Monthly Archives: January 2005

. Got to have balance, haven’t we? Six to one and half a dozen of the other, tit for tat, a fair crack of the whip, everyone’s human etc. That’s maybe why the Beeb put two reports out with apparent simultaneity showing the US as critic (of Iran) and the US as criticised (by Human Rights Watch).

Now for the differences. The headlines are written in such a way that the US’ is seen expressing a viewpoint, whereas HRW have their headline in the form of a statement marred only by the slight matter of quotemarks around ‘erodes’ (a word with fairly unincendiary connotations, except when you place it next to the explosive term ‘global human rights’).

While the Iran-alert article focusses narrowly on an item of news- the fate of a female Iranian human rights campaigner- the HRW article (for it really belongs to them) gets a wide ranging remit, and double-takes on the simple thesis that all schoolchildren (and D.U. contributors) know, that ‘ when a country as dominant as the US openly defies the law, it invites others to do the same.’

You have to say this is pretty lame in a news article, and risible in an opinion one. Like the ‘world’ actually cares about ‘human rights’!

But whether the world really cares about human rights or that’s just some liberal fantasy, Aunty Beeb is determined to bring us up as if it did.

The Rathergate report [pdf] must have been a shade touchy for some loyal BBC scribe to report. Replacing a name here, a circumstance there could easily conjure images the Beeb would prefer to forget. It’s a bit ironic to read the following:

The internal investigation received widespread coverage in the US media, which has been battered by a series of media scandals in the last two years at such major newspapers as the New York Times and USA Today. [And we won’t mention any battered media institutions on the other side of the pond, will we.]

“The 224-page report, which blames the network’s rush on a ‘myopic zeal’ [Now where have we seen that before?] to be first with the Bush story, amounts to a stunning repudiation of the newsgathering process of CBS News,” wrote Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. The US media hit CBS hard in the wake of the investigation The New York Times wrote: “Already under duress from years of budget cuts, poor ratings and reduced influence [The Beeb feels your pain…well, except the budget cut part.], CBS News suffered a crushing blow to its credibility yesterday because of a broadcast that has now been labelled as both factually discredited and unprofessionally produced.”

The Boston Globe called the investigation “a scathing independent post-mortem that describes the story’s journalistic failings“. [Lord Hutton led the way.]

So, are fossilized old media BBChemoths capable of learning anything? The perils and punishments for prejudicial ‘journalists’ who refuse to let the facts get in the way of a good story can be painfully public. As Yogi Berra used to say– “It’s deja vu all over again.”

the communist authorities ordered the construction of millions of backyard iron furnaces to forward the revolution. Nearly all this vast effort was useless. You can’t make industrial-quality iron from mud-brick furnaces. I thought of this when I read in Christopher Booker an item (scroll down) about

Another ludicrous example of how the BBC now pushes its own cock-eyed agenda was an item on Radio 4’s You and Yours last week on wind turbines. The message was that, if you install your own turbine, you can make money by selling the surplus to the National Grid.

All five contributors, including the energy minister, Mike O’Brien, were wide-eyed lobbyists for wind power. A man from Kent who has erected a 45-foot turbine at the bottom of his garden, at a cost of £25,000, was asked how much electricity it produced. He admitted that, thanks to the vagaries of the wind, it did not average more than “two or three kilowatts”. The BBC carefully did not explain that this is only enough to power a couple of electric fires, or boil a few kettles.

Just above that there is an item about the BBC downplaying of the tsunami relief work of the US and Australian Navies in favour of reports about the views of politicians on the disaster, the EU’s three minute silence and so on.

Do more people read the blogs than watch BBC Digital? Speaks for itself.

Second comes a wee snippet about the Kirsty Wark affair which in turn links to this post from Freedom & Whisky. (Some of our US readers, or indeed some of our English readers, may not have been following Warkgate. You should. It’s something like Celebrity Big Brother for the Scottish ruling elite. Check out Ed Thomas’s recent posts. Kirsty Walk is the BBC Scotland presenter who does their election night specials and lots of other political work. And holidays with the First Minister. And helped approve the designs for the famous and astonishingly costly Scottish Parliament building. And who refused to hand over footage from a documentary about the building and its astonishing cost to the inquiry about the same, a refusal backed up by the then controller of BBC Scotland, John McCormick, who said surrendering the tapes would clash with the BBC’s policies.)

The Bunny has up a third post that includes the wonderful line “it was as if Grima Wormtongue had been banished for the day.”It’s about the BBC when it was Auntie.

writes:

Just have a look at this. The Hizbollah attacks an Israeli army vehicle in Israel, Israel shoots back and the headline is “Israel mounts south Lebanon raid.” Not “Hizbollah attack Israeli army vehicle” or anything similar.

Bloody Trots.

UPDATE: That was the headline when I wrote the post. Now it’s different. David B comments:

“Looks like they changed it to “clashes erupt on Lebanon border”. Let’s blame both sides instead…. that’s fair isn’t it?

