tsar, John Mann, is coming after the Canary in 2020. He intends to purge all independent “left” web sites of the scourge of anti-semitism.
Go Canary!
Since the election ,the establishment media has become quite subdued,a few election facts and figures,Boris’s trip up north,etc.Now just imagine for a minute that Corbyn and Labour had won.Imagine those same news outlets .It would be Apocalypse Now..Do you need any more proof of their bias and smear tactics?Never believe ANOTHER WORD THEY SAY–.NOT ONE.
More caps, everything should be in caps. It underlines your point and adds gravitas.
The bbc response is predictable but what disturbed me most about this article is the canary being investigated for antisemitism, by the looks of it because of a comment Kerry-Ann made to Jonathan Freedland on twitter during election night reminding him of the prominent role he played in the election of Boris Johnson. Turns out that Jonathan is jewish and any criticism of him is now antisemitic, omfg, personally I didn’t know he was jewish till now, I just thought he was one of the guardians most shallow journalists.
Seems like the idea of press freedom is out of the window for smaller left wing publications, timing is also very suspect as we embark on a tory admin headed by a pm, who was taking messaging advice from Steve Bannon not that long ago. May I say this is ripe for award winning documentarians to film this process as it unfolds, it has it all, shoddy accusation against a caramel lefty, who is also a journalist, kafkaesque with orwellian overtones, perfect for netflix and a wider audience, interested in the abuse of power.
Boris the liar Pinocchio but really Corbyn didn’t have a chance against these vile creatures but those of us who did vote. Tory will see the error of their ways under him Corbyn would atleast brought back whot we have lost our leader is now giving up because of all the crap they threw at him oh dear more culling of the stock through benefits denial aktion T4 going to roll on now
Plus’s the doors open to those Blair’s babies to once again take the party over
KINSHIP! A new kind of politics: the three teams and the three posses of juts. A vision of a post-Labour post-Scottish-Independence British political landscape.
Team A: Corbyn (and his army, vast and diverse, across every part of England), me, the antiwar protestors, the frontline, the most vulnerable, the bloggers living inside grenfell speaking out against the disaster to come, before it came.
Team B: SNP Scottish Independence activists and Corbyn-policy embracing Blair-detesters.
Team C: The Tory Corbyn division, frequently lib dem, sometimes Labour (consider the great Hugh Grant, for whom Murdoch will buy no drinks), including Corbyn-promoter Giles Brandreth, a few IQ points beyond (non-Team A or B or C member and) Numberwang Presenter Rachel Riley (paid up Israeli MP for Channel Four and uniformed Cheerleader of mob-jut posse B – see below).
Then we have mob jut-posse A: the classist ‘I hate the toffs’ jut posse, largely Labour, not ‘far left’ but working class white Labour with sense of white entitlement – angry that ‘toffs’ share white entitlement with tokens but not with the vast swathes of other white British entitled people.
In a friendly brotherly way I mocked Dennis Skinner for being part and parcel of this sort of foolish dick-waving, and he and his bunch were the hole in Corbyn’s armour – all those seats lost which gave Tories victory – they were lost because the ‘Labour’ voters were from jut posses A and B which are interchangeable, and chose white Boris over ‘nigger-lover’ Corbyn. Brexit and no more muslims, that was what they wanted, not Jeremy Corbyn.
Then mob jut-posse B: the tory jut-heads. These are main the ones who just voted for Boris, they include Lippy Lipman, of course, and the many sales and marketing workers she has cashed in on human purchase-decision-forcing with. They are jut-heads. He, Boris, is one of them, as is Mogg, many Labour MPs including Blair and all his goons, many Lib Dems, like Nuclear Swinson – went out with a bang did that one. (All praise is due to Scotland, maintainer of all Britons, Lord of the Day of Judgment).
Mob-jut posse C also exists: the rest of the masses, well-meaning but off course (hey, don’t call me arrogant, did you see who was just elected Prime Minister in a ‘landslide’?)
