Wednesday 3 April 2013

Is the BBC deliberately creating a culture of anti-Catholic hatred?

There have been some alarming reports reaching CUT, that the level of abuse which ordinary Catholics are having to suffer in the workplace is getting out of hand. Of course a certain amount of anti-Catholic bias has always existed in the UK, the leftovers of the Reformation. However, in recent years many Catholics have had to put up with sustained and deliberate verbal attacks and even worse. These attacks appear to reach a crescendo after the BBC has broadcast one of its notorious documentaries on child-abuse and cover-ups in the Catholic Church. We should accept that some of these documentaries and current affairs programmes are warranted; bishops should have taken action earlier.  But they now need to speak up for members of their flocks who are suffering. 

No other denomination or organization or section of the community has had the same amount of attention in this regard. Take, for example, child abuse in the Church of England.  This has a similar problem with child abuse by vicars, but the BBC do not show the same level of interest whereas almost every case in the Catholic Church has been followed up with a current affairs programme or a documentary. I do not think the BBC has made a single programme on child abuse in the Church of England. When I enquired whether the BBC has made a documentary on child abuse in the C of E this is the reply I received.
Thank you for contacting us.
I understand you feel the BBC is biased against the Catholic Church.
Impartiality is the cornerstone of all our news and current affairs output and we ensure all our correspondents and production teams are aware of this to help us deliver fair and balanced coverage for all the stories we report. We seek neither to denigrate nor promote any particular view, rather we present the relevant facts and allow our audience to make up their own minds based on them.Senior editorial staff, the Executive Committee and the BBC Trust keep a close watch on programmes to ensure that standards of impartiality are maintained.
Below is a list of Church of England abuse allegations that we have featured.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19425149
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-17284399
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-21776012
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-20311843
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-20393842
Nevertheless, I do appreciate you feel strongly regarding this, and as we’re guided by feedback such as yours, I’d like to assure you that I’ve registered your comments on our audience log. This is a report of audience feedback that’s compiled daily and made available to staff across the BBC, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers.
Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.
Kind Regards
Michelle McGahan
BBC Complaints

There is a major difference in the way the BBC reports child abuse in the Catholic Church to the way it reports child abuse in the Church of England. For example, the above links to news reports are only a few of the child abuse cases in the C of E; these are not documentaries or specific programmes on the subject but straightforward news items that will soon be forgotten. The question I put to them was how many documentaries have they made on child abuse occurring in the C of E.  They ignored my question.
The way in which they reported that an Anglican bishop and his assistant were involved in child abuse is a case in point. When I first heard the report on Radio 4 they were merely described as priests of the Church. Here is a report we produced last year:
BBC make child abusing Vicars seem like Catholic Priests.
It is a sad fact of modern life that childhood is no longer cherished in the same way it once was. Many children can have their precious innocence taken from them by the all pervasive media as soon as they learn to speak. They are targeted by the advertising industry and many other pressure groups and turned into materialistic consumers even before the start school. Perhaps it is not surprising given that the children of today are the survivors of the holocaust of abortion. Life today, it would seem has been devalued by a culture of death that targets the most venerable at the very beginning of their life’s journey and then again if secularists get their way, towards the end of their lives or even if they are unfortunate enough to become severely disabled.

Beside all this children today must also face an epidemic of child abuse.  In England and Wales every day in secular society there are 60 cases of child abuse reported to the authorities. Of course the numbers of children being abused are proportionately very small but the reporting of these cases by the media can traumatise children. It is important therefore that when the media and especially omnipresent BBC report on these cases they not only get their facts right but also that the journalism is clear and transparent. They should under no circumstances use the victims of child abuse to support a secularising agenda.

I was therefore amazed and concerned on the 30th of August to hear two reports on child abusing Church of England vicars that seem to make them appear as Catholic priests. How did the BBC do this you may ask? Let me explain I first heard a report on BBC radio 4 in the evening PM programme on child abuse in the diocese of Chichester however there was no mention of the Church of England. But the vicars in question were referred to as ‘priests’ and there was no mention that they were vicars. I turned over to BBC radio 5 and the same happened there was no mention of the Church of England but it was simply referred to as the ‘Church’. That this was an Anglican diocese was not explained it wasn’t until it was stated that the Archbishop of Canterbury has had to intervene that there was any clue that it of the C of E but given the Archbishop penchant for pontificating in Catholic affairs it could easily seem that he was talking about the Catholic Church again. Especially given his notorious pronouncement about the problems in the Catholic Church in Ireland in 2010 perhaps he should learn that what go around comes around.

However, what were the other clues that could make it seem too great un-Churched of the UK that this was probably the Catholic Church they was talking about? One was that the child abusing Vicars were referred to only as priests of the Church there was no mention of the Anglican Church or the Church of England in either report. How different it is when the BBC report on the cases of child abuse in the Catholic Church – they make sure that everyone knows who they are talking about in these cases.

Pantomime Religious and Ethics Programmes from the BBC
One of the main features of a pantomime is booing the baddie and cheering the goodie. There is a trend in BBC Religious and Ethics programmes to make nice little documentaries about Protestants and cutting edge ones about Catholics. For example Vicar Academy was a warm documentary series on Anglican men and women training to be vicars in a changing world. However, quite often when Catholics are featured the BBC manages to find people who oppose the teaching of the Church and want change. The BBC quite often likes to feature discordant elements in the Catholic Church in Ireland, or it reports on child abuse in Boston in the USA while ignoring the severe crisis in the Anglican Church of Australia.

