A couple of days ago there was the most extraordinarily lazy piece of reporting I have ever seen on the BBC TV news. In response to the new Hollywood film of the Adventures of Tintin, the Beeb decided to feature Hergé’s “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets”, his first book. The BBC’s angle was that Tintin in the Land of the Soviets was a very accurate portrayal of life in the USSR.
In fact “Les Aventures de Tintin, reporter du “Petit Vingtième”, au pays des Soviets” was originally published as crude anti-Marxist propaganda in an ultra-conservative Catholic newspaper by a 22 year old cartoonist who had no knowledge of the USSR, and based his story on information given to him by the Mussolini loving proprietor, Abbé Norbert Wallez. Continue reading
Who at the BBC thought it was a good idea to link a piece on Radio Four’s prestigious Today programme about the terrorist attack on New York ten years ago with the increase in Muslim population in Luton? What possible connection could there be, unless you seek to insinuate that there is a connection between the mainstream Islamic population and acts of violent terrorism?
Transport Union RMT today slammed the BBC’s Question Time for “outrageous political bias” after an invitation to General Secretary Bob Crow to appear on the programme this evening with London Mayor Boris Johnson was withdrawn at short notice. It seems that Bob Crow has been replaced with Mark Serwotka of the PCS union. 
Perhaps it was unintended, but two or three weeks ago, at the height of the protests that were gripping the great cities of Egypt, the director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, appeared on the channel’s flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, in London as part of a debate on the future of newsgathering, and mentioned the BBC and 