Monthly Archives: September 2003

. Seems that the Telegraph is going to start monitoring the BBC for itself. In announcing this move Charles Moore has this (and more) to say about BBC bias:

No, BBC bias is not a piece of partisan trickery – it is a state of mind. So strong is the state of mind that a great many of the acts of bias, perhaps the majority of them, are quite unconscious. It is time to delve into that unconscious. Hence our Beebwatch, which starts on the opinion pages today.

The BBC’s mental assumptions are those of the fairly soft Left. They are that American power is a bad thing, whereas the UN is good, that the Palestinians are in the right and Israel isn’t, that the war in Iraq was wrong, that the European Union is a good thing and that people who criticise it are “xenophobic”, that racism is the worst of all sins, that abortion is good and capital punishment is bad, that too many people are in prison, that a preference for heterosexual marriage over other arrangements is “judgmental”, that environmentalists are public- spirited and “big business” is not, that Gerry Adams is better than Ian Paisley, that government should spend more on social programmes, that the Pope is out of touch except when he criticises the West, that gun control is the answer to gun crime, that… well, you can add hundreds more articles to the creed without my help.

Nice try Mr Moore but you going to have to try just that bit harder if you want to be the Daddy of the BBC bashers.

This is the spin of Caroline Hawley’s ‘report’. Frankly, I’m just shocked that the Coalition forces have not got Baghdad up and running yet. Who would’ve thought that after some four months since the overthrow of the Saddam regime, Humpty Dumpty is not yet re-assembled. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

, I have discovered an awesomely intelligent blog called The Belmont Club. Here’s what the club has to say about the fate of the BBC after a major terrorist victory.

Stephen Lewis of the Sterling Times message board sent this link.

Follow it, please. Now would be a good time.

Mr Lewis has found a report on the Radio Nederlands website stating that the BBC, the BBC, is to monitor message boards for hate speech on behalf of the authorities.

Once upon a time the only official way your home could be searched was by a policeman backed by a warrant issued by the courts. OK, as a libertarian I could raise certain objections even to that, but it was the evolved and generally agreed custom of my country and that counts for a lot. Then the privilege of search spread first to customs officers and then to tax-gatherers, until now practically any parasite of an environmental health officer or social worker can walk in.

Count on it. The same process is happening with restrictions of freedom of speech. Fifty years ago the legal right to impose restrictions was the preserve of the courts. Many of the restrictions were ridiculous: the Lord Chamberlain censored naughty bits out of stage plays until as late as 1968. However, in terms of political speech, freedom fifty years ago was greater than freedom now. Speakers in Hyde Park Corner could and did call for the gutters of Mayfair to run red with the blood of the rich and the copper would just say, “steady on mate, steady on.” Part of the reason for this freedom was that the right to restrict was itself restricted to the justice system.

It’s a sign of a half-way healthy state (half-way being about as good as states get) that it is very clear who is doing the state’s dirty work.

Now, it seems, the job of spying on British citizens has been franchised out to that “much loved” institution, the BBC. As Mr Lewis says, that is not their role. Later on in the post some Radio Nederlands commentary is quoted, saying that it might be better to have “trained journalists” doing the monitoring than others. Not surprising, I suppose, that the trained journalists at Radio Nederlands rate their fellow trained journalists at the BBC as the best people to employ for this task. I must disagree: if I had to choose I’d rather be spied on by professional spies. At least they live in the real world, and in particular have the peril of Islamofascism very much in the forefront of their minds. I’d trust them way above the BBC to be able to tell the difference between clear statements warning against Islamofascism and genuine hate speech ¹.

When it comes to judging others – judging us here, for instance – the BBC is very likely to imply that anyone who says out loud that a kind of death-cult has infected to some degree a disturbingly high proportion of the Muslim world is thereby an Islamophobe.

But when it comes to judging themselves, or judging the groups they have a soft spot for, the standard is very different. You can see the double standard in operation by the BBC’s choice of Jew-hating ranter Mahathir as official BBC “expert” on Islam for an upcoming forum. (See this website, here and passim.) Tell you what, Beeb guys, if you want to monitor “hate speech” why don’t you start with him?

1. I do not make this distinction between real and apparent hate speech in order to say we should forbid one and allow the other. I am a free speech absolutist. That means I must support the political right to make truly hateful hate speech, however vile, while also asserting my right to condemn it. This includes hate speech about Muslims and hate speech by Muslims. But the distinction between real and apparent hate speech is crucial in terms of moral assessment and national security.

(This post also appears on Samizdata and its offshoot dealing with surveillance and privacy issues, White Rose.)

It gets better – this forum on whether there should be a new UN resolution on Iraq and more troops sent there, features …(drumroll)…’BBC reporters’.

I am sorry, but a BBC reporter setting out matters relating to an issue is a news article, not a ‘Forum’. Perhaps they could ask Mahathir to comment on this as well (see post below on ‘Ask the expert’) – no odds on who he would blame for the current problems in Iraq.

There really seems to be a problem at the BBC – the BBC, which is supposed to be a non-profit public broadcaster, has swallowed the whole digital media thing hook, line and sinker.

Commercial stations have digital and satellite, so why not use bags of public money to screen BBC tat (4,000 home improvement shows, apologies for Islamist terrorism masquerading as human interest stories from the West Bank, and EastEnders) in direct, subsidised competition with shareholder-funded commercial outfits?

The internet is the future, so why not spend bags of coerced taxpayers’ money on churning out this sort of rubbish?

This is exactly why the BBC could be a narrow, high culture state broadcaster, or a privatised commercial one, but not the bastard offspring it is. This shows Blair’s mistake in corporatising it – witness the BBC’s institutional reaction to the Gilligan – Kelly scandal – close ranks, and defend, whatever the facts. Whatever you do, don’t let the organisation’s continued existence come into question.

