It must be a fundamental human right not to have to pay James Purnell. The obnoxious Blair clone is on £420,000 a year at the BBC. I found this article absolutely horrifying; the BBC has appointed as director of news and current affairs James Harding, a man who wrote a defence of the 2008/9 massacre of 1400 Palestinians in Gaza, which used illegal and horrifying white phosphorous bombs as well as depleted uranium, and killed hundreds of small children. That attack was so shocking it reintroduced a significant proportion of the British student population to the idea of radical politics.
That the BBC should appoint the openly politically partisan to top positions – and that they should be openly neo-con – is not shocking because we have come to accept the depredations of the political class as normal.
The purpose of the BBC ended when Grag Dyke and Andrew Gilligan were forced out and the BBC issued a formal apology – in effect to Tony Blair – an apology for telling the truth about Iraqi WMD and the “dodgy dossier” which Blair, Campbell and Scarlett conducted. The BBC has seldom made the mistake of telling the truth since.
I increasingly find myself advocating political opinions I would have found anathema five years ago. I am forced to the opinion that now it is time to abolish the licence fee and end all public funding to the BBC. We should not be blinded by nostalgia; the BBC has no claim to impartiality or “public service ethic.” Nor, for the most part, to quality. Talent shows, reality TV and endless cooking and property auction programmes are not something everybody should be obliged to pay for, on penalty of not owning a television.
Doubtless bits of the BBC would survive in the private sector. World Service broadcasting might be taken over by DFID – another “fake independent agency” can be interposed if desired. But even if some good were lost, the overall harm done by this inflated structure and its all-pervading propaganda is such that it would be worth the sacrifice.
The Leveson Inquiry was a brilliant sleight of hand which managed to get liberals arguing for more government control of the media, while the real problem – the need for a radical breaking up of media ownership – was ignored. If we fracture the Murdoch empire and break up the BBC, with radically tough regulations restricting the percentage of the market any owner can have, we have a real chance to have a diverse media and broader political debate.
All institutions tend to corruption the longer they have existed. Over time those who control the structures of power develop ways to make sure large institutions are twisted to their personal interests. There is not much the rest of us can in truth do about it, except to give the kaleidoscope a good hard shake every now and then.
It is time to shake the kaleidoscope and abolish the BBC.
UPDATE
Just received from BBC Press Office:
Hi Craig
We wanted to draw your attention to our release from 14 Feb this year:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2013/tony-hall-senior-team.html
James Purnell’s salary as Director, Strategy and Digital, will be a total of £295,000 not £420,000.
Best wishes
BBC Press Office
So that’s OK then.
Craig,
I entirely agree with kempe that “many people complain about the BBC’s anti-Israeli bias” Although I cannot afford watching television, I usually send a letter or two every week to the BBc comptroler complaining about the antisemitic accent of some of their commentaries and occasionally reprimand them for neglecting to broadcast great thoughts voiced in the glorious past by our statesmen. The lonely voice of Churchill, brutally silenced on innumerable occasions for displaying the great courage to state that “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place,” –Speech to the Peel Commission (1937). For those unfamiliar with the issue, may I point out that palestinians are the dogs Churchill talked about.
Dad!
Just use your brain for a moment. Mum was far too smart for someone like you EVER to be my father.
and researching the life and political thought of 19th-century South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar .
Another thing that highly annoys me about the BBC ( Apart from Nicholas Witchell constantly masturbating himself silly over the Royals, even though said Royals hate him ) is it’s nauseous sycophancy with the USA.
Someone gets a speeding ticket in America and the BBC is full on breaking news!!, wall to wall 24-7 coverage with the obligatory multi-personal press conferences featuring 20 minute slots from everyone from the State Governor right down to a local hobo who witnessed the offence.
As a ps. Radio 3 is crap as well. An expensive fig-leaf for this odious operation. R3 lost its way years ago. Lousy programming, lousy sound – tiny audiences too for whom they have little but contempt.
Proms are fun but hardly a duty of the licence-payer to the tune (sic) of millions.
All a jolly for BBC apparatchiks.
“Another thing that highly annoys me about the BBC ( Apart from Nicholas Witchell constantly masturbating himself silly over the Royals, even though said Royals hate him ) is it’s nauseous sycophancy with the USA.”
So don’t watch it.
Was a time the BBC was all we had, then they played “God Save the Queen” and you watched a white dot disappear into the middle of the screen.
