Monthly Archives: March 2006

. Rottweiler Puppy picks up the BBC’s online coverage of London’s weekend anti-war demo (rarely the sort of thing to lack lavish coverage when featuring Iraq); amongst the most appalling issues at large is the state of the BBC’s spelling. ‘snot a blog y’know, auntie.

A reader called Dina writes:

Hi, I just wondered if anyone else watched the programme on BBC2 on Friday 17th March about called “The Family that Walks on All Fours”?

I watched this expecting it to be a scientific documentary about the curious anomaly of a rural Turkish family who have several mentally handicapped children who walk on all fours, like monkeys. The programme started well. About half way through, one of the scientists interviewed the Imam at the local village Mosque who was afraid that the programme might hint at Darwinian evolution in explaining the childrens symptoms. The programme went on sympathetically to explain that the idea of evolution is generally anathema in Turkey as an Islamic country, especially in rural areas and the Imam thought that to allow a Western programme to make the connection could invoke the wrath of an Al Qaeda attack on the village. The programme then went on to emphasise that hostility to the idea of evolution is not exclusive to Islamic countries and then, in classic BBC style, the programme switched to show an American Evangelical Church discussing the bible. At this point I changed the channel. I thought I was watching a genuine scientific documentary, but I should have known that the BBC needs to insert a political (especially anti-American) angle into such a programme. I try not to watch the BBC as much as possible as I cannot stomach the boring and predictable PC, anti-American drivel that is their stapel diet. Anyway, I just wondered if anyone had seen this and agrees with me?

Just be grateful they didn’t find some reason to show a clip of Gitmo.

:

‘The BBC is an integral part of Britishness, is it not, part of the national heritage, synonymous with fair play, and respected for it, especially by foreigners who resent that their news media are essential tools in the hands of the regime. Well, here is a personal anecdote to illuminate reality…‘

• Clive Davis, Times columnist and blogger wrote this article for the Washington Times: “Public service broadcasting, some honesty from the left?” (Hat tip: Rachel and USS Neverdock.)
• Melanie Phillips discusses a Newsnight programme that had some schlockhorror relevations about secret collusion between the Israelis and the British in, er, the 1960s. (Hat tip: Archduke.) This article in the New Statesman is by the producer of the programme, so I assume it is a fair representation of it. Both programme and article claim that a Jewish civil servant called Michael Michaels, now deceased, helped the Israelis get plutonium without telling Tony Benn. Much play is made of Michaels’ middle name being “Israel”.

  I don’t know enough to offer an opinion as to the historical truth of these claims. Melanie Phillips offers credible reasons to doubt them. All I can say is that even if every allegation made in the programme is true, half a lifetime has gone by and the Israelis haven’t nuked anyone yet. Care to bet that the same would be true of the Iranians?

  But I digress. The question before us is BBC bias. After terrorist attacks by Muslims the BBC has been at pains to encourage non-Muslims not to stigmatise Muslims generally. Here is one example, one of many that could have been chosen. It is only fair not to blame all members of a group for the crimes of some members. So why is the treatment of allegations of Jewish “dual loyalty” so much less sensitive? Melanie Phillips quotes some lines from the programme:

  ‘Well his middle name was Israel’, Kelly replied. ‘You think there was an element of dual loyalties here?’ pressed Crick. ‘Yes’, said Kelly.

  I can’t imagine the BBC being willing to broadcast equivalent dialogue about someone whose middle name was Mohammed. After the capture of one undoubted criminal whose last name was Muhammad the BBC was scrupulous to a fault in refraining from speculation that his race and religion might have provided some part of his motive. Again, this is only one example among many that could have been chosen.

• House of Dumb says that BBC coverage of the tenth anniversary of the Dunblane massacre “offers us an answer to the age old riddle: what’s the difference between ‘campaigners’ and ‘lobbyists’ ? Answer: the side of the issue they’re on.”

  I’m kicking myself for not spotting that one myself, as I read the same article. I guess I have read so many articles using the same terminology that it slid straight past me.

