By Jay Baker
Fake news can come in many forms. One of the most blatant stems from agenda-driven reporting. That’s when “journalists” form their narrative before they begin gathering the facts. They then only accept the facts that bolster their chosen narrative. All others are discarded. And if they can’t find actual facts that suit them, they make them up, either from whole cloth or with selective editing and deliberate misrepresentation.
Sadly, some of the biggest names in news are the most egregious offenders, as we learn from one man’s experience with the BBC.
Jack Krak — no that’s not a made-up name; and what were his parents thinking? — is a television media producer residing in Poland and something of an expert on Polish soccer and hooliganism. So when representatives from BBC contacted him in 2012 to help them with a story about the European soccer championship which was to be held in Poland and Ukraine that year, he saw a great opportunity.
The story was to air on BBC’s Panorama program, which is the longest-running investigative news program in the world (think CBS’ 60 Minutes). The story would — according to the BBC representative speaking to Krak — focus on aspects of the Polish and Ukraine football culture that might affect players and fans attending the games from other countries. Specifically, it would key on hooliganism and the potential for and history of trouble at the stadiums during the games.
Krak was to work as a “fixer” — sort of an advance person who sets up interviews, scouts filming locations, obtains media credentials for events, arranges transportation, gathers background information and performs the myriad of tasks necessary so the show’s star talking head can swoop in for a couple or three days, make his report and move on to the next story.
Turns out a story on Polish soccer culture is not what BBC wanted at all. It wanted to create a narrative that Polish and Ukrainian soccer fans were racists and anti-Semites. Krak set up interviews with the people BBC wanted to talk to, but the interviews never seemed to make the BBC crew happy. Interviewers never got that soundbite they were looking for because none of the players interviewed — not the black ones, not the Jewish ones — ever said they had experienced discrimination of any kind.
Oh, the fans were rowdy, they said. But discrimination? Never happened. Racist slurs? Nada. And this despite pushing, prodding and cajoling with a series of loaded questions designed to manipulate them into claiming they were victims.
So the BBC made some up. When network pretty boy Chris Rogers flew in for his few minutes of work, he instructed the crew to turn the microphones on the crowd, and Krak to watch the “Nigerian players to look for nastiness from the crowd.” Rogers told the crew to be on the lookout for “anything good.”
When by late in the game nothing “good” had happened, Rogers appears to have simply made something up. He claimed to have heard someone in the crowd making “monkey sounds.” No one heard “monkey sounds” but him. And even replays of the sound tape, Krak says, fail to give a clear rendering of “monkey sounds” or anything resembling them.
When the experience was over, Krak dreaded what he’d see come out of the BBC. When he saw the finished product, he said his dread turned to shock. The episode was titled “Stadiums of Hate,” and featured interviews cut and sliced and out of context and a complete misrepresentation of what the BBC had told Krak they were doing, and what was actually was said and done during the making of the story. As Krak put it, “They had come up with a suitably provocative title for their contrived, deliberately misleading fairy tale about a football culture permeated with vile racism.”
Polish people were outraged. Within a week, every person who appeared on camera in the Polish portion of the program claimed they had been misrepresented. Even the director of an organization dedicated to monitoring racism in Poland called the program “one-sided.”
After the BBC came under intense fire from around the region, the company tried to scrub the episode from the internet. It’s no longer on YouTube, although most if not all of Panorama’s episodes can be found there.
UK journalists hesitated to touch the story because they didn’t want to be seen as “defending racism.”
For his part, Krak doesn’t expect to get any more work from BBC. You can read Krak’s entire account of the experience here.
And then there’s The Washington Post…
It’s not clear what Kenny and Lisa Priddle expected to find when they decided to move from New York to Alabama (aside from $50,000), but whatever it was, they’ve concluded that after eight years they haven’t found it and it’s time to go home.
The Priddles jumped at an offer of a $50,000 payment from millionaire Larry Blumberg to move to the south Alabama town of Dothan — Blumberg’s hometown, located in Southeast Alabama just north of the Florida line — to inject some life and new blood into the local Jewish temple. Blumberg made the offer in an advertisement in the magazine, Reform Judaism.
Temple Emanu-El has 100 members, and with temples across the country closing due to declining membership, Blumberg was hoping to revive it and make sure it didn’t meet the fate so many were meeting across the U.S. When she saw the ad, Lisa was so excited she shouted to Kenny, “We’re doing this.”
“It might be nice,” Kenny eventually agreed, “to come build the South.”
From WaPo:…”All these small towns, their synagogues have closed,” said Blumberg, whose company Larry Blumberg & Associates manages dozens of hotels and other properties across the Southeast. “This is a nice place to live. It really is. I just wanted to see if we could perpetuate it.” Maintaining a visible Jewi…
The “open dialogue” involves the Priddles — and perhaps others, WaPo doesn’t say — going to local churches to “try to explain her religion, even though it seems like most people in her town never really get it.”
