Jonathan Oliver

DIE BBC gegenübergestellten Anklagen des gestern Abend der Pro-Brüssel Vorspannung, während es aufgedeckt wurde, daß die Korporation £141m „in den Weiche“ Darlehen vom europäischen Anschluß herausgenommen hatte.

Die Rundfunkstation hat drei verschiedene niedrigverzinsliche Darlehen von der Eu-unterstützten Investitionsbank (EIB) herausgenommen um die Expansion seines wachsenden kommerziellen Reiches zu finanzieren.

Es tauchte auch auf, daß das BBC Bewilligungen vom EU wert £1.4m über letzten fünf Jahre empfangen hat.

Die Brüssel Abkommen werfen unbeholfene Fragen für die Korporation über seine Deckung der europäischen Angelegenheiten und seines sprießenden profitieren-bildenden Armes deren Interessen auf die Eigenschaft verlängern und veröffentlichen und des Internets auf.

Die Details der Darlehen und der Bewilligungen, die zurück sechs Jahre ausdehnen, tauchten in einem Brief auf, der Bob Spink von Zarin Patel, der Direktor des BBCS Finanz, eine konservative Wartungstafel geschrieben wurde.

Das erste £66m Darlehen 2003 wurde verwendet, um „zu finanzieren paßte-heraus“ von einem neuen Gebäude in der Mittel-Dorfentwicklung des BBCS in Westlondon, das später für einen Profit verkauft wurde. Das zweite Darlehen für £25m und der Third für £50m wurden zu BBC aufgenommen, das, der profitieren-bildende Arm der Korporation, um für den Erwerb von überseerechten zu den Programmen zu zahlen weltweit ist, die durch das BBC in Großbritannien gebildet wurden.

Die EIB hat sich als „autonomer Körper beschrieben, der bis zur Finanzinvestition eingestellt wird, die europäische Integration fördert, indem sie EU-politische Richtlinien förderte“.

Es spezialisiert sich, auf, niedrigverzinsliche Darlehen zur Verfügung zu stellen unterhalb der normalen handelsüblichen Sätze. Jedoch lehnte das BBC ab, genau freizugeben, welche Rate die EIB auflud.

Der BBC Brief, geschrieben in Erwiderung auf eine parlamentarische Frage, gibt auch eine Reihe Bewilligungen frei, um zu helfen, pädagogische on-line-Programme zu finanzieren und das BBC Archiv zu konservieren.

Spink sagte gestern, daß er sich hinunter eine Common-Bewegung das BBC für das Annehmen des Bargeldes verurteilend setzen würde: „Ich werde betroffen, daß die Unabhängigkeit und die Objektivität des BBC durch die Finanzierung vom EU unsachgemäß beeinflußt worden sein können.“

Ein BBC Wortführer verweigerte jede mögliche Pro-Brüssel Vorspannung: „Es gab keine redaktionellen Verpflichtungen whatsoever angebracht zu den drei EIB Darlehen. Die kommerziellen Geschäfte Des BBCS gehen zur Investitionsbank im Vergleich mit jeder anderen Handelsbank aus lediglich kommerziellen Gründen.“

He added: “The BBC occasionally receives some EU funding in relation to specific educational or research and development projects.”

However, the size of the EU loans highlights the rapid growth in the BBC’s commercial activities, which are kept separate from the core programme-making funded by the £3.5 billion a year licence fee.

Critics question how commercial contracts fit into the BBC’s “public services” remit.

TELEVISION Quality seems to be the very last thing on BBC execs mind, writes Declan Lynch

THERE was a general air of stupefaction when the BBC bleeped the word “faggot” from Fairytale Of New York. But those of you who were reading this column last week were not surprised at all. No, you’ll have smiled knowingly, remembering that opening line about the the BBC being dead, killed by many things but mainly by the wrong sort of people rising to positions of power within that once-great corporation.

With exquisite timing, on the very next day, we learn that someone in a position of power at the BBC has nothing better to be doing than censoring perfectly good songs for no good reason. And within this sad vignette, we can glimpse the broader calamity which has reduced the BBC to the level of any other channel of the 800,000 currently available.

It reveals the sort of thinking which seems to take almost everything into account, apart forn the one thing which matters — and lest we forget, the one thing that matters, the only thing that should concern any BBC person in relation to any piece of work, is whether it is any good.

Is Fairytale Of New York any good ? Yes, it is very good indeed.

That should be the only issue at stake here, the rest is all form-filling.

Because it’s hard to be good.

It can take a lot out of you, being good. And if you’re spending any time at all worrying about offending people, you probably won’t manage it.

In fact, you’ll end up being offensive anyway, to those of us who like good things. Ronan Keating offended me, for example, when he changed “you cheap lousy faggot”, to “you’re cheap and you’re haggard”, but I didn’t complain about it much. Until now.

You also encounter this fearful mentality in other areas. “What’s in this for women?” they might ask a programme-maker, who should reply that if something is good, then everyone, including women, will feel the benefit. So that’s what is in it for women — its goodness.

Ah, but that’s not what is meant at all. These fearful types would be perfectly happy if the work was a complete load of cobblers, so long as there’s something in it for women. And seemingly, there’s a lot of types like that in the BBC these days, wasting everyone’s time on stuff that doesn’t matter, asking all the wrong questions.

THERE wasn’t much for women in Himself the recent profile on Setanta of the golfer Christy O’Connor (Senior). So why did they make it?

Something to do with the fact that Christy O’Connor seemed for many years to be one of the few Irish people who were any good at anything, in this case the game of golf. He was also very good at drinking and staying up late and generally having a wonderful time, after which he could still be standing on the first tee at first light, starting with a solid par and then going birdie, birdie, birdie on his way to shooting a new course record of 62.

In fact, in these days, when the ancient recreations of men are increasingly reviled, there would probably be some sort of a law against Christy O’Connor, or “Himself”, as he is known to his butties, in stereotypical fashion.

Indeed, if a female equivalent inspired a documentary called Herself, it would be seen as faintly patronising.

Yet, as we searched the film in vain for something that might be offensive to lesbians and gay men, we could only agree with contributor Niall Toibin, who ventured the view that the two greatest Irishmen of all time are the singer John McCormack and the same Christy O’Connor. Were they any good? Yes, they were very good indeed. In fact, they were great. And, while you can see a plaque to my fellow Athlone man McCormack on the front of an excellent Chinese takeaway in the town, you can remember “Himself” on DVD.

