When troops die in Iraq the exact circumstances seem in one sense insignificant. But I think it’s worth pointing out that the seven US troops who died near Fallujah today were killed by a car bomb which the BBC, in reporting both before they identified the cause of destruction as being a car-bomb, and afterwards, defined as an ‘ambush’.
This seems wrong to me, because for one thing it is unclear whether this might in fact have been a suicide bombing- I think it likely that it was- and for another a definition of ‘ambush’ generally includes the sense of an attack involving personnel, and would seem not be applicable to a booby trap or a stationary roadside bomb.
So, why is this piffling issue significant? Well, if the car was stationary in the road where the troops passed it would be evidence of incompetence on the part of the military if such a vehicle had been capable of wreaking such casualties.
Secondly, if the car was not stationary and we are talking about a suicide bombing then that is a favoured tactic of al Qaeda- and we know that al-Zarqawi is believed an active presence in Falluajh. This fact would also bring into focus the military’s use of precision bombing strikes on safehouses in the city.
So it matters whether as the BBC say this was an ambush, or a carbomb from a stationary car, or a suicide bombing. The latter seems the most obvious explanation- which would explain the deaths of so many without implying incompetence, shed light on the Fallujan ‘resistance’, and likely be a cause for the deaths of US servicemen in a War on Terror far more publicly acceptable than any Michael Moore-like notion of the Fallujan ‘minutemen’ would be.
The question is whether the BBC is geared to report the real events in Iraq, or the Michael Moore docu-drama that many wish they could report.
After writing the above I decided to trawl for the facts about the Fallujah bombing. Using Google News I found the most recent articles, and found reports such as this one from the AP, headlined
‘Apparent suicide car bomb kills seven U.S. Marines, three Iraqi soldiers near Fallujah’
This to some extent settles my mind- it seems the only logical explanation for the casualties- but if I read the BBC site alone I would have likely been misled.
Update. The Commissar is questioning the numbers of injured for August cited by the BBC in the same article (following the WaPo it would seem. Via Patterico).
Update 2: Looks like this is what really happened. Why did I need to go to Fox News for the story?
“The question is whether the BBC is geared to report the real events in Iraq, or the Michael Moore docu-drama that many wish they could report.”
They aren’t wishing they could report that way, they ARE reporting that way. They are obfuscating and omiting the facts to give an ivalid impression without actually telling lies. Although I too question the “ambush” headline. That is in a grey zone, I suppose. They certainly pushed it again.
To answer your rhetorical question: Fox gives unbiased reporting. They also equally present both sides of an issue when there is debate.
It’s working for them too, their cable news channel beat all three mainscream networks for the Republican Convention viewership. That’s a cable outlet beating broadcast outlets. Go figure.
Fox gives unbiased reporting?
Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho
StinKerr – give Outfoxed a watch. Not flawless, I’ll grant you, but it gives such a good rundown of Fox’s blatant bias (eg Hannity vs Colmes, Bill O’Reilly’s blurred opinion/journalism) that Fox even cleaned up their act afterwards!
Well, OutFoxed comes highly recommended: MoveOn.org is pushing it in association with Al Franken, so I’m sure it’s unbiased. 😆
These are the promotional quotes on their website:
“It’s unfair, it’s slanted and it’s a hit job. And I haven’t even seen it yet.”
-Eric Shawn, FOX News Reporter
“scathing” … “eye-opening”
-Hollywood Reporter
“an obsessively researched expose” -NYT
“Fox is not objective. Fox is a Republican propaganda machine.” -Roger Ebert
“Move over Michael Moore. It’s Robert Greenwald’s time to shine.” -CNN
“A must-see movie, no matter what your politics are.”
-Christian Science Monitor
I’ll point out that CNN and NYTimes are feuding with FOX on a contining basis and that both are extremely left leaning.
I couldn’t find a MoveOn house party viewing within 30 miles of me so I’ll see if I can find a bittorrent and watch it. Watching the selected cut and edits should be amusing.
Sure, you watch it and you kind of think “hmm, well some of these talking heads are disgruntled employees, so do I trust it?” and, to be honest, the film is boring in parts, and obviously leftist.
That said, the clips it contains show what they show. Fox has been blurring opinion and comment in a completely blatant fashion and the way in which opinion is melded into “news” just ain’t journalism. If you get peeved at the occasional BBC bias, then you should be utterly outraged at Fox. I got the DVD through a third-party seller on Amazon.co.uk, and it only cost me just over £6 with p&p from the States.
Check it out – even if you hate it, it’s worth seeing as a take on journalistic bias.
Superglaze
Please realise that it is irrelevant to this blog what Fox, CNN or indeed any other news broadcaster does or does not do or how biased they may appear to be.
The BBC states that they are impartial, yet there are examples, that even you concede, show bias.
In addition neither you or I are directly forced to pay for any of those other broadcasters.
If your point is then that no broadcaster is, or can be, free of bias – which I happen to think is the case – then fine, but give me the option of not having to pay for the BBC.
If your point is that the BBC provides and unique service that I should be forced to pay on pain of imprisonment then go ahead make your case.
Just saying ‘yeh but what about…’ or ‘no it isn’t’ to examples of bias just isn’t good enough.
I think my feeling, Superglaze, is one of irritation that either because of the BBC’s laziness and lack of interest (which I doubt) or because of their willingness to present events in Iraq in a particular fashion, I had to go away from my telly-tax-funded service and seek out the facts. Surprise, surprise, the fullest account (the most information offered) I found was on Fox- and it was just as I had conjectured.
