of twenty-three South Koreans, with reporter Robin Denselow opening with:
Close-up footage of dumped body (that wouldn’t be shown in this detail if the victim was British):
“Another death in Afghanistan. The body a South Korean information technology worker who’d volunteered to join a Christian church group hoping to be involved in missionary and aid work was discovered yesterday morning.
Cut to Al-Jazeera film of frightened kidnap victims:
He was the second of the group of twenty-three kidnapped Koreans to be executed by the Taliban, who threatened further killings if their demands for the release of prisoners hadn’t been met by this morning.
Cut to intrusive footage of distraught and distressed Korean relatives:
The kidnapped group includes eighteen women and their plight has led to emotional scenes across South Korea”.
Note the word ‘executed’. In what sense, Robin, was the word ‘executed’ better than the word ‘murdered’ would have been in your report?
The man was kidnapped, held to ransom, shot dead and dumped in a ditch. It was a murder pure and simple. To describe it as an ‘execution’ is to give the murdering scum perpetrators an air of legitimacy that is entirely inappropriate and a disservice to humanity.
Please do feel free to post your reasoning in the comment box on this thread, or, if you prefer, by email to biasedbbc@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
P.S. Just for good measure, Denselow’s report was followed up by Jeremy Paxman interviewing well known Taliban kidnap expert and muslim convert Yvonne Ridley, complete with fetching headscarf, who added little to public knowledge other than to demonstrate that Polyfilla is a viable alternative to the niqab.
Strangely, Paxman introduced Ridley as “a British journalist who was captured and held by the Taliban for eleven days in 2001”, omitting to mention Ridley’s prominence in ‘Respect‘, the George Galloway/SWP front party. For some reason, I have a nagging feeling that were Ridley a member of a similarly extreme right-wing party that her affiliation would have merited a mention on Newsnight.
BBC is expert at filtering out any words that may reflect negatively on terror groups, including, of course, the T-word itself.
So it’s unsurprising that it would confer legitimacy on murderous Taleban terrorists with the usual tactic of muddying the waters by applying a neutral word to a heinous crime.
I assume that in the BBC’s inverted moral universe it’s OK in war for a group to abduct civilians, including women, and start murdering them one by one to achieve its aims.
Or if not OK, then certainly no worse than shaming abu Graib prisoners of war with sexually degrading acts, or putting terrorists behind bars in Gitmo and insulting them by laying an infidel hand on a Koran.
[Moved to the correct thread]
Robin Deneslow should have stuck to being a rock critic.
Seems the BBC don’t follow their own BBC Radio Style Guide…..
“The Spoken Word
Be faithful to English as it is spoken. No one says “Prime Minister Tony Blair” or “England striker Alan Shearer” or “plumber Alan Smith”. Nor should we, ever.”
So who is this “Prime Minister Gordon Brown” then Beeboids?
And meanwhile from the BBC News Style Guide page 69
“Execute means to put to death after a legal process. Terrorists or criminals do not execute people,they murder them.”
BBC – we don’t even obey our own rules – this is what we do.
Actually the Beeb’s use of the term “executed” is very strange. I was living in South Korea a couple of years back when another missionary was murdered in Iraq. I was writing for a small internet media outlet at the time and was on friendly terms with a number of expat journalists: AP, Reuters, Time. No one described that murder as an execution in any copy I saw, as an execution is a legally sanctioned killing – a group of theologically motivated gangsters does not amount to the say thing. Unless the Taliban is the recognized government of Afghanistan, it is simply wrong for the Beeb to refer to this as an execution.