THEN again there is such a thing as prejudice, and we must guard against it. Having seen Mr Jacob Zuma, the new head of the ANC on an RTE news report for approximately 45 seconds, I formed the iron conviction that this man would be the scourge of Africa.

Just a few key words like “acquitted on rape charges”, and “massive corruption claims” led me to jump to the conclusion that this man needs to be watched carefully..

I can only hope that I’m wrong about this. For once.

The Book of Poor Ould Fellas, written by Declan Lynch and Arthur Mathews, published by Hodder Headline,€14.32 makes an ideal last-minute Christmas present

- Declan Lynch

By Janet Daley

What is the BBC for? You might think that there was a pretty straightforward answer to that question, or at least that the answer provided by Lord Reith (”to inform, educate and entertain”) could scarcely be bettered for simplicity and felicitousness. But, oh dear, no - this is a more complex world than the one into which the BBC was born.

So the great Sphinx-like question hangs over the corporation like a threat of death. In fact, that apparently philosophical inquiry, to which the BBC has devoted endless internal meditation and debate, is designed to address a logically intractable dilemma summed up in two rather more specific questions.

Quite apart from the extraordinary (when you think of it) capacity to have people imprisoned for refusing to pay to support their activities, why should the BBC have the crushing advantage over its competitors, not only in television and radio, but on the internet as well, that is provided by a huge public subsidy?

And, given that it has that £3.2 billion subsidy, why should it then seek to compete ruthlessly with commercial rivals, for all the world as if it were as dependent on advertising revenue to survive as they were?

Once uttered, those questions answer themselves - or rather, it becomes clear that they have no answer. There is no good reason why the BBC should have exclusive access to an ever-increasing subsidy when it behaves just like one more crassly competitive broadcasting company, especially as its public funding allows it to distort the markets in which it competes by, for example, offering humungous fees to celebrity presenters or running a news website whose vast resources no newspaper site could possibly match.

That, apparently, is the sound conclusion of the Conservative Party, which plans to endorse an idea that has been going the rounds for some time: that the money provided by the licence fee for public service broadcasting should cease to be monopolised by the BBC. A share of it should be available to any broadcasting outfit that proposes to make programmes deemed to be in the public interest. Not only would this be more just, but it would be a stimulus to all the channels to raise their game.

British television broadcasting is plunging downmarket in a desperate race for the “mass audience”. Serious documentaries and grown-up political discussion have been the biggest losers.

ITV has axed its last remaining political programme, Channel 4 clings desperately to the prestige of its single evening news broadcast, and BBC News 24 (which should have been the last redoubt of proper current affairs programming) is killing off Dateline London and Head to Head.

Ironically, in the supposedly cut-throat commercial environment of American television, no major network or cable news channel would dream of ditching the great flagship political discussion programmes - Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Late Edition, Fox on Sunday - which appeal to small, specialised audiences but are hugely influential.

Being able to bid for public funding to make serious, high-quality programmes, whether factual documentaries, political debates or original drama, would provide a counter-balancing influence for broadcasting organisations which now have to rely on crude market share to attract advertising revenue.

It would also put an end to the existential musings of the great BBC monolith (What are we for? Why are we here? Can we go on?) which, in the great tradition of metaphysical system building, have produced sinister, self-serving results. For, in fact, the BBC - with the help of some credulous parliamentarians - has answered its own question with a huge leap into the social policy business.

The new BBC Charter resolves the insoluble dilemma of why the corporation should be treated differently from all other broadcasting companies by elevating it on to another plane entirely. You may not have been aware of this (even though you pay for it) but the BBC - rather like M&S food in those memorable TV adverts - is not just a broadcaster. In the words of its new chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, it must be much more than a mere “commissioner, producer and transmitter of wonderful programmes”.

In order to justify its unique role (and its unique form of income) it should engage with licence payers as “citizens” as well as audiences. There is a new Charter commitment to “sustain citizenship and civil society”, which is elaborated as “reflecting and strengthening cultural identities”, as well as “promoting awareness of different cultures and alternative viewpoints”.

As Sir Michael put it in a speech last month, the BBC is being “challenged to play its part in reinforcing social cohesion in an increasingly diverse society”. He went on to give his personal commitment to that objective in these terms: “All of my previous work has convinced me that diversity both within and between local communities is a source of strength rather than weakness - and that the UK will become stronger the more it recognises and builds on that diversity. The BBC can and should help with this.”

Whether you agree with those sentiments is neither here nor there. Who precisely is Sir Michael, not to say all those hundreds of faceless programme producers, writers and editors, to decide that the UK will become stronger if it embraces diversity? Who elected them?

Sir Michael’s account of the BBC’s mission is explicitly, tendentiously and presumptuously political. Whether licence fee payers believe that their country will become stronger “the more it recognises and builds on” diversity is a matter between them and their mandated government. It is entirely inappropriate for the BBC to enforce a particular systematic view of how society should develop and how, as Sir Michael himself notes, its rapidly changing structure should be addressed.

Engaging in a clash of overtly political objectives is properly the business of political parties or opposing lobby groups, not a supposedly neutral, publicly subsidised broadcaster.

If there is a case for diversity, it must be among the viewpoints of broadcasters themselves. But I doubt that was what Sir Michael had in mind.

Ben Dowell

Two-hour classes to teach the BBC’s editorial staff how to avoid deceiving viewers are likely to cost around £500,000, the corporation revealed today.

The director of the BBC’s college of journalism, Vin Ray, said that the bill included cover for some of the 17,000 employees participating in the sessions.

“The people doing the course are being paid anyway so we estimate that the cost will not exceed £500,000,” he told journalists at a press briefing today.

Ray is overseeing the initiative, Safeguarding Trust, which the BBC hopes all editorial staff will have completed by the spring.

The programme was introduced to address viewer concerns after the BBC became embroiled in a number of deception rows.

These included the so-called Crowngate affair, in which a misleading clip of the Queen was played at a press launch, and the use of a fake winner on a Blue Peter competition, which led to an unprecedented £50,000 fine from media watchdog Ofcom.

Each Safeguarding Trust session lasts around two hours and involves 20 people participating in a “workshop situation”.

The session begins with an introductory video, featuring a lengthy clip from Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker’s BBC4 shows Screenwipe.

This is followed by BBC news reporter Nick Higham taking viewers through the issues and assessing the distinction between “artifice and deception”.

The remainder of the video shows footage from workshops with members of the public discussing the issue of trust and specific programme clips.

