I make no apologies for comparing a Fox News report with a BBC one. The success of Fox speaks for itself, and as Peter C. Glover argues, it’s about time we saw something similar in the UK.
But one of the biggest slanders going today is that Israel is an aggressor, a source of trouble, an arrogant ungrateful unilateral go-it-alone bully.
So I think that a responsible media outlet would look carefully and be wary of reinforcing that impression (which any sane person must see is extremely far-fetched).
That’s why I really didn’t like this article from the BBC, because, for an article concerning an international issue like Iran’s nuclear program, it’s all about Israel.
The contrast I said I’d offer was with this Fox News article:
Yes the lede is about Israel, but the headline indicates the multilateral approach that is in fact taking place. We all know about Chirac’s threat this week to use nuclear weapons to retaliate against a terrorist state- Fox also points out the German Defence Minister’s avowal that “Yes, we need all options.”.
So what we can see from Fox that we can’t from the BBC is that Israel isn’t in fact out of step, that the precisely stated Israeli position is consistent with everyone else’s precisely stated position within the concerned western alliance. It’s obvious there is a concerted effort going on- that is the news, rather than Israelis on the warpath.
Of course, if I were pro-mullah Iranian I would want the headlines to be all about Israel. There’s enough anti-Israeli feeling out there to fuel a pacifist movement towards Iran if Israel is seen to be the cause of an impending war. Not only that, Israel has both a track record (Osirak ’81) and is widely considered the most imminent realistic threat, militarily-speaking, so any pressure that could be applied to her through the media would be welcome.
But I’m not Iranian, and I don’t like the BBC adopting the talking points of the Iranian leadership. In allowing Israel to be in the foreground, and similarly worried (though less directly threatened) nations to fade into the background, the BBC wittingly or unwittingly wields the spotlight for Iranian security.
“Licence fee is set to rise by 4%
err – 4.2% actually”
and it’s already been edited, anyone get the feeling that this is one of those stories that will continue to be tweaked with stealth edits and burried away in the entertainment section as soon as possible.
“BBC to extort and squader 4.2% more from scared TV owners.”
How about:
“More single mums to go to jail”
This isn’t even the main story on in the entertainment section!!
Apparently a story from yesterday about ‘The West Wing’ (a programme that has barely registered viewing figures in the UK) being axed is considered a bigger story than the BBC poll tax increase.
I’m enduring the BBC Six O’Clock News to see if this gets a mention.
So the Yanks have a warship called Winston Churchil? Remind me – I’m in no mood to visit the Royal Navy website – is there a HMS Winston Churchill at the moment? I don’t think so.
disillusioned_german | 22.01.06 – 7:57 pm | #
dunno if its posted already, but (from memory) HMS Churchill was one of the first generation of British nuclear-powered Attack Subs. (called hunter-killers in my day). She’ll have gone to the breakers by now (or possibly rotting away as a numbered hulk in some hidden corner)
Depending when she was decommissioned, the name will surface again in the near future.
(sorry)
The navy often likes to skip a generation.
So where’s our £131.50 going? Well paying for BBC world to advertise on Eurosport to tell the rest of the world that they aren’t biased really see my earlier blog) And of course we can always tune in to BBC1 at 7.00 for a little light relief. Holiday program’s destinations this week are Turkey and Abu Dhabi. (I’m sure full of plenty of advice on how we can ensure we don’t offend any Muslims while we are there. Probably also glorifying Islamic architecture (even though they can’t master the art of constructing arches yet) etc) How non-biased is that?!
There is a very flashy ad currently running on the BBC which warns the viewer that the TV licence people can pinpoint non-payers with their super-flashy technology blah blah blah. Cue lots of flashy graphics.
It’s very scary and probably cost loads.
I wonder how much it costs to make these adverts and the other trailers on the various networks? And does this money come out of the licence fee, I wonder?
Aha! I see TV Licensing is mostly contracted out to Crapita and it employs 1,200 staff.
