The BBC stated that their Reality Check team:
... will focus on content that is clearly fabricated and attempting to mislead the public into thinking it has been produced by a reputable news organisation.
The immediate implication here is that the BBC considers that as a £3.65 billion major news broadcaster, it is beyond reproach in reporting facts and truth, and is therefore happy to set itself up to monitor and police other news sources for the accuracy of their content.
BBC claims podium of truth
But what could have caused the BBC to have taken this narcissistic and egotistical stance in self-righteousness?
The clue does not take long to find:
False information around big events such as the UK’s referendum on leaving the EU and the US election has been especially rife, with numerous instances of completely fabricated stories, many of which are created with the sole aim of generating advertising revenue from people viewing the stories.
Both Brexit and the election of Trump have, according to the BBC, been beset with fabricated stories. The inference is that stories were so fabricated and so widespread that 17 million Britons were mistakenly swayed to vote to leave the EU, and millions more US voters were misled into voting for Trump rather than Hillary Clinton. Since the BBC has a track record of highly biased support for both the EU and Hillary Clinton we might just see why the BBC would be upset at competition in the world news circuit.
With heady professional passion and an ego the size of a rhinoceros, James Harding, head of BBC News, led the BBC's rhetoric:
The BBC can’t edit the internet, but we won’t stand aside either … We will fact check the most popular outliers on Facebook, Instagram and other social media. We are working with Facebook, in particular, to see how we can be most effective. Where we see deliberately misleading stories masquerading as news, we’ll publish a Reality Check that says so.
Climbing even higher onto his podium of BBC truthful self-righteousness, Harding added:
And we want Reality Check to be more than a public service, we want it to be hugely popular. We will aim to use styles and formats – online on TV and on radio – that ensure the facts are more fascinating and grabby than the falsehoods.
Thank goodness the BBC has stepped up to be the guardian of truth, and thank goodness that James Harding has volunteered himself to champion and head the new Reality Check team. We can now all sleep much easier in our beds knowing that the BBC and Mr Harding are looking out for truth.
Mr Harding apologies to Leveson Inquiry
Let's forget the BBC's own slight weaknesses in the field of truth for a moment and consider Mr Harding. This is the same man who previously served as Editor of Murdoch's Times newspaper - itself a bastion of truth and respectability, especially in the City and Westminster circles. Well not quite. Poor James was forced to apologise to the Leveson Inquiry into press 'respectability', for his role in running the Times news team whilst reporters for whom he was responsible (his statement) broke the law to hack other people's emails.
Perhaps he didn't know, perhaps he wasn't told, perhaps he didn't care. No matter, he had the responsibility for editorial standards and the professional behaviour of his team. Heaven forbid that similar such dirty dealings would be going on in the vast organisational black hole of the BBC - or even perhaps, a little fabrication of the truth here and there by BBC reporters. It might be me, but I don't get good vibes for Harding's claim of the moral high ground in world-wide truthful reporting.
The launch of BBC Reality Check indicated two key things. Firstly, that despite the rampant BBC propaganda supporting and promoting UK, US and European Union political agendas, which they have churned out for years, the work of many amateur journalists, and especially those broadly known as the web-based alternative media, has clearly upset the BBC's propaganda apple cart. Secondly, the damage has been so great that the BBC has had to launch a counter-attack against free speech.
Understanding the BBC's role
At this point we should perhaps remember what the BBC says it is there to do. Its 'Mission' is to:
enrich people's lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain.
And their 'Vision' is
to be the most creative organisation in the world.
Of these two self-proclaimed goals, it is perhaps the latter that has a distinctly 'scary' feel about it. The most creative organisation in the world! What does that actually mean? Creating what? In reality, what does the BBC create? It clearly doesn't create a better world. On the contrary, and as we shall see, the BBC specialises in the dark media arts. Are they there to create truth?
