Monthly Archives: September 2005

. This article manages to combine two of the BBC’s major failings- treating the US as a species of enemy and the EU as some kind of all-powerful godparent for the states of Europe. The article ends (despite being a news article) in familiar vein:

‘The US may not really need baby food from Italy or divers from Belgium, but its call for European and international help shows that, after the divisions over Iraq, it has now realised that even superpowers need friends.’

It’s the classic itchy-fingered BBC reporter’s opinionated twist.

However, the article begins by claiming that the EU is sending aid to Katrina victims, when, as Richard North points out, this is not the case. According to North, citing a Belgian Newspaper, ‘the twelve EU member states who sent aid have done so on an individual basis. Their efforts involved neither “EU” aid, nor EU money.’

So, incorrect and opinionated- not bad for one little news article. But hey, anything to give the EU a freebie public relations success.

In the Guardian Zoe Williams justifies a great social evil:

“We cling on to the licence fee out of some civic humanist ideal, the value of a medium that is above commerce, above the ignoble scramble for popularity and cash”.

Well if that’s the best defence then there really is no alternative. Privatise it, now.

I caught a few minutes of Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman talking to whatsisname with the blond hair over in New Orleans. There was rather more material for blog posts than I could cope with, but here’s a few extracts:

“…This is going very badly for the Republicans…”

“…Bush is trying to palm off blame on the director of FEMA… but that won’t wash, since the White House appointed the director of FEMA…”

“This is going to have a big impact on the way President Bush is seen by History, isn’t it?”

It no longer surprises me to hear from the Beeb that History, so tight-lipped to lesser mortals, has already confided her judgement to the Newsnight team. But one comment really did surprise me. Whatsisname actually said that it was “extraordinary” of former President Bill Clinton to intervene to criticise Bush. He said ex-presidents just don’t criticise, even implicitly, their successors.

Excuse me?

The BBC’s John Humphrys shot his mouth off about some politicians in a speech to a bunch of PR men on a cruise. Now he faces an exhaustive internal enquiry. Naughty Humphrys. He owes most of his fame to his role with the BBC, so he really ought to wear the mask. Still, boys will be boys, and the internal enquiry would be better directed at what he says on air rather than off it. Sage words from the Times:

Like it or not — and on the whole he seems to like it — Humphrys is a public figure. His views are therefore a matter of legitimate interest. What they are not is a suitable subject for an exhaustive internal BBC inquiry. Michael Grade, the corporation’s Chairman, is said to have requested a full transcript of the cruise ship speech. He should read it, chuckle and move on: he has the more serious issue of institutional bias to confront, and on this score the BBC’s frontline presenters are far from blameless.

And

Humphrys has argued that the journalist’s chief responsibility is to challenge authority. This is necessary, and extremely easy. It is far harder for the journalist to ensure that his own views do not interfere with the presentation, and BBC presenters are all too often impatient with anything other than a soft-left world-view. Humphrys’ performance as an onboard entertainer should not be exploited by the Government to settle old scores, nor by Mr Grade to improve relations with the Government. But it might usefully prompt sober introspection by the BBC’s most senior journalists.

‘The truth was simple and apparent to all. If journalists were there with cameras beaming the suffering live across America, where were the officers and troops?’

The BBC’s true colours shine through in this article. We find an enraged and ideologically inflamed writer swallowing every one of the so-called ‘fitting metaphors relating to the New Orleans debacle.’

That is what journalism is not about, yet here we have a BBC journalist in full pursuit of his ideologically chosen enemies.

Perhaps the BBC is fed up of people thinking they don’t care about the States (my most charitable thought). Perhaps there’s an element of the Michael Moore theory that disasters shouldn’t happen to Democrat voters, as it has in New Orleans. Perhaps this is intensified by the BBC’s utter lack of balance when called upon to report the old colonial victims, the blacks. Perhaps too the BBC has been listening to US broadcasters tearing their hair out (for some similar reasons) and has been lured into thinking they are reflecting a genuine consensus- just another victim of the US MSM. Add to that the gnawing anger they feel that the purest capitalist society around has become the most admired and feared, and one can see the need for emotional breakout.