Here is the scary, rather Orwellian bit:
“TV Licensing’s role is to collect the licence fee and to educate people…”
It’s all here:
http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/aboutus/index.jsp
It will look nice your St George flag amid all those banners hanging out of apartment windows “Heisse Luft statt Russisches Erdgas”
Rick | 23.01.06 – 6:05 am |
Rick: Nice one. The Germans can still burn their national team if they finally run out of (Russian) gas!
hmmm … interesting one this
here’s an Islamist site
http://islamic-world.net/
and they also refer to the likes of Hamas as “militant”.
Note that the BBC are also referring to them as “militants”. hardly impartial if you are using the same term that the Islamists use.
OT, but this is a photograph of George Galloway and Pete Burns wearing skin-tight spandex catsuits (n.b. no visible lunchboxes):
http://images.thisislondon.co.uk/v2/showbiz/bbceleb06/georgepeteWENN230106_450x410.jpg
Warning: photograph consists of George Galloway and Pete Burns wearing skin-tight spandex catsuits (n.b. no visible lunchboxes).
There is a very flashy ad currently running on the BBC which warns the viewer that the TV licence people can pinpoint non-payers with their super-flashy technology blah blah blah. Cue lots of flashy graphics.
”
How reassuring !
Years ago convoys of Us military vehicles on German Autobahns carried signs “Wir fahren fuer Ihre Sicherheit” – “We are driving for your security”
I now see that in Britain men in detector vans are driving around (instead of police patrols) to protect me from alien signals to ensure I receive the purity of BBC output………………..how simply Vladmir Putin !
About to ask if I can “Have My Say” on the licence fee rise..
I have also complained regarding…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ukfs/hi/newsid_4630000/newsid_4639000/4639080.stm
Quite amazing…! I need a drink.
“Australians and Americans have difficulty understanding the BBC, that we should collect two and a half-billion pounds in a sort of poll tax to fund a broadcasting system,” he said”
Durn right we do! I for one find the idea of having to pay for the privilege of watching tv appalling.
I for one find the idea of having to pay for the privilege of watching tv appalling.
Dear Roxana, it is not for “the privilege of watching TV” that we are impressed into buying a licence……it is simply a tax on ownership – you do not even need to switch on the VCR or TV to be liable. Retailers can be fined if they fail to supply details of purchasers to the Agency.
BTW. The Germans have a similar arrangement on photcopiers, CDs, Videos, and CD/DVD burners
Ritter, I checked out the link about the expenses story and couldn’t help but notice their justification:
“Programme-making accounts for the overwhelming majority of hotel and travel costs in an organisation such as the BBC with output as diverse as Doctor Who, which is made in Cardiff and on location, and news coverage of events such as Hurricane Katrina.”
It boggles the mind to see the appalling reportage of Katrina being used to justify their expenses. The blogs gave better coverage for no costs whatsoever – and the beeb have the gall to use it to justify their multi million expense package.
Beyond pathetic
Deepdiver
Rick: But then Germany is the country that invented taxes (at least that’s what I believe). We’re being extorted over here – that doesn’t mean that others shouldn’t follow suit.
In Germany they’re also likely to introduce a license fee for computers that can receive TV programmes via the web.
Make that: “… that others should follow suit.”
At least when it comes to Mafia extortion you tend to get something for your money…
“It boggles the mind to see the appalling reportage of Katrina being used to justify their expenses.”
And wasn’t that chap – you know the one, he wrote a piece about how hurricane Katrina was a blow to the usually complacent, thick-headed Americans and would surely change their thick-headed little head about Kyoto, or words to that effect – actually in a hotel on the other side of the country? Wasn’t the ITN coverage done by a skeleton team whilst the BBC had a dozen or so reporters spouting much the same stuff to no greater effect?
I would bother to check my figures. If I could be bothered. Which I cannot.
Although here is a story in which America’s National Public radio – which is self-funded – is a bit miffed at the BBC stereotyping southerners (no examples given; do a text search for “oddities”):
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4845302
“A Very British View of Katrina
Specifically, the BBC appears to be focusing on the oddities of American culture and politics. There have been numerous interviews with spokespersons that seem to represent a view of America straight out of movies like ‘Deliverance’ or ‘In The Heat of the Night’. They don’t sound like anything that would be heard on NPR.
