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Shibley Rahman to BBC : I find these BBC smear tactics repulsive, but not surprising
The Band Aid has a lot of goodwill and amazing fantastic worldwide reputation, which, to be fair, the BBC should be repugnant at trying to smear in the name of investigative journalism. On that matter, I find the vast majority of investigative journalism, even in the tabloids, excellent. When the BBC do it, as they do regularly, it is truly disgusting.
“On a number of occasions the BBC tried to rush out an announcement, on heavy news days,” said Mr Grade, a former Controller of BBC1 and chief executive of Channel 4. ”
They tried to bounce us into making an announcement, in terms that weren’t agreed, on the day the Chilean miners were released and then on the day the public spending cuts were announced. They said it was just coincidence. But it was a bit too much of a coincidence, if you ask me.”
According to this report,
“The strength of the BBC’s reputation meant that when it does make a mistake it was “more serious than anybody else’s mistake,” he said. Bob Geldof agreed. “The BBC has a special obligation, most singularly in the case of the World Service whose broadcasts are relied upon by people in difficult situations in places like Africa where the truth can be a life or death issue,” the Band Aid founder said. “So it has a particular responsibility to check its facts.”
As regard me, there is a report still on the BBC website today. The BBC have evidence that I did not commit the crime explicitly stated in the headlines, and that I have no caution, warning or reprimand, or any offence indeed. The BBC Trust refuse to make an apology for this, thus continuing damage to my personal reputation. This was discussed in 2006 when I was severely alcoholic, and they misused their opportunity to report which they had under law. I have seen at first-hand smear tactics by the BBC, and I find them repulsive. Whatever ongoing damage to my reputation by the BBC keeping their article today and people reading it and not inviting a disabled guy with 7 degrees and 40 months in recovery to interview, this is nothing compared to the ‘damage done to 24 years of charity giving work by Band Aid’ (Sir Michael Grade this morning).
Concerning the actual offense to do with Band Aid, the corporation admitted in an on-air apology it had “no evidence” for the claims which prompted a complaint from Band Aid Trustees including Bob Geldof.
The facts speak for themselves of how the BBC did it, in the public domain. An edition of Assignment, broadcast on the World Service last March, initially reported aid had been diverted by a rebel group in the beleaguered African country to buy guns.
The Yahoo report continues that that story was subsequently followed up online and on programmes including From Our Own Correspondent and the BBC News which named Live Aid and Band Aid as the source of the mis-directed funds.
This is another BBC smear. They ran 3 stories about me in about 4 days in 2006, when the General Medical Council had neither concluded that I had engaged in stalking, nor were investigating it. The criminal evidence was that I had not been. The BBC should be genuinely disgusted at their behaviour.
Shibley Rahman exclusive: Iain Fale meets Alice Cooper away from the BBC
Rumours are circling around Westminster that @iain_fale also met up with Alice Cooper, while @iaindale was reviewing the papers this morning on the Andrew Marr show. The topic of conversation was how best to present compassionate conservative education policy, under market-led Toby Young and demolition job-led Michael Gove. This is being considered as a possible anthem.
The BBC represents a sickening waste of public money
If the BBC represents ‘good value for money’ in this age of austerity, then frankly I am a gorilla. The way the BBC wastes its money, and its general corporate arrogance and demeanour, makes me physically sick. They have also caused me and my family no end of mental torture.
A recent report in the Telegraph makes very grim reading for those of us who believe that the BBC has extremely poor standards in editorial competence, in accuracy, impartiality and balance.
To add insult to injury, the BBC last year spent £31,500 on taxis, £21,000 on hospitality and £45,500 on flights.
Helen Boaden, Director of BBC News, claimed £240 for a “leaving party” which 12 people attended, but the name of the departing staff member was blacked out.
Bob Shennan, the Controller of Radio 2 and 6 Music, spent £217 on “wine purchased for the team” on February 16th, the night of the Brit Awards.
Ken MacQuarrie, Director of BBC Scotland, claimed £165 for a new aeroplane ticket having “missed previous flight”.