So, before, Mob-jut posse A and Mob-jut posse B were united and outnumbering Teams A and B and C.
Mob-jut posse A and B were voting en masse for Blair. Blair destroyed Britain and whilst nobody wanted to admit it they wanted a new leader, but got new Blairs, ones with more tact, but the same lack of talent or ethics. The Blair clones persisted in Labour and then the tories. When the tories were in power they already took much of mob jut-posse B from Blair, hence ended up initially in a coalition and then with precarious leaders like May and early Johnson.
At that time Team C remained, as for the previous entire decades, totally cut off from Team A.
Then activists like me destroyed Blair entirely, as mob jut-posse A had held him down long enough to make it easy. In a panic mob jut-posse A tried to revive and work with mob jut-posse B and then lost control and mob jut-posse A and B became a single posse united under white supremacism, Trump and Boris.
Mob jut-posse C had now joined Team A and Team C to vote for Corbyn but were defeated by untold mob-jut posse-ism. But Labour has been destroyed, Team B has (this is clearly leaping ahead in spacetime) elevated itself far above all three mob jut-posses, its longterm enemy for centuries, and above Team A and C and become a superpower, a country far superior to England in the cornflake-order.
Team C and Team A unite in a society where Labour is destroyed and mob jut-posse B and A are now fused permanently into one small part of the Tory party, where it originally was birthed.
Team C and Team A take over the Tory party and win number 10 and are in control, with Mob jut-posse C as their majority.
The problem so far is that the voters of Team C and Team A have been entirely divided, totally split apart, each of them saddled with a bunch of yahoos for ‘allies’.
Add to this the idea that independent candidates can fill the seats and new alliances can replace the number game currently played by one single two-faced party (ConservativeLabour) so that the most unifying policies determine the coalitions and alliances, not paperwork and money, and as a result the old system has no further power and only a new kind of politics reigns supreme.
___
I have tried to ‘illustrate’ my description and give it more detail, here:
BLAIR ERA
mjp A + mjp B + mjp C votes Labour
Team A refuses to vote and protests and is held down and kept without money by Team A and mjp A and mjp B and mjp C
Team B votes SNP
Team C votes Tory
result: Labour majority endures with huge momentum (the actual kind, not the brand)
MAYHEM ERA (blair loses the cash in an iraqi desert)
Team A refuses to vote and protests and is held down and kept without money by Team A and mjp A and mjp B and mjp C
Team B votes SNP and decreasingly Labour
Team C votes Tory
mjp A votes Labour
mjp B votes Tory
mjp C is confused, stops voting, votes here and there, joins Farage, joins Lib Dems
result: Labour slowly loses more and more of mjpC and then the tories and lib dems form a coalition to take it over for themselves and divvy it up, things like grenfell and trump and the collapse of the nhs happen
CORBYN MOMENT
Team A votes Labour
Team B votes SNP and Labour
Some of Team C starts voting Lib dem and ‘even’ Labour, if absolutely ‘necessary’
mjp A votes Labour
mjp C votes Labour to some small degree but many of them say lib dem or farage
mjp B votes Tory
outcome: tories are shaken, corbyn alliance looks amazingly strong due to sudden appearance of Team A after total dormancy as voting block
CORBYN DEFEAT
Team A votes Labour
Team B votes SNP
Team C votes Tory, Labour, lib dem
mjp A votes Tory
mjp B votes Tory
mjp C votes Tory, lib dem, green,
outcome: massive tory win
BORIS ERA
sabotage of tory party begins by day 41, then:
Team A returns to protesting by not voting and spitting on the fake democracy of white supremacist britain and its little poodles and slaves
Team B votes SNP and brings about the end of Britain, the birth of Scotland, the end of Labour and the cornering of mjp A and mjp B
Team C starts to think about independent candidates, jumping the tory ship, eradicating protest votes and creating new indy votes, taking them away from tories seat by seat, resignation by resignation, by-election by by-election, what remains of Team A remains under the Labour label in parliament, or affiliated parties, and works with the new Team C
mjp A and B remain racistly galvanised
mjp C is horrified and helps Team C and Team A
leading to (later in the era) –
Team B – no longer relevant
Team A votes for AC coalition
Team C votes for AC coalition
mjp C votes for AC coalition
mjp A and mjp B will vote Tory
result: AC coalition wins and endures and tory party vanishes forever
(will check all that later, tomorrow, and make sure it says what I want it to say and that there are no communication errors)
I don’t believe Mr Corbyn’s call to join Labour is sincere, this morning.