The BBC also seems to portray aspects of Southern culture in a less than flattering light, especially in its interviews with local religious leaders who see Katrina as divine retribution for New Orleans’ ‘sinfulness.’
Knowing Glances and Smirks?
I am sure that the BBC is not inventing these interviews. But the effect is that it sounds less like reporting than like caricature. Public radio listeners likely understand what is going on – that BBC cultural assumptions about the United States remain mired in a reflex European opposition to American foreign policy. But what comes through the radio sounds mean-spirited and not particularly helpful; it probably evokes knowing glances and smirks among editors and producers back in London.
There is more right than wrong in the BBC’s coverage. But when it comes to portraying certain American cultural expressions, the BBC seems to have a tin ear.”
NB for all I know NPR is a Republican party mouthpiece and Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, the writer of this piece (and “ombudsman”) is a stooge of Big Oil.
Ashley – nice to hear that from NPR, they tend to be left-leaning if I recall correctly. The BBC should take note – NPR are no “Fox News” as they like to remind us!
If there is one country which is safe from getting Russian gas cut off (and – erm, sad to say, – there perhaps is ONLY one: Even Belarus has been subject to moody mid-winter strops from the east) it is surely Germany. Mr Schroeder carefully ensconsed at the head of the Gazprom-led consortium constructing a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea direct from just outside St Petersburg to Germany – carefully bypassing (and therefore upping the political and economic pressure on) those difficult and pro-Western, pro-American states of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Well, if we run out of German football players we can burn we can use Socialist and Green Politicians next. There are plenty of them out there. 🙂
In Germany they’re also likely to introduce a license fee for computers that can receive TV programmes via the web.
disillusioned_german | 23.01.06 – 10:44 pm | #
Very kulturbedingt – even in the Gruenderjahren of the 1890s the State spent money like water on AEG and Siemens to build infrastructure thinking tariffs would finance matters – the 1914-18 war was financed from current spending without any debt funding structures – sadly it looks as if the political elite in Germany has always been spendthrift and periodically drives the nation towards insolvency.
German SME companies built the economy as family businesses with innovation and enterprise and exports and the German State milked it dry each time like the archetypal Marxist politico-elite
I’ve listened to NPR quite a lot recently via the American forces radio network. The thing that strikes me is the balance in all their stories; i.e. both sides of an argument are usually given equal airtime with little or no comment and analysis.
They are slightly left leaning but that’s more evident when they have political discussions in studio – the Democrats perhaps get a slightly easier ride. It’s certainly not as blatant as James Naughtie on the BBC for example.
GC,
I think you’ve made some good points regarding BBC production values etc etc so I’ll leave it here other than a couple more.
Firstly the newspaper market in the UK is full of ‘right wing’ papers. Of the dailies the Sun, Mail, Express, Telegraph, Times (more arguably) all have ‘right wing’ editorial lines, against the Mirror, Grauniad and Independent on the ‘left’.
Some of those on the ‘right’ are less than supportive of the Conservative party. This isn’t because they’re raving lefties. It’s partly becuase the Conservatives have genuinely been such a shambles that one might reasonably be loathe to support them even if sharing many of their core principles. It’s also partly because of the tendency these days for papers to market themselves as ‘spokesmen of the people’, which makes it very difficult for them to support a party which recently has patently not been a ‘spokesman of the people’. Watch them scuttle back if Cameron has some success (even if it comes through not very ‘right wing’ policy).
I think all of these papers though reinforce my point that current popular UK ‘right wing’ philosophy is almost entirely reactive. There’s a paedophile scare and action is demanded, an immigration scare and action is demanded….. Rarely does anyone propose a coherent policy programme.
My final point in support of that is that the radio market, where costs of entry are vastly lower than TV is also almost entirely devoid of ‘right wing’ programming of the sort all over the US. If the market was there wouldn’t it have taken to the airwaves at least by now?