But the caricature offered by the BBC journalist is a disgrace. A disgrace.

First we have the predictable dig at the ‘home-spun myth about the invulnerability of the American Dream.’ This was so predictable, and so unnecessary- and stupidly wrong (think of John Edwards’ Dickensian depiction of the girl who had no coat and you’ll see that immediately). The whole first three paragraphs are utter bilge- but I notice so cunningly put together that though they appear to unequivocally indict President Bush, they could be read differently as a more general comment.

Then we get the BBC’s patent ‘metaphor’ approach- involving a series of assertions about a ‘heroic Mayor’ (who is certainly a savvy enough political individual to see that his skin’s safety depends on deflecting blame), an ‘extraordinary complacency’, Federal agencies staying ‘tucked up at home’, and no ‘official’ plan. Again, this is lightly veiled- but an utter attack on the Bush administration.

The really extraordinary thing is the disingenuousness of this writer. Take the representation of New Orleans vs the US Governement:

‘The Bush administration, together with Congress, cut the budgets for flood protection and army engineers, while local politicians failed to generate any enthusiasm for local tax increases.

New Orleans partied-on just hoping for the best, abandoned by anyone in national authority who could have put the money into really protecting the city.

Meanwhile, the poorest were similarly abandoned, as the horrifying images and stories from the Superdome and Convention Center prove.’

He covers himself with the comment about ‘local politicians’- but notice how the population of New Orleans is abandoned by central government, who also abandon the poorest. What, do these party goers have a sovereign right to party, with central government picking up the bill? Notice that it’s central government, not local politics, that’s responsible for local concentrations of poverty. Nothing could be further from the US political philosophy enshrined in the Constitution. The attitude displayed by the BBC journalist is truly extraordinary, attempting to condemn all of this political culture through a condemnation of the Republican ascendancy over it. Not for the first time I am left wondering what a Beeboid is on.

But perhaps, as I intimated, there is a rational explanation- the BBC’s colonial grievance culture. He explains himself:

‘The neglect that meant it took five days to get water, food, and medical care to thousands of mainly orderly African-American citizens desperately sheltering in huge downtown buildings of their native city, has been going on historically, for as long as the inadequate levees have been there.’

He doesn’t seem to realise- having accepted every caricature floating around in the aftermath of the hurricane, he can’t escape his own mentality, bloated with historical caricature.

‘In the workout room of the condo where I am currently staying in the affluent LA neighbourhood of Santa Monica, an executive and his personal trainer ignored the anguished television reports blaring above their heads on Friday evening’.

Laughable, isn’t it? The whole of the US is in the grip of delusion but our man in the USA, the noble British Broadcasting journalist, is a lone survivor, valiantly doing his serious journalism from the workout room of a condo in LA.

It stinks of utter bovine stupidity.

As a final slander he comes out effectively accusing US citizens, and he means the average Joe here, of being tax evading criminals:

The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country – of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society – has reached a crisis point this week.

Was there ever such a stupid response to a crisis (certainly when one considers the extraodinary generosity of the US people that is unfolding and will continue to unfold. Hugh Hewitt’s response, dignified and practical, shows just how far left this BBC journalist is)? I don’t know; but I do know the BBC should consider this man’s future very seriously, and they could write a nice note of recommendation for his next job interview to help him on his way.

BBC News 24 this morning managed to turn their headline report on Hurricane Katrina into another Bush-bashing exercise. Much of the focus was on the criticism of Bush and the slow response of the White House to the disaster.

Of course, we know that big government is often slow to act when it counts, but you’ll never hear the BBC admitting that that is true in general. You’ll never hear them admit that if big government is bad at disaster relief, which is the sort of thing that government should be there for (and should be good at) then maybe it’s not such a good idea to let the government run so much else in our lives. You’ll never hear them praise the swiftness of the private sector (such as insurance companies) in contrast.

Nor will you ever hear the BBC have any economist or insurance expert on to point out the harsh-sounding but elementary fact that the government’s continued handing out of compensation to the people who live near the coast and who have suffered from flooding undermines their incentives to take the proper precautions, get decent insurance, or even move somewhere less prone to flooding.