  I tended to agree with – in fact I might go further than – one specific criticism of the post offered in the final paragraph of the comment by JohnM. But DumbJon is a blogger, not a public body charged with a duty of impartiality.

that the moral relativism and non-judgementalism of BBC foreign affairs reporting is spreading to Home News. Here’s a news report which seems to miss half the story.

“Police said two men had entered the pub on the Langworthy estate, which was packed with fans watching a Manchester United game, and opened fire. The bodies of the two victims, who are both believed to be 27 and from Salford, were found on grassland across the road from the pub.”

A glance at this story gives the impression that the poor ‘victims’ had been shot by the bad men who entered the pub. Let’s find out what really happened, shall we ?

“The attackers, wearing balaclavas, walked into the Brass Handles pub in Pendleton, Salford, and opened fire.”

“The gunmen were then chased out of the pub, and while they were running across the little croft one of the men was shot in the back. His mate turned and was shot in the face.”

“Witnesses said a man got out of the Mondeo, took the guns and balaclavas off the bodies and sped off.”

A good round-up of Newspeak at MinTruth by Peter Glover(and BBBC gets a mention too).

I copied down by hand one of today’s Ceefax stories, currently running in the world news digest page 142 (page 2 out of 6). I had to wait for it to cycle round to the right page twice because I couldn’t write fast enough. After all that I found that the entire Ceefax story was merely the first four paragraphs of this web page.

Dispute hits UN rights watchdog

A session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission has been suspended for a week amid disagreement over plans to reform the Geneva-based body.

The commission meets annually to examine global human rights standards.

The US has condemned the reform plan, but it has broad support from European, Asian and African countries.

Members with poor human rights records have recently discredited the commission’s work, the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes reports from Geneva.

That’s where the Ceefax story stops. The impression is given that the reactionary US wishes to block reform of the UN Human Rights Commission; that it wishes to perpetuate the present situation whereby countries with poor human rights records discredit the commission’s work. A reader who did not already know would never guess that the substance of the US objection is the opposite of this. The US contends that the proposed rules of entry for the new Human Rights Council, the body that is meant to replace the current Human Rights Commission, are too weak. It argues that countries with poor human rights records will be able to get seats on the new body as they did on the old and subvert the Council as they subverted the Commission.

But perhaps this wrong impression is merely an unfortunate result of the strict word limits on Ceefax stories, and the full picture is given in the story as it appears in the web page?

No. The full, website version of this story only says that “the US says the plan has major deficiencies.” What the US thinks these deficiencies are is not said.

Never mind, I expect the story linked to on the sidebar under the heading “See Also”, “US rejects UN rights council plan” explains why the US is being so obdurate?

It does, eventually. But first we must hear that the US thinks the new plan is unacceptable, that Bolton thinks it has manifold deficiencies, that the US would vote No if the vote was put now, that Bolton is disappointed, again that Bolton says, “we don’t think it is acceptable”, and again that Bolton thinks it has manifold deficiencies.

Only after this hammering of negativity do we learn that “the US ambassador questioned whether the proposal would keep human rights abusers off the new council.” I wonder why the writer thought we had to be told six times that the US did not like the plan before we got one sentence as to why.

says the Sunday Times.

THE BBC is to be forced to promote British citizenship and a sense of community under a new royal charter to be unveiled this week.It will redefine the purpose of the BBC, entrusting it with a far wider brief than its established mission to “inform, educate and entertain”.

You might think that I’d be cheering. I don’t know what the opinion of my co-bloggers will be on this issue, but speaking for myself, I think this new charter is a bad move. We shall be doing well if nothing worse happens as a result of it than it being ignored and laughed at; a slightly more probable result is that the BBC will become more PC.

Don’t think that I don’t see the problem this new Charter is trying to overcome. In September 2004, after the BBC had displayed its usual reluctance to call anyone a terrorist even after the slaughter of children at Beslan, I wrote:

… unlike Reuters et al the BBC is paid for by a compulsory tax on the British people. It goes out under the name of my country. Come charter renewal time, the domestic BBC justifies the license fee by saying that we, the British people, are getting a public good (“The public interest must remain at the heart of all the BBC does.” – Michael Grade, Chairman.) Likewise the BBC World Service, funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the same Vote as the British Council, explicitly presents itself as bringing a benefit to Britain and the world.

