Monthly Archives: July 2006

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

featured a virtual advertisment – in two senses – for demonstrations organised by the Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain, says USS Neverdock. His screenshot shows a box headed “Protest Assembly Points” and then the exact times and places for the demonstrations in Birmingham (“Outside Waterstones, entrance to Bullring”), Exeter, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kirckcaldy, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, Sheffield and York. To finish it off nicely there’s an encouraging slogan across the bottom of the page saying, “Back peace call – Archbishop” But that just happens to be the headline for a link to another story. One hopes that its positioning just below the list of assembly points for demonstrations so that it appears the Archbishop is calling for people to back them is mere coincidence. And then there is the question of why the Archbishop’s remarks were reported that way which my colleague Ed Thomas has already blogged about.

Talk about public service! To place a quarter-page advert for your demo in a national newspaper reaching the same size of audience as the BBC does usually costs quite a lot, but the BBC will help out for free. Will help out some of us, anyway. For some reason when it comes to Sunday’s pro-Israel protest the exact assembly point isn’t so newsworthy.

Since then for some reason the BBC got embarrassed about their advertisment. Never mind, it was up long enough for good citizens to make their arrangements.

On the same subject, here is a Google News shot of an earlier version of the same story. The headline was “UK protests over Israeli attacks.” The same headline and first few paragraphs made up Ceefax page 108. Interesting headline, don’t you think? Could easily be read as meaning the UK government had protested over the Israeli attacks, which it has not. Or it could be read as the UK as a whole nation is united in protest over the Israeli attacks, which again is not the case. But of course it really meant that some protests were to be held in the UK against the Israeli attacks. Again, one hopes that like “Back peace call – Archbishop” the ambiguity is mere coincidence.

Had an interesting time using Google News recently. An hour or two ago I saw an article about Rowan Williams, the Arch-Bish of somewhere, who was quoted saying that Hezbullah was using Lebanese as a human shield. This was accompanied by numerous links reinforcing the fact. Reuters provided the lead article, I think. I also saw this.

Later, trawling the BBC I came across a more than slightly different emphasis:

“Bishop slams UK over Middle East

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has joined calls for the UK to press for a ceasefire in the Middle East.”

I went back to the Google page and found the emphasis had changed, with the BBC and the Guardian in the vanguard. Now the newsmen were queueing up to condemn the UK for failing to pressure Israel (of course they were mainly just lifting the reports from the Beeb and Reuters, but guess what, the BBC were winning). Examining the time sequence, it seemed the BBC were pivotal in the change of emphasis, and looking at the article the people of Britain will be thoroughly ignorant of the balancing factor in Williams’ speech- there is no mention of the Hezbullah-human shield condemnation. Williams may be a kook, and Reuters may deserve the prefix “al-“, while Google in my view merit no prizes, but the BBC is the swaggering transnational bully that conforms its reportage to the latest axis of UN-French speak.

Update:I still have the original BBC article open on my computer even as the stealth edit has kicked in- radically. Luckily I quoted the intro [ edit: change of headline spins it very differently]. Anyone who can offer screen captures or Google caches and/or give me and others some simple instructions as to how to obtain them will have performed a service.

By now every two-bit media organisation has repeated the BBC mantra. Most current BBC readers will now conclude (unwittingly) that the BBC is adopting a balanced line compared to them whereas in fact much of the media, especially the British local media, has simply been following their BBC ‘leader’. This is classic BBC- spread a radical agenda and then stealth edit their way out of the blame. The question is begged as to why the BBC ran a story for such a short time before changing it radically. They neutered the Reuters line, and then modified their own. Surely they are not responding to a changing news situation but are gerrymandering the headlines for the coming 24 hours.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

As part of the discussion of this post an anonymous commenter said the following:

So what U.S. party was Gary Condit a member of?

Chandra Levy: Accusation and denial

Hmm, no clues there. How about this page?

Condit passes lie detector test

No joy there either. Strange. How about this page?

Condit battles resignation calls

Why, no. He mustn’t be in any party. Well, let’s see what this page says – Stephen Sackur will surely enlighten us:

Levy soap opera puts press in lather

Why Stephen, you’ve not put the party affiliation. Pressure of space I’m sure.

Well, let’s try Kevin Anderson:

Mystery overwhelms US airwaves

Nope, no joy there either.

This one maybe:

Condit launches ‘PR offensive’

Er, no – nothing either.

Well, Mr Condit is mentioned here…

Levy police question park attacker

…But still no clue which party he belongs to.

Nor here:

Profile: From small town to big city

Sigh – can you imagine the BBC reporting a scandal involving a GOP Congressman with this number of stories and not mentioning his political ties?

The original comment had just URLs; I have given the titles of the BBC stories.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

In the previous post I mentioned Israelis killed by suicide bombers in pizza parlours. The crime I had in mind was the massacre at the Sbarro pizza restaurant on August 9 2001. One of the victims was a 15 year old girl called Malka Chana Roth, nicknamed “Malki”.

Malki’s parents have a blog called This Ongoing War.

Many commenters and other blogs have already pointed out this post: A Word About the BBC

I was listening to the ten o’clock news with half an ear and I caught Jeremy Bowen saying something like if Israel can’t prove that bombing the bridges in Lebanon was justified “then it’s a war crime.”

I don’t get it, BBC. So what if it is. Why do you care?

Note, I’m not asking why you, the readers of this site, might care – or you, the BBC audience, or you the Lebanese or you the Israelis or you the Palestinians or you the world. You all might have many and different opinions on whether it’s a war crime in law, or whether it’s a war crime in the sight of God – but I’m not asking you.

I’m talking to you, the British Broadcasting Corporation. When Hamas and then Hizbollah attacked Israel you never troubled to tell us the legal status of the acts. When suicide bombers killed Israelis at pizza parlours and bar mitzvahs you never gave us any of this war crime schtick, although attacks targeted at non-combatants are the epitome of a war crime. “Terrorist” is a term with meaning in international law, yet when bombers murdered your own countrymen in London a year ago you were so anxious to avoid being judgemental that you had someone go through what your reporters had written in the heat and pity of the moment, carefully replacing the word “terrorist” with the word “bomber.”

(God, what a shameful job. While they were still scrubbing the blood off the streets and the rails, some hack was scrubbing out any suggestion that the killers might have been bad people. Was it a junior hack under orders or a senior hack doing his own dirty work? Or were you all sent slinking back to your desks each to expunge his own words? I’d really like to know, but whichever it was you were anxious to avoid any talk of “crimes” then.)

“Bomber” not “terrorist”: by your own account your only job is to describe projectiles hitting meat. So what’s up now, with your “war crimes” and your “Israel kills Lebanese civilians”? You don’t need these fancy legal concepts, as if it mattered to you whether they were civilians or not. By your own stated standards moral distinctions between killings are “a barrier rather than an aid to understanding.”

I just don’t get it.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.