15 Responses to Balance, what’s that?

  1. cat says:
    May 24, 2005 at 10:39 pm

    The Engage complaint to the BBC includes the phrase ‘The BBC is widely expected to do better.’ What a joke.

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  2. JohninLondon says:
    May 25, 2005 at 9:06 am

    Anyone else sick of James Naughtie preaching at us from Africa ?

    With the refrain of “It is the job of the West to sort things out, to pay for everything” and “The Churches in Africa opposed to appointing homosexual bishops?” and “Strange there is mayhem and massacre in Nigeria – Islam is religion of peace.”

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  3. Eamonn says:
    May 25, 2005 at 9:58 am

    “Anyone else sick of James Naughtie preaching at us from Africa ?”

    Yes.

    The Naughtie worldview:-

    Extreme left – misguided, but hearts in right place
    Centre left – excellent
    Centre – questionable
    Centre right – evil
    Far right – super evil
    George W Bush, Republicans, People with strong Christian views – hyper evil

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  4. alex says:
    May 25, 2005 at 9:59 am

    Nothing the Bwana Broadcast Company loves more than to patronize people with brown skin.
    Spreading Northern European “Largesse” and agonized Scottish Relativism to the wretched natives

    “Take up the White Man’s burden
    The savage wars of peace
    Fill full the mouth of famine
    And bid the sickness cease
    And when your goal is nearest
    The end for others sought
    Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
    Bring all your hope to nought”

    Kipling said it best, Naughtie in true BBC style has fudged the last line.

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  5. Natalie Solent says:
    May 25, 2005 at 11:07 am

    If you go back to the now-updated Normblog post you will see that the piece has been repeatedly stealth edited. First they changed the title from “‘stitch-up’ fear” to “‘stitch-up’ claim.” Then they dropped the second pro-boycott quote from Ilan Pappe and added – hey, what a great idea, why didn’t they think of that one in the first place? – a first anti-boycott quote from John Pike.

    I still didn’t think much of this:
    “Ms Blackwell accuses Bar-Ilan of helping with degree programmes at a college in a settlement in the West Bank.” *Accuses*? Isn’t that one of the things universities are meant to do, help with degree programmes? The word “accuses” implies that it is necessarily wrong to help with degree programmes in that territory.

    It’s not a BBC bias issue, but Ms Blackwell did come out with one unintentionally hilarious line: “If the people who come to the council are the usual people, who are dedicated unionists who care about the issue, we could win. If we find the meeting is packed with people who are opposing the boycott, we may struggle.”

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  6. anon says:
    May 25, 2005 at 4:32 pm

    OT. ‘It’s worse. The producers just can’t imagine that someone could possibly oppose European integration or any of the other left-wing causes because to them, and their friends, these are self-evident truths. It simply doesn’t even occur to them that reasonable people could disagree with them.’
    Aitken nails the entire argument. And in Today’s Metro — I know, I know, fourth-rate rubbish you wouldn’t wipe your…anyway, — but interesting example of this ‘my ideology is self-evident truth, yours is just ideology’ mindset.
    Christopher Hitchens’ Love, Poverty and War is today reviewed by Metro’s own Robert Murphy. It enjoyed a stunning four-pars worth of space, which is about three pars more than your standard Elle Magazine review and 179 pars less than something you might find in the TLS, for instance.
    Anyone familiar with Hitchens’ journalism…
    http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/641kyjkk.asp
    knows he doesn’t pull his punches or suffer fools. And if he wants to shuffle along the ideological spectrum, that’s his business and he defends his positions with more vigour and brio than most hacks writing today.
    Like Metro’s own Robery Murphy, who writes: ‘The quality of CH’s journalism has become increasingly erratic over the past few years and this latest piece is representative of that.’
    The classic BBC/Mainstream media trick. Bush/Israel/Hitchens opposes my worldview, so I will cover my bias with a weasel word like ‘erratic’.
    He continues: ‘By a wide margin, the best selection is Poverty, a selection of superb polemics that, tellingly, date from ten or more years ago…Iraq sees an unmistakeable shift in tone into a gung-ho celebration of war, most notably in his confused criticisms of Noam Chomsky.’
    I can think of many words to describe Hitchens on Chomsky, and ‘confused’ wouldn’t be one of them. ‘Devastating’
    might be nearer the mark.
    ‘Althoug his excesses from that period are absent, his volte-face is still clear and is just as bewildering now as it was at the time.’
    For Metro’s Robert Murphy as for
    so many in the head-in-sand left, Hitchens has committed the unpardonable crime of facing up to the real world.
    I know it’s only Metro, but telling nonetheless.