Mark Thompson, the corporation’s Director-General, claimed £4,449 for flights to the Sun Valley conference in Idaho, and a further £4,429 for a trip to Boston but a note claims that “this flight was not used and a refund should appear”. He also claimed £177 for a second passport.
Erik Huggers, Director of Future Media & Technology, claimed £1,242 to travel from Tel Aviv to Paris in April, claiming it was the “last seat” on the “only available flight” because of “ash cloud travel disruption”.
Alan Yentob, the BBC’s Creative Director, claimed £123.50 for a train from London Paddington to Castle Cary on the opening day of the nearby Glastonbury festival. He also spent £822 on a flight from Heathrow to Nice in the South of France, when the same journey can be booked currently for £136.
Danny Cohen, the Controller of BBC Three who is to become the Controller of BBC1, spent £1,657 on an eight-night stay in a Los Angeles hotel.
This is your money they’re playing with. And they’re the ones pedalling the cuts are necessary, not letting you know of Labour’s alternative. How sickened do I feel? Very…
Dr Shibley Rahman is a research physician and research lawyer by training.
Queen’s Scholar, BA (1st.), MA, MB, BChir, PhD, MRCP(UK), LLB(Hons.), FRSA
Director of Law and Medicine Limited
Member of the Fabian Society and Associate of the Institute of Directors
Time for the BBC to give up on the pretence of responsible journalism
Today, I loved reading the Times on my iPad. Indeed, parts of the British media are world-class, and worthy of our reputation abroad. The Times and Financial Times are probably my most favourite media publications of all.
Unfortunately, in the run-up to the General Election, the BBC were without shadow of a doubt gunning for Gordon Brown – to lose. Many of my friends were appalled about the highly personal comments made towards him in both style and manner, and this includes so-called respectable people in respectable institutions (for example, Nick Clegg’s conduct in the Lower House in Prime Minister’s Questions). For the BBC and people like Adam Boulton, ‘Bigotgate’ was possibly a gift.
Some have said that senior presenters of the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg and Nick Robinson, put the most unbelievable gloss on the Tory Party, that a large number of my 2400 friends on Facebook were talking about not renewing their TV licence as class action protest. Maybe, taken as a whole, the BBC does not suffer from lack of impartiality, and indeed some of the output of the BBC is first-rate (for example, the Today programme). Some items on BBC online news would be more fitting for a tabloid on a bad day.
Right-wingers tend to claim the BBC has enormous left-wing bias, therefore providing evidence that it produces balanced coverage. My parents, who have lived in this country since 1961, used to have enormous respect for the BBC, and indeed the brand of the BBC used to be superb internationally, but now that they have zero respect for it. Whilst there used to be goodwill for ‘Beeb’, the illusion has nearly become shattered to an irreparable state. Now that its standards have declined so much, it is vital that an external entity should look at the functioning of the BBC as a professional media operation. The BBC investigates complaints internally mainly, leaving little recourse for complaints, because OFCOM’s terms-of-reference are so narrow.
The journalists are supposed to obey the Editorial guidelines of the BBC which are widely publicized, but within a single day it is ‘dead easy’ to find examples of problems in accuracy, balance and impartiality. However, one has to wonder whether journalists should declare a ‘conflict of interest’ in the same way that directors of companies in England have to declare a financial interest under the Companies Act (2006)? Does it matter that a highly influential person within the BBC News machine, Nick Robinson, was a prominent Tory at University? His argument will be that his professional manner can be divorced from his political views, in that a doctor with severe depression can be a psychiatrist, but might it be worth the while of the BBC to publish once-and-for-all some statistics on the volume of complaints for a definable and measurable period, such as the 2010 General Election? Throughout the election campaign, the coverage towards David Cameron and Nick Clegg was much more lenient than towards Gordon Brown.