The BBC must be the only people on the planet who are. Big Mike made sure his loyal wacko fans stuffed the ballot box. That’s fair enough, but the Beeb could at least mention this less than obscure fact. Leave it to one of those money-grubbing American broadcasters to let us know the fuller picture.

Last month Moore posted a letter on his Web site, www.michaelmoore.com, asking fans to vote for the movie, in part to annoy conservative critics of the documentary, which is critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Iraq war.

Moore’s win was greeted by catcalls as well as cheers.

I guess things are looking up in Beebdom.

I noticed Greg Dyke’s recent book, Inside Story, being sold off in Waterstone’s for half price, only three months since it was first published. Amazon.co.uk have it for even less – a mere £8 – 60% off the list price!

A quick search of the web turns up an article by Andrew Donaldson in the South African Sunday Times that throws some light on the matter:

This was a year when the big hitters in the book industry paid vast sums for huge, often very self-important books which swiftly wound up in the remainder bins.

Penguin, for example, forked out £600,000 for Revolution Day, by the ‘handsome’ BBC Iraq reporter Rageh Omaar. It has sold just 16,000 copies — and, according to observers, recouping just 5% of the publishers’ advance.

HarperCollins doled out £600,000 for Shooting History, the memoirs of Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow, and £500,000 for Inside Story, the bitter confessional by former BBC director-general Greg Dyke. Snow’s book sold about 9,000 copies, while Dyke’s sales almost hit the 6,000 mark. Not good, to say the least.

It seems that British readers aren’t buying Greg (or Jon or Rageh).

Presumably this is because the book market in Britain is a free market – no one is compelled to buy a particular state-specified book just so they can read some other book – unlike their television viewing equivalents – forced to pay the BBC’s tellytax just to watch something else.

(never like doing that), but last time I mentioned Kirsty Wark at any length, I happened to remark, amongst other things, that ‘the public knows little (by the Beeb’s own definition) about the BBC’s ‘contacts’, and would probably be disillusioned if it did’

Now, of course, we know more about those close contacts- and what we find out is particularly disquietening, as forecast. The matter at issue is the official enquiry into the exorbitant cost of building the Scottish Parliament, and the potential subversion of that enquiry by Scotland’s most eminent female BBC presenter.

Scottish opinion here.

. Richard North at his EU Referendum blog caught a live one:

‘Nick Clarke, interviewer for BBC Radio 4’s World at One, ran an outrageous puff for the EU constitution on today’s programme.

Well, at least we know where he stands.‘

Is it necessary to add that the BBC have no business expressing their opinions on this matter, certainly not in such a context?

Sleep on it, they say. Sleep on it and you’ll feel calmer in the morning. I did and I don’t. Yes, I’m talking about the BBC peddling conspiracy theories about Diego Garcia and the tsunami again. Again because I find it more disturbing the more I think about it, and because I have a few more links to add. Actually, this is going to tie into one of the most heartfelt complaints against the BBC: its reluctance to use the word “terrorist”.

To recap:

The British Broadcasting Corporation, funded by the British taxpayer considers it an open question whether, ten days ago, between one hundred thousand and a quarter of a million people were at best deliberately not saved or at worst murdered by the United States Government.

You think I’m exaggerating? Read the BBC story again. “Or was some malign hand at work…” If that “malign hand” does not mean either that the Americans started the tsunami and by some devilish means made it circumvent this island (strange and costly mercy amid such vast ruthlessness!) or warned their own servicemen while deliberately leaving others, including American tourists, to die, then what does it mean?

The British Broadcasting Corporation, funded by the British taxpayer, publicises this proposition and invites its millions of online readers worldwide to debate it in a non-judgemental fashion.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, funded by the British taxpayer, declines to give an opinion as to whether these rumours are true.

Many of those readers, both from the West and the East, are uneducated scientifically. Many of them are living in countries and cultures where paranoid conspiracy theories about the Americans and/or the Jews are common currency (even more than they are in certain left-wing circles here in the UK.) Many of them move in circles where the wish to kill an American or many Americans in revenge for this colossal crime which, they are told by their neighbours and their own newspapers, the US has perpetrated on their people need not remain a fantasy.

“Why did mother die, father?”

“Because of the Americans, my son. Some say they let off an atom bomb under the sea. Others only that they knew a great wave was coming but left us to die while warning their own people.”

“My teacher says that’s propaganda. For all that they are foreigners, for many years we have known that the BBC is more trustworthy than the papers here. We should see what the people at the BBC say.”

“Even the BBC dare not deny it.”

Rumours like this have started race riots, pogroms and even wars. Once started they go on for decades. There is no more fertile soil for terrorism than a sense of historical grievance. Fifteen years from now I expect young men now children to be blowing up aeroplanes because they grew up believing that hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists were killed by the Great Satan. The BBC will have played a part in that.