As a propaganda machine the BBC is outstanding. Aside from 'normal' news reporting, the BBC has operated BBC Monitoring, part of the World Service Group, since the Second World War.
First funded by the FCO, and now the TV licence payer, BBC Monitoring is still intimately linked to the British intelligence services, especially GCHQ. It employs a team of highly trained language specialists to monitor overseas radio and television broadcasts. Their job is to listen to and interpret what the broadcast message and messenger is really saying. If, for example, there are indications of political decisions or objects hitherto unknown to HM GOVERNMENT, or indications of military movements, threats or internal political strife, then BBC Monitoring flags up their findings and analysis to the secret services.
So innocent people on the Indian subcontinent, for example, may listen in the BBC World Service broadcasts believing that they are listening to friendly transmissions and truthful news from Britain, but in reality the BBC is spying on political, social, economic, and military events in their country. Perhaps India is big enough to look after themselves, but few people realise that the BBC spies on hundreds of countries around the world in this way, and especially those within trouble spots. After all, the BBC likes nothing better than reporting violence, riots, mass shootings, rape, torture and wars.
Enter BBC proxy charity BBC Media Action
Unfortunately the BBC does not just stop there. It also boasts that its 'charity' BBC Media Action is "transforming lives through media around the world", backed up by its mission "To inform, connect and empower people around the world."
These are heady claims by a charity that is funded by the UK government's Department for International Development (£14.7m) and Foreign and Commonwealth Office (£4.1m), the US State Department (£0.5m), the Government of Norway (£0.7), the UN (£3.0m), the EU (£2.4m), and receives money from many other NGOs, agencies and change agents.
We must also mention Bill and Melinda Gates. The happy couple, who seem to have a deep interest in helping the world's poor through population control, vaccinations, and easing in Western banking and debt based financial systems to many poor and thus highly vulnerable countries, have scraped their loose change barrel to give BBC Media Action £4.5m. Why?
At this point, as we probe into BBC media truth concerning Syria, we encourage our readers to read our article 'BBC Media Action: Subversion from Broadcasting House to Kazakhstan.'
This concise analysis delves into the dark political, subversive and propaganda origins of BBC Media Action, including the 'Marshall Plan for the Mind', and sets out its dirty media work amongst the unsuspecting people of Kazakhstan.
We should also note that Juliette Harkin, a former BBC Media Action Project Manager, was kind enough to give a little more than a glimpse into the aims of her work, and thus the real agenda of BBC Media Action, in their Country Case Study: Syria. She boasted that they had been working inside Syria to help foment regime change:
We [BBC Media Action] worked in 2004 with individuals within the ministry who wanted change and tried to get them to be the drivers of that. All media development work that has been done in Syria has, in my opinion, been predicated upon this idea that there can be change from within – you have an authoritarian regime and you find who the reformers are within that (individuals) and you work with them.
Was she aware of what she was doing, was she used, or an innocent in her work, or didn't care?
Understanding BBC Fake News in Regime Change
In terms of Fake News, just think what Juliette Harkin's comments really mean. In both the UK and worldwide, the BBC was reporting the unrest and uprising of the Syrian population against the Assad government, as if it was autonomous.
According to the BBC, Syrians were rebelling, of their own accord, due to their own dissatisfaction with their government. Yet the reality was (and still is) that the BBC was reporting events which it had itself helped to foment from inside Syria.
The BBC attacked Assad at every opportunity, accusing him of every brutal action possible, including gassing his own people, when in fact the BBC was itself actively working inside Syria to subvert peaceful life, and to assist the UK's clearly stated political aim of regime change. Never mind Fake News - this BBC action is duplicitous, obscene and must surely be a hostile act on an unsuspecting overseas nation state.
Just imagine the furore if the BBC discovered that President Assad had been using teams inside the UK to help oust the Prime Minister David Cameron, on the basis that Syria found him to be an aggressive warmonger - a man prepared, for example, to unleash unlawful bombing attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen.