These include an interview involving BBC news presenter Sophie Raworth that contains a number of cutaway and so-called noddy shots as well as a controversial Newsnight film about Gordon Brown that was edited in the wrong order.

Staff taking part in the sessions will be given feedback from the focus groups and told the BBC’s position on each of the clips.

In most cases, the BBC was happy with the editorial conduct, although the re-editing of the Newsnight film has not been deemed acceptable.

So far around 4,300 staff across the whole of the BBC have attended the course, with the remaining 12,700 expected to complete it by March.

Thw BBC director general, Mark Thompson, is to attend his session on Friday, while his deputy Mark Byford has already completed the course.

Anne Morrison, the BBC’s controller of network production, said the programme was not “an honesty course”.

“We cannot teach people to be honest in two hours,” she said. “If they are not honest we should not be employing them.”

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has deliberately distorted Iranian history in a recently published news report.

In the news report ‘Tajik capital’s last Lenin plea’ published on its website on Nov. 9th 2007, BBC deliberately distorted the Iranian history by claiming the 9th century Persian poet Rudaki was ‘Tajik’.

“The communists want to move the statue to their party headquarters when the park in which it stands is redesigned. It will be replaced by a statue of the ninth-century Tajik poet, Rudaki…. They believe a statue of Rudaki, the founder of Tajik literature, is a more fitting ideological figure for the city.”

The BBC knows or should have known that Rudaki was in fact Iranian (not Tajik) and numerous reliable sources including ‘Britannica’ have confirmed him to be the ‘Father of Persian poetry’ and the first Iranian poet to compose poems in the ‘New Persian’ in Arabic alphabet.

Rudaki was born c. 859, Rudak, Khorasan of Iran. A talented singer and instrumentalist, Rudaki served as a court poet to the Samanid ruler Nasr II (914-943) in Bukhara until he fell out of favor in 937. He ended his life in wretched poverty.

Approximately 100,000 couplets are attributed to Rudaki, but of that enormous output, fewer than 1,000 have survived, and these are scattered among many anthologies and biographical works. He died in 940/941, Rudak.

SBB/HGH

The BBC has admitted adding the sound of babies crying to footage of quintuplets born to a Russian woman. The original footage, distributed by an Oxford hospital of the five girls, had no audio.

But when the story ran on BBC Breakfast the clips had sound, even though the babies had respirators in their mouths.

“Although we don’t believe viewers were materially misled, we should not have added sound to these pictures,” a BBC statement said.

Other broadcasters including Sky and ITN ran clips of the footage without audio.

A BBC spokesman said the corporation should have left the footage alone: “We received the film without sound and on reflection we should have kept it that way.”

The sound was removed from the story by the Six O’Clock News bulletin after it was commented upon by the hospital.

The admission follows a series of recent broadcasting scandals over authenticity.

On September 11, 2007, the BBC published an article called “9/11 demolition theory challenged“, which described a research paper written by University of Cambridge senior lecturer Keith Seffen.

Dr. Seffen, the BBC said, had constructed a mathematical model of the World Trade Center collapses which showed that “once the collapse of the twin towers began, it was destined to be rapid and total.”

According to the BBC, Dr. Seffen proceeded from this mathematical model to describe the destruction of the twin towers as a “very ordinary thing to happen”.

The BBC also reported that Dr. Seffen’s findings “are published” in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.

The Journal of Engineering Mechanics (JEM) is a monthly publication of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). A search of the ASCE website turned up no mention of a Keith Seffen, nor any mention of any “Seffen”.

I wrote a brief item about this that morning.

1) September 11, 2007:
UK Engineer: WTC ‘Collapses’ Were ‘A Very Ordinary Thing’

Shortly after my piece was published, the BBC page was changed to say that that Dr. Seffen’s findings “are to be published” in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.

I noted the change in an update to my item, where I also provided a link to two different mirrors of the original text. I also noticed the distinctive smell of manure. So I kept digging.

It became apparent obvious that the BBC piece was based on a press release from Cambridge, which said (in the opening paragraph) that Dr. Seffen’s findings were “published”, and (much later) that they were “to be published”.

Apparently this self-contradiction didn’t raise any eyebrows. But it was not the only problem with the press release.

Virtually every paragraph was either misleading or downright false. And it showed very clearly that Seffen’s approach was not scientific, but political. I wrote about the press release on September 14th.

2) September 14, 2007:
Bad Science: Keith Seffen And The WTC ‘Collapse’

Nearly eight weeks later, after repeated requests for clarification (from myself and others) had been ignored, I posted a compendium of the coverage Seffen and his paper had received, noting that it had been largely uncritical but remarkably sparse.

3) November 5, 2007:
Seffen’s Folly: Attempted 9/11 Hoax By Cambridge And The BBC Was A Failure

The following day I noted some of the many unanswered questions and documented a series of requests for clarification which had been ignored by Dr. Seffen and by Dr. Ross Corotis, the editor of the JEM.

4) November 6, 2007:
Where’s The Paper? Did The BBC And A Cambridge Don Commit Fraud To Cover Up Mass Murder?

Several readers of the latter two stories joined in the effort to obtain further information. Some of them had academic credentials, and their requests stirred Dr. Corotis to action.

Two days later, I was pleased to report on a message from the ASCE, saying that according to their records, Dr. Seffen’s paper is scheduled for publication in the February 2008 JEM.

5) November 8, 2007:
WTC ‘Collapse’ Research Cited In September Is Scheduled To Be Published In February

This was good news for two reasons. It marked the first public commitment from the ASCE to publish the paper. And it provided confirmation of the fact that the paper had not been published when it was cited (and referred to as published) by the BBC and others.

Then another reader — one with even more impressive credentials — started digging in a different place, and unearthed a copy of the paper itself.

The following day I posted the first few pages of Seffen’s paper (in HTML) on my website

6) November 9, 2007:
Introducing Keith Seffen’s “Progressive Collapse Of The WTC: A Simple Analysis”

I also provided a link to the entire paper (a small PDF file).

http://winterpatriot.pbwiki.com/f/seffen_simple_analysis.pdf

True to the description provided by the press release, the paper turned out to be worthless as science, but not entirely meaningless.