Now there are more TV and radio stations than you can shake a stick at and the internet as well I don’t see what the problem is. Press TV is good though they too seem obsessed with the USA, then there is RT but they seem to have a lot of content America related. Al Jazeera is a little biased in my opinion and seem to focus on American matters. There are many more out there though, the list of stations is a long one, you can take your pick of the TV stations talking about America. Hell these days you can even set up your own internet TV, there are loads of people sitting there talking about America from their own bedrooms and broadcasting to the world.
Thanks for this blog post Craig Murray.
The BBC is unashamedly pro-Israeli, revoltingly so. Manufactured complaints of anti-Israel bias are from insincere, astro-turf fantasy merchants, peddlars of wind and piss. Purnell and the like are at root treasonous agents of a foreign power, despoling and undermining this country and its people wherever and whenever they possibly can, with no fear of anything arresting their depradations, they’re entirely up-front about it, know they’re protected all the way to the 1st class carriages of the gravy train.
Claims also that the BBC is ‘too left wing’ from the usual mouthy suspects on the right, do not stand the least scrutiny as the BBC has backed to the hilt the right-wing economic agenda pursued by Thatcher and Blair and their emulators, helped plunge a murderous weapon of unspeakable pain and cruelty, killing lives and killing hope, into the hearts of the poorest, weakest and most vulnerable in this country. Helping out our home-grown resident psychopaths in office is not nearly enough for the initiates and priesthood of the cult of the BBC, they’ve consistently backed some of the world’s most infamous despots too.
The BBC does not receive ‘complaints’ from the right and from pro-Israel Quislings, it self-censors, anticipating their bizarre demands, it receives its orders and counts as its only friends those same bankers and genocidaires, hasbarists and sayanim who make these token substance-free complaints. Of course it ought to be unmasking and ostracising them, calling for their arrest and speedy trial on charges from blackmail to murder. If it suspended all further planned programming and simply reported 24/7 for the next ten years, the facts and the truth – on the rightward lurch in this country they have helped facilitate and the criminally insane nature of the Israeli, US and UK regimes – it could not in that time redress the imbalance in its output, or atone for the damage they have done. We must add to that damage the gulf between present circumstances and the potential outcome – what could have been, the positive results – if it had simply done a half decent job of things instead of being fully complicit in such epic crimes as we have all witnessed. We’ve now passed from despair and shock to a virtuous, righteous clamour to retaliate and avenge.
The BBC is guilty as charged in the court of public opinion. Sentence is flogging.
A referendum on its abolition, implicitly scrapping the absurd licence-fee, would not only demand its demise but would swell the polls, re-invigorating political participation.
In the meantime, mass licence-fee refusal, bringing down (in)Justice system is indicated.
We revolt tonight!
The revolt is postoned till tomorrow night, President Fred has just had his hair done.
Fred: “Al Jazeera is a little biased in my opinion and seem to focus on American matters.”
Al Jazeera IS the BBC, near as dammit. It is staffed by ex BBC world service journalists:
It launched with David Frost interviewing Tony Blair!!!
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/frostovertheworld/2006/11/2008525184756477907.html
Unlike Press TV, I don’t think we’ll wake up to find Al Jazeera banned from the British airwaves any time soon
Iain and all
Look, the BBC doesn’t produce the occasional informative laudable programming because it is the BBC. I claimed gravitas, I think it can be said of the modern era that the the BBC produces the occasional informative laudable programming in spite of it coming through the BBC.
It is just silly to believe that the staunchly pro-Zionist BBC were to be deservedly abandoned then that would be the end of intellectually worthy programming (or even some entertainment) as we know it.
There are many ways in which such programming can come about.
Channel 4 has a history of decent programming peppered amongst the Brookside dross. PBS and Frontline in the USSA often achieve this too.
I think the common thread here is that when INDEPENDENT producers are involved then the ‘worthiness’ of programming shoots up. Same is so of the BBC, it is usually the independently minded employees (the small number thereof) that give output with the sheen of quality.
So some on, stop all this sentimental garbage. ITV also made the odd but of decent programming too.
“The revolt is postoned till tomorrow night, President Fred has just had his hair done.”
So name a better or less biased broadcaster.
“Channel 4 has a history of decent programming peppered amongst the Brookside dross. PBS and Frontline in the USSA often achieve this too.”
After the Great Global Warming Swindle I don’t think there can be any doubt who’s pocket they are in.
Power of Nightmares was a pretty good documentary.