One thing is true – if Labour stops their minimal calling out of Islamophobia when it’s no longer an election tool, it just goes to show how much anyone in this land really gives a shit, other than the hardcore of Teams A and B and C, about Middle England’s rampant racism and islamophobia.
As for the media and institutions, unabashed by the fact that the tinges-are-funny corp was 100% defeated and that the SNP with its Corbyn-like anti-centrist policies had a total victory, they want to say “see, it’s Corbyn’s fault, he’s too left wing” – what they really mean, and we know it, their stooges and goons all say so to me in private, the ones who treat me as a human – is “you SEE what happens when we have an attempt at a British leader who disobeys our American Overlords? Tut tut. We MUST only have leaders who obey our American Overlords.”
http://www.tvhobo.com/share.php?a=1&sheet=136
John Mann appears to be the perennial attack dog, always railing against his perception of the traitorous ‘left’,where does he get all that spare time and energy to pursue his personal ‘crusade?
Israel.
I just subscribed. I couldn’t before, I was in a dire financial situation, but I’m a little better now. Best of luck.
So typical of the BBC. An institution which itself is supported by socialist principles turns on the hands that feed it, whilst begging us to support its ‘public’ socialist funding status, all this while deliberately siding up to Neo-liberal Autocrats, and attacking the very concept of socialism!
I mean how fucked in the head is the BBC? Seriously? How can the BBC hypocritically support the sell-off of the NHS by supporting the very people and institutions that should be an anathema to it? How can the BBC have the utter gaul to claim it alone is deserving of socialist support (in the form of us paying a tv licence), but the NHS is worthy of being privatised?
The BBC has behaved so badly in all of this, that it is literally guilty of being a traitor to its own funding principles. The BBC was and is a Socialist experiment, publicly funded and backed by law. The BBC has always claimed it is there for OUR benefit, but it insists on not just backing those who would see it privatised, but harming those who would actually defend it.
I am calling here for the BBC to no longer be allowed to stay a public entity. The BBC should be sold off to private investors, it should become exactly what it has campaigned to avoid, and it should no longer receive socialist licence-fee support, and be forced to compete with other private enterprises.
I am saying this as a person who has frequently supported the public status of the Socialist BBC, who has signed petitions to keep the BBC public, and who valued the BBC above all other Media (no longer). The NHS and the BBC both shared the fact that they were funded and supported by Socialist values and principles, now the BBC has sided with those that would destroy the NHS, our Democracy, and our Country. In fact the BBC is one of the largest traitors in our country, and is already run like it is private entity, except for its funding.
The BBC has gone from being a co-jewel in the crown of this nation, to being a murderer in the vein of Cain, murdering its brother Abel (the NHS) because it is loved above even the BBC. Cain killed his brother because he was jealous of Abel getting God’s favour. The BBC (Cain), has actively supported the destruction of its much loved brother The NHS (Abel), and is complicit in its attempted murder.
The BBC does not deserve to be funded in this very intimate and special socialist way. For the first time in my life, I am going to say that actually, the last thing we need is a Privatised NHS alongside a Publicly-funded BBC. We need to flip the script. The BBC should be sacrificed to the capitalist, Neo-liberal God it now loves, and the money from that sale should go into ensuring the NHS comes back into full public ownership.
I have no more love of the BBC, in fact this last year has sealed the deal. The BBC has become my most hated media provider on Earth, nay in existence. All who work for that dishonest piece of garbage media need to know that it is no longer deserving of it’s socialist status, and that it should be sold off and privatised so that the NHS (which is by far more valuable) may live.
