says Nick. Denis Boyles gets a few licks in at the America-hating European press. Among several examples of media bias he refers to a Harper’s magazine article penned by the BBC’s Nicholas Fraser.
That leaves the rest of the magazine to annoy and pester — including, in the current issue, a piece by Nicholas Fraser. Fraser, who works for the BBC, defends the BBC. The article isn’t online — they’re practically giving the magazine away by mail, for crying out loud — but Harper’s + BBC = you know the story: We get a lede so over-upholstered in digressions that you could jump out of a fifth-story window, land on it, and walk away unharmed, and a side order of big-huge stats (BBC annual income: $6.5 billion, 28,000 employees, 82 years old, etc.). But then the predictable spiral: a novel dig at Lord Hutton’s report (“whitewash”), slams at Fox (“moronically celebratory”) and at CNN (“not…immune to the spirit of jingo”), with the amiable old Beeb shambling “along in the middle ground.” This leads to an anecdote using al Jazeera as a model of journalistic integrity, followed by an interesting question: “Who would…believe that a tax, the non-payment of which is punishable by a jail sentence, is the best way of subsidizing public liberties?” The answer: Guys who work for the BBC and write really long articles about it for Harper’s — that’s my guess. “The BBC is the last bastion of intelligent speech and therefore of mass intelligence,” writes Fraser.
Example of said intelligent speech: “The growing contempt or indifference with which most media are regarded is the truest symptom of the growing malaise of democracy in our time.” Exercise: Which word should be replaced by the word “journalism” in the preceding sentence?
Ummm, let me guess.
Dyke’s folly
Production cost per viewer hour
BBC4 91p
CBBC 53p
BBC Choice 33p
BBC News24 19p
C4 6p
BBC1/2/ITV 4-5p
C5 3p
So, as Insider would tell us, Channel 5 is awful. But how can the BBC justify costs 27 times higher to produce true public service broadcasting that is watched by very few, but paid for by all?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1093635,00.html
Contempt for journalism grows when its practitioners claim impartiality and objectivity when the evidence is against them. It’s difficult not to hold habitual liars in contempt.
By the same token, journalists who acknowledge or even parade their agendas and biases may alienate some people, but at least they’ll be cosidered honest.
People can cope with agendas and bias; they’ve always been a part of journalism. What annoys people are protestations of innocence and purity coming from the guilty and the impure.
Off Topic
compare this two
http://allafrica.com/stories/200404290789.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3667515.stm
In Channel 5’s defence it brings Major League Baseball to terrestrial TV in the UK, and this is well worth 3p per viewer hour for the many lovers of one of the USA’s great institutions.
On another matter could someone put me on to the item in which a senior BBC functionary advised a meeting in Gibraltar that it was the ‘duty’ of the BBC to counteract eurosceptic UK news media?
Today Sharon condemned the “murder” of the pregnant settler and her four children. But the BBC website changes his word to assassination”.
Typical. Down to the last nuance of language, the BBC distorts events. Those children were MURDERED by people who had stopped their car and walked over to pump bullets into all of them, including a 2-year olde child, to make sure they were dead.
Shouldn’t the BBC be making lots of documentaries about how these murderers can become so psychopathic ? Shouldn’t they be filming in schools, mosques etc – to find out how this depravity is already glorified by official statements in Palestine ? And even in her report on these murders, Orla “Goering” also distorted the nature of the pullout from Gaza, implying that was all the Palestinians could ever get. Bias even while young children are being buried.
Yet another pro-Islamic lovefest promoted by the Baghdad Broadcasting Caliphate:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3663771.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3678115.stm
Headline
“US hostage in Iraq gains freedom”
Note “gains freedom”, not escapes from murderers & kidnappers. The US military says
“Thomas Hamill was found south of Tikrit after he apparently escaped from his captors, US Army spokesman Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt told reporters”
But the BBC notes
“his captors threatened to kill him if the US siege of Falluja was not lifted.”
And
“Mr Hamill’s freedom came as US marines began withdrawing from Falluja, handing over to an Iraqi military force.”
So Kimmitt probably talks with forked tongue. Hamill must have been released because the US have done what the kidnappers, who must be honourable men, demanded.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3673615.stm
An analysis of the move to put an Iraqi force into Fallujah.
The writer makes it seem as if the marines were reacting only to the lynching of 4 US civilians.
“Are the killers of four US contract workers to be handed over? This was, after all, the marines’ chief mission.”
The writer makes no reference to other attacks by the Fallujah insurgents, such as the attack on the local police HQ, nor the town’s strategic significance on the main road between Baghdad & Jordan.
So the result of attempts to capture the killers of those 4 men is that “Large numbers of civilians have already been killed there.”
Then the last paragraph in that Hamill article is “Mr Hamill’s freedom came as US marines began withdrawing from Falluja, handing over to an Iraqi military force.”
So, lucky for Mr. Hammill that his freedom just “came”. Fell out of the sky. And, occured as US forces were in retreat.
I can’t tell whether the BBC is so deeply offeneded that this truck driver dared to take the initiative to “gain” his freedom (or allowed it to “come” to him as they now seem to have concluded) OR they’re just lousy journalists. Actually, I believe that its both.
Yes, the Marines moved on Fallujah after ENDLESS attacks from that city, not just the killing of the contractors. nd they still have a cordon round the city, which they will maintain. But the BBC would rather paint it as a retreat.
The Times reports that
Meanwhile the British licence payer is forced to fund more of the same-
Apparently
Well at least the BBC has come clean about its middle eastern reporting over the last few years. T
Obviously the spin which Al Jazeera puts on it’s stories is aimed at an Arab audience, hence the less than complimentary coverage of the US and chums, but its source material on Middle Eastern matters is indisputably the best available.
If the Beeb has access to this material it can only improve its coverage. Pretty good news given that one of the most depressing things about the whole situation is that Western media (and governments) really haven’t had a clue about what’s actually going on in Arab society.
Check out this link…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3683115.stm
See if you can find any hint that the previous guards in Iraqi prisons were MUCH more likely to commit real torture of prisoners. There’s even the Nazi bogeyman, but no mention of Saddam’s regime.
They truly are the Baathist Broadcasting Corporation; paid for with the threat of jail! Words cannot get across how unspeakably annoyed I get with this rogue media.
OT : A bizarre development in the BBC quote marks saga :
Disney ‘blocks’ Moore documentary
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/3685633.stm
Why is “blocks” in quotes ? The Disney spokesman is quoted as saying :
“Zenia Mucha, a Disney spokesman, said: “We advised both [Moore’s] agent and Miramax in May of 2003 that the film would not be distributed. That decision stands.” ”
so there’s no “blocks” about it. It’s an absolutely copper bottomed explicitly admitted by the blocker • blocks – .
Meanwhile…I’m sure most Moorewatchers could think of a different word in the headline to put quote marks round.
“its source material on Middle Eastern matters is indisputably the best available. ”
Any evidence for that – it seemed to be completely wrong footed by everything thats happened so far in Iraq – from quagmire to stalingrad etc and has only really played a passive role as a mail box for Osama and other snuff videos.
Or perhaps you can let me know of any “scoops” that Al Jazera has sourced – I cant think of any.