Selective Editing

Of course the BBC doctored its footage to make it look as if Donald Trump had incited the January 6 riot, not that that deceit will have made any material difference. Rather more consequentially, the BBC reversed its footage of Orgreave to make it look as if it the miners had attacked the Police rather than the other way round.

It also broadcast an infamous Panorama about Jeremy Corbyn, if probably not a very effective one; in the runup to the 2019 General Election, Labour was on 33 per cent and a Conservative overall majority was far from guaranteed until the deal with the Brexit Party, a favour that the Labour Right returned in 2024 when it ordered the Labour candidate not even to set foot in Clacton, where he still took nearly as many votes as Nigel Farage's margin of victory. The same machine actively guaranteed that Iain Duncan Smith would retain his seat rather than see Faiza Shaheen in Parliament.

And the BBC is making the Sde Teiman story about the leak rather than the rape, a word that it refuses to use in this case despite having come as close as it ever would to admitting that it ran a fabricated story about rapes of Israeli women on October 7. The Sde Teiman rapists have never denied it. They held a defiant press conference, and their supporters, including Members of the Knesset and some in the uniforms of the IDF's Force 100, rioted in July 2024. A month earlier, in a report that it was also highly critical of Hamas, the United Nations Human Rights Council had found that the IDF was inflicting sexual humiliation on Palestinian men and boys.

To the BBC, Trump is as dangerous as the miners, as Corbyn, and as the nonwhite males whose economic exploitation has necessitated their demonisation as sexual predators, leading to sexual and other violence against them on every continent in the course of at least the last half-millenium, meaning on all continents simultaneously since the completion of the process of European "discovery". Even Trump may be forgiven a sense of pride at being counted in such glorious company.

Trump's misrepresentation by the BBC has been brought to light by the Daily Telegraph, the independent directors of which have again complained, about someone who had not yet acquired it, to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In other words, to the Labour Government, which the previous Conservative Government legislated to give the last word on its ownership. Apparently, that this the only way to protect the Free Press. These directors are independent of what or whom, exactly? They should be told that if they could not find any potential proprietor to suit them, then the Telegraph would be nationalised, as it seems to think that it already is.

That would rank with the Reform UK flagship Kent County Council's order that Union and Saint George's Flags be taken down to stop the Christmas lights from setting fire to them, and with Nigel Farage's abandonment of his entire economic policy even while replacing it with a pay cut for his angry young men and with the requirement of PIP claimants to take days off work to present themselves for reassessment as to whether or not their legs had grown back. Five or 10-minute interviews on Zoom? Oh, Nigel, do not believe everything that you either read in the Telegraph or hear on the BBC.