Could This Man Ever Have Been Impartial? |
Gordon Brown for example, was a reporter for Scottish TV current affairs. .... he can hardly have been unbiased, and others in the party have been caught campaigning for them, while still exerting control over media coverage.
Firstly Channel 4 ran a docudrama 'UKIP: The First 100 Days', that professed to give a plausible account of the first 100 days in power, if UKIP won the next election. Highlights included race riots, Asian MP's defecting after illegal immigrants were deported, economic chaos, and even the repeal of the smoking ban. In fact you name it and it was going to happen ... we only just avoid Armageddon!
It was so biased that even a lefty comedian like Jason Manford described it as a bit too biased. There were over 250 complaints to C4 and over 1,000 to media watchdog Ofcom ..... who said: "We will assess these complaints before deciding whether to investigate or not." However we all know how that will end .... If it was Top Gear then just two complaints are enough to get the show threatened with cancellation ... so over 1,000 .... will mean nothing happens at all.
Then the BBC decided that it too would broadcast a show that was hardly unbiased. Called 'Revolutionary Presents; Democracy Dealers' it was a show whose premise apparently was that it was a party political broadcast on behalf of the Conservative-Liberal coalition. In it a couple of ambitious young MP's, James Twottingham-Burbage and Barnaby Plankton are shown going about their MP's business of running the country, whilst sharing but one brain cell between them. 'The New Statesman' it isn't .... the first and best of these kind of parodies. It is a bad start, and poor writing when you have to give names like that to the characters, just to ensure the viewers realise they are meant to laugh at them.
Alan B'stard .... The New Statesman |
Still it's a strange world in which the publicly funded BBC, and the subsidised Channel 4, can attack the major non Labour parties, under the guise of 'entertainment' and despite thousands of complaints, get away with it because .... in the words of Channel 4, "the election period set out in the Ofcom broadcasting code has not started". ... they then claimed a range of programmes in the run up to the election, but nothing actually redressing the balance for the UKIP hatchet job.
Whereas the worlds most popular factual and entertainment show, Top Gear, can be threatened with closure, if just two people out of 5 million viewers complains.
Biased reporting in the UK is now part of the problem and not part of the solution .....
I was surprised when I heard about the Ukip 'mockumentary', especially so close to the election. It was blatently biased and inappropriate.
ReplyDeleteI don't care which party is was, it was bias. Facts, are a different matter, so an expose of corruption etc is appropriate at at time and especially before an election ... the scandal that is Tower Hamlets or the 'Red Princes' phenomena are good examples of stories that should be high profile.
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