There are 60 cases of child abuse reported in secular society every day in England and Wales. Should the BBC be trying to understand why there is such an abuse epidemic here? With the worship of sex and the cult of celebrity, are the BBC and other media outlets partly responsible for this? The Jimmy Savile problems and the many cases of child abuse at the BBC both by him and by other BBC employees should have told them something. But it appears that the BBC is ducking its responsibility.  A member of CUT (Our prayer Crusader under the patronage of St Gerard) has recently written to the BBC complaining about the anti-Catholic bias in News reporting.  He tells CUT that, ‘The reality is that there is no way they can argue their way out of this: 45% of their top 100 results for the term 'sex abuse' related to the Catholic Church- totally disproportionate. If the politicians are intent on preventing the press from victimizing people then they surely ought to rein in organizations like the BBC.’ He received this risible reply from the BBC:
Thanks for contacting us about BBC News.
We’re sorry to read that you feel that reports are biased against the Catholic Church and that an unfair number of online news articles relating to the church are returned when searching for the term ‘sex abuse’.

We know that not everyone will agree with our choices on which stories to cover, and the prominence that we give to them. These are subjective decisions made by our news editors, and we accept that not everyone will think that we are correct on each occasion.
Regarding the BBC News Online searches, results are returned in chronological order by the date they were published and the content of them has no bearing on the order they appear in the results. For instance, at this moment in time the same search returns a number of results at the top that are in no way connected to the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless we’d like to assure you that your complaint has been registered on our Audience Log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that’s made available to all BBC staff, including BBC News, channel controllers and other senior managers.

The Audience Logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions on future BBC programmes and content.

Once again, thank you for contacting us.

Kind Regards
Andrew Gilfillan
BBC Complaints

An important term was used in this reply by the BBC’s Andrew Gilfillan , These are subjective decisions made by our news editors’. Subjective we understand from the thesaurus means slanted, biased, prejudiced, skewed, one-sided … I do not think CUT could have put it better. Should Mr Gilfillan have used the term objective? Perhaps this was a slip of the tongue or perhaps Mr. Gilfillan possesses that rarest of all qualities to be found at the BBC - honesty.

The whole point of this Blog post is to expose the sheer bloody-minded anti-Catholic bias at the BBC. We do not particularly want the C of E or the Scouts or the NHS or any other organization to be targeted in the same way that the Catholic Church has been. But we do expect balance and honest reporting. The BBC is paid for by a compulsory license fee from everyone who watches live TV therefore we as British Catholics expect to be treated in the same way as everyone else. We are part of British culture and we do not expect to be attacked in the work place because of unbalanced and bigoted reporting by the BBC.

Our Prayer Crusader under the patronage of St Gerard has requested that we all contact BBC complaints of this matter and write to our MPs.
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

BBC's The Mystery of Mary Magdalene.

Another BBC production to help Catholics stop paying the TV licence fee was Melvyn Bragg’s The Mystery of Mary Magdalene.

At one of the most sacred and solemn moments of the Christian year the Paschal Triduum, the crucifixion of Our Lord, the BBC  broadcast the blasphemous and groundless assertion that Our Lord Jesus Christ had sex with St Mary Magdalene.  No Catholic would want to be responsible for helping to fund such a programme.

9 comments:

  1. Does anybody know if there is an independent television regulator? The BBC's self investigatory procedure cannot be the final resort, surely? What with the crackdown on the press and all of the talk about a royal charter and million pound fines, one would expect something like this to be in place for television also.

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    Replies
    1. You could try The Office of Communications (Ofcom) this is a statutory body established by Parliment to regulate all aspects of the communications industry.

      The office of Communications
      Riverside House
      2a Southwark Bridge Road
      London
      SE1 9Ha

      Tel 020 7981 3000
      web www.ofcom.co.uk
      email contact@ofcom.org.uk

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  2. I always get very annoyed when the BBC report on anything Catholic, they are just so bigoted.

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  3. There needs to be a collating and recording of anti-Catholic incidents in the workplace. I often wonder what it is like for young, practising Catholics in the office etc environment. It may be fine.....but then again they may be suffering in silence. It is time we looked after our own.

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    1. It depends how much of a loyal Catholic one is. If you criticise the Church’s teachings then you are fine. However, if you speak up for the Church you are in trouble, many are hiding their faith just to get by.

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  4. The sooner the BBC is closed down the better. Why should people be forced to pay a licence if they want to watch world television. The BBC is an anachronism which only exists to support anti Christians " the culture of death "and the Homosexual lobby. It is totally unrepresentative and is used as a propaganda vehicle for the left and the social engineering brigade. So much evil has emanated from this organisation that all the BBC buildings should be demolished and replaced with memorial parks with a small chapel within the grounds. We all need to pray for everyone who worked in the BBC even the technicians can be influenced by so much evil .
    RIGBY

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    1. with more and more people watching other screen media output such as You Tube and internet TV less and less people are watching the BBC. So you are right why should we pay for the BBC anachronism when they are so blatantly anti-Christian? ?

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  5. I remember watching a documentary on the Jimmy Saville case, shown by the BBC. Within the first 30 seconds of the programme, the narrator stated that "Saville was raised Catholic." No further mention was made of this fact, nor did it seem to bear any relevance to what was said in the programme. In addition, I have yet to hear any other documentary or report on the Saville case that mentioned this fact. I can only assume that the fact was stated right at the beginning of the programme only to further cement the prejudice linking the Catholic Church to sex offenders, despite the fact that Catholic priests are no more likely to abuse children than any other group in society.

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    1. You are right the BBC will never fail to have a swipe at the Catholic Church especially if it deflects attention from its own nefarious exploits. Also you are correct in thinking the there is no more child abuse among Catholic priest than groups in society – in fact compared to BBC personnel there seems to be a lot less.

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