A Telegraph reader responds to yesterday’s BBC coverage:
.Re: A wonderful coup
Date: 15 December 2003
Sir – Saddam’s trial will reveal the shocking truth about the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, just as the Nuremberg trials did about Nazi Germany. His capture is a wonderful coup for the allies that will place the justification for the war beyond doubt.
Yet the treatment of this event on BBC News 24 can best be described as muted. Correspondents spoke approvingly of Tony Blair’s lack of American-style “triumphalism”, as if such a reaction would itself have been a crime. We were 20 minutes into one news bulletin before Saddam’s atrocities against the Iraqi people were mentioned.
The BBC’s coverage of the war in Iraq and the subsequent occupation has frequently been defeatist and biased against the allied forces. The discovery of mass graves, containing 300,000 bodies, has received far less coverage than the non-appearance of weapons of mass destruction. Yesterday’s unsatisfactory reporting once again raises serious questions about the political agenda of the nation’s public broadcaster.
From:
John Townsend, University College, Oxford
And so say all of us.
“Raises serious questions….”
Seriously now.
Though I wonder whether it is at all possible to raise serious questions about a clearly propagandistic “news” service, whose caricatures, disguised as reporting, merely mimic the mindless mindsets of the jokers who prepared them.
(Keeping in mind, of course, that all truth is relative on the one hand, and one must speak truth to power, on the other.)
OT I know but if you think the BBC is bad on this try watching Sky News.
They seem to be trying to outdo the BBC in terms of negativity and bias.
The execrable Peter Clarke and Ian Woods double act is simply beyond belief.
Apparantly the night time raid to get Saddam was one that ”went right for a change”
I agree with Morgan, Sky News has utterly lost it. In fact, I think I was watching at the precise moment they did lose it.
In the run up to the war, Sky News simply outclassed and out impartialed the BBC. They presented ‘both sides’ of the arguments with clarity and some depth.
Then “shock and awe” happened, where the spectacular but selective bombing of regime targets in Baghdad commenced in the evening. It looked like the apocalypse, and like the end of Baghdad. It wasn’t of course; it was just lots of big bangs going off and colourful flames shooting into the sky (the next morning Baghdad looked pretty normal and traffic was flowing). But the sea change in Sky News (especially the cosseted anchors) was apparent. They lost their sense of perspective.
As with the BBC, the reports from the field were generally much better than the opinions generated in the ivory towers of the studios.
And I still fancy Emma Hurd in her helmet and flak jacket. 😉