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  7. anon says:
    May 25, 2005 at 5:56 pm

    ‘metro’ left wing? Are you joking?

    this was a troll, surely

    or is the ‘evening standard’ MSM in your eyes too?

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  8. anon says:
    May 25, 2005 at 7:45 pm

    of course you’re right, anon. turning 16-inchers on the 10-second silence is like the tirpitz firing on a kayak. i just happened to glance at it this morning and choked on my metaphorical bagel. metro hacks are young and silly, but young and silly metro hacks grow up into bloated, biased, hideously twisted dan rathers and barbara pletts. nip ’em in the bud, i say.

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  9. Susan says:
    May 25, 2005 at 8:51 pm

    Are people having conversations with themselves in here?

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  10. jon livesey says:
    May 26, 2005 at 1:04 am

    In all honesty, I don’t think that this is a particularly good example of BBC bias. The “stich-up” comment comes from one of the boycott organizers – well, what else would she say? – and it’s legitimate to quote it.

    We shouldn’t worry when the BBC quotes biassed statements. It’s when the BBC gets itself into the act that we should.

    This boycott nonsense annoys me, but it’s not an example of BBC bias in the same sense as not reporting Ronaldo’s visit to Israel was.

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  11. Anti Aunty says:
    May 26, 2005 at 1:30 am

    There is an excellent piece by Boris Johnson entitled “I won’t pay to be abused by the BBC”in today’s “Telegraph”…

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  12. Natalie Solent says:
    May 26, 2005 at 7:58 am

    John Livesey – the problem wasn’t with the quoting of the “stitch-up” comment from the organiser. The problem was with the original wording, ‘”stitch-up” fear’, later changed to ‘”stich-up” claim.’ The original wording gives the impression that the fear was reasonably feared, so to speak, either by most of the people there or by some objective authority. (e.g. like “New Ebola outbreak fear”) In fact the fearing was done by Sue Blackwell and, by her own words, the “stitch-up” consisted not of secret manipulation of the democratic process – the usual meaning of stitch-up – but of lots of her opponents turning up to vote.

    As I always say, the fact that correction occurs is good. The fact that there is no indication of it is bad. The relevant BBC page is refusing to come up for me this minute, but I bet that “last edited” box still carries the original date and time. See this blog, passim.

    There was also the way the Beeb had to be pushed before it thought to get a quote from an opponent of the boycott. The original article provided quotes from two supporters. Exact equivalence isn’t always to be had, but one from each side isn’t such a hard goal to aspire to.

    Why such a long reply? Because in contrast I think this is almost a *quintessential* example of BBC bias. They really, really didn’t think at all.

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  13. Verity says:
    May 26, 2005 at 5:30 pm

    Alex – The Bwana Broadcasting Corporation! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

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  14. jon livesey says:
    May 26, 2005 at 9:15 pm

    “The problem was with the original wording, ‘”stitch-up” fear’, later changed to ‘”stich-up” claim.'”

    Oh, come on. This is what’s called straining at gnats. I see headlines every day this side of the Atlantic that say “such-and-such fear” when what’s probably intended is “such-and_such claim”.

    This is journalistic laziness, not Goebbels reborn.

    I despise BBC bias, and I’ve described examples of it in these columns, but let’s not get carried away.

    On the bright side, I see that the new meeting ended up defeating the boycott, so that at least is a good thing.

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  15. Denise W says:
    May 27, 2005 at 12:28 am

    Susan,

    LOL!

       1 likes