The 80/20 Rule

An expert speaks

If you're a regular watcher of what passes for news on the BBC these days you'll often see Abd Al-Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, invited to give his opinion on political developments in middle east.

As a BBC 'friend' he's rarely pressed on whether his own views might colour his analysis, which is a shame as they are quite enlightening.

Next time the BBC puts on one if its comfy little panels on the middle east (you know the sort of thing, a balanced lineup consisting of someone from the centre, someone from the left, someone from the extreme left) and Abd Al-Bari Atwan is wheeled out, I wonder if he'll be asked about this interview he gave to Lebanese TV?

"If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight."

It's easy to see why the BBC holds him in such high regard. I wonder if he made an appearance in the Balen Report? I guess we'll never know.

Imagine my surprise....

Interesting story on BBC radio a couple of nights ago, based on a report in the Lancet Oncology, about cancer survival rates in the developed world .

The item (on the 6PM news, Radio 4) noted that despite massively increased investment in the NHS, our survival rates for cancer still lagged below those of European countries.

At first I thought this was just another example of our 'glorious' NHS failing to live up to the expectations placed upon it by taxpayers. Then I looked at the study.

Although you wouldn't know from the radio report which, by mentioning only European survival rates, gave the impression that the table was topped by European countries, our friends at the BBC had neglected to give the full picture. Let's illustrate with a couple of representative paragraphs from the online version of this story on the BBC website:

"Overall, for men Sweden had the best survival rates with 60% of cancer patients alive five years after diagnosis, compared to between 40% and 50% for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland."

"For women, Sweden and Iceland were top on 62% with Wales, England and Northern Ireland just below the European average of 56%, while Scotland was among the worse on 48%"

So, according the BBC, the key bits of the table looks like this:

Sweden 60.3%
Wales 47.9%
England 44.8%
N. Ireland 42%
Scotland 40.2%

But as be seen from the Telegraph story on the same report, the BBC has missed out a bit at the top:

United States 66.3%
Sweden 60.3%

Simple error of omission? I think not. How embarrassing it would be for the socialised, tax-funded BBC to admit that the great satan's evil private healthcare system is the best bet for cancer survival?

As with so much that comes from the BBC, if it doesn't fit the narrative, it doesn't get reported.

Laughing at the BBC (2)

As I type the third most important story in the world, according to the BBC news website, concerns a researcher who has matched a public database of IP addresses to anonymous Wikipedia page edits. The BBC's take on this story is typical:

"Wikipedia shows CIA page edits: Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's president. An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries."

Indeed it does. Disgracefully the BBC fails to tell us that the same tool also shows a huge number of BBC edits to wikipedia pages including changing the word 'terrorists' to 'freedom fighters' and altering the entry of the current US President - changing his middle name from 'Walker' to 'Wanker'.

How mature our wonderful state broadcaster is. How balanced. How honest. It must be the unique way in which the BBC is funded that allows its staff members to devote so much of their time to puerile vendettas.

From the excellent Biased BBC.

Laughing at the BBC (1)

At the end of this news article on the BBC website concerning floods in North Korea, the BBC asks:

"Are you in North Korea? Have you witnessed the floods? Have you been in touch with people in the affected area? Send us your comments using the form below."

Amazing.

I smell a tax raid.

Radio 4 was banging on about Private Equity funds again this morning and the tax breaks that have helped these funds establish themselves in the UK and become successful vehicles for business investment.

It was former BBC Business Editor Jeff Randell who commented that the default attitude of the BBC is to treat business as a criminal activity. That attitude has been much in evidence over the last few weeks. Ironically one of the main drivers of the 'Private Equity is Bad' series currently being run is the possibility of Land Rover and Jaguar being bought by private equity funds. I say ironic as the last time the media and the unions kicked up a storm about private equity in the motor industry was when they successfully managed to scare off the Alchemy Parters bid to buy Rover Group from BMW. Instead we were treated to scenes of workers and unions welcoming their 'saviour' John Tower and his Phoenix Consortium. The same group who managed to destroy the company shortly afterwards and ship the assembly line equipment to China.

