Monthly Archives: December 2003

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.

is delineating the BBC worldview. You can help the good work.

kept a minute by minute watch on the breaking news of Saddam’s capture. He spotted some interesting editing:

(Obliged to correct myself again – at 3.45 PM.) The BBC video I’ve linked to now no longer shows the beginning of the Bremer press conference, but goes straight to the pictures of Saddam undergoing medical examination. Now, why? It couldn’t be that ‘Ladies and gentlemen – we got him!’, followed by jubilant applause, was somehow not kosher by them? It surely couldn’t.

There’s also mention of the BBC at the bottom of this post about Noam Chomsky.

. Glenn Reynolds has captured some BBC reaction– reaction I also caught live on TV. At times like this there’s so much to take in, and nothing much can take the edge off things for me over the capture of Saddam. On a serious note though, I also heard Saddam’s capture described by the BBC as a ‘propaganda coup’. I often feel that, as when someone calls someone else a liar or a cheat, there are words you can’t take back- they’re beyond balancing. Update. I thought I’d add Glenn’s link to the BBC reporters log here, so everyone can find their ‘favourite’ bits more easily. Update 2: As Glenn says, Tim Blair’s on a roll (scroll away).

A GOOD NEWS story from Iraq by the BBC.

Jonathan Marcus wants us believe everything Human Rights Watch has to say about the “avoidable” deaths of civilians in Iraq. He seems happy to photocopy everything the HRW report has to say about American and Coalition tactics. Mr Marcus should read Steven den Beste’s devastating critique of HRW here before touting them as worthy of our trust. The trouble with the BBC approach is that HRW is a highly partisan, anti-war, anti-Bush organisation. Fairness and accuracy in reporting and analysis should dictate some mention of this by the BBC, but, alas, we hear only the voice of a parrot.

Somehow I don’t think a critical template was applied to this recent article about a conference in Geneva where the correspondent saw ‘vintage’ Robert Mugabe, whose speech ‘stood out’. As Natalie said about Ethiopia, to be fair the BBC do have some critical coverage- in this case some angles on how bad Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is. But why don’t they hold him to account personally, instead of permitting an article to fawn over him just because he stands out from the other leaders? Yes, he does stand out, amazingly enough in a continent with such corrupt and ‘colourful’ leadership. Maybe those leaders weren’t performing the ‘old classics’ about inequality and colonialism for their Swiss hosts because they still care about being included in a sane and potentially lucrative political discourse.

They wouldn’t take this ‘neutral’ a stance at the BBC if the vast bulk of their reporters didn’t look to blame ‘the West’ (and in this case us, the British) first, or if the vast bulk of reporters had any sympathy with the real deprivations of Zimbabwe. Where there is blame to be laid, you can guarantee it won’t be understood, let alone tolerated, by an intemperate despot like Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean Head of (a suffering) State. If you take any lead from such a man, the real story is already lost to you.

nb. I am aware the BBC has been banned from Zimbabwe by Mugabe- which in theory would limit their coverage. This only increases the bizarreness that the BBC are willing to talk of ‘vintage Mugabe’- the same vintage Mugabe that banned them I suppose. And by the way, no mention either of Mugabe’s travel ban (part of EU sanctions intended to affect him personally). A big thank you to the Swiss then, with an assist to Chirac who set the trend by inviting Mugabe to Paris- but didn’t shake his hand in a very, er, French compromise.

reported a demonstration of about 200 former Iraqi army personnel in Basra today. They were protesting over what they said was the failure to pay them pensions over the last few months. They lit tyres and made plenty of noise. This incident made the headlines.

Are the BBC in the business of mocking the thousands of people that marched against terrorism several days ago in Baghdad, without so much as a mention on any BBC News report that I’ve heard of? Of course, one of the negative Beeb’s key themes of the moment is the strife over the dismantlement of the Iraqi military, and the US’ attempts to revive it in a much smaller form (- not that they’ll examine that foundational reality until they’ve squeezed some negative headlines out of it). But in the meantime, why allow facts on the ground to spoil a good story, or two?