Getting straight to the heart of the matter, The Huffington Post's article Hillary Clinton's Enthusiasm for Regime Change Wars grips the regime change agenda:
The presumption of dictating to an independent nation the form of its government is so arrogant, so atrocious, that indignation as well as moral sentiment enlists all our partialities and prayers in favor of one and our equal execrations against the other.
Wars for regime change also violate international law. Article 2 (4) of the United Nations Charter generally prohibits 'the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state...' Article 51 creates a narrow exception for wars in self-defense 'if an armed attack occurs... Regime change wars do not fit that narrow exception.'
Yet Syrian regime change was the repeatedly declared policy of the US, UK and EU from the outset, and these collective Western powers ultimately trained, armed, funded and unleashed the 'ISIS' terrorists to fight their proxy war against Assad. Follow the simple path of deceit. Western governments pay BBC Media Action to run 'projects' galvanising rebellion against Assad, whilst those same Western governments work in the margins to set up and equip the terrorists which the BBC was to deliberately and misleadingly label 'moderate' anti-Assad rebels.
Follow the Government Money
We must surely be fully justified in asking: just who was BBC Media Action to intervene in the internal politics of the nation state of Syria?
The clue to this pernicious action comes from the old adage: follow the money. BBC Media Action claims to be a charity, but we have clearly revealed that in reality it is a paid agent of the Western collective state. It can only have operated in Syria, and against Assad, on the basis that its work would help the underlying UK, US and EU collective governmental regime change agenda.
Clues are not hard to find. BBC Media Action is a major partner of European External Action Service (EEAS), which promotes their project:
Bridging Syria's divides: Mass media programming and platforms to build resilience and social cohesion to counter violent conflict and radicalism across all sections of Syrian society.
But what does this description really mean? A secondary sentence in the flyer spells it out:
The project will develop and produce radio series relevant to the topic of radicalisation in Syria and entertain dynamic debate.
Here we can see the BBC up to its old tricks: devise and broadcast programming, preferably with the help of innocent local people, which injects the views, values and agenda of the BBC to foment a change agenda in all areas of the target society. By focusing on radicalism and creating 'dynamic debate', the real effect is to create discord, unrest and uncertainty. This is insidious and dangerous interference in a nation state, be it Syria or any other.
So BBC Media Action was working to help undermine Syrian social cohesion and inflame those hostile to Assad, and the EU paid them a mere €2,409,751 to do so. That sum was only just one contribution to the cost of this work, and a fraction of their other government and non-governmental agency funding.
European External Action Organisation
The blatant hypocrisy could not be clearer since the European (Union) External Action Organisation declares that:
it is the European Union's diplomatic service, which helps the EU's foreign affairs chief - the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy - carry out the Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy.
In this one example BBC Media Action was thus paid to help further the political agenda of the EU, and that agenda was, and remains, Syrian regime change.
The EEAS website reveals a string of other EU-backed political projects to further the anti-Assad agenda:
- Supporting transition towards democracy in Syria through preparing for a[n] engendered constitution building process. The overall objective of the action is to contribute to a democratic transition in Syria inclusive of gender equality.
- Strengthening social cohesion for a democratic and inclusive Syrian civil society. To enable key individuals and community based groups from Syrian civil society to undertake community capacity building in key sectors to foster an effective future transition process in post-conflict Syria.
- Supporting Syrian professionals to prepare for leading roles in a future transition to a peaceful, democratic and inclusive Syria. Qualified Syrians will be enabled to become key actors in a future transition process and are willing and capable to contribute actively in the fields of transitional justice, security sector reform, urban planning and local administration. Exchanges with experts from within the EU are established.
- Promoting social cohesion and moderate voice in Syria. To provide Syrian civil society actors with a tailor-made approach for supporting new and existing initiatives through capacity building, networking, sub grants and continual mentoring to promote social cohesion and non-violent mobilisation and to amplify moderate narratives.