Nor was there the slightest bit of reporting on what is actually happening with the relief effort, just claims repeated over and over (from people who are unlikely to know what is happening) that Bush was to blame. For all we knew the relief effort was focused where it should be focused, on those thousands of people in dire need of medical care, rather than the healthy people sitting on the streets who are a bit hungry (which was clearly the case with the BBC footage, whatever the situation elsewhere).

But BBC reporters are remarkably good at finding disaffected poor black people and even more disaffected middle-class white lefties who can be relied upon to say the right things. We did get a tantalizingly brief shot of dozens and dozens and dozens of trucks driving somewhere in the distance, but wherever they were going, the BBC reporter wouldn’t be there.

No, he was focused on the fact that these people were living in filth, and they panned to a shot of some food containers in the gutter. It was pretty lame stuff — the street looked no different to the average London street. And why don’t they pick their rubbish up, you wondered? Even if the bins are full, put it in a pile, don’t just strew it everywhere. But this too was Bush’s fault.

(I don’t doubt that there were filthy scenes to be found in the city, but wherever the real filth was, the BBC reporter and the BBC cameramen weren’t there).

Another thing the BBC was doing was pushing the “These people were too poor to get away from the city”, the obvious insinuation being that being poor killed thousands of people and that this never would have happened had we affluent middle-class whites not given more money in taxes to the poor (even though I bet a lot of these people were on welfare anyway).

This sounds dubious to me. The warnings to the citizens could scarcely have been plainer: you must leave, the whole city will be ruined, you and your family will die if you stay, your house is going to be destroyed. That was literally what they were saying. The BBC is trying to convince us that all these people couldn’t afford even a bus ticket to get out of the city? (I bet there were free buses laid on anyway). How little resourcefulness do you possess if you can’t even get you and your little children away from what you know will be a flood zone when you have plenty of warning? If most of these people were on welfare, then doesn’t say much for welfare culture. I would have walked if nothing else was possible.

But of course there was another possibility that the BBC didn’t consider: maybe these people just decided to take their chances, not believing that the flooding would be that bad. The goverment always trying to scare you, they might have figured, this won’t be that bad. Why spend my money on a beat-up? It won’t affect me, anyway. I’d rather stay here and protect my house, etc. It is a wrench to walk away from your home knowing there’s a chance that it will be ruined and you won’t be there to try to protect it.

It was also noticeable that all the criticism of the government the BBC aired was directed at the federal government. But in US (like Australia) the state goverment is very important. So is the city government, although less so than the state government. Yet there was no criticism of the Louisiana state government anywhere in the report.

However, the BBC did air criticism of the levee situation – these were apparently inadequate. Yet somehow the BBC failed to inform us of the body that is responsible for the levees. Now, I’m no expert on the situation, but I suspect it’s the state government rather than the federal government who is responsible. But there’s little milage for the BBC in airing criticism of an obscure female Democrat governor rather than W.

And what about the Mayor? Isn’t it part of his job to try to make sure his city is adequately defended? But the only bit of news in this story involving the Mayor— a black man who defected from the Republicans to the Democrats — was the reporting of his criticism of Bush. There was no criticism of him reported.

(I’m not blaming the mayor or the state government, though. I don’t know the situation, I don’t know whether the levees were adequate, I don’t know what the expert assessment was beforehand. I don’t know what the costs would have been and how much money they had. Let the MSM speculate wildly and get it all wrong).

On top of all this, the BBC then outdid itself for chutzpah. They then reported in hushed tones that the UN was offering its help to the US! And they interviewed Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief coordinator, in a most reverential manner!

You’ll remember how unbelievably hopeless the UN was when it came to the tsunami disaster in South-East Asia, and how brilliant the US and the Australians were. You’ll also remember how the BBC managed to minimize any reporting of the criticism of the UN at the time, and actually create the impression that the UN was playing a major role in the relief effort, even when this mostly consisted of relief efforts meetings in Geneva a month after the tsunami hit. And how they managed to downplay the role of the American and Australian governments. There’s one BBC rule for US Republican governments and another for the UN, it seems.

(Cross-posted at Blithering Bunny).