I will from now sign every ‘save the BBC’ petition in the negative, that is to say, whenever someone asks me to help keep the BBC public, I will put my name to making it private. I will also campaign to have IT, not The NHS, suffer privatisation. At the end of the day The BBC has already sold itself out, and what is unforgivable is that it lied to us, and deliberately undermined democracy and our democratic process in order to ‘fix’ the election for the benefit of its Neo-liberal and extreme Capitalist lovers.
It is time to end The BBC’s gross hypocrisy and lies.
Sell the BBC to save The NHS!
Punish ‘Auntie’ to save our ‘Mother’ NHS.
Fuck the BBC and its Neo-liberal agenda, they behave like a for profit, private corporation already, it’s about time they were funded like one, instead of robbing us blind with its anti-democratic, treasonous behaviour.
If we had seen the actions against Corbyn happening in another country such as Russia, what would the BBC have to say about it, particularly the result.
The BBC seem very sensitive about claims of right-wing bias. That’s because for years they have colluded with the Tories and right-wing media in posing as left-wing – in this way to shift the debate rightwards and portray the BBC’s establishment news as vigorous and anti-establishment. This election campaign and the BBC’s disgraceful coverage should now have alerted all but the most gullible to the role of the BBC as cheerleaders for the establishment, the Tories, and their donors and backers across the world.
I’m afraid the only thing the media will understand is being hit in the pocket. Boycott the BBC and the press is my advice.
In the future, the Labour party needs to be disciplined in it’s approach to MSN.
No Labour MP should give an interview to the SUN, Mail, Express, without having a Solicitor in the interview to corroborate the interview and answer’s, also record all interviews with the MSN.
Labour should concentrate on the Internet, Facebook and other online services, the Paper news is coming to an end.
IF any Labour MP gives an interview to any of the above msn sources and failing to follow the above procedure, they should be sanctioned.
Having said all that the next leader of the Labour party needs to be ruthless in their approach and install order and discipline to the party.
The electorate has shown over the last 3 elections that they do not want a Labour party that is perceived to be too far to the left, but they will support a center left party.
You start well but end so badly. The center left has been comprehensively rejected by the electorate. it is only the mainstream media that continues to push the notion that it has not. Mainly because the MSN knows that if Labour retreats to this route it will be in the wilderness for decades.
With respect, we got slaughtered this election by being indisciplined and having a Manifesto that started well, but got lost in the edited add on’s + Corbyn was the 2nd biggest subject on the doorsteps after Brexit, the man was Toxic.
The next leader of the Labour party needs to be some one the electorate can identify with, so for me it should be some one who is from the North of England.
Maybe Long-Bailey with Starmer as the Deputy, and give Liz Nando, Jess Phillips and Angela Raynor TOP roles in the shadow cabinet, and hold the Torys to call when they retract their promises.
One other thing, the Labour party can claim a pyrhric victory if the Torys enshrine the NHS in law, we can claim that at last the Troy party has accepted the context, also we can claim that the Torys are implementing our policy’s if it right they will bring back Bursary’s for nurses.
Oddly enough I don’t know anyone who actually watches BBC anymore. As I don’t either, and don’t have intention of doing so. Neither do I pay for a TV licence.
In a conversation with the private TV licence collector. I made an official complaint of rudeness, about a comment made to me by one of their telephone operators.
I have been left alone ever since.
I was looking forward to visit by one of those detector vans. I asked the.complaint manager if he could make sure they came to check me in the afternoon and could he let me know a week before so I could get some nice chocolate biscuits in for their visit.
He told me that it would be very unlikely that I would get a visit, and not to worry about what their favourite tea bags were.
I think that warning advert about those vans is a complete lie BBC. I have been waiting for six years now, nothing, no sign of a van, not even when I request a visit. It’s nice to have a bit of company being stuck at home all day on my own.