The BBC has for some time been producing inaccurate coverage of news stories, some of which are clearly not in the overall public interest but constitute a ‘witch-hunt’ at best. The BBC regularly contravenes rules of responsible journalism as explained in Reynolds v Times Newspaper case from the House of Lords. The recent debacle has been that Question Time has been accused of demonstrating left-wing bias, when David Dimbleby was virtually shouting down answers given by Hillary Benn. Even when it comes to defamation, it is not a problem as they have a well-funded legal team, paid for by millions of tax-payers. Protecting the identity of ‘Stig’ in the public interest did not come particularly cheap, ‘reliable sources claim’.
Apparently, a Conservative source said:
Now, more than ever, is the time for the BBC to be careful and frame the debate responsibly so that the facts are properly heard. The spending review is a serious topic for all of us, it needs to be treated as such.’
Surely 150 days is a bit early for right-wing political paranoia to start setting in?
Today, we have a main news item concerning Wikileaks suggesting that all we see in the media may not be what is happening in real life.
How transparent is the BBC machinery? Sure, they can publish the salaries of Directors who are earning £500,000 a year, or more, but is this what is really ‘getting the goat’ of ordinary licence payers? Was it correct that the BBC refused to play the DEC humanitarian appeal? The Glasgow Media Group repeatedly has shown the BBC is more right wing in coverage; a genuine public interest point is that, with the BBC attacking pensions of BBC workers and now to make 16% cuts, we can expect even more right wing bias.
Take specifically what happened last Wednesday. An individual has written to me the following:
“My part of my union (Revenue & Customs, PCS) had a small demonstration outside our HQ @ 100 Parliament Street (opposite the HOP). I was offered a spot on the Radio 5 Question Time being held on the Green after the cuts were made. There was some confusion and I was advised that the BBC didn’t want any trade union representatives on air!!! However, a few of us hung around whilst the political heavyweights were being interviewed. No one from any UK news outlet paid us (or any other protesters) any notice at all.
However, my colleague was filmed by Al Jazeera – who seemed more interested in what the protesters were saying than the politicians. She also did a longish interview for a Danish TV station and an interview for the Portuguese press. I was intervied by Helsinki Sanomat in some depth. The European press were interested in the lack of action by the TUC. I was asked if I would rather be French. The day before we were followed by Japanese TV for a documentary there and today we were interviewed in London by the French TV.”
On the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is mooted that BBC still broadcasts much more pro-war views, even when 76% think troops should be returned. The most sinister development in their editorial policy is that they appear parrot ‘we have got to cut the deficit’ views without even providing the evidence from the Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman, and David Blanchflower CBE, that the cuts will be a disaster. The BBC then creates editorial imbalance by not presenting half of the argument, thus making the entire argument grossly inaccurate. It is then easy for the BBC’s Director General Mark Thompson to satisfy the Conservative PR machine to present the coalition’s cuts in a favourable light, and for George Osborne to claim that Labour has no alternative.
The spin that has been propagated on this is truly mortifying. No mention is made by the BBC that the Conservatives supported the Labour borrowing plan between 2001-2007, the UK had the lowest debt of G20 countries on entering the recession, the recession was truly worldwide (as they might be forced to admit when we go into a double-dip), and that the reason Labour does not wish to specific which would it cut first is (a) because Labour with the Fawcett Society think the budget contravenes the Equality Act (b) Labour does not agree with the macroeconomic policy in the first place. Labour has made it perfectly clear in the public record for a long time that it does not support the rate or depth of cuts. It is especially nauseating that the Coalition does not command any authority on narrowing the ‘tax gap’.
The BBC could do a lot for public confidence in its reputation by reporting on tax avoidance by millionaires, or reporting on the alternative funding of the public sector services, rather than what it seems to spend most of its time in: gutter, trashy witch-hunts to grab headlines, so-called “breaking news”.
The real reason that people appear to hate the cuts is actually – shock horror – because real people (not millionaires) hate the cuts. The Coalition will be hard pushed to find a city sympathetic to their cause – maybe Middlesborough was a bad choice, but I look forward to Question Time from the BBC, in my home city of Glasgow next Thursday.
It’s all getting a bit serious isn’t it?
Here’s a video of Adam Boulton ‘losing it’ with Alastair Campbell
and Nick Robinson potentially contravening the Criminal Damage Act (1971)
Your journalism is safe in their hands? I’m saying nothing..