More from WaPo:…The Jewish couple committed when they came here to share their faith with whomever they could, and on this day, they had been invited to the church to explain Hanukkah to a group of about a dozen adults with mild dementia. Lisa walks in flustered as the participants chat at round tables above the st…
After explaining Hanukkah slowly, either because the audience has dementia or because audience members, being Alabamians, speak slowly themselves (WaPo doesn’t say), Lisa is put off because no one asks questions for a moment, and when they do they’re asking questions about Jewish food. In that, in the fact that a Methodist church was playing Christmas music at Christmas time, and in the fact that one of her co-workers prayed “In you-know-who’s name,” Lisa is “uncomfortable” about the community’s anti-Semitism.
Let’s put this in simple terms. The Priddles were essentially paid $50,000 to be missionaries. Turns out they aren’t cut out to be missionaries.
It takes a special person to take his faith to people of different faiths… or no faith. There are highs and lows. But to label people as anti-Semitic because they aren’t interested in becoming Jews is nonsense.
The worst thing they can cite is they went into a Methodist Church to talk to a bunch of dementia patients about Judaism and they got questions about food? What else are those old dementia-sufferers going to talk to them about? It’s a southern thing to find something in common to talk about… and if it’s not a common relative, it’s usually food.
Sounds like they were being friendly and welcoming, not anti-Semitic. Did the Priddles think one visit would make elderly Methodists into proselytes?
Other Jews at the temple, including some taking part in Blumberg’s program, seem to see things quite differently. As WaPo notes, “Other Dothan Jews embraced Blumberg’s idea. They love their city’s laid-back attitude, its warm Southern neighborliness, its historic synagogue building with close-knit members who support one another even in the current absence of a full-time rabbi..”
Karen and Terrance Arenson, who are part of Blumberg’s program and moved from Los Angeles, says they are delighted with their decision to raise their daughter in Alabama.
“Dothan is a great place to live, an awesome place to bring up a kid. Much slower pace of life, lower cost of living. People in the Deep South are super friendly,” Terence says.
That doesn’t sound like Dothan is populated by a bunch of raving anti-Semites. Why didn’t WaPo focus on them rather than the Priddles?
Alabamians are an accommodating bunch. Sure, you’ll come across a bigot every now and then, just like you will anywhere. The vast majority of Alabamians don’t care if the Priddles worship at a temple or don’t worship at all.
Maybe the Priddles are the problem. One thing Alabamians don’t like is having busybodies from another state coming to “build the south.” By and large, Alabamians are content with what they’ve built themselves. They don’t appreciate puritanical condescension from northern big city-ites trying to change them.
Cigarettes force people to smoke
A group of researchers from Stanford Prevention Research Center have looked into health data from the nation’s 500 largest cities and concluded that the people who live in neighborhoods with the highest smoking rates are more likely to be poor, less likely to be white, and more likely to have chronic heart or lung diseases. (Your tax dollars at work!)
Being the anti-capitalist progressive busybodies they are, they have a solution, which they describe as “policy measures.” According to study leader Eric Leas, smoking rates are high in these areas because they have a high prevalence of tobacco stores.
From The Los Angeles Times:…[P]eople in neighborhoods with higher smoking rates were more likely to encounter stores selling cigarettes and other tobacco products — an increase of five tobacco retailers in a census tract corresponded with a 0.11 percentage-point increase in smoking prevalence there, the researchers found. Regu…
Capitalism 101: Stores don’t go to neighborhoods to create a demand. Tobacco stores are there because there’s already a demand for tobacco products. If you limit the “quantity, location, and type of tobacco retailers,” tobacco consumers are going to buy their tobacco in other communities or on the black market or obtain them by some other means.
Tobacco stores do not make people buy tobacco products.
These researchers are the same type of people who think guns make people kill other people.
Digging dirt
The leftist Deep State rag The Hill wowed us with this headline this week: GOP operatives did for dirt against rising star O’Rourke.
That’s very likely. It happens every campaign season. Here’s an alternate headline: Campaign operatives enter campaign mode.
I remember all those stories from The Hill about the Hillary Clinton campaign digging for dirt on Donald Trump during the last campaign. Wait. No I don’t. That’s because Clinton, the Obama administration and operatives from the NSA, DoJ and FBI worked with the Democrat National Committee and the MSM to fabricate campaign dirt compiled by a former British MI-6 agent into a FISA warrant, wiretaps and phony Trump-Russia collusion stories.
The Hill still doesn’t get that story right.
— Jay Baker
