If I may add a little contrast

to Andrew Bowman’s earlier post about CBS reporting of the meeting between President Bush and the McCartney sisters, I received an email from Fausta Wertz of the Bad Hair Blog, pointing out this post.

Shamefully, this morning’s BBCA newscast, after reporting on the above, invited a former SF/IRA public relations man. His position was that the women were puppets of political opponents, nearly the same exact words Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator told the same BBC earlier this week. The BBC reporter had previously concluded his report by saying, “When it comes to Northern Ireland, there’s no longer much to celebrate.”

To the contrary. It’s time to celebrate the courage of six women.

To be fair to the BBC, it seems to me at least possible that their intention in running the Sinn Fein guy was to give him rope to hang himself with, metaphorically speaking. Hard to tell. Very hard to tell. The record of the BBC in regard to Northern Ireland is uneven. Good reporting has often been combined with determined efforts to shoehorn the conflict into a colonials-versus-natives template.