I don’t think it’s irrelevant – it was certainly relevant to this particular thread. I’ll certainly agree that no network is free of bias, but would you all be complaining about the licence fee if the beeb was more to the right of where it is?
Superglaze
er… yes and so would you no doubt.
Please also understand that it isn’t just the news output that offends some people.
It is the whole PC, touchy feely right-on bollocks agenda, a la The Guardian, that it tries to promote through its programme output, or the brazen plugging of its services aka advertising, that pisses some people off.
Read John Lloyds ‘What the media are doing to our Politics ‘ as an example of this.
I expect to be confronted with career journalists trying to make a name for themselves on SKY et al pushing the fashionable chattering class line on events but the whole point is that the BBC should be above all that.
The fact that they demonstrably and repeatedly are not means that there is no justification for the licence fee.
Unless you can argue differently of course.
An observation.
It used to be the hardline left who demanded ever increasing pay for less work. Everyone with any intelligence saw the economic impossibility of such a policy in perpetuity, but were abused as ‘chattering classes’.
Now its the hardline right who declare that terrorism derives from the forces of evil and that any consideration of root causes in parallel with military/police action is therefore morally repugnant. Everyone with any intelligence who sees that this will regenerate terrorists in perpetuity is dismissed as ‘chattering classes’.
I watched “OutFoxed” as you suggested. As advertised, it’s a hit piece using selected snippets to advance the premise that the producer started out to prove.
All of the accusers are various degrees of left leaning spokespeople ranging from Walter Cronkite to Al Franken. Pretty much what I expected when I noted that it was sponsored by MoveOn.org.
Some of the others seem to have dedicated themselves to denigrating Fox through websites and books while ignoring bias in other networks.
Cont’d.
The selective editing is exemplified by the way they kept repeating clips of Sean Hannity telling how many days till Bush is re-elected and ignoring Alan Colmes telling how many days till John Kerry is elected. I believe they take turns with that opening message. Hannity gives his at the beginning of his segment and Colmes gives his when his segment starts. Balanced, if not fair.
This bird won’t fly, it’s only got one big left wing.
I was surprised when I found myself in complete, wholehearted agreement with the message presented at the end: There is bias in the media, five companies control most of the media outlets in the U.S., local broadcasting is being killed off or absorbed by these giants, it’s time to put a stop to it.
RB
You want ‘Root cause’?
How about the islamofascists hatred of anything that isn’t Islamofascist coupled with their non negotiable desire to see its subsequent destruction by any means open to them.
I’d call that a force of evil.
Their cause has not been hindered by the inability or unwillingness of their host govts to do anything about it or indeed by the many ‘moderate’ muslims failure to protest ‘not in my name’.
They have been helped immeasurably by the self-hating, bleeding heart western liberal chattering classes which ceaselessly denigrate, impugn, attack and criticise any and all decisions taken by the Western Govts designed to protect themselves and their citzens from their avowed and self confessed enemies.
con’td
Remember to the chatterers Putin was the very model of a modern statesman as he tried to prevent the Iraq war last year
After the Beslen atrocity those same chatterers are damning him as a repressor of the Chechen freedom fighters.
I think it safe to dismiss them.
Yoy,
My point proved I think. Cheers!
An exert from Anne Applebaum’s book on the Gulag – Pulitzer prize winner and hardly coming from the left:
‘Acting in the name of the Soviet motherland, Stalin deported the Chechen nation to the wastes of Kazakhstan, where half of them died and the rest were meant to disappear. Fifty years later, in a repeat performance, the Russian federation obliterated the Chechen capital, Grozny, and murdered tens of thousands of civilians…….To do so was the moral equivalent of post war Germany invading Western Poland’.
Root causes of terrorism? Or is it all the Islamofacists.
‘Root causes of terrorism? Or is it all the Islamofacists.’
You decide.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/000238.php
Clearer?
RB
Or there’s this
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040904/ap_on_re_eu/russia_rebel_goals_1
Look, you’re welcome to agonise over root causes of terrorism
I’d rather take them at their own word
Yes, yes, yes.
I KNOW that there are scary Islamic fundamentalists out there who think that all non Muslims should be massacred and have a talent for knocking up apocalyptic web sites. That doesn’t invalidate any of my points if you read closely.
Your history GCSE paper must have been interesting.
‘Discuss the reasons behind the coming to power of Hitler in Germany?’
‘It was because the Germanyans were all evil’.
‘Discuss the reasons behind the outbreak of the first World War’.
‘The evil doers attacked the good guys evilly’.
RB
‘I KNOW that there are scary Islamic fundamentalists out there who think that all non Muslims should be massacred’
And you might add ‘are doing their level best to do that’ eg Beslan
But please what is your point?
I fail to see how showing that the chatterers being wrong twice about Putin proves anything.
Your reaction to Nazism -yes a force of evil – would have been much like Chamberlain’s I think
I prefer Churchill’s, and I paraphrase, ‘F**k the cause here’s the solution’
Result Nazism is no longer a major threat.
Hey, last month Putin was a baddie (or possibly even an evil doer) to whatever the opposite of ‘chatterer’ is (badly dressed and wierd looking Daily Mail readers you only ever encounter on the train perhaps?) – he didn’t do what Bush told him to and had begun to reverse the ultra free marketism that we’d kindly bequeathed the Russians. This month he’s terrorist fighter extraordinaire.
Inconsistency truly is a uniting force.
Listen I wouldn’t trust Putin to tell me the time but finally I think he gets it.
It’ll be your turn soon.
Read Steyn in this week’s Spectator.
It may help you on your way.
Thanks, it’s been fun.