But there is no more rock-bottom public good or benefit than not being randomly murdered. The BBC is obliged by its Charter and accompanying agreement to show “due impartiality” between political opinions but this is specifically stated not to mean “detachment from fundamental democratic principles.” The BBC has no more right to be impartial between a victim of terrorism and a terrorist than it has the right to be impartial between a rape victim and a rapist. (Although it must be careful to respect the right to a fair trial of those accused of rape, terrorism or any other crime.)

This website is devoted to uncovering cases where the BBC expresses an improper partiality between parties and ideologies within the covenant, so to speak, and cases where it displays an improper impartiality between those within and those without.

And in January 2005, after the BBC pandered to conspiracy theories about the tsunami, I wrote:

No media service, not even a privately-funded one, should be indifferent to these kind of values. A tax-funded media service in a democracy cannot be, unless it wishes to deny its own justification for existence…..

…if the maintenance of liberal values in Britain and the world matters, that objective being what the BBC claims it is for, then you don’t play neutral to the most basic liberal value of all, the right to continue living without being blown up at random. If neutrality is possible or desirable, why is the BBC not neutral about ordinary British murders?

…

Because, and never mind the name of this blog, in that sense it has no business being unbiased.

So why do I think this well-intentioned new Charter is a bad idea? Because I remember the National Curriculum. It was one of the most instructive episodes in modern British politics. Forgive me for quoting myself yet again; this family of issues is something I’ve thought about many times and I haven’t the time to keep thinking up new ways to say the same thing. Last November I wrote about why you should never, ever have a national curriculum:

She [Margaret Thatcher] was enraged by excessively trendy schools churning out PC semi-literates who knew about whale song but not Waterloo. “I’m not having this,” she said to her officials, “Get out there and make me a national curriculum.” She imagined it as being written on one side of a piece of paper: reading, writing, ‘rithmetic. A key point was always to include major kings-n-battles. Stories of spectacular historical ignorance on the part of schoolchildren were a major factor motivating supporters of the national curriculum.

Inevitably, this mildly repressive tool turned in her hand. Sure as eggs is eggs the national curriculum was taken over by the educational establishment, made monstrously detailed, and suffused with its values. Thatcher herself later admitted that the nationalisation of the curriculum was one of her biggest mistakes.

And sure as eggs is eggs the BBC establishment will take over all these new “purposes for the BBC” listed in the new Charter. The Sunday Times article lists these new objectives as including:

promoting education, “stimulating creativity”, “representing the UK, its nations and regions”, and “bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK”.

Amuse yourself in thinking up ways to make these rather nebulous objectives into tools for expanding the BBC bubble.

Personally, I think the BBC ought to be privatised tomorrow. (Don’t worry, lurking Beebfolk, this needn’t mean melting down all the master tapes of the David Attenborough wildlife documentaries, like you always hint it will. You could even keep the name “BBC”, like they kept the names “British Gas” and “British Airways.”) If, for some strange reason, it is thought best not to feature the immediate launch of a “Tell Sid” advertising campaign for shares in BBC Plc as the centrepiece of tomorrow’s White Paper, the next best thing would be to persuade the BBC to act in the the spirit of the Charter it already has.

UPDATE: Stephen Pollard looks at the other theme of the White Paper, the replacement of the BBC Governors with a “BBC Trust”, promoted by Tessa Jowell as “the voice of the licence-fee payer.” Pollard writes:

Forgive me for spoiling the party in White City, but I have an alternative suggestion — a more direct means by which my views and interests can be expressed.

Until today, that is. To BBC Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen, Hamas are now “Islamist nationalists”.

Jews living in the West Bank ? Well, frankly, some of them are ‘fanatical’.

Nothing like a sense of proportion, is there ?

Hat-tip – MN

A Michael Taylor, in the comments to the previous post, on the BBC. It’s not Paul Reynolds in disguise, is it ?

The agenda-setting is tedious for those who don’t share their world-view, but where it’s accompanied by the hard slog of good journalism – Channel 4 News for example – you agree to disagree and wish them well on their way.

Who believes these are the people to save the BBC?