Author Archives: Andrew

– complete with the usual BBC celebs partaking of their own paid jaunts, at licence payers expense, natch (but “it’s such hard work”, as they never fail to point out when interviewed!).

Yesterday’s programme featured the various attractions of holidaying in Muscat, the capital of Oman – enticing and fascinating it was indeed – “fabled home of Sinbad the sailor and the Queen of Sheba, and a place where bottled water costs more than petrol”. Apart from the fact that the UK, in common with Oman (and many other lands), is also “a place where bottled water costs more than petrol”, the BBC omitted to mention that, whilst safer than the likes of Iraq or neighbouring Saudi Arabia, Oman is nonetheless a country where the UK Foreign Office advises caution on the part of British and western visitors, including:

• “There is a high threat from terrorism against western, including British, interests. Attacks could be indiscriminate and against civilian targets, as they have been elsewhere in the region”;
  

• “You should review your security arrangements carefully. You should remain vigilant, particularly in public places”;
  

• “Small-scale demonstrations took place in April 2003, but were carefully controlled by the authorities, and there was no damage to people or property. You should take sensible precautions for your personal safety and avoid public gatherings and demonstrations”;
  

• “In public, general modesty of behaviour and dress is expected. Women who wear shorts or tight-fitting clothes, in particular in downtown areas, are likely to attract unwelcome attention. There have been some reported cases of sexual harassment”;
  

This last one in particular wasn’t much heeded by the programme’s winsome presenter. Come on BBC, it wouldn’t have taken much to suggest that your customers at least check out the FCO’s advice before visiting a potentially volatile area would it? Even the BBC web page about the Oman jaunt, whilst helpfully asking “If you liked Oman, why not try Dubai?”, omits to mention the FCO or even provide a link to their Oman page!

Whilst we’re on the subject of the Holiday programme, the show also featured northern Cyprus – which, we are informed, “has been a divided island since 1974”. Time is spared for a ‘two-way’ with a ‘political analyst’ who informs us about the ‘green line’ and ‘UN troops’ and how “the military presence is more of a relic and has no real effect on its growing tourism”.

That’s as may be, and northern Cyprus does appear enchanting, but, amidst all this ‘political analysis’, would it have taken much to mention what the historical event that divided the island in 1974 actually was? Or would that be outwith the BBC’s mission to entertain, educate and inform?

And hey, let’s be careful out there folks!

is an interesting article on BBC News Online about the extortion of ‘protection’ money by Basque terrorists in Spain. In typical BBC style the article finishes off with some relevant background details:

The raids on 3 October which resulted in key arrests, including suspected Eta leader Mikel Albizu, have also led to the capture of a large quantity of weapons.

On Sunday, two arms caches containing mortars, dynamite, anti-tank rocket launchers, guns, ammunition and assault weapons, detonators and documents were discovered in southwestern France.

Eta has been fighting for more than 30 years for an independent Basque state.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to have been space available (or perhaps it’s a lack of knowledge or effort on the part of the ‘journalist’) to add the small detail that the 30 year fight to which he or she refers has involved the murder, sorry Beeboids, ‘killing’, of more than 800 people.

. Eric the Unread links to a rather delightful spot of Greg Dyke bashing by way of a review of Dyke’s new book by Charles Moore in The Telegraph*. Here are a few snippets for your edification – the first four are hilarious, the last one something that we at BBBC can attest to:

When he arrived at the BBC, Greg wanted to change the culture. He learnt how to do this when he ran LWT from 1990. There, his first act was to “put up an enormous picture of me in reception at our building on the South Bank”: he wanted to be “accessible, open, and friendly”.

When he lost control of LWT, he became very rich through the sale of his shares: “It was a truly miserable time… I also learnt to live with suddenly being rich.” Things got worse at the BBC. He had to sell lots of shares and to scrape by on less than £500,000 a year. Luckily, though, thousands of staff came to love him.

“Three weeks to the day” after Greg had been pushed out, he visited Robben Island, the place in South Africa where Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned, and found it “an incredibly emotional experience”. As he went round, “…my tears flowed quietly, tears for what had happened on this horrible island, but also tears for what had happened to me in those three days in January”. Luckily, he says, he eventually achieved some perspective, and realised that what had happened to him was “insignificant in comparison”.

According to Greg Dyke, his book has “three themes: broadcasting, politics and me”. The reader, however, may find the first two topics rather thinly covered. Greg is enormously excited by the story of himself.

During, before and after the Iraq war, the BBC maintained neither impartiality nor accuracy. The assumption behind almost all its coverage was that the war was wrong. It therefore felt that it did not need to check the details of stories whose heart, as it saw it, was in the right place.

A classic goring! Do read the whole review if you have time.

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As pointed out by BBBC reader Michael Gill in a comment, a silly conspiracy theory (of apparently dubious origin) doing the rounds of lefty blog sites about a bulge (i.e. a wrinkle) in President Bush’s jacket during the first presidential debate during the week before last have made it straight onto BBC News Online – Bush’s bulge stirs media rumours.

