Monthly Archives: October 2005

, the ever miserable Caroline Haw-Hawley managed to get out of the BBC’s private enclave in central Baghdad to report from Halabja, largely bemoaning:

“but it’s not for this that Saddam’s going on trial, at least not yet, relatives of the five thousand Kurds massacred in Halabja in March 1988 will have to wait for their day in court, the first legal proceedings against Saddam are for separate killings in the town of Dujail, hundreds of miles from here”

Unfortunately Caroline didn’t have the time to tell us that “court officials say the case was chosen because it was the easiest and quickest case to compile“, which sounds quite reasonable under the circumstances, but she did manage to wrap up her piece with:

“each headstone here represents a family wiped out with weapons that Saddam Hussein bought from the West”

Just in case Caroline’s definition of “The West” unintentionally misleads anyone, here, courtesy of Scott Burgess, are figures he derived from those of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (an independent foundation established in 1966 under the auspices of the Swedish parliament), showing “actual deliveries of major conventional weapons” to Iraq between 1980 and 2002, expressed in millions of dollars, in relative terms, at 1990 prices:

Referring to the original source, we can see that the UK’s total for this period, according to SIPRI, was $79 million dollars. We can also see that there are no figures recorded for the period from 1991-2002 – the period when UN sanctions were officially in force, which is confusing, because I distinctly recall watching, ‘Live on Sky’, as US forces found recently manufactured Russian and French arms at Baghdad airport after they liberated it from Saddam’s forces in 2003. Almost as confusing even as Caroline’s apparent understanding of “The West”, given that, according to SIPRI, over 80% of the arms sales to Iraq were from the Soviets, French and Chinese, which isn’t “The West” as I understand it, then or now.

Just to be clear though, SIPRI’s figures are based on ‘major conventional weapons’ sales rather than chemical weapons, but they give a good indication of who really armed Saddam. Moreover, chemical weapons themselves are relatively cheap and easy to make, the hardest part being the delivery systems for those weapons, which is where all those arms sales would have been useful for Saddam.

To see the report for yourself take your pick of Windows Media Hi/Lo or Realplayer Hi/Lo, starting about 20’39” from the beginning.

, the presenters announced “and we’ve got a new phone number, 020 8535 1000…” – what they didn’t mention was that their old phone number was one of the many 0870 disguised premium rate rip-off numbers (where the caller pays the recipient at high rates, often paying to be held in a queue!) that have proliferated across the BBC, government departments and second-rate call centre operations across rip-off Britain over the last few years, as previously highlighted here at Biased BBC.

Hopefully after a decently short interval the BBC’s fearless Watchdog will recover from its longstanding hypocrisy and get on with what it should have been doing all along, namely exposing and challenging this BT inspired scam that has ripped off consumers for years in the finest traditions of the former state telecoms monopoly that should have been broken up properly long ago.

While we’re on the subject of Watchdog, keep an eye out for their occasional inclusion of enviro-propaganda masquerading as consumer affairs – for instance, an anti-car piece broadcast a few months ago publicised enviro-loonies as they went around harassing law abiding drivers, and an apparent throwaway comment in last night’s edition “Now, global warming may be about to turn Britain into a group of islands linked by underwater motorways…”.

, Alan Connor of News Online (a sometime follower of Biased BBC), has written an interesting article about the relevance or otherwise of David Cameron’s privileged education and the ever-shifting public perceptions of class, private education and Old Etonians.

The following comment from the (Don’t) Have Your Say selection below Alan’s article caught my eye:

Old Etonians ruin the fabric of society. Oxford is infested with them like an old apple with maggots.

Gayrav, Oxford

Can you imagine such a thoughtless bigoted comment being selected for (Don’t) Have Your Say if ‘Old Etonians’ were replaced with some other social group (take your pick from the BBC’s usual roll-call of favoured minorities) and ‘Oxford’ with a correspondingly stereotypical place?

So says this BBC story by Alfred Hermida. It continues:

It is seen as arrogant and determined to remain the sheriff of the world wide web, regardless of whatever the rest of the world may think.

It has even lost the support of the European Union.

Like David Davis has even lost the support of Gordon Brown.

It stands alone as the divisive battle over who runs the internet heads for a showdown at a key UN summit in Tunisia next month.

The stakes are high, with the European Commissioner responsible for the net, Viviane Reding, warning of a potential web meltdown.

“Responsible for the net”, is she? I’d always heard it was Al Gore.

“The US is absolutely isolated and that is dangerous,” she said during a briefing with journalists in London.

If any of the assembled journalists thought to ask her what exactly this danger was, or why the net is liable to melt down unless the Iranians get a share in running it, Mr Hermida does not tell us about it.

“Imagine the Brazilians or the Chinese doing their own internet. That would be the end of the story.

The end of the story… yes, you could say that. Later the article warns that the US faces “opposition from countries such as China, Iran.” I wonder why. Mr Hermida declines to keep me company in my wondering; he doesn’t express any curiosity as to whether the Chinese and Iranian authorities might have any other motive than a selfless desire to share the burden of Icann’s labours, or the American authorities any other motive than nationalism for wishing to fend them off.

AmEx has posted a superb parody which makes another good point:

Britain has an image problem when it comes to broadcasting.