I fear with BBC online that the tail has started to wag the dog – the BBC has a website, and it should get bigger and bigger of course (like all government departments – great when you are unaccountable and have £2.7billion of taxpayers’ money to squander), so let’s just fill it up with more and more of this rubbish. Someone is paid to sit there and idly think up filler, as the organisation takes on a life of its own.

How many jobs in the BBC depend on BBCi? I would be most interested to know.

has plenty to say about “Moonbat” Mahathir, premier of Malaysia and believer in every anti-semitic conspiracy theory going, who the BBC bizarrely picked as one of their experts on Islam. (See Toby Blyth’s post of Sep 02 for earlier commentary on Charles Krauthammer’s appearance then disappearance on the same billing.) The BBC’s page called “Mahathir in his own words” is somewhat more honest than I expected, and does include two of his milder anti-Jewish statements.

It’s good they are finally being reported. No, my quarrel this time is with the flattery of his ravings that his appointment as an expert implies.

Can you imagine the outcry if the BBC were to appoint as an “expert” on anything a white BNP member who held the same views about Jews as Mahathir does? For they do hold the same views: Mahathir is a great recycler of the screeds of Western anti-semites, being a particular fan of various writings of Henry Ford.

This on-line forum or whatever it is is supposed to take place on Oct 12th. By now the BBC will already have appointed and briefed some smooth-talking gnome to sit behind Mahathir and respectfully say, “Ah, no, Mr Prime Minister, we can’t really say that here.” I wonder if they’ll pull the plug on him if he really goes ape.

I’d rather he were not censored. Let the world see him for what he is. But the fact that the BBC has appointed him as one of its two designated experts on Islam is odd on several levels. I wish I could say that my objection was he was unrepresentative of Islam as it stands today. He is not. The Islamic world is awash with crude anti-semitic conspiracy theories. I don’t want the BBC to paper over this fact as they usually do. Yet at the same time I feel that it is – and I really mean this – disprespectful of Islam to blandly choose this addled old Alf Garnett figure as one of its two representatives as if that was all there was to it. It’s as if a real Alf Garnett were solemnly instated as an expert on Britain. He might, at certain times have been a fairly representative representative but, well, you’d kind of hope that they’d hunt aroud for someone better than that. Experts are meant to be above average.

I am dumbfounded, actually. Who on earth first thought of ringing up the old git and asking him, hey, you wanna be our expert on Islam? Did he volunteer himself and the Foreign Office were too polite to refuse? It doesn’t seem to advance the BBC agenda at all. Paradoxically someone like Daniel Pipes, who is a hate figure to to the progressive/Muslim nexus, would actually give an account of Islam that would be less likely than Mahathir’s to arouse contempt for the religion.

I can’t see this as ending in anything other than a huge row and considerable embarrassment for the BBC.

So, this is the BBC’s idea of what it means to be a citizen of one of the world’s oldest democracies, the country that invented the Westminster system and faced down Napoleon and Hitler?

One tourist attraction, the minimum wage, rubbish teeny-pop bands (or music attractive only to teenagers), the Queen’s birthday, the Welsh Assembly, the working time directive, Islam and minority languages…

Do you detect a left-wing bias here?

Firstly, the facetious and smarmy undergraduate tone of the quiz is presumably intended to ridicule Blunkett’s plans to introduce a citizenship test. While Big Blunkett is a terribly authoritarian Secretary of State and is criticisable all round for his anti-civil liberties ‘flog and hang’em’ mentality, this is an idea that plenty of other sane countries (like Australia) adopt (and hey, I am sure you have to pass a religious test if you wanted to become a Saudi citizen).

Secondly, the questions all deal with Labour/left wing issues – minimum wages (theoretically unsound to a non-Marxist economist), the Queen (she is so silly she has TWO birthdays – so let’s abolish her and become a republic), Welsh nationalism (hmmm…English bad, non-English good, two legs bad, four legs good), minority languages (we just love them don’t we – repeat after me – English bad…), Islam (what can I say – Western bad,…), consumer rights (kettles? obviously a plot by Western capitalists to screw good old workers who just want a nice cup of tea) and Labour Prime Ministers (Labour was only in power for about 25% of last century from memory – and did not in any real sense predate the 20th century in the UK – say it again, Conservatives bad,…).

What about an article about citizenship and toleration and respect for free speech, freedom of religion, the rights of minorities like gay people, and respect for womens’ rights, and whether one can be a citizen and espouse the violent overthrow of its democracy and its replacement with a grossly discriminatory and violent religiously based legal system?

This is a serious issue – and my taxes pay for this biased nonsense? Where is Cato (of Carthago delenda est fame) when you need him?

, so I really must take steps to preserve the limericks about the Master of Balliol that were sent in by readers.

Here they are:

There once was a Master of Balliol

Whose writers delighted in onlyoil.

Needing nary a push,

To blame all on Bush,

Will Master throw Gilligan down’t’ hole?

Don Eyres

There was a Master of Balliol, called Graham

Who thought things and knew how to say ’em

When he looked at old Auntie,

He denounced her as slanty

And t’is pity we’re all forced to pay ’em.

David Carr

Graham, old Balliol’s Master,

Knew Beeb was set for disaster

When Gilligan said,

Through a hole in his head,

“I’m sad to report I’m a bastar- “

Sharpshooter

There once was a Master of Balliol

Who, taking a break from his daily toil,

claimed democracy

needs Aunt BBC

which in turn needs its unquestioned Charter Royal.

Blog Irish

Too cloistered, the Master of Balliol

was blind to the Beeb’s abject failiol

to be aptly fair

‘tween the critics and Blair,

falling in with the anti-war wailiol.

Norman Geras

Laban Tall also comments, but not in rhyme.