I suspect that had Alchemy Partners (an evil private equity fund) succeeded in buying Rover, there'd be more than 200 people working at Longbridge today.

But back to Private Equity. I'm wondering why these stories are so prominent now? My guess is that our glorious new prime minister is preparing the ground for a tax raid during his first 100 days. We know he's short of money and he has 'form' as they say, having done the same to pension funds... and look how well that turned out.

Hilariously, Unions are now suggesting that the tax raid on Private Equity funds should be used to compensate workers whose pension schemes collapsed largely as a result of the tax raid on pension funds.

Nothing has been learned it seems. I wonder, in ten years time, when we're bemoaning the flight of venture capital from the UK and the collapse of business investment, which new 'bad guy' will be squeezed to plug that gap and continue this depressing downward spiral of idiocy?

Cross-posted to my.telegraph

The Clue is in the school's name...

At the "King Fahd Academy in Acton", a school "owned, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia" teachers use textbooks that describe Jews as "apes" and Christians as "pigs".

The school is refusing to withdraw the textbooks.

We do use books that call Jews 'apes' admits head of Islamic school

I wonder how many other schools are similarly dodging the race hate laws. Can you imagine the headlines if say a fictitious 'Pope Benedict XVI school' used textbooks that described Muslims in such derogatory terms? Yet this news item is buried under a couple of inches of snow and our obsession with diseased turkeys in Suffolk.

It's left to Newsnight, a program which hardly anyone watches, to 'break' the story. Sad.

technorati tags:Saudi Arabia, education, islamist, racism, King Fahd, Acton

Blogged with Flock

Jeremy Paxman almost talks sense

From Biased BBC. Writing in the BBC's in-house magazine 'Ariel':

"I have neither the learning nor the experience to know whether the doomsayers are right about the human causes of climate change. But I am willing to acknowledge that people who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that it is the consequence of our own behaviour."

"I assume that this is why the BBC's coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago"

Just a pity that his lack of "learning" and "experience" has resulted an inclination to accept and repeat any old rubbish instead of critically questioning.

Interesting that Paxman, who knows how to use the English language, should use the phrase "pretence of impartiality". Should we assume from this that the BBC is never really impartial but only pretends to be?

Surprise.

BBC Bias/Idiocy

Those who believe that the BBC has an inherent bias against nasty defence spending (no doubt believing that the money would be better poured into diversity training, the BBC's coffers and into that black hole called the welfare state) got a bit more ammunition to play with today.

Blair's recent speech on the role of the armed forces gave the BBC a perfect excuse to exercise its poor grasp of maths and politics. A table at the bottom of this article* listed defence spending of what the bbc clearly thinks are the only 4 countries in the world that matter:

US: 470bn - 4% of GDP
UK: $64bn - 2.5% of GDP
France $44bn - 2.6% of GDP
Germany $27.9bn - 1.3% of GDP

Can you spot the deliberate mistake? According to these figures UK GDP ($2.56 trillion) is 50% higher than that of France ($1.69 trillion) and astonishingly even higher than that of Germany ($2.46 trillion).

Amazing, I didn't know New Labour had been so successful.

The BBC is trying to demonstrate that the UK spends too much and could easily cut defence spending and still be on a par with 'nice' countries like France and Germany.

No mention is made of, for instance, the Japanese who have a defence budget that is both larger and better spent (no silly European projects for them) than our own.

* "UK must continue to fight wars" is the headline. Nicely bias interpretation of the speech don't you think?

**UPDATE**

Somebody in the BBC has found a calculator ... not one that works terribly well though. The news story was updated at 17:59, now the BBC alleges defence spending as:

As you can see France's defence spending has dropped from $44bn (2.6% of GDP) to $41.5bn (1.95% of GDP). In a matter of hours the BBC's estimate of French overall GDP has thus increased from $1.69 trillion to $2.13 trillion.

What they've done here is to adjust the %GDP figure to try and arrive at the correct French overall GDP whilst continuing to lie about French defence spending.

So what's the truth?