Dr Shibley Rahman is a research physician and research lawyer by training.
Queen’s Scholar, BA (1st.), MA, MB, BChir, PhD, MRCP(UK), LLB(Hons.), FRSA
Director of Law and Medicine Limited
Member of the Fabian Society and Associate of the Institute of Directors
I'm not a stalker, and why I'll attack BBC defamation
Let me get something straight. There are aspects of the BBC which are wonderful.
However, I have had a very unpleasant experience with the BBC. The BBC ran a series of headlines about me in 2006, as an individual junior doctor very early on in his career with a severe alcohol problem. I needed support not derision. The BBC argue that they are right to report that I was accused of stalking in the GMC hearing, which led to my erasure. I have never had a conviction, warning, caution or reprimand for “stalking”, and I will continue to express my disgust at the BBC for continuing to report this. I do not see any point in having it persist on their website so many years on, with no subsequent follow-up on my progress since, and my perception unfortunately is that it feels like a very personal unpleasant campaign against me. They are damaging my professional reputation in a reasonable observer (the meaning of defamation in the law), through a daily Google search, meaning that rehabilitation for genuine alcoholics in recovery for me is unfortunately impossible, and their corporate arrogance never fails to amaze for me. I am extremely happy that their budget is being slashed in the Comprehensive Spending Review, as their journalism is ridden with editorial inaccuracies, imbalance and lack of partiality. Glyndebourne is not paid for purely from the tax payer.
And as for the Murdoch press. I happen to think that the Times is a brilliant newspaper. I was reading it at the weekend, and competition law should not stifle success. Murdoch operates across different genres, different micromarkets in business, so I find the pluralism argument exaggerated. And, as it happens, I think the Daily Mail is wonderful, despite me being a lifelong Labour supporter!
[Update: Please read this article in the light of my biography. My father passed away in November 2010. I love him very much, but still live with my Mother. I nearly died in June 2007 during a 6 week coma, but as of this day I have been in recovery from alcohol. At the beginning of 2012, this was coming up to 5 years. Since 2007, despite my many skills, I have not been in a regular salaried job.
Dr Shibley Rahman is a research expert in dementia and research lawyer by training.
Queen’s Scholar, BA (1st.), MA, MB, BChir, PhD, MRCP(UK), LLB(Hons.), LLM, MBA FRSA (updated since time of the article)
Member of the Fabian Society
The Comprehensive Spending Review
I will be assessing the impact of the CSR this afternoon. Already, the party lines appear to have been drawn in the Twitter sand, with some interesting emotions emerging, ranging from the BBC to social housing.
Dr Shibley Rahman
Some broadsheet journalists indeed deserve a very bad press
The arrogance and self-opinionated, badly-evidenced, garbage of some broadsheet journalists beggars belief. I should like to keep Mary Riddell out of this, whose article on the branding of David Cameron I think was the best piece of journalism this year, and Polly Toynbee, whose views on social democracy are far stronger than me but whose articles are always erudite and thought-provoking. Provoking I suppose is another word for the other end of broadsheet Fleet Street, such as Victoria Coren and Paul Waugh, whose ramblings seem insightful prima facie, but actually border on prejudiced and imbalanced on frequent occasion: more inciteful than insightful. Please don’t get me wrong; there’s a lot of brilliant investigative journalism done by the red tops and others, which enriches the accountability of people in power and influence.
I suppose my wrath was first incurred by Andy Marr’s latest contribution in the Guardian:
“The BBC’s website has nearly 100 blogs and invites its readers to “have your say” on an enormous range of topics, from Westminster to the weather.
But one of the corporation’s most familiar faces, Andrew Marr, has dismissed bloggers as “inadequate, pimpled and single”, and citizen journalism as the “spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night”.
Marr, the BBC’s former political editor who now presents BBC1’s flagship Sunday morning show, said: “Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all.
“A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people,” he told the Cheltenham Literary Festival. “OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk”.