The list — for a number of different executing agencies (alongside BBC Media Action) — goes on, with a never-ending supply of EU funding to drive the agenda. The last of the above programmes is funded to over €1 million by the EU.
Syrian Regime Change aka Transition
Whilst these EU programmes are sold in terms of humanitarian need and aid to help people and society, the language reveals much more. Transition is a key word. The inference is that selected Syrian professionals will be trained to become EU actors to help drive (transform) Syria towards an EU style society - a new sociopolitical economic society and order that will completely replace traditional Syria lifestyles.
Only yesterday, EU High Representative Frederica Mogherini announced that she will host an international conference in Brussels on the future of Syria and the region. The announcement came following the first meeting in 2017 of EU foreign ministers, which she herself chaired. Mogherini's weasel words contained a repeated theme, and that was 'transition'. Her conference, for example, would have two main objectives:
on the one side taking stock of the implementation of commitments of the donor community at the London conference, on which the EU has delivered in full [here, we may ask, is she talking the donation of aid or bombs or both?] ... most of all it will be a political conference, hoping that could be the moment for the international community to together turn the page and start the political transition, the reconciliation process and the reconstruction of Syria.
Against this background of very dirty political 'soft power' by the West in Syria, the BBC flooded UK and world news with highly biased Syrian news describing how "dictator" Assad murdered babies, used chemical weapons against his own people and murdered all those that opposed him. As we have already stated, this BBC propaganda was supported with descriptions of the Western-backed terrorists and their sadistic killing machine as 'moderate rebels' suffering under that very same brutal dictator, Assad.
BBC shocked at desire for profit
Let's go back to the BBC and Mr Harding's Reality Check, and remember that he described his concern over:
numerous instances of completely fabricated stories, many of which are created with the sole aim of generating advertising revenue from people viewing the stories.
The key point of interest here is his theatrical shock horror that other media outlets might want to generate advertising revenue from their stories. If the BBC is a £3.65 billion media machine working hand in glove with the UK government and intelligence services, then consider also the existence of the £1.1 billion BBC Worldwide, and £91 million BBC Global News Ltd. All supported by the bully boy muscle of Capita, which does the heavy door-to-door collections should anyone dare not to pay their BBC licence fee in the UK.
Mr Harding acts as if the BBC is a non-profit organisation. Far from it; BBC money and resources, such as pension funds, have been used to create the slick BBC Worldwide corporate media empire, which has profits of some £156 million. Not bad on the back of public money collected by Capita for, yes, you've guessed it, profit. BBC Global News has not yet delivered the cash cow, and profits are slim, but give it time.
So against this big money and big profit background, are we to assume then that these BBC companies are so squeaky clean that they will not spin facts to create the best profit-making story?
BBC Reality Check
Hopefully, the BBC's Reality Check team will read this article. I would very much like them to challenge our investigation into the dirty dealings of the BBC, and their skewed political reporting which has been particularly prevalent in war zones worldwide:
Afghanistan (no mention of the US & UK involvement in the opium poppy drug trade);
Libya (no professional investigation of the funding, training and arming of terrorists by the UK and US to help assert regime change);
Syria (no real investigation of anything - just the regurgitation of UK, US and EU anti-Assad anti-government propaganda);
Yemen (where the BBC has also failed to investigate this UK- and US-created civil war and their funding, training and arms, which features particularly vile military brutality by the British government's old friend Saudi Arabia).
BBC Reality Check Oxymoron
I encourage readers to watch and read reports by Vanessa Beeley, who has reported the facts from Syria and Aleppo. Her work has established without doubt that BBC reports on the Syrian conflict have ranged from poor to deliberately misleading Fake News.
Taking a 'Reality Check', it is apparent the BBC is a master of propaganda, and its duplicitous senior management is happy to betray the thousands of staff who still believe they work for a trustworthy, truthful and reliable organisation, along with the wider viewing and listening public. For the BBC to suggest it is the guardian of media truth is indeed an oxymoron.