This raises an interesting thing. If the people of Britain are mostly left-wing, then a fair and balanced news service would continually be accused of right-wing bias, because its point of view would be skewed away from the left of the graph towards the middle.
In this hypothetical world, every time a right-wing viewpoint is aired people would throw bottles at the screen and there would be uproar and raised hackles, even if the right-wing viewpoint was given no more time than the left-wing viewpoint. In a mostly left-wing Britain a discussion programme which gave equal time to a right-wing guest would be as controversial as the National Front’s late-70s election broadcast.
I’m sure I read something along these lines a while back, but for the love of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour Amen I can’t remember.
And of course in our world people like David Icke and so forth are given very little screen time because they are minority extremists. Could it be that the BBC genuinely believes either than a “neutral” broadcaster should reflect its perception of the Will of the People (and thus be left-wing) rather than a hypothetically perfect non-partisan viewpoint, or do they believe that the right-wing viewpoint is as deranged and extreme as that of David Icke and thus not worth taking seriously?
Cockney
There’s a lot of Conservative papers. But there’s very few right-wing ones.
I don’t think the people of Britain are remotely ‘left wing’, just apolitical and susceptible to ad hoc reactive populism rather than rigid ‘left’ or ‘right’ ideological principles.
As far as broadcasting bias goes I think the ‘centre’ is driven by ‘the people’, there’s no verifiable way of identifying a centre ground irrespective of popular opinion.
Rob,
Reason being there’s no market for it at the mo. Considering the economic aspects of libertanianism are essentially capitalism taken to its logical conclusion, libertarians have been mysteriously rubbish at packaging and marketing their message to consumers.
I don’t think the people of Britain are remotely ‘left wing’, just apolitical and susceptible to ad hoc reactive populism rather than rigid ‘left’ or ‘right’ ideological principles.
Remember the old quotation about the French ?
“they wear their hearts on the Left and their wallets on the Right”
Cockney writes:
“Of the dailies the Sun, Mail, Express, Telegraph, Times (more arguably) all have ‘right wing’ editorial lines, against the Mirror, Grauniad and Independent on the ‘left’.”
You can hardly include the Times in that list – it is resolutely behind Za-NuLabour, as is the Sun. You might think the Sun reactionary, but it is still a Labour-supporting rag. The Left can be reactionary, too – which is where these traditional terms break down.
Particularly if you take the Sundays into account and include the curiously positioned FT, it’s pretty clear that the ‘Right wing domination of the press’ is simply an urban myth, popular among Islington folk.
Entry into the radio market, meanwhile, is phenomenally difficult. Unlike in the USA, licenses are scarce and costs massive. As a consequence, UK commercial radio is dominated by music and sport programming in search of sufficient advertising revenue to keep a station afloat. Talk radio simply can’t generate sufficient income to stay in business in the UK’s system.
Again, the barrier to entry is the presence of the BBC, aided and abetted by a regulatory regime which makes it almost impossible for newcomers to start.
Finally, yes, you are correct when you say there is no coherent policy on the Right (nor likely to be under Cameron, it seems) but, as we agree, there is certainly a market for Right of centre views, hence the success of rags like the Mail. Therefore, the lack of a broadcast equivalent cannot be due to a lack of perceived market, can it?
The market is there, but how can you reach it when the BBC sprawls across the airwaves like an octopus, menacing anyone who tries to enter?
Personally I have long believed Radios 1 and 5 should definitely be sold off and privatised, and that the local stations should cease to re-broadcast national feed and that the BBC should be regionalised with separate boards
Cockney,
Libertarians aren’t interested in selling. they are much more bothered about being forced to purchase something. An example being the license fee.
“Dear Roxana, it is not for the privilege of watching TV” that we are impressed into buying a licence……it is simply a tax on ownership – you do not even need to switch on the VCR or TV to be liable. Retailers can be fined if they fail to supply details of purchasers to the Agency.”
Even worse!
“BTW. The Germans have a similar arrangement on photcopiers, CDs, Videos, and CD/DVD burners.”
That’s awful!