7) November 11, 2007:
Keep Your Hats On: Keith Seffen’s “Mathematical Model Of The WTC Collapse” Is Incoherent, Inappropriate, And Almost Meaningless

Via the fantastic Winter Patriot site, make sure you add them to your bookmarks

Staff accuse ‘arrogant’ new trustees of standing in the way of radical reform

By Tim Luckhurst

The cuts endorsed by the BBC’s controversial new governing body, the BBC Trust, have started to bite. On Monday management briefed unions on planned cuts in news coverage, intensifying fears about the future of flagship shows including BBC 1’s one and six o’clock bulletins.

With mass redundancies looming, the pressure on director-general Mark Thompson is intense, but senior colleagues say the structure of the corporation has never been less able to support its leader.

“No sitting director-general of the BBC has been sacked by the chairman who appointed him,” said one of Mr Thompson’s closest allies. “But Michael Grade has gone, and Mark is worried that he might not be in the post this time next year. Sir Michael Lyons intervenes constantly and intensely. It is very different from the days of the old board of governors.”

Sir Michael, the one-time Bennite Labour councillor and former chief executive of Birmingham City Council, accepted the chairmanship of the trust in April. BBC managers describe trustees’ behaviour in recent months as arrogant. An executive complained: “They are strutting around asserting themselves in that awful way people do when they are trying to work out what they are for.”

Supporters of the director-general fear tension between management and regulators will destroy the united front the BBC needs to survive its travails. They warn that the corporation is too fragile for a big clash between trustees and management, but fear confrontation is looming.

“The BBC is going through some of the biggest challenges it has ever faced,” said John Whittingdale, chairman of the House of Commons Media Select Committee. “You have the crisis of trust over issues such as the Queen documentary and Blue Peter and at the same time Mr Thompson is setting out his strategic plan. It is inevitable that the BBC Trust will take an active interest, but it should not intervene before management decisions are made.”

Under the old system managers managed and governors defended their decisions. The trustees are less docile. They have views and they are constitutionally entitled to express them on behalf of the licence-payer. Thompson supporters fear he may carry the can for decisions he did not make.

Observers were surprised by the “salami-slicing” strategy Mr Thompson calls “Delivering Creative Future”. The joke inside the BBC is that it is not creative and there is no future. But such humour disguises concern that the DG’s freedom has been curtailed. His supporters blame the trust for insisting that the BBC must continue making programmes for every taste despite a huge funding shortfall.

“It is an unsustainable position in the digital era,” said a top BBC journalist. “If there is no market segment from which the BBC can legitimately withdraw, then we are condemned to spread resources too thinly. Mark’s instinct was to be radical. The trust made that impossible.”

Adrian Sanders MP, Liberal Democrat member of the select committee, agreed that something appeared to have diluted Mr Thompson’s radical instincts. “Members of the committee from all parties were very surprised that the BBC did not come up with a proposal to dispose of some channels. There was a real expectation that it would.”

Mr Thompson had encouraged that expectation. In March he said that the BBC would “stop doing certain things” and emphatically rejected salami-slicing departmental budgets. Why did he retreat? Insiders blame the trust, which, they say, is intensely conservative and determined to preserve all the corporation’s services, no matter how limited its budget.

But it should surprise nobody that the trust is actively interventionist. A trust spokeswoman said that was not how the programme of cuts was devised. “Trustees tested and challenged what the BBC management put forward. The trust has been very independent in its thinking. It starts from a different perspective from its predecessor. The trust represents a different interest from the governors: the licence-payers.”

David Miller

A Spinwatch investigation has revealed that journalists working for the Services Sound and Vision Corporation (SSVC) have been commissioned to provide news reports to the BBC. The BBC has been using these reports as if they were genuine news. In fact, the SSVC is entirely funded by the Ministry of Defence as a propaganda operation, which according to its own website makes a ‘considerable contribution’ to the ‘morale’ of the armed forces.

In the US, Washington has been rocked by the scandal of fake journalists. The Bush administration has been paying actors to produce news, paying journalists to write propaganda, and paying Republican party members to pose as journalists. In the UK this has been reported with our customary shake of the head at the bizarre nature of US politics and media. Implicitly we are relieved that, however bad things are here, at least we are not as bad as they are.

But Spinwatch can reveal that we have our very own fake journalists operating in the UK. The government pays for their wages and they provide news as if they were normal journalists rather than paid propagandists. Normally they work in a little known outfit with the acronym BFBS, which stands for British Forces Broadcasting Service. BFBS exists to ‘entertain and inform’ British armed forces around the world and is entirely funded by the British Ministry of Defence. BFBS is run by the SSVC. But on this occasion no mention of Ministry of defence funding was made. She was introduced simply as a reporter ‘from the British Forces Broadcasting Service’ who ‘has been embedded with the Scots Guards’. As one wag inside the BBC puts it, this suggests a process of ‘double embedding’, first working for the MoD and second embedding with a regiment. The report began:

‘Route 6 is the main road North out of Basra. It runs through the badlands of Iraq’s marsh Arabs They make a living from crime - carjackings, smuggling and murder are common place. It’s also the scene of an age old feud between two warring tribes.’ (25 November 2004)

Naturally enough, we are told that the regiment in which the reporter is ‘embedded’ has resolved these tribal problems by negotiating ‘a ceasefire’ following which ‘ the two tribes had had their first nights sleep in several months’.

The British Army view of the Iraqi people can be less than sympathetic. The army crackdown on looting early in the occupation was codenamed ‘Operation Ali Baba’ after the folk tale ‘Ali Baba and the forty thieves’. Issuing orders for Operation Ali Baba the commanding officer gave what the Army now acknowledges was an illegal order to ‘work them hard’. This led predictably to torture, only discovered when some brave soul in a photo developing shop reported the resulting record of abuse to the police. The view of the Iraq population as thieves is evidently shared by both torturers and propagandists.

There were interviews with five separate British soldiers including one with a ‘master sniper’ brought in to counter resistance attacks on the Iraqi police. But there are no interviews with any Iraqis. The report concludes with a straight forward piece of propaganda for the occupation: ‘While the Scots Guards remain the ceasefire is likely to hold strong. There’s been little trouble in the area since the peace was brokered and the ceasefire has been extended to December the first. But the Iraqi police and national guard still lack confidence and credibility to keep the peace on their own and should the fighting resume, the governor of Basra has given the go ahead for the Scots Guards to use more force to make route 6 safe again.’ Even although the report has itself hinted that the fighting is targetting the occupation, we are left with the extraordinary statement that the army in illegal ocupation of Iraq is actually a ‘peacekeeping’ force.

