BBBC Reader Andrew has been scrutinising

BBBC Reader Andrew has been scrutinising some BBC coverage, and via E-mail it’s here for your interest:

BBC News Online published an article on Friday 23rd headlined US concern over war dead photos about the controversy in the US over the publication of photos of flag-draped coffins on the web – the photos were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act, contrary to the wishes of the US Government.

There are two troubling aspects to the BBC’s coverage of this story:

1) The publication of the photos on the web has aroused further controversy – it turns out that a good number of the images on the site the BBC links to are actually those of the remains of NASA astronauts killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia accident – the reason for this is that the FoI Act request was for all such photos from 01FEB2003 to the present – the Columbia accident occurred on 01FEB2003. More than four days after this significant additional information has appeared across the web and wire services, the BBC story has still not been updated to record this fact. (Link)

2) More troublingly, the bottom third of the story, under the heading ‘War President’, covers the publication of a ‘mosaic’ of President Bush “composed from photos of US service men and women killed in Iraq”. The BBC states that the image is by “an anti-war activist” and that it is published on his web site American Leftist.

What the BBC doesn’t tell us, its compulsory customers, is that the image was first published on April 4th (scroll up one line). It’s not news – it’s more than three weeks old. It’s a satirical political image that some lefty BBC hack has tacked on to the end of a vaguely related news item, under the guise of news, because it looks good and is in line with their Guardianista sympathies (i.e. anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war). Moreover, reading the website of the image author and the comments of others, it seems that the photos are of coalition dead, not just US dead, that a number of the photos are repeated several times over and that there is even doubt over whether or not they are all actually dead.

All of this dodginess aside, making an image like this is not difficult with modern software – it’s basically an image imposed over a montage of smaller images, changing the colour tones of the smaller images to reflect the larger image – so it doesn’t even qualify as news on the grounds of artistic merit. And if anyone from the BBC cares to suggest it does, can we respectfully request the inclusion of similar ‘satirical montages’ to complement other news items – here are a few suggestions for starters:

– Moqtada Sadr – composed of dead coalition soldiers;

– Sheik Yassin – composed of victims of suicide bombings;

– Martin McGuinness – composed of victims of the IRA;

– George Galloway – composed of victims of Saddam’s reqime;

– Tony Blair – composed of victims of NHS waiting lists;

and so on, depending on one’s political whim. It’s not difficult to come up with these wheezes. And it’s not news, except on the BBC, paid for through a compulsory television tax. Remember, it’s not your BBC, it’s their BBC!