It is seen as arrogant and determined to remain the sheriff of international news dissemination, regardless of whatever the rest of the world may think.

It has even lost the support of the US. It stands alone as the divisive battle over who runs the World Service heads for a showdown at a key UN summit in Tunisia next month.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: And then read this Eurosoc article about former Swedish Prime Minister (and UN Special Envoy to the Balkans) Carl Bildt’s editorial in the International Herald Tribune arguing that the setting up of an “international mechanism, controlled by governments” would be “profoundly dangerous” and would be likely to result in “theocrats or autocrats around the world getting their hands on the levers of control.” (Hat tip: Dan.)

Mr Bildt’s line of argument is well expressed, but not at all unusual. Many share his view, including many non-Americans. I am, alas, not surprised that none of these arguments were alluded to on Mr Hermida’s article.

– a BBC report about Nalchik (the centre of terrorist violence recently) which accomplishes their wish not to include even a mention of Islam. I commented on the general trend here at my own site earlier on. In this report they are militants they are rebels they are rebels affiliated with Chechens; but for all we know from this report, they are not Islamists- nor are they terrorists.

Now, I’m just wondering when the stealth edit might come. It’s the routine delay between original disingenuous report and the ultimately more factual one which fuels one’s suspicions that the misleading is not accidental, but relates to BBC policy.

Hat tip: JBLM and others.

A reader writes:

The report out today from the Crime and Society Foundation – which points out that most murders in Britain are of relatively poor young men – is reported on the BBC website (link here) as follows:

Increasing murder rates over the past 25 years were triggered by a recession in the early 1980s, a report says.

Pointing the finger of blame unambiguously at the Tories. The tenor is accentuated with another telling phrase, allegedly from the author of part of the survey, that the research indicated that there was:

… a link between rising murder rates and young men leaving school in the early 1980s, which was a time of mass unemployment.

Reminding us again, in case we didn’t know, how grim those boys on the BBC website think that life under Margaret Thatcher was. Yet the press release and executive summary from the Foundation are not nearly so certain about cause and effect. Nowhere does the press release from the Foundation make the direct linkage with the 1980s that the BBC intro does (murder rates were triggered by the recession etc…). And the contribution of Professor Danny Dorling ( the co-author of the report quoted by the BBC) is described in the executive summary as follows: link

In conclusion Dorling argues that the deeper causes of the increased murder rate lie in the social and economic policies pursued by successive governments during the 1980s and (my italics) 1990s. The emergence of mass unemployment in the 1980s and the increased levels of poverty that continue to this day (my italics) have contributed to social stresses and conflict with long-term consequences.

In short, Professor Dorling is apparently very careful to lay the blame – unlike the BBC report – on both Tory and Labour governments. An alternative intro, playing the same editorial games of selectivity, could have been:

The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and increasing poverty of the lower classes – both of which have grown markedly under New Labour – have been blamed by a leading crime think tank for increasing levels of murder among young men.

That would be the day!

: there’s only one thing missing from this BBC journalist’s view of the airborne relief effort in Pakistan- a mention of the US ‘copter contingent. The Pakistan military’s effort gains all the mentions, though numerically the US is a close second (as a matter of fact). The pictorial display is slightly better (giving the US a mention on page 2), though I do wonder how many helicpopters the French have contributed, to be given a similar mention to the US. For any worried about this, I of course applaud all efforts from all sides, and of course regret any failures to save those in danger; I just feel that the US has been deliberately frozen out by the Beeb (and that this is typical), and this is indicative of a news organisation driven by political considerations rather than reporting the facts of the matter.

Having misrepresented US aid commitments to Pakistan (as noted previously), the Beeb found it convenient to do so again.

This report says that the aid effort has been ‘stepped up’, immediately following this with the statement that ‘In Balakot, close to the epicentre in Pakistan, US helicopters have been used for the first time to ferry supplies.’ This is a report dated today- I’m pretty confident it wasn’t around yesterday. What a decent news organisation might have pointed out here is some salient points from the following:

‘RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN AND NEW DELHI – US military helicopters arrived Monday from neighboring Afghanistan, assigned to help out in the relief effort of a key US ally devastated by the Oct. 8 earthquake. But on arrival in Pakistan, severe thunderstorms and hail kept the choppers all but grounded Tuesday, a source of frustration here.
“Thunderstorms are preventing us from doing our job,” says Staff Sgt. Lance Albert, a member of a five-man chopper crew of the Oregon National Guard, aboard a Chinook helicopter.’

When put alongside the BBC’s eyewitness account (also reported as part of the main story intro) that “I have seen people eating grass…. People are dying of starvation.” , it can be seen that the slant of article suggests that the US response is somehow implicated in that situation. Very unfair, in context– dangerously so, given US-muslim relations.

“The second obstacle is that it is hard to know exactly what a world without the BBC would look like. The ramifications on media, cultural, political and social life would be so profound that it is very difficult to predict what they might be. It is not too dissimilar, for example, from envisaging a country without a national electricity grid.”

– from Measuring the Value of the BBC: A report by the BBC and Human Capital (October 2004) [Text version here, PDF here.]

This gem was found by commenter “Grimer”.