A Node, and it’s not just Press TV that’s banned. Russia Today is available on Freeview, but not available from any Virgin service provider. Users generally only learn this after they have signed up to a Virgin package. It is causing some discontent. So much for Branson’s belief in free enterprise.
http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/TiVo/RT-Russia-today/td-p/1254229
ZBC are patting themselves on the back this morning having won a raft of Sony Radio Awards last night at the Grosvenor House Hotel hosted by Chris Evans. The list includes Radio 4 Today and Ceri Thomas as director news, John Humphreys for his Entwistle interview. Radio 5 Live, PM and Eddie Mair, Limp Ics coverage etc etc.
Categories and winners here, and gold, silver and bronze in each category. Just the same format as the Limp Ics in fact!
Champagne all round chaps. Chris Evans won an award too, bronze in Breakfast show of the year.
http://www.radioacademyawards.org/winners/
O/T, sorry, but this is deeply disturbing. I’ve condensed it a bit, the writer is somewhat intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity-
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/
A week ago, I mentioned very briefly that small businesses in Greece are to be taxed based on estimated income…..What’s been emerging gradually over the last few days is that ‘estimation’ is the wrong word here: if the electricity company estimates your bill and by next April you’ve overpaid hugely, you can get a refund.
The new idea from the department of Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras isn’t going to work like that. It’s not an estimation, its an assertive assumption that transubstantiates – having been made flesh in the new tax law – as fact, and thus a sum you must pay. As you almost certainly don’t have the cash to pay it, well….er, you can see where this is going can’t you? I mean, you’re not on the streets are you?…
…(but (-K))… it isn’t just for (businesses (-K), it’s for live people too. To be precise, everyone… As from now, millions of Greek taxpayers will be called upon to cough up even if they have no income, but they are alive and have a home to live in.
It’s the legalisation of asset seizure, pure and simple. It is the assumption that you are a tax evader, and therefore a suitable case for sequestration. It is, in a nutshell, the new test-method for stealing. We’ve had the depositor haircut. We’ve had the secret raids on pension and assurance funds direct from the suppliers. Now we have the creation of fantasy criminals who must of course be punished, and their assets taken in lieu…
One of the things that mildly interesting about this blog is the way in which certain commenters work themselves up into tiny rages about various issues, giving the strong impression that they have just discovered, and succeeded in exposing, something brand new which nobody’s spotted before and which therefore constitutes a ‘scoop’.
This applies very much to much (but not all) of the commentary here on the BBC.
Lord Reith’s autobiography – probably published before most of you lot were born – makes the point that “Broadcasting has for long been recognised as an estate of the realm”. In a letter to Stanley Baldwin at the time of the general strike, he wrote “Assuming the BBC is for the people and that the Government is for the people, it follows that the BBC must be for the government in this crisis too”.
Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that the BBC “came to pass silently, invisibly; like a coral reef, cells multiplying, until it was a vast structure, a conglomeration of studios, offices, cool passages along which many passed too and fro; a society, with its kings, lords and commoners, its laws and dossiers and revenue and easily suppressed insurrection”. And he wrote of the BBC’s “gentle persuasion, patiently wearing away angular opinions; loke waves on a beach, ebbing and flowing, transforming rocks and stones into smooth round pebbles, all alike…”. Sounds familiar?
Even more balanced commenters than the denizens of this blog make the mistake of thinking that the BBC only starting going in what they consider to be the wrong direction 5 or 10 or 20 years ago; this is because they assumed that the ‘opening up’ of the BBC to mocking satire, ‘gritty’ dramas and general irreverence and an apparently more direct style of questioning public figures starting in the 1960s marked a new, freer, more independent and more investigative ethos rather than just being a superficial response to the cultural and societal revolution which started in that decade. The period of say 1963-1983 should not be seen as a turning point but merely as a blip in a continuum stretching from the founding of the BBC up to, and including, the present day.
So now that you’ve seen that all this of which you complain is not new, may I invite you all – to use the words David Cameron used to Angela Eagle – to “calm down, dear(s)”.
Pay attention now children. You’ve gone and irritated Dad now and he won’t stand for it. He’ll club you to death with clever condescension. You must stop all that thinking and holding of silly attitudes. Observe how such trivia as evidence, information and rationality turn to vapour in the merciless light of Dad’s colossal intellect.
Just stop all that thinking right now.
One of the thing’s that mildly interesting… (sic)
Sophie.
Tell him.
Mr Komodo.
Only one thing sic on this blog……
‘I’m still waiting for someone to explain to us how, after reading one of you posts, they were able to understand an issue just a little bit better.’