For Andy Marr, this surely is a case of “don’t bite the hand that feeds you”. The relationship between blogging and the mainstream press has recently surfaced, for example at the top of the Gherkin.
Could it possibly be that the only reason that Andy Marr feels so bitter about blogs is that he has trouble in getting superinjunctions of them? Meanwhile, top blogger Iain Dale makes a very valid point that the news about William Hague MP was not ‘mainstream’ until the Foreign Office had issued a statement on it, and that was only because Guido Fawkes had successfully raised the issue in the blogosphere. I remember the abuse on Twitter thrown at Andy Marr by my Labour friends and colleagues when he mooted with Gordon Brown the notion that he was on the anti-depressant. His sources? I can find no mainstream source of this, prior to the blogosphere. My Tory friends have been making much hay of this, as if it’s a very central public isssue. It really is not – people should not stigmatise mentally ill people who lead successful lives, in much the same way that homosexuals go about their business in professional life with enormous skill and ability.
Broadsheet journalists should not have the monopoly of informed opinion. They incessantly go on about the disabled and bankers, like Mary Riddell did today. However, as a disabled person, I would like my views to be taken account. For that matter, as a person who has six real degrees to a high level in both undergraduate studies and postgraduate studies, I have well informed opinions about the graduate tax and student finance in general. For example, I have an opinion about ‘making people pay back more’, given that I personally have not been in salaried employment since 2006, which is an enormous strain for me and my parents with whom I live in Primrose Hill. I don’t want to read journalists pontificating about this everyday – but let’s face it this is how they sell copy. Likewise, when I was in medicine, I don’t remember people asking underpaid immigrant nurses for their views about living in a more globalised UK, and the thorny issues of insecurity, aspiration, and fairness. Get out of your ivory towers. I am disabled. I live in the real world, with only my disability living allowance as a regular source of income. I find your articles patronising, and it’s obvious you haven’t spoken to the people involved? Talk to the bankers whom you intend to impose your levy on, but for heaven’s sake keep discussion of them outside discussion of me (the disabled). I understand totally, however, your predicament of considering us ‘in the round’ as we are all part of the Big Society, notionally, but our problems are different to theirs!
Dr Shibley Rahman
Queen’s Scholar, BA (1st.), MA, MB, BChir, PhD, MRCP(UK), LLB(Hons.), FRSA
Director of Law and Medicine Limited
Member of the Fabian Society and Associate of the Institute of Directors
Have the Chinese lost face over the Morrissey “subspecies” comment?
A guest article by Sonny Leong, Publisher and Chair, Chinese for Labour
In an interview in the Guardian Weekend magazine recently, Morrissey, gormer singer of The Smiths, describes Chinese people as a “subspecies” because of their treatment of animals. The response of the British Chinese community was deafening silence.
Morrissey reignites racism row by calling Chinese a ‘subspecies’. Remark came in context of an attack on China’s animal welfare record, with singer having been criticised on a number of previous occasions for negative race comments The link is here.
Can you imagine the fuss if Morrissey had made such comments about Indians, Africans, or Jews? There would be uproar, marches down Parliament and demonstrations across the land. So where are the Chinese protests or demonstrations? Nowhere. Absolutely zilch! Have we lost our face over this comment?
Why do the Chinese complain so little? Where are the Chinese business and community leaders defending their values and pride? Why is no one from the community standing up to the authorities to insist that this
sort of behaviour is totally unacceptable?
Anna Chen, performer, writer, and broadcaster who blogs as “Madam Miaow” ( www.madammiaow.blogspot.com), and is often the sole British Chinese commentator to protest against not only Morrissey’s
statement, but also the intensifying prejudice emerging in the liberal media, says:
“There’s been a wave of anti-Chinese Yellow Peril fever whipped up coinciding with the rise of China as a superpower, surfacing in sensationalist scapegoating every time there’s a disaster. They’ve attempted to stick us with the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in rural England, the Gulf Of Mexico BP oil leak, even climate change when the West has been belching out carbon emissions for 160 years since the industrial
revolution and look set to continue doing so at four times per capita that of the Chinese. She has been criticised by the mainstream media in her fight against racism in the media.
