Monday, October 30, 2006

Indications...

The BBC gets extremely het up about acusations of bias. Biased BBC goes the extra mile to demonstrate what it sees as evidence of a permanently skewed mind-set. As someone who started blogging in response to continued rage at the Today programme it probably goes without saying that I am continually infuriated by various incarnations of the BBC's attitude.

As Andrew Marr has recently admitted, the bias is not due to a conscious espousal of one side over another, more a reflection of a remarkably shallow pool of talent from which the majority of employees are drawn. Someone has referred to the problems resulting as 'mistaking cosy consensus for impartiality'.

So it was without much surprise, but a sort of weary shake of the head that I read the plot synopsis for today's episode of Spooks.

Adam (Rupert Penry-Jones) is sent to infiltrate a Christian extremist group that is launching a terror campaign on Muslim targets. He finds his man and discovers a planned attack on a mosque in Manchester, but his mole has also caught the eye of the Israeli secret service, who pick an inopportune moment to attempt an assassination.

So, the terrorists are extremist Christians (an extremely pressing problem in the UK at the moment as I'm sure we can all agree) who are trying to explode bombs in a mosque (as opposed to the much easier method of just sitting back and waiting for them to explode all by themselves) and this is all exacerbated by the Jews (I mean c'mon!) who try and assassinate British Christian informers, to prevent the prevention of the bombing of a mosque.

This all sounds like some tinfoil-hat wearing moonbat conspiracy theory. And it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to imagine the BBC commissioning a drama where extremist Muslims conspire to kill Christians, and for hostile Muslim Governments to get entangled in internal British security. That'd just be the news.

2 Comments:

Blogger Devil's Kitchen said...

nd it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to imagine the BBC commissioning a drama where extremist Muslims conspire to kill Christians...

Sorry, Tim, but they have done this one at least twice; in fact, one of the min jobs of the Spooks team is counter-terrorism and they make frequent allusions to Muslim threats in many of the episodes. I'm afraid that you can't nail that bias on Spooks.

Besides, since the police recently captured a couple of BNP members with a veritable arsenal who were allegedly plotting to blow up a Mosque, I don't think that the Spooks premise is necessarily too far-fetched.

DK

1:48 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Spare me! No one can actually say what was in this veritable arsenal. So far, the closest we've had is a police officer claiming that it included some stuff that could potentially be used to make explosives, in which case every farmer in the country should be busted.

Ditto with Spooks. Sure they cover Islamic terror, but they always spend half the episode ramming down our throat just how extremely extremist the extremists are, with Mullahs delivering little speeches about 'true Islam' and the day being saved by a 'moderate Muslim' hurling himself onto the bomb while stridently denouncing the terrorists. Call it a hunch, but I'm betting this latest episode didn't have any characters on talking about the 'True Right'.

DumbJon

7:50 pm  

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