(And if it wasn’t yet obvious to you that it is all rubbish, if you are inclined to take literally the splendidly sarcastic first comment to the previous post from Bob Gleason, “As a Yank, I want to confirm that the U.S. military can, indeed, start a tsunami at will, but then have it go around any installations we might have in its path. My tax dollars at work. Damn, we’re good!”, ask yourself why, if the Yanks can and would do that, did they waste their time directing their tsunami at Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. Why not North Korea? There are lots of earthquakes in the Sea of Japan to work from. There was one Thursday before last.

You might also take a look at a new blog I found via our referrer logs, Shadow Chaser. The author, Michael Gill, has up two posts about all this, here and here.

Mr Gill points out more BBC misinformation. This BBC story about the effect of the tsunami on Somalia says

The small Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia – home to a US naval base – escaped unharmed as it was forewarned by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii.

This account from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association does not say anything about the reason for Diego Garcia escaping unharmed being that it was forewarned. It merely says that the US Navy at Diego Garcia reported to the US Navy Pacific Command at 8.20pm Hawaiian Standard Time that it had not observed the tsunami then.

And as Mr Gill says, Diego Garcia scarcely needed a warning from Hawaii, as the tsunami had hit the shores of Thailand and Indonesia hours before it reached Diego Garcia. Look at the animation of the tsunami he links to. Diego Garcia is that dot in the bottom left corner. (Strictly speaking that dot must be the whole Chagos Archipelago group of islands, of which DG is one. It’s at 6.34S, 72.24E if you want to use the latitude and longitude scales at the side.)

It’s a damn shame that nothing like the Pacific warning system was in place in the Indian Ocean. Those NOAA guys seem to have tried, but – “I’m a scientist! Get me the President of Indonesia!” Sorry, the world doesn’t work that way. Or it didn’t ten days ago when tsunamis were considered rare in the Indian Ocean; it might today. The fact is that a monitoring station in the wrong bloody ocean which was never set up to work outside its area was never going to be able do that much. The systems were not set up. Tsunamis move at 500mph. Sad, very sad. Not evidence of a malign hand.

So how does a conspiracy theory about the tsunami link into use of the word “terrorist”?

The answer to this is tied into the answer to another set of questions: What is the BBC for? Why do we have to pay for it?

Recently in an effort to be more accountable the BBC instituted Newswatch. This Newswatch story about why the BBC will not refer to ETA members as terrorists confirmed what many here already knew: that the BBC’s policy is to admit the existence of something called “terrorism” in general but not to ever call anyone terrorists, even if they are admitted to have carried out what the same writer, Matt Holder, calls “atrocities”. Presumably the outburst of uses by the BBC of the word “terrorist” applied to specific individuals at Beslan, commented upon in this blog, was in violation of those rules. Here is the reason Matt Holder gives for the policy:

It [the BBC] avoids labels wherever it can. And its credibility is severely undermined if international audiences think they can detect a bias for or against any of those involved.

Actually that isn’t what credibility means. You have credibility when people think you are truthful, not when you successfully conceal from them what you think good or bad.

The only reason why we should care about the credibility of the BBC; why our society should see it as enough of a Good Thing to pay for it out of a particularly unpopular hypothecated tax, is that the credibility of the BBC provides some social good.

The social goods that the BBC claims to provide are ensuring people are well informed (an ideal that rests on the proposition that truth in itself is good) and making people better citizens – that is more peaceable, more tolerant, more law-abiding, better able to participate in society. Oh, and in so far as the non-UK audience is being considered, less likely to kill Britishers.

No media service, not even a privately-funded one, should be indifferent to these kind of values. A tax-funded media service in a democracy cannot be, unless it wishes to deny its own justification for existence. Don’t kid yourself. All public broadcasting is ultimately advocacy.

If truth in itself matters, then you don’t abuse your position of trust to pass on a known and dangerous lie, pretending that your hands are clean so long as you don’t actually endorse it. That is what the BBC did in spreading the tsunami conspiracy theory.

On to the T-word: if the maintenance of liberal values in Britain and the world matters, that objective being what the BBC claims it is for, then you don’t play neutral to the most basic liberal value of all, the right to continue living without being blown up at random. If neutrality is possible or desirable, why is the BBC not neutral about ordinary British murders? Or about rape, or theft, or racial attacks or any of the other crimes that disfigure the body politic? Some section of our own British audience – quite a large section if the BBC is to be believed – cheers on racist attacks and presumably objects to any bias against those involved. Why does the BBC not strive to maintain its “credibility” with them?

Because, and never mind the name of this blog, in that sense it has no business being unbiased.

What is the BBC saving up its credibility for anyway? The mere pleasure of contemplating the high regard in which it is held? The BBC audience figures are no concern of mine. If the BBC is striving to keep that segment of its international audience that thinks it OK to take children hostage and shoot them comfortable with its beliefs, then would that the figures were lower! The basic reason for me, the taxpayer, wishing for you, the BBC, to be trusted is so that you can change that sort of thinking. So that when there is an important truth you must convey you are believed. So that when it it is necessary to save lives you can say, “this rumour is not true” and they’ll take it from you, because you are truthful.