:

Dos and donts

Good Luck!

Meanwhile, far removed from this sparring, Instapundit presents some sensitive observations on the US media coverage, or lack of coverage of Iraq. I wonder how much Greg Dyke’s criticisms of the media there have impacted on their approach recently. Come to that, I wonder how much the BBC’s attitudes generally have proved trendsetting. Do they [those attitudes] run deeper [and have more influence] than the [typical liberal] US media reluctance to back their Republican leader? [To clarify, have the US media been unwarrantably ‘shamed’ by Dyke’s comments and specious statistics about what I believe he called ‘flag-waving’ US coverage of the ’21 days’ conflict?] Another, British, commentator, has his own reflections on Iraq somewhat contrary to the BBC in-crowd (thanks to Donald Sensing for the link). [update. I’ve updated some of my comments in brackets, because I was beginning to forget what I meant by them! Blogger’s prerogative, I trust.]

. West ‘risks new Ethiopia famine’ is the headline to this BBC story. Attracted, in a train-wreck sort of way, to the assumption that it’s the West risking a new Ethiopia famine rather than Ethiopia risking a new Ethiopia famine, I took a look. The article is a mouthpiece for the views of Dr Tewolde Egziabher, an Ethiopian government scientist, who says, no less than four times, that the private sector is the problem. Here’s a quote from the start of the article.

“Will Ethiopians starve again?

“Ethiopia’s efforts to feed itself and avoid another famine are being fatally undermined by Western policy, a senior scientist has told BBC News Online.”

“Will Ethiopians starve again?” That’s an interesting question. Here’s another interesting question, not mentioned in the article and certainly not put to Dr. Egziabher by his ever-respectful interviewer:

WHY THE HELL DO YOU THINK ETHIOPIA STARVED THE FIRST TIME?

Sorry. Sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever descended to leaning on the caps lock button before, but the thought of the monstrous thing that killed one million Ethiopians going unnamed made me angry.

Give the BBC some credit. The answer to my question can be found on the BBC website, although you have to put the separate bits together yourself because the BBC won’t exactly lead you to this conclusion. Here is the country profile for Ethiopia. And here, in that profile, is the answer to my question:

In 1974 this helped topple Haile Selassie. His regime was replaced by a self-proclaimed Marxist junta under which thousands of opponents were purged or killed, property was confiscated and defence spending spiralled.

Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, now Zimbabwe… In Africa*, where Marxism has gone famine has followed. “Property was confiscated” may not sound so bad but those three words were the death knell for millions. If farmers, black or white, know that if the reward for high production will be having their produce or their very farms stolen from them, why then they won’t produce much. Not exactly rocket science is it?

Naturally, my assessment of the causes of famine is not shared by everybody, and I wouldn’t expect the BBC to talk as if it were. However the role of private property rights as a bulwark against famine is one of the major arguments kicking around the world poverty debate at the moment. Yet it came as no surprise that neither the interview with Dr Egziabher nor this analysis of why famine stalks Africa, nor this one of why Ethiopia faces another famine address the issue at all. The nearest we get is that the first story has a tiny, tiny mention of how under the “present terms of trade African agricultural exports command low prices and cannot compete on world markets.” Nice try but exactly wrong. Under the present ‘terms of trade’ i.e. the monstrous barriers to trade put up by the BBC’s beloved European Union, African exports are commanded to have artifically high prices, otherwise known as tariffs, in order to protect French farmers. That’s why Africans can’t compete on the world market.

Like my argument on insecure property rights being a cause of famine, the argument I have put forward on tariffs, while not universally accepted, is a major contender in the debate, put forward by people far more eminent than I with such force of evidence and logic that even deep-dyed anti-capitalists like Ken Livingstone have reconsidered their opinions. So don’t expect to hear much about it at the BBC.