Monthly Archives: May 2005

While the BBC get all excited about cool new British cloning, and fresh monkey business, they apparently haven’t noticed a whacking blow to their greatest environmental news fetish- news that the Antarctic is putting on weight. (via A Tangled Web)

Oddly no-one ever seems to learn that when it comes to a lot of the investigations we perform in science today our knowledge is in its infancy. At least one guy the BBC interviewed seemed to get it:

‘”A large, striking monkey in a country of considerable wildlife research over the last century has been hidden right under our noses,”‘

Makes you wonder what else has been hidden from them that’s right under their noses. Especially those scientific minds that bring us the Beeb in all its glory.

Update (Sat)– In response to Natalie’s interest, expressed in the comments, here are a few links gleaned from a commenter at the aforementioned ATW- post here– that highlight the fact that the BBC really have bought into a political agenda with their relentless enviro-spin. All over the web I’ve found people quoting the BBC as a source for global warming warnings- including in the post I’ve just linked from ATW. I hope these three links– posted in order of technicality, with the most technical first- illustrate that the Beeb has sidelined debate in favour of left-tinged crusading politics, as usual. From the second of the three sources linked, this quote impressed me a lot, and it was good to read-

‘the predication of government, and United Nations’, policy for energy growth on the unsustainable myth of ‘global warming’ is a serious threat to us all, but especially to the 1.6 billion people in the less-developed world who have no access to any modern form of energy. The twin curses of water poverty and energy poverty remain the real scandals. By contrast, the political imposition on the rest of the world of our Northern, self-indulgent ecochondria about ‘global warming’ could prove to be a neo-colonialism too far.’

This picture series is entitled “French Left split over referendum.” The opening page says:

“A battle is on for left-wing votes as France’s referendum on the EU constitution looms. Most supporters of the centre-right UMP party are expected to vote Yes, ignoring the far-right No campaign.

But many Socialists appear ready to defy party leaders by voting No, with the far-left. BBC News asked a selection of left-wingers for their views.”

Emphasis added.

That is the question asked by The Scotsman’s Jenny Hjul. (Hat tip: Gary.) She says:

His presence in Washington begs two questions: why did BBC Scotland feel it needed to send its own man when (a) it is currently implementing drastic cost cuts and (b) the BBC’s Washington correspondent, Clive Myrie, was already there and more than up to the job?

Also, if BBC Scotland really, really had to send, why did it have to be Wylie, whose friendship with Galloway goes back years and who, as the Diary pointed out yesterday, received an acknowledgement in Galloway’s autobiography?

Wylie is not an expert on Iraq or on American politics. And in this case, he was clearly not impartial, and neither was BBC Scotland. Shame on them.

Oliver Kamm quotes from the Scotsman’s article and comments on it in a post called “British Back-scratching Corporation”. (Hat tip: David H.) Mr Kamm – who has read everything about everything – points out that Wylie and Galloway co-authored a book on the Romanian revolution, “presenting a highly tendentious thesis favourable to the government of the thuggish Communist apparatchik Ion Iliescu.”

Norm Geras has a post up at Normbloglooking at something the BBC missed in their report on Ronaldo’s UN visit to Ramallah. Did he visit anywhere else, perhaps?

Over at Samizdatathey have an interesting post about how, according to the BBC, capitalism is causing famine in North Korea (as opposed to Stalinist communism being the root cause of that country’s ills).

I particularly liked “Market reforms introduced in North Korea in recent years mean most people only get about half the food they need through the state and have to buy the rest themselves.”

I’m rather busy at the moment, so here are some quick links on several subjects all in one fell post.

Coming Anarchy (a blog with the intriguing tagline “Speak Victorian – Think Pagan”) wasn’t impressed with the economic assumptions behind a BBC article called Living in Somalia’s Anarchy.

Norman Geras agrees with many complainers that Jeremy Paxman and other media interviewers are too rude and dismissive to many political interviewees, including George Galloway. Anyone who reads Normblog knows that he isn’t saying this out of any fondness for Gorgeous George.

Dash Riprock is one of many who comment unfavourably on this article by Tim Butcher, “Stigma of life in “Traitors’ Village.”

JC Keiner wrote a formal complaint to the BBC about the same article, copied to us. She cited the way in which reprisals including plucking the eyes out of a corpse were described as “Old Testament-style brutality”. An extract from her letter of complaint:

“It is surely anti-semitism to attribute these brutal atrocities committed by non Jews to Jewish religious law, based on a gross misrepresentation of it. Your web site compounds this by using the words “Old Testament-style Brutality” as a subhead. It is not excusable to defend this as an example of a correspondent’s personal perspective, since the BBC undertakes to avoid anti-semitic or otherwise racist content.”

“Lazy Student” says that this piece on the French Referendum makes “a no vote sound like the end of the world.” (UPDATE 18 May: PJF reports that the phrase “So a No [vote] looks like bad news all round.” has been stealth edited out of this article.)

ADDED LATER: The Newsweek allegation about a copy of the Koran and its fateful consequences have been the subject of a blogswarm. Paul Reynold’s article “Koran story brings US journalism crisis” rounds up this and related stories.

The text of the Robin Aitken story is now up at Blithering Bunny. It’s written by Damien Thompson.

Thanks to reader David H for the scan, and EU Referendumfor further highlighting the story.

…but the same conclusions. Helen Szamuely and The Rottweiler Puppy take on the BBC over bias. Helen reports the work of Robin Aitken, former BBC journalist:

‘Robin Aitken is writing a book on the BBC bias. He has already done a good deal of the research and marshalling of the material for a dossier he presented to the Governors in the 1990s. It was comprehensively ignored…’

, the Beeb sees setback for Bush as a “blow by powerful Senate group”! (Surprise, the Senate is a political body comprised of Democrats, Republicans and one “Independent”. What is so surprising about a renegade Senator from the rustbelt who rocks the boat?) If you really want to know what’s happening, look elsewhere for factual reporting. The only surprise here is that Senator Voinovich, a Republican, did not vote to recommend Bolton to the whole Senate. Voinovich had already expressed some doubt about Bolton. While unusual, it does not sink Bolton’s chances of approval. It merely provides the Beeb with a ‘Bush is humiliated’ non-story.

The real story is that anti-Bush flunkies in the CIA and State Department are doing their best to torpedo Bolton’s nomination to the UN because he has a proven record as a diplomat who actually works for his president.

:

The BBC’s story on Galloway contains this little gem:

”UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has been criticised over his son’s work with the programme, but he himself, in an interim report by a UN committee issued in March, was cleared of wrongdoing.”

Of course, he was not cleared at all:

“I thought we criticised him rather severely. I would not call that an exoneration,” Volcker told US network Fox News in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.

UPDATE: More on this at USS Neverdock. Marc Landers writes:

Despite Paul Volcker publicly denying that his report cleared Kofi Annan of wrongdoing, the BBC make this false claim on three webpages.

Volcker said: Asked point-blank whether Mr. Annan had been cleared of wrongdoing in the $10 billion scandal, Mr. Volcker replied, “No.”

link to Washington Times article

The three BBC webpages are here:

link 1,

link 2,

link 3