What the BBC have done (and it took me all of ten minutes to figure this out - God only knows what the BBC researchers were doing with their time) is failed to compare like with like.

They have compared French defence spending (minus pension obligations) with British defence spending (including pension obligations). A like for like comparison would show France spending slightly more on defence as a percentage of GDP which, owing to their slightly smaller economy, translates into slightly less than the UK in dollar terms.

By slightly less, I mean around $1bn, not the $20bn+ gap the morons at the BBC would like you to believe.

...and the Germans?

Ah, the poor Germans. According to the BBC their economy is still smaller than ours.

Blogged with Flock

The BBC doesn't do advertising.

Today we learned that Saddam Hussein is about to be executed, that Sinn Fein looks likely to back the PSNI, that crowds in Mogadishu turned out to cheer the head of the internationally recognised interim Somali Government as he entered the city after his Ethiopian backed army had sent the Islamist forces running.

I'm no expert on the structuring of a news bulletin but I'm puzzled why, on such a day of momentous and complicated events, 10 minutes into its main evening news bulletin the BBC decided to run a puff piece on the Hajj.

The 'news' was this: the Hajj is happening.

That's it. Nothing happened at the Hajj to draw the attention of the worlds media. No riots, no deaths in stampedes, it just happened. Is something which happens every year, continuing to happen as it does every year, really news?

No, it isn't. The BBC had decided to air another advert for "the world's fastest growing religion", a religion in which "all are equal" (cue pictures of happy women taking part, at least I assume they were happy, it was a little hard to tell as all were wearing nijabs or burqas) and which "is colour blind" (cue interviews with Muslims, all male, from various ethnic backgrounds).

Gosh, almost makes you want to drop everything and visit Mecca yourself to experience this wonderful atmosphere of peace and equality, doesn't it?

Except that the reporter neglected to mention that this 'equality' extends only to other Muslims as it doesn't matter how pristine your liberal credentials, if you try and go anywhere near Mecca and you're not a Muslim, then you're in deep shit. If you try and practice your religion in Saudi Arabia and it isn't Islam, you're in deep shit. The practice of any non-Muslim religion in Saudi Arabia is prohibited, as is the owning, printing, or distributing of any non-Muslim religious material. Apostasy is punishable by death and no Christian Churches are allowed on the territory of our wonderful Saudi allies, the same people we recently bent over and took one up the arse from in order to secure an order for a few aircraft.

I can't see the same approach to visits to Vatican City by non-Christians, or practice of Islam in Italy gaining the same level of BBC appreciation, can you?

But the worse thing about this 'news' was just how pathetically transparent it was. A clumsy attempt at opinion moulding by an organisation that's completely lost touch with it's audience.

Kofi: My Biggest Regret

I caught an interview with outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on the BBC earlier this week. In the interview Mr. Annan described as his "biggest regret" the deaths in a bomb blast of 23 UN staff in Iraq 2003.

A tragedy to be sure, but Mr. Annan has a strange sense of priorities if that incident (over which he had no control) was the biggest regret of his career. How about some of the things he did have control over?

Like his decision, as head of the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations in 1994, to refuse UN commander General Romeo Dallaire permission to raid Hutu arms caches, despite his warning that mass slaughter was planned, and the failure to inform the Security Council of the situation?

How about the fine record of UN Peacekeepers during his watch? The paedophile ring UN troops were found to be running in the Congo, subjecting children to rape and prostitution in Haiti and Liberia or the prostitute trafficking endemic amongst UN troops in Kosovo?

Or the Oil for Food scandal, easily the worst financial and corruption scandal ever to hit the UN and which prompted Annan (who's son Kojo was employed by the UN oil-for-food contractor Cotecna) to order his then Chief of Staff, Iqbal Riza, to shred thousands of UN documents (including the entire UN Chef de Cabinet chronological files for the years 1997, 1998 and 1999) many of which related to the oil-for-food program, before they could fall into the hands of the Volcker commission?

I'm not surprised that the BBC failed to ask this grandstanding idiot any of the hard questions that might have made for an interesting interview.