According to the editor of Good Morning Scotland the piece ‘was a bit a of a one-off because she happened to have been embedded with the Royal Scots. Until a few months ago Martha was a correspondent here at BBC Scotland (had been for several years) and is therefore a journalist we know and trust. ‘It was quite an unsual commission’. Unusual indeed, but not unique. Further inquiries by Spinwatch have revealed that another item from a different BFBS journalist was broadcast on Radio Scotland on Christmas day 2004. Insiders at BBC Scotland are livid about this, indeed several have contacted Spinwatch to pass on their concerns. One reports that colleagues have remarked on the ‘complete lack of balance’ of the piece and one described it as ‘an audio press release for the Army’.*

But were the BBC right to say that the journalist concerned was one ‘we know and trust’? Certainly there has been a significant wave of journalists from the mainstream media signing up to work for the government since the election of the Blair government. Alastair Campbell is only the most famous. BBC journalists too have made the transition to propagandist as in the example of Mark Laity who became a spin doctor at NATO from whom no further work was commissioned..

The BBC editor claimed in defence that ‘I should stress too that BFBS is not controlled by the MOD. It is funded by them in much the same way the BBC World Service is funded by the Foreign Office. Their journalists are actually employed by the SSVC, the Services Sound and Vision Corporation, which is a charitable organisation with editorial independence from the MoD.’ (email to the author, December 2004)

This is not quite accurate. A quick visit to the website of the Services Sound and Vision Corporation (SSVC) which is the parent of the BFBS reveals that ‘Our work makes a considerable contribution to the maintenance of the efficiency and morale of the three Services. Our activities are carried out directly for the Ministry of Defence. Any profits are donated towards Forces’ welfare.’ Whatever might be said about the World Service relationship with the Foreign Office, it has not ever been accused of donating its profits to the welfare of Britain’s diplomats. The notion that the SSVC which is wholly funded by the MoD serves any other purpose than propaganda is fanciful.

The BBC editor also noted: ‘Nonetheless we did flag up in the cue that she was embedded for the BFBS.’ They did indeed, but very few radio listeners are familiar with what the BFBS is. This is true of the whole network of propaganda agencies in the UK is little known, but anyone with an internet connection can find out about the organisations involved. The Foreign Office runs a network of fake news operations and has done for years. In recently times these have been contracted out to private production companies with the helpful effect that the government funding is further camouflaged. They have also been extended markedly to focus more cetnrally on the middle east since 2001. One such is the London Press Service which is described as follows on the government I-uk site: ‘an agency offering the latest British headline news, news round-ups, features and pictures for use by journalists overseas.’

This is a rather coy way to describe a government propaganda service. Click on its website for an admission of the defining feature of this whole network of agencies; that the news on the site ‘is for free use by journalists’. Look in vain for an indication of who really funds this service. All you will see is a notice at the bottom of the home page : ‘The london Press Service is operated and maintained by Intelfax Ltd.’ Intelfax is in turn an independent production company but the London Press Service is funded entirely by the Foreign Office.

Or take the example of British Satellite News (BSN) broadcast for free over the Reuters World News Service. According to its website, BSN ‘is a free television news and features service, which provides you with coverage of worldwide topical events and stories from a British perspective. Our dedicated team of experienced television journalists specialise in producing topical stories that inform and entertain a global audience. ‘ Again not much in the way of a clue that this is a fake news site. BSN is run by a company called World Television which does work for the BBC such as the live coverage of the TUC conference and also works for multinationals such as GSK and Nestle. The Foreign Office helpfully tells us that BSN has ‘a particular focus on the Arab/Islamic world.’ It also mentions that BSN ’s fake news ‘is currently used by 35 broadcasters in the Middle East and over 440 worldwide.’ The secret of all this material is that it is not only free to use but that it is used as if it was genuine news and not British propaganda.

The UK is awash with fake news, of which the examples here are only a taste, it is just that we don’t pay much attention to it. The American scandals over fake news are played out against the background of some pretty clear laws forbidding propaganda with a disguised source within the borders of the US. There are no laws forbidding fake news in the UK. Perhaps we needs some.

It’s a matter of alarm and concern that there are so many people out there who still believe that the BBC is a balanced and fair-minded source of news and current affairs. That belief was, at best ill-founded and at worst, typical of the hypocrisy of a British self-image of decency and fair-mindedness which, through that peculiarly British imperialist institution, the public school, gave succeeding generations the ideological veneer and justification for an unabashed and rapacious colonialism.

So successful were Britain’s ruling classes in persuading themselves of their manifest destiny to rule –an ideology which gained serious promotion through Rudyard Kipling’s obnoxious caricature of the ruled as being the White Man’s burden– that both Britain’s rulers and their ruled came to believe in their own Victorian spin.

It was out of that national hypocrisy that the BBC was born in the twilight decades of Britain’s decayed raj when, despite the harsh face of colonialism, a Scottish Presbyterian, Lord Reith, was canny enough to disguise the BBC’s real purpose of control through the instilling of elitist values by giving it the motto, “Let Nation Speak Peace Unto Nation”!

Today, in the post-Blair vassal state of a United Kingdom itself in collapse, Reith’s motto has become nothing more than an embarrassment for a corporation that is increasingly recognized as being little more than an exclusive conduit for state propaganda. The greater majority of BBC personnel may, as reports suggest, like to consider themselves to be liberal-minded nice guys but the message that Aunty puts out to the world is one of totalitarianism and brazen warmongering.

Its present, wholly one-sided, coverage of the war crime that was the invasion of Iraq and the imperialist occupation of that country and Afghanistan is just a case in point. Another is its calculated avoidance of any mention of the stolen US elections of 2000 and 2004 where the people of the United States were, in effect, hijacked by a group of robber politicians and a corrupt judiciary. Another is its continued promotion of the official Bush-instigated conspiracy theory of 911 and its silence over the extremely suspicious events surrounding that other probable conspiracy, the London bombings of 7 July 2005.

One could keep on with a long list of the BBC’s embedded reportage of events emanating as straight spin from the state’s sources, both in London and Washington. Keeping out any real, critical political analysis and barring its airwaves to anyone other than the apologists of the British state and its Washington boss, it stubbornly insists on promoting Neocon ideologues such as the unhinged John Bolton who is constantly given BBC airtime long after having been discredited and fired from office.

BBC’s ‘Bonkers’ Bolton

All that is bad enough but the role that the BBC is playing is much worse and far more deceptive than that.