Sophie, you’re so straight and laced-up. I know it must have been hard being brought up by an self-on-message-opinionated, Thatcher-radical-reactionary-progressive,waccy-baccy-back-packing, doggy-do-art-loving, freedom-of-expression-not, product-of -the-’60’s, but-loving-parent-figure, if-not-exactly-dad.
Rebel as much as you like, we enjoy his contributions and we recognise in a way you may not that there isn’t much freedom of expression in a kibbutz.
“Channel 4 has a history of decent programming. ”
History being the operative word. It doesn’t produce much decent stuff now.
How much does anyone really learn from watching the bbc, or Sky, or listening to the radio, or reading a newspaper? I begin to suspect that you learn very little indeed; it’s all just entertainment, and only the surface of issues is really possible, within the constraints of each medium. I also suspect that what you un-learn is far more important …
Basically, if one wishes to learn something, one may read a book, or perhaps watch a doco, or absorb a few articles from the internets – wiki is, for its faults, a very good reference site, on many issues. But mainstream media? Simply not worth bothering with – other than as fun, or as a study in communications and propaganda. And Habawhatsisname might, for once, have a point – why is anyone surprised?
The bbc is what it is. I suppose I’m obligated to say there are good journalists out there – and there are – but does this really matter? There are probably good journalist working on The Daily Mail – but it’s still a Hitler supporting, poor bashing, vaguely racist rag, owned by a fully paid up member of the bastard class.
As it goes, I’m reading McMafia. Very good. Excellent roll call of scumbags, not a few of whom have made cameo appearances in Craig’s blog. I’ll read that, and avoid the bbc, I think.
There is only one news/current affairs programe worth watching and that is the UK Column Live. Time for your wake-up call folks.
http://www.ukcolumn.org/
One of the things that mildly interesting (sic)…is the ability of some posters rapidly to edit their posts, or have them edited (see mine @ 1021, cut & paste from HBCK’s original attempt @ 0909), and still get it wrong.
How is that done, please?
Really?
Pardon my ignorance, but does anyone actually need at TV these days when you can download anything you want to see. It’s so easy to avoid the mainstream media altogether.
“radically tough regulations restricting the percentage of the market any owner can have”
When have they ever worked then?
Habbabkuk
Wow!
In a departure from your usual habit of carping, hectoring, badgering, nit-picking and generalised obfuscation you actually post something cogent. It even has something identifiable as a point. More surprisingly, the point has merit. What a shame you spoiled it by littering your piece with so many schoolboy errors of grammar and style. I wouldn’t normally worry about such things, but since you spend most of your time on this blog complaining about the mote in your brother’s eye while considering not the beam in thine own, I thought I would set the record straight.
A selection:
One of the things that mildly interesting…
along which many passed too and fro…
Even more balanced commenters than the denizens of this blog make the mistake… This seems to be saying the commenters on this blog are balanced, which I suspect is not the point you intended.
the mistake of thinking that the BBC only starting going…
Etc.
Go and stand in the corner.
@Summerhead
“Surely this is all academic. I suspect there’s going to be a sharp fall off of people paying the licence fee due to the rapidly increasing use of internet streaming to watch programmes. Look around at how many people are glued to their smart phones. Conventional TV is in its twilight years along with any luck the corporate news media.”
Interesting. So if you stream to your phone/computer you don’t need a licence? Whilst its currently true that you don’t need a licence if you watch content that isn’t being streamed live I would count on this being the case going forward.
If its deemed necessary that the BBC survive with licence fee based funding it wouldn’t be difficult, given appropriate legislation, for devices to be tracked back to individuals, and households, and a check run to see if there was a valid licence covering the viewing/listening.
Looking more generally I’m concerned at the desire to throw the baby out with the bathwater for what are issues with the current incumbents of posts within the BBC. Those people will not be there forever and it would be better to reform than scrap and watch commercial organisations cherry pick the profitable parts of the current BBC.
Truth John Goss becomes rarefied in an atmosphere of deception the West uses to gain false superiority and benefit in a bipolar world.
The acquirement to annul Russian support in Syria by any means including mass murder to support the UK political contention that a NATO strike on Syria would have enacted regime change in that sovereign state without excessive blood-shed, destruction and displacement, has meant taking risks such as exposure.
It is exposure that has confirmed US attempts to subvert Russian citizens with access to intelligence in an attempt to bribe Russia with powder keg diplomacy into a compromise on the ultimate subjugation of the Syrian peoples.
http://rt.com/news/fsb-detain-cia-agent-253/
Read how the Guardian/BBC presents this exposure to a deluded British audience.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/14/russia-detains-us-embassy-employee