Re: Biased news reporting : Fri Dec 28, 2012 9:40 pm  

The media is biased in all kinds off fields, not just international relations or politics. It is very biased in the corporate playground too.

Re: Biased news reporting : Fri Dec 28, 2012 10:41 pm  

A friend of mine recently mentioned that back in early 1982, in the back pages of the FT, he read a couple of column inches with regards to potential oil discoveries in the South Atlantic around a bunch of Islands he's never heard of. A few months later, we all know what happened. If you look now, there are oil explorations all round the Falklands. Here's an interesting pdf from the London School of Economics http://www2.lse.ac.uk/IDEAS/publication ... freije.pdf

A friend of mine recently mentioned that back in early 1982, in the back pages of the FT, he read a couple of column inches with regards to potential oil discoveries in the South Atlantic around a bunch of Islands he's never heard of. A few months later, we all know what happened. If you look now, there are oil explorations all round the Falklands. Here's an interesting pdf from the London School of Economics http://www2.lse.ac.uk/IDEAS/publication ... freije.pdf

Re: Biased news reporting : Sat Dec 29, 2012 1:05 am  

World of Redboy wrote:

Maybe you should have read the other released dispatches, as winning an election wasn't on her mind.

Complete horseshit, at any other time we would have left a tiny spec on the map to its fate and negotiated a hand over, being well behind in the polls and looking like being ousted at the impending election was very much on her mind.

Re: Biased news reporting : Sat Dec 29, 2012 12:49 pm  

Big Graeme wrote:

Complete horseshit, at any other time we would have left a tiny spec on the map to its fate and negotiated a hand over

See Hong Kong, where the wishes of the residents counted for squat when it came to making a sacrifice to keep the Chinese sweet.

Re: Biased news reporting : Sat Dec 29, 2012 1:26 pm  

Andy Gilder wrote:

See Hong Kong, where the wishes of the residents counted for squat when it came to making a sacrifice to keep the Chinese sweet.

Great point.

As for the BBC it's really plummeted over the past decade or perhaps that's just me being more aware of media bias than. Whatever the case, I'm lost to remember the last time their news team blew the lid off something. The only time, it seems, when the BBC does tackle an issue it's due to Panorama rather than a news story they've broken. Same with comedy. Since Sachsgate, it's comedy has been mediocre with the odd exception. This is exactly how the governments would like it though. A barely critical public service news source that is gradually getting less and less relevant, being superseded by any number of online news outlets. I'm just wondering when it's going to get put up for privatisation.

Re: Biased news reporting : Sat Dec 29, 2012 1:45 pm  

Big Graeme wrote:

Complete horseshit, at any other time we would have left a tiny spec on the map to its fate and negotiated a hand over, being well behind in the polls and looking like being ousted at the impending election was very much on her mind.

Tony Blair said he would fought the war too. Can't recall him ever needing to win an election after being well behind in the polls.

Re: Biased news reporting : Sat Dec 29, 2012 1:55 pm  

Ajw71 wrote:

Tony Blair said he would fought the war too. Can't recall him ever needing to win an election after being well behind in the polls.

Tony Blair wasn't even a Member of Parliament when the Falklands Confilict was started and won.

Re: Biased news reporting : Sat Dec 29, 2012 1:59 pm  

JerryChicken wrote:

Tony Blair wasn't even a Member of Parliament when the Falklands Confilict was started and won.

So what? He was asked whether he would have done the same thing as Thatcher and he confirmed he would have, so for Big Graeme to say "at any other time we would have left a tiny spec on the map to its fate and negotiated a hand over", is not the case, as if Blair had been in office he would have also done as Thatcher had.

Re: Biased news reporting : Sat Dec 29, 2012 2:07 pm  

Ajw71 wrote:

So what? He was asked whether he would have done the same thing as Thatcher and he confirmed he would have, so for Big Graeme to say "at any other time we would have left a tiny spec on the map to its fate and negotiated a hand over", is not the case, as if Blair had been in office he would have also done as Thatcher had.

I don't see your relevance, WTF has it got to do with Tony Blair, the PM was Margaret Thatcher, the Government was a Conservative one, it was the decision of the MP's in the Commons at that moment in time as was the decision to invade Iraq at the time of Blairs government - you can't defend decisions in hindsight by attributing them to people who weren't even part of the decision making process.


And when I say "the decision of MP's in the Commons" I include MP's of all party's.

Just not the ones who weren't actually MP's at the time.

Re: Biased news reporting : Sat Dec 29, 2012 2:12 pm  

WIZEB wrote:

She had an election to win.

You know, 'Rule Britannia', flag waving, and all that bollox.

It worked.

This thing about Thatcher winning in 1983 because of the Falklands is a bit of a myth. There was no reason to believe at the time that a war would help reelection anyway - you would have thought that Churchill would have benefited from a khaki election, after winning WW2, but he got voted out in a landslide defeat by Attlee in 1945.

But also from a tactical point of view, fighting the Falklands war was a massive political risk for Thatcher. If we had lost she would almost certainly have had to resign and a lot of the advice she was receiving was that this was going to be a very difficult fight to win. The safe political option would have been to go for some 'diplomatic settlement' that accepted the Argentinan invasion, and Thatcher (rightly) was not prepared to accept that.

I am not a Thatcher lover by any means but you have to get the facts straight over why she won in 1983. It was basically the same reason she won a majority of over 100 in 1987, when there was no Falklands and no 'longest suicide note in history' Labour manifesto and no Michael Foot. It was because the opposition was split. The SDP-Liberal Alliance hoovered up close to a quarter of the electorates votes in those elections, because of first past the post they didn't get that many seats of course, but it meant they ate away the left/centre left vote. Meanwhile on the opposite side, Thatcher getting 42% or so was able to win landslides.