”
Here is what she says of the BBC’s celebration of Fu Manchu:
““Fu Manchu in Edinburgh” gleefully revived racist stereotypes of the Chinese I’d hoped were long-buried, and could have been subtitled, Racism for Fun. Why present a Yellow Peril figure as if he was a real person complete with lurid wallowing in the very worst racism, dehumanising the Chinese as a race, linking us with filth, and presenting us as Bin Laden-like Western-civilisation-hating subhumans? There was no irony. No attempt to subject these prejudices and stereotypes of a bygone era to any kind of modern interrogation. Instead, they were re-imported, intact, into the present day. I can’t imagine the BBC vilifying any other minority
group like this.”
The author Sax Rohmer had never met a Chinese person and was writing from malice and ignorance — the “experts” on this programme only have one of those excuses.
There’s a woeful absence of Chinese voices in the media, so when the BBC fills the vacuum with degrading Sinophobic depictions such as this one, they do a grave disservice to a significant licence-paying section of the population.
Professor Greg Benton of Cardiff University also commented: Chinese are quite numerous in British society today, but ethnic Chinese are very underrepresented in the BBC and its programmes, which is a disgrace. This was not a very funny programme, and if it was meant to be ironic, the irony didn’t work. If you’re a young Chinese isolated in an overwhelmingly white school and community, as many if not most young Chinese are, you get a lot of mockery along these lines. Why not commission more work on that? First deal with the racist stereotyping – then we can perhaps afford to be ironic about it.
The British Chinese number more than 450,000, the largest such community in Europe, and the third largest ethnic community in the UK. Yet no senior community leader has stood up to condemn such vile vitriol from a has-been musician in search of a headline.
What would it take for the Chinese community to rise up and challenge such racist statements? What would it take to make the Chinese angry enough to take to the streets to protest? Or are we, such a passive community that we will take whatever is thrown at us so that we can live ‘peacefully’ in our host country?
I say to my community and my fellow community leaders – enough is enough – if we do not stand up for ourselves no one will. We have let down our previous generations who had survived in racist environments and we will let down our younger generation and children for not having the principles and courage to stand up to such cowards.
We portray ourselves as hardworking, law-abiding and successful. We hide behind these norms for fear of misunderstanding. Peel the layers and selfishness, cynicism, exploitation oozes from the community pores.
When criticisms are made, accusations of betrayal and disloyalty are thrown at the maker. No wonder, nobody speaks up. If the community does not feel that it has a rightful place in society then that right will be taken away from them by people like Morrissey. It has been suggested that all the Chinese care about is making money. Yes, make your money but remember there are higher values, too. You have your self esteem, principles, culture and, most importantly, pride. No amount of money is worth it if we let our pride and values slip – we will a forgotten community.
On that BBC article again from 2006. Defamation, wherever it comes from, can never be morally deemed to be creative output
The decision not to remove the news story from the BBC’s web site falls within the category of “editorial and creative output” …
Reputations can be severely damaged by being so reckless about information, particularly in this online world. 60% of employers look up future employees on Google, apparently.
The BBC are acting like a nasty bully to me, and I think their attitude towards me has been nothing short of sick. I am disabled, and despite seven degrees, I am too frightened to seek regular employment because of the attitude of the BBC in showing some compassion to me. Yes, I was alcoholic, but I survived 2 months in a coma at the Royal Free Hospital. I have trained in academic law, rebuilt my life, and live with my wonderful parents here in Primrose Hill. The BBC know all this as well as the evidence that I have never been a stalker.
The BBC articles are still there for everyone to see if you Google “Shibley Rahman”.
Interestingly the BBC decision letter (9 September 2010) makes no reference that there is a strong case that the article is clearly defamatory in its central accusation and headline.
A note: I experienced bullying at school, where the bully just expects you to shut up after a while. Having been distressed for several months about this, I am not going to be silenced. Here is the evidence for the world to see whether you like it or not.
I am protecting my reputation, as indeed other institutions are protecting theirs.