Moreover, just to make sure this dubious rumour is given maximum exposure, it is currently on the front page of News Online, with a headline reading ‘President Bush’s mystery bulge stirs rumours he was wired’, for those who skim the headlines rather than read the full story.

There was a similar conspiracy theory about Kerry pulling out and unfolding a ‘cheat sheet’ at the same debate (which turned out to be unfounded – Kerry actually pulled out a pen – in contravention of the debate rules nonetheless). Yet not a whisper of this has been mentioned on News Online, not even as relevant background information to accompany the wishy-washy Bush’s bulge rumour story that they’re currently peddling. Why the disparity in coverage? I guess it depends on what line the ever impartial BBC are pushing.

BBC One’s news broadcasts on Monday (1pm, 6pm and 10pm, 04OCT04) featured reports from Margaret Gilmour, their Home Affairs Correspondent, on the detention without trial in the UK of foreign terrorist suspects who cannot be deported for legal reasons. The report on the 10 O’Clock news ran for a lengthy ~2m 43s, opened by Huw Edwards with:

The highly controversial powers to detain foreign terrorist suspects without charge

or trial have been challenged in the highest court in the land, the House of Lords. The case focuses on nine men who have been held for up to three years. Lawyers for the men say the powers are fundamentally inconsistent with core values of liberty and equality.

Gilmour commences her piece with:

This is the dilemma for the law lords: Does the post September 11th terror threat justify declaring a public emergency in the UK, because that’s what the government has done in order to suspend certain human rights laws so they can hold foreign terror suspects without trial. Are they legally allowed to do this? Well that’s what this case is all about.

We then run through a bit about the hearing room, a painting in the room (Moses and the ten commandments), the nine law lords judging this case, the opt-out of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, “11 foreign terror suspects are being held without trial under the act”, David Cairns MP (Lab) – supporting the Home Secretary, most held in the high security Belmarsh Prison in east London, a former prisoner who “met them in jail” (he isn’t identified and his reason for being in jail isn’t mentioned) who claims the detainees have “lost all hope in the British legal system”, then a clip of Conor Gearty of the Centre for Human Rights Law at the LSE (to the effect that ‘the case is about trade-offs between liberty and security’, oh really?), and then back to Gilmour, who sums up with:

This is about the balance between the war on terror and human rights. Whatever the law lords decide will set a new benchmark establishing how far civil rights issues in future should be taken into account by government and the courts.

All the while with both Edwards and Gilmour omitting the crucial seven words that hit upon the essential truth of the story – specifically that the case is about foreign nationals, terror suspects, ‘who cannot be deported for legal reasons’ – for that is the nub of the story – foreign nationals whose behaviour has made them unwelcome here (which we, as a nation, are perfectly entitled to determine), but who cannot be deported (under our law, mind, in case their home countries abuse them) and who won’t leave of their own accord.

In other words, they are locked up and looked after at our expense to protect us from them and them from their own governments, until circumstances change or they go home or find somewhere else willing to take them – which, to me, whilst far from ideal, seems the best compromise under all the circumstances.

But without those seven words (at the very least), which take all of three seconds to say (not much to squeeze into a 163 second segment!), Gilmour’s reports are quite misleading, particularly as we had various repeated reports over the weekend of a small protest outside Belmarsh (all the usual suspects, SWP, Respect, Liberty, Loopy Lawyers 4 Freeing Terrorists etc.) promulgating the usual leftie lies that Belmarsh is Britain’s Guantanamo Bay and so on, when it patently isn’t – these foreign nationals are free to leave at any time, so long as they’re leaving Britain.

Furthermore, Gilmour (and some other reports) also omit the significant details that there were originally seventeen people detained under this legislation (bottom of report) – two of whom have left the UK voluntarily, one who has been released under ‘house arrest’, one now detained under other legislation and one who has been released following the consideration of new evidence.

Given the complexity and the emotiveness of this issue, why didn’t Edwards or Gilmour manage to spend three seconds addressing such a crucial point about exactly why these people are being held in the way that they are?

If you have the time and the bandwidth you can, for now at least, see the report for yourself here (224Kbps, Windows Media format) – it starts about 8m 53s into the programme and ends around 11m 36s.

* is an interesting article by Philip Webster in The Times today about John Humphrys radio interview with Tony Blair yesterday (as also covered by Melanie Phillips in her diary). Here’s an excerpt of the relevant bits:

IT WAS the interview he had been seeking for three years. But when John Humphrys finally got the Prime Minister in front of him for a Today programme grilling yesterday, the country got slightly more Humphrys than Blair.

The former seemed so determined to pose the questions on Iraq that he has been dying to throw at Mr Blair all this time, that sometimes it appeared he did not really want to wait for the answers.

At least twice he told Mr Blair that he wanted to “move forward” as Mr Blair was spluttering to get his response out. Virtually all the 20-minute encounter was about Iraq.

It was civil, mutually respectful, completely lacking in any personal animosity. But it was mainly about the past as the BBC man took Mr Blair through questions about the faulty intelligence on which the war was based and the legality of the conflict. Mr Blair gave mantra-like responses to several