Using anodyne language, innuendo and subtle suggestion, the BBC inverts the reality of affairs by creating an alternative reality and reporting on that instead as the authentic world.

The British media are masters in the art of deceit, they don’t distort reality so much as manufacture another version, casually dismissing the truth as an unrepresentative oddity.

Outright deception, delivered in a regular voice and pleasing prose, even and chirpy of tone, triumphs, as honesty is crowded out by the brilliant ruse that presents telling the truth not as the presence of honesty, but the absence of etiquette ..

Kola, Medialens, 28 October 2007

BBC News 24 is the corporation’s flagship, satellite broadcaster of news and current affairs, hence given a razzle-dazzle imagery of up-to-date, global news reportage accompanied with the sound of an urgent, authoritative yet vibrant, drumming rhythm heard in every airport departure lounge and hometown settlement across the planet.

But, together with the rest of the corrupt BBC, News 24 is feeding you and me, twenty four seven three sixty-five, what is little more than a carefully packaged, unmitigated lie.

A case in point was News 24’s recently broadcast programme in its Our World series, “Do they know who we are?” ostensibly a piece on the rapid growth of electronic surveillance technology but hidden beneath the packaging actually its promotion as something desirable that the majority of people want.

The attention span of the average viewer is no more than a few, brief seconds so the message has got to be put across in the first moments. It is then reinforced over and over with a few variations included such as an opposing view or argument which is then immediately demolished.

So this piece of surveillance promotion starts with a cheerfully upbeat version of the Harry Lime Theme from the Third Man, zither and all. This sets the mood for a positive reaction from the audience. If a negative reaction were required, the music would be appropriately anxious, even disturbing.

Almost immediately a message flashes across the screen: “75% want more security.” After some impressive clips showing Silicon Valley scientists predicting the inevitability of increasingly hi-tech surveillance technology we are introduced to the ‘product’, in this case a Gameboy-like hand-held sensor which can detect the presence of terrorists hiding inside a building whose architecture is predictably Muslim. Even their breathing, we are told, can be sensed through walls by this wonder gadget.

Then, rather cleverly, the reporter takes us to a Muslim community in Forest Gate, London and we are reminded how the police had conducted a heavy-handed raid on “suspect terrorists” last year, leaving one man shot and wounded. If the police had been able to use these sensors, the reporter suggests, perhaps all that would have been avoidable. Makes you think doesn’t it?

We are shown a group of Muslims being introduced to this technology by the reporter who, in an apparent concession to his audience, point out that there had been some immediate complaints about the imagery in the promotional video showing Muslim architecture. “But as soon as the audience were shown the technology being used in Iraq they accepted it,” he claims.

He picks on a young member of the audience who says, “We don’t need to worry. Anyone can watch us.” And then another older man who agrees that this kind of sensor could be used for “legitimate intelligence.” Thus, using recorded soundbites in a highly selective way, we see how a Muslim audience is persuaded that these highly intrusive sensors can be used in situations of war or surveillance, either against the enemy or an innocent public who should have nothing to worry about from ‘legitimate intelligence’!

Strange, is it not, that a Muslim audience could be persuaded of its use in the Iraq war? You would have expected a massive, negative reaction. But no. Instead, capitalising on guilt feelings among Muslims, they are sold the product as justifiable under wartime conditions. Once this breakthrough is achieved, the audience has been softened-up enough to accept its use by police or ‘legitimate intelligence’ (whatever that may be!) against a public that should not worry if it has nothing to hide!

This last is regularly used by the promoters of increased surveillance technology and totalitarianization. If you’ve nothing to hide, why worry? Using an individual’s anxiety (ie that he might have something to hide from ‘the Law’) and the principle of the Big Lie we are bullied into accepting further encroachments on our right to privacy.

The Big Lie is based upon the idea that most everyone tells little lies from time to time. Little lies and dishonesties are, therefore, understandable and acceptable. It’s what we all do. But Big Lies, on the other hand, are neither comprehensible or acceptable. So, when subject to a Big Lie, part of us –the part which governs our ‘little me’, personal values– shuts down, unable to deal with the enormity of it. But another part keeps running and is forced to come to terms with the unacceptable, to accept that as the message comes to us from a source of authority then it must, has to be, true.

This process is sometimes described by the mind manupilaters in blatant fashion as ‘thinking the unthinkable’, ‘pushing the envelope’, or put in another way which remains unsaid, of being coerced into accepting the unacceptable.

This process is called Cognitive Dissonance, the process used here to extract the appropriate soundbites from an audience made to feel guilty about the ‘war on terrorism.’ Well, that’s ok then, we are led to think. If a Muslim audience can accept this new technology (for they do have a problem with terrorism, don’t they?) then it should be perfectly acceptable to us. Again, the projection of our guilt (but we do have things in our life we prefer to keep hidden!) onto Muslims (who we know are susceptible to becoming terrorists).

The key-phrase to sum up this event was obtained from a man in his (responsible) ‘thirties who agrees that such intrusive technology would be fine when used by “legitimate intelligence,” meaning government authorities. Again, the phrase begs so many questions as to what is and isn’t legitimate but we aren’t given time to dwell on that.

Instead, we are taken to the final, reinforcing summation: there are already 4 million CCTV cameras in Britain so is our private life safe? We are then told (sources not revealed) that 75% want more surveillance and this ‘fact’ is borne out by an ‘expert’ from the US National Security Agency, a body with a suitably authoritative name (how many people would know that the NSC is a US government spy agency?)

The promotion is ended with the same upbeat introductory theme.

Neat one, eh? Being of a mischievous, cynical nature I was left wondering if the BBC got a nice little hidden backhander from some Silicon Valley manufacturer for having given airtime to this promotional piece? With government cutbacks on BBC revenue it is increasingly having to privatize and commercialize its operations. So, while doing what the government tells it to do, in this case to promote the totalitarianization of Britain, why not make a few dollars on the side?

And, I couldn’t help keep thinking of those Muslims in Forest Gate, my febrile imagination hearing their repeated cries of indignation against the way so many of the audience had left that meeting, feeling that they had been utterly conned into unwittingly cooperating with a foxy Big Brother BBC.

Chimes of Freedom 
 

First, they axed Ozzie soap Neighbours. Then, they edited film footage of the Queen to make her look like a mardy old minnow.

Now, the BBC plans to recover a £6 billion “shortfall” by making cuts to the very departments that made it so well-respected – news, factual programming and children’s TV - resulting in up to 2,800 job losses over the next six years. Even the corporation’s world-famous broadcast journalists will not be spared in the mass cull.

