Oh dear, oh dear. On the evening and throughout the night of Tuesday December 28th/29th, two days after the tragedy of an enormous natural disaster in the Indian Ocean, can you guess what important world-changing news made the 3rd lead story on the UK edition of the BBC News Online home page?
Extended Indian Ocean tragedy coverage? No.
Indian Ocean fundraising efforts perhaps? No.
Row over escaped prisoner figures maybe? No.
Give up? Yes, it was the death of American leftie writer Susan Sontag (“widely regarded as one of America’s leading intellectuals”), barely known in the UK, and most likely hardly a household name in the US either.
Exacerbating the warped prominence given to this relative non-event in world affairs, there was an additional front page picture feature linking to a special [Don’t] Have Your Say page – Send us your tributes to the late critic Susan Sontag.
Note the gushing invitation to Send us your tributes – as if that’s all there could be for this supposed cultural icon – rather than, for instance, a more measured line like Send us your reaction to news of Ronald Reagan’s death. Note also how no overt mention is made of Sontag’s extensive left-wing credentials – something that would doubtless be spelled out were she writing from a right-wing viewpoint.
By the next morning all of this was banished from the News Online front page – perhaps the Sontag coverage was the action of a leftie-cub-journo-trainee who’d drawn the Christmas holiday night shift short straw, but who lacked the nous to realise that the death of a left-wing icon, whilst doubtless heartfelt to such a BBC minion, is really not headline news. At least not outside of the BBC Newsroom.
BBC News Online – reporting all the news that’s important. To them.
Yeah, I thought it was weird too. Susan Sontag?
I note the caliber of the usual suspects/contributors — the predictable bleating by the leftist sheeple about her “courage” in standing up to the evil ChimpyMcBushHitler junta. She probably lived on Fifth Avenue in a $2 million coop.
All so dreary, boring and predictable. One wonders at the capacity of even the BBC sheeple to continually withstand the steady and relentless drum, drum, drumbeat of
propaganda.
I might never have heard of her if she hadn’t called the white race, a “cancer on humanity” for which the liberals of the day widely applauded her. No wonder she’s a hero to the guys at the beeb.
We all know how “hideously” infected with the terrible cancer of whiteness is the Beeb! Cancer here, cancer there, cancer everywhere.
It really is quite rich of them to give her the honorific (Don’t) Have Your Say status…
She fell under the literary radar years ago. She was a Trot who hated everything about the way her nation was functioning, no matter which way it turned.
She was also simply too strange for television interviews, and even the Left-column programmers at NPR would keep interviews with her short. She was a very poor public speaker.
All I remember about Susan Sontag is she was in that Woody Allen movie about the human chameleon spouting incomprehensible gibberish about the social significance.
That seems to pretty much sum up her career as a ‘prominent intellectual’ incomprehensible and of course anti-American.
I don’t consider myself or my colleagues to be intellectuals simply because we’re far too intelligent. From the level of discourse on this site, that probably applies to most of the correspondents. Look at who are named as intellectuals – Marx, Tariq Ali, Sontag, and half of France. From the drivel written, it is clear that they are true intellectuals.
I just read the Susan Sontag Have Your Say “tributes”. Do seem to be a reasonable number putting the boot in. Its not all gushing praise.
Oh yes indeed Lurker, I noticed that too – but the invitation to Have Your Say was, and still is, to send in your ‘tributes’! Hardly impartial!
Guess what major person the BBC left out of it’s yearly review!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4127423.stm
They are so transparently biased it’s simply f’ing untrue!
Rob: Who? Who?
Okay Rob, lemme guess before pasting in your link. The initials of this ignored person are G.W.B. Am I right?
Wrong. It was John Kerry – you may remember that he lost the US presidential election to someone.
The reason the Democrats lost, as some have realised, though not many, is because, as Zell Miller, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, and indeed Thomas Frank have pointed out, the American Left is now very much ensconced in Hollywood and New York, and now cares more about Gays and Feminists than it’s traditional base, the white working class.
The Dems are dominated by East and West Coasters who know nothing about “flyover country”.
A Democrat candidate who cannot win in a solidly working class state like West Virginia has clearly done something wrong.
But you won’t see criticism of Kerry and the Dme’s campaign on the Beeb.
Rather late to the party but thanks for bringing this thread to my attention.
Some of the HYS comments, both pro and con are priceless (the former unwittingly, I suspect)
“Her work with the people of Sarajevo with war raging all around her, remains an example of tremendous personal courage. She didn’t have to be there, she chose to help those poor, suffering people in their time of need. ”
Yes, staging that Beckett play in the Balkan NYC that was mid-90s Sarajevo was as pertinent & germane as it would’ve been to, say, tour Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos around the sites of mass-graves.