Monthly Archives: January 2004

regarding this piece about Gadaffi and WMD. This is what he said:

“This biased opinion piece is just that – biased opinion. The obvious interpretation that Libya acted in response to the Iraq example

rather than sanctions which have long been in place is ignored.

Do publish biased opinion if you think that’s your role (I don’t) but do not present it as disinterested analysis. Your social and political biases have lost the BBC its reputation which was not rightly yours to throw away. This is copied to the “biased BBC” blog which I trust you read.”

this website has an idea for a way to legally make it uneconomic for the TV licence to continue.

Meanwhile Biased-BBC blogger Toby Blyth has his own new blog at Bilious Young Fogey.

Specialist pharmacist Anthony Cox has a disturbing article on his site about how the BBC has fed the public hysteria and confusion over MMR, and what the consequences may be for Britain’s population. It’s one thing to be miffed about the BBC wasting licence fee money on extravagant trips for executives and reporting a stridently left-wing agenda, and it’s yet another to realise that — as a licence payer — your money is financing such dangerous misinformation. I have also written elsewhere on what this case, and the Today programme debacle with Andrew Gilligan’s inaccurate reporting on the Iraq dossier, tells us about what really motivates the BBC — and the deadly outcome it all may have.

Comparing and contrasting the BBC’s rotten behaviour on this issue with their rotten behaviour on the issue of WMDs — and the consequence of death in the latter, with the possible consequence of death in the former– brings to mind specks and planks. In both cases, the BBC’s employees have acted recklessly and purely out of self-interest. In both cases, they claim to have the public interest at heart, but in the case of MMR they have actually misled the public and caused greater confusion. I would say that also applies to the BBC’s behaviour in the case of WMDs and Dr David Kelly, and we will hear from Lord Hutton on that soon enough, but at the very least the BBC has itself admitted to getting things very wrong (while assuring those in its employ who got it wrong that their jobs are safe), and a good man died in the course of their follies.

None of this would be forgivable even if the British public wasn’t forced to finance it, but it’s made that bit more distasteful by the fact that we are.

, and a good point to make, about that Andrew Marr report on TB’s trip to Basra. Maybe, he suggests, the soldiers were huffy with Blair because of things like this– which might be filed under that broad BBBC section ‘news the BBC couldn’t care much less about broadcasting’ (and yes, I know army men don’t always love a sailor, but I’d imagine they wouldn’t be impressed, for various reasons).

Whenever I write for this site it’s almost invariably to point out BBC stupidity rather than straightforward bias. And here I am doing it again, pointing out this article by Andy Hamilton, about a series of his being dropped for poor viewing figures. Seeing as one of the justifications for the the existence of BBC1 is that it is supposed to be ‘above all that’, and that Andy Hamilton is in the top five most significant comedy writers working in British television right now, I think it more than amusing that he writes so savagely about our favourite broadcaster.

. Greg Dyke has spelled it out in fascinatingly bullish fashion in an email to anxious staff ahead of the Hutton report:

‘ “What is important once Hutton is published is that if the BBC is criticised we learn from whatever is written – assuming of course that we agree with what is said,” Mr Dyke told staff.’

Note- not ‘If we are criticised we must learn from our mistakes’, but ‘we learn from whatever is written’, and then only ‘assuming.. we agree with what is said’. If there was a movement for the dismantling of the BBC, it would feed on such arrogance of unaccountability. (Hat-tip to Mr Sullivan)

Another “Yer Wot?” moment, this time brought to us in one of those ‘From our own correspondent’ semi-personal pieces by Bridget Kendall. This is the bit that had me Yer Wotting:

The French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, another formidable orator, took the floor.

His speech was equally ardent, arguing that the world did not necessarily have to follow America’s lead.

Then something extraordinary happened.

As he finished there was a ripple of applause. Not something usually allowed in the Security Council chamber.

It felt like a muted gesture of open revolt.

Cor, she makes it sound like Moses laying low the Egyptian overseer or Rosa Parkes refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Did I miss something or wasn’t upshot of the momentous day she describes that… that’s right, I remember now! The US said ‘thanks but no thanks’ to M Villepin and toddled off and invaded Iraq anyway. OK, there’s a respectable argument that the US, in enforcing compliance with the million and a half UN resolutions violated by Saddam Hussein was actually saving the United Nations from itself, but, even so, “The day the UN didn’t matter” might have been a better heading.

Norman Geras writes:

…Marr presented Blair as now going for the humanitarian dimension of the Iraq intervention because of how things had turned out with WMD and as though he had just discovered it. This is becoming one of the major components in the anti-war party’s current mythology. But that’s what it is: mythology. Blair stated the humanitarian argument plain as day, albeit as subsidiary.

Incidentally, there is no such thing as trespass in the noble sport of Beeb hunting. On the contrary. Extra spears always welcome.

One is wielded by Brian Micklethwait iin this Samizdata post. Actually, I think the likeliest explanation for this one is that offered by Dr Johnson when asked why he defined ‘pastern’ as the kneee of a horse. “Ignorance, Madam. Pure ignorance.” The writer just didn’t know what “rally” meant. Something to do with Indianopolis, innit?

I got this one from the comments to the post below. Many, including me, were surprised to note that the audience of Radio 4’s tranzi flagship Today apparently contains a goodly proportion of believers in the right to armed home defence. Laban Tall writes about the way the BBC dealt with this distasteful result.

with some of your emails in the next few days.