As a child I hoped I’d grow up to become just like pearl-earring-wearing news correspondent Kate Adie or the late, great, crime-solving Jill Dando. Others idolized iconic Radio 4 presenters who helped to keep British culture and humour alive, or the Blue Peter presenters who pioneered educational entertainment and humanitarianism for children. It pains me that today’s equivalents, like Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, are being treated with such little respect. Even more disgraceful is the fact that Beeb bosses called its big-namers into “special meetings” when the ruckus began, urging them to stay on-side with the changes whilst leaving the rest of its workforce to rot in job-loss paranoia.

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s treatment of its hard-working, long-committed staff during recent talks has bought shame on one of the UK’s finest media institutions – with the company first discouraging strikes on site, then sending out template letters seeking volunteers for redundancy. Director general Mark Thompson has since become the face of blame for staff and general public alike, largely thanks to his act of coolly camouflaging a gross money-making scheme as a “cultural development” white paper.

Whilst other channels have always been twinned with the notion of soulless commerciality, the BBC has long considered itself a cut above. However, with its overpaid, outdated stars (inc. irritating one-trick pony Graham Norton) and ubiquitous desk monkey ‘executives’ being automatically saved from the big chop, this has been proven rather untrue. At the heart of the Beeb’s upcoming rebirth is NOT forward-thinking innovation as spouted by the salacious press office but a trust of rich, greedy dictators and a large sum of cash.

This, of course, begs the question: if all the BBC will be offering up from now on is second-rate news and more repeats, what exactly are us licence payers paying £100 a year for? Especially those of us who also pay to subscribe to satellite or cable packages but are still not spared from the terrestrial TV licence trap!

It’s hard to believe that the recent panic came as a result of the government announcing that the BBC’s licence fee would actually RISE, to £151.50 by 2012. Unfortunately, this was less than the Beeb had been expecting. Mr. Thompson responded by saying that the settlement figure left a “gap” of about £2bn over the six years. The BBC trust then asked Mr. Thompson to make further efficiency savings of 3% each year.

Sure, it’s a case of cause and effect - we all understand how the industry works and how the digital age has affected traditional TV - but why should cuts come from popular and informative programmes like Planet Earth and Top Gear? Short answer: money. Low-brow ‘entertainment’ such as Strictly Come Dancing is far more lucrative and thereby far more valuable to the Beeb.

Speaking of the digital age - with the BBC now launching its own online streaming service (where you can download your favourite BBC programmes directly to your computer for free) what right does the corporation have to demand an ever-rising fee for a dying medium?

It is becoming clear that the name of the once-prestigious, classically-British BBC is now permanently soiled. If the TV giant plans to ‘reinvent’ itself by pumping more big-number, no-brainer reality shows into the TV Guide, why don’t they sell out like compadres ITV, C4 and Five and charge for advertising? Could it be that penny-pinching the pockets of Britain’s television-owning population (whether they watch your rubbish channel or not) is more “cost-effective” than popping ad breaks in? More importantly, did they ask us, their financial backing and viewing audience, what we’d like to see sacrificed to profit?

It’s been a long time coming but I finally feel that it is time for us to boycott the Beeb by tuning out and switching off.

For years, this out-of-date channel has coasted along on an archaic reputation that no longer applies. Even worse – the BBC have recently used our hard-earned cash to reel off a series of sub-standard channels like BBC3 and BBC4, which have tiny viewing audiences. With no reference to its public, the BBC has cut its losses by axing the very programming that made it so excellent and unique – keeping instead the pop tart variety of television that can be found anywhere at any time.

Just like another much-disputed obligatory ‘tax’ one cannot choose to opt out of paying for the BBC - our own government enforces this by law, fining and prosecuting those who challenge it - but we can protest in another way: by refusing to watch all and any BBC programming. This way, the Beeb will pay for their blind-sighted ignorance in falling viewer figures. Since they have our money irregardless, do the Beeb really care whether we watch or not? Let’s find out!

Nobody claimed that TV wasn’t a corrupt business (just look at the movie Network for clues) but the flailing BBC should now be left to its own devices, not supported by our own governmental administration! You can damn well work for your advertising revenue, BBC, just like everyone else! We should no longer be legally forced to pay for it, especially in light of recent events that have damaged its validity, popularity and worthiness.

I urge you to press this, pass it on, link to it, or comment in support of the BBC Boycott. Switch off and switch over to C4 or ITV! Peppered with ugly, mindless commercials they may be but at least they’re not asking us to stump up for a service that should be free - like in most countries across the globe, where just buying a TV set is enough! I’d rather watch the Dairy Milk gorilla or even Carol ‘First Plus’ Vorderman than pay for something I don’t watch and - bar Spooks, Question Time and the odd nature documentary - no longer enjoy.

Only by ‘striking’ against the BBC can we actually have an input in what the company are doing with the money they steal from us without consultation. Only by refusing to watch Channels 1 and 2 can we protest against crucial job cuts in news, factual programming and children’s TV - the very backbone of the British televisual experience!

Boycott the British Broadcasting Corporation! Ban the Beeb! Turn off your BBC channels until either the government revoke obligatory TV licences or until the BBC take their cost-cutting, damage-limitation bullshit elsewhere. Here’s a hint: start with the who-cares?-comedy-crap on BBC3 and BBC4!

http://shitandspin.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/bbc-boycott/

The corporation’s rivals and detractors are up in arms over claims of commercialisation

James Ashton

THE PARADOX will not have been lost on rebellious news heavyweights such as Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, who fear that the BBC is losing its soul.

Just as the corporation’s director-general Mark Thompson was revealing details of 2,500 job cuts that will hit hardest in news and factual programming, the BBC’s money-making arm was celebrating a windfall.

After being granted approval from its governing body, the BBC Trust, the BBC announced that its news content, due to be generated by some 370 fewer staff, will later this year be beamed online around the world � adorned for the first time with advertising.

The new commercialisation of BBC.com is very much in keeping with thrifty Thompson’s mantra of making less go further � forced on him by a shortfall of £2 billion on the licence fee. Users of BBC.co.uk will not notice any difference as banner ads will be seen only by overseas readers.

But critics fear the move puts the BBC’s hard-won international reputation for impartiality under threat � even though a portion of the new income will be ploughed back into the BBC newsroom. On top of that, the advertising will cover the loss of the £4m annual grant the international website gets from the Foreign Office. The grant is being reallocated to World Service radio.

Moreover, the BBC’s commercial rivals are again up in arms that an institution supported by a £3 billion annual bursary is chasing a slice of their income stream.

David Moody, BBC Worldwide’s director of strategy, retorted: “They should welcome this as the nature of competition. Users will get more choice. And for us this is a chance to earn money from an international business site to reinvest in the BBC’s core journalism. It seems eminently logical to me.”

This is the BBC’s second notable attempt at making money from its cyberspace operations. Its first, Beeb.com, an online shop for viewers, was shut down in 2002 because it was insufficiently different from the corporation’s free sites.

This time the BBC seems to be more confident. In April, it struck a deal with You Tube to set up a channel of television clips that can be viewed in Britain, with advertising alongside.

Commercials have also appeared since 1991 on BBC World, the international news channel that loses £15m a year.

Support for the controversial BBC.com plan is the latest development at BBC Worldwide, whose tentacles are quietly but inexorably spreading.

Not only is it Britain’s third-largest magazine publisher, with titles including the Radio Times and Top Gear, but abroad it publishes Hello! magazine under contract in India and makes television shows in Hollywood for the American networks.

There is more to come. Eyebrows were raised by the recent purchase of a controlling stake in the Lonely Planet travel-guide business, not least at Penguin, which owns the rival Rough Guide imprint.

Armed with a £350m loan facility, BBC Worldwide’s chief executive John Smith is aiming for two more such deals in the next year.

He wants to build up a clutch of online “communities” round themes such as parenting, cars and travel. As an example of what could be achieved, the Lonely Planet’s website has 4m users.

The target is to plough £200m a year back into the BBC by 2012, with 10% of income coming from digital sources.

Worldwide’s ownership was last assessed three years ago, when the corporation opted to sell off smaller, noncore divisions instead of the whole shooting-match. Of these, only BBC Resources, which owns the corporation’s studios and outside-broadcast trucks, remains. A sale process, led by Ernst & Young, has been kicked off. In addition, the corporation is selling its famous Television Centre headquarters in west London in 2013.

Meanwhile, strong exports of Doctor Who DVDs and the sale of the Strictly Come Dancing format around the world sent BBC Worldwide profits up 24% last year to £111m.

Unsurprisingly, it argues that such expansion benefits the licence-fee payer. A chunk of its profits is handed back to the corporation, in effect depressing the licence fee by £9 a year.

Moody said: “We have a very robust business that is producing a lot of profit that can be reinvested. Our shareholders want us to take a long-term view so we can deliver ever larger profits back to them.”

Perhaps he has a fair point. But as they prepare to bid farewell to hundreds of colleagues, the argument is unlikely to cut much ice with Humphrys and Paxman.

By Chris Hastings

The BBC’s highest-paid stars including Jonathan Ross, Terry Wogan and Graham Norton will keep their huge pay packets despite drastic cuts to the corporation’s budget.

The Sunday Telegraph understands that Mark Thompson, the director-general, has ruled out any move to slash salaries of big names for fear that they will defect to ITV.

Mr Thompson is struggling to fill a £2 billion black hole in the BBC’s finances. The loss of up to 2,800 jobs, the sale of assets and a massive reduction in programme budgets are likely.

Ross has a three-year deal worth £18 million, Norton has a £5 million contract and Wogan earns £800,000 a year. Other high earners include the Radio 1 DJs Jo Whiley and Chris Moyles who are reportedly paid £250,000 and £630,000 a year respectively.

Speculation about salary cuts emerged last week when it was claimed that Mr Thompson had called 100 of the corporation’s biggest names to a meeting this Wednesday, when the package of cuts will be signed off by the BBC Trust. Sources insisted last night, however, that only full-time staff got the summons and that most of the highest paid personalities are freelance. The sources claim the meeting is more likely to be a briefing about the cuts in general.

One source, who asked not to be named, said: “Not one of the very high earners or their representatives has been approached on pay. Any self-respecting channel controller would give up the job rather than let the director-general interfere in these kinds of negotiations.”

The last details of the cuts package are still being finalised. Mr Thompson and Sir Michael Lyons, the chairman of the BBC Trust, are due to meet at 7.30am tomorrow to thrash out further details.

The news operation and the corporation’s factual progamming division are expected to be the hardest hit. Managers in BBC News have told staff to brace themselves for around 520 job cuts.

Full details of the proposals will be presented to staff on Thursday.

BBC1 controller Peter Fincham resigned today in the wake of a damning report into misleading footage of the Queen.

However, the report revealed the Palace agreed a statement retracting the story at 9.44pm on the day the trailer was shown. But both they and the BBC decided to hold it overnight to “check the temperature of the story”.

Mr Thompson said he accepted the inquiry findings and repeated the BBC’s apology to the Queen.

Other names in the frame include former Endemol boss Peter Bazalgette.

Not a sheep

I blogged yesterday about the blatant bias in the BBC’s coverage of the Labour and Conservative party conferences. In amongst that article was the following analysis of the BBC news “reaction to” each of the speeches, I think this worth highlighting and expanding upon.

Here are the links to the BBC reaction to the three main party leaders’ speeches for Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Menzies Campbell.
As you can see, the reaction to Gordon Brown comprises 5 Labour MPs, 6 Union Leaders, a representative each from Greenpeace and CND but no opposition MPs and just 3 of those reactions were in any way less than completely positive about the speech. The reaction to David Cameron’s speech comprises 3 Conservative MPs, 3 Labour MPs, representatives of Greenpeace, the Green Party, Greenpeace, the SNP, IPSOS MORI, 2 Conservative bloggers and 1 Lib Dem blogger and 8 of the reactions were negative about the speech. The reaction to Menzies Campbell comprised of 6 entirely positive comments from Liberal Democrats.

Even the lines that introduce the reactions are interestingly constructed:

“Union leaders, ministers and delegates give their reaction to Gordon Brown’s first speech to Labour’s annual conference as prime minister”
Gordon Brown’s speech requires only reactions and they will be almost entirely positive.

“Politicians give their verdict on David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool”
David Cameron’s speech requires verdicts and the BBC will make sure that the verdicts are balanced.

“Lib Dem delegates give their opinions on Sir Menzies Campbell’s closing speech to their annual conference”
Menzies Campbell’s speech is only of interest to Lib Dems so we will only ask them.

The BBC just do not care any more, the bias is blatant. Either it is directed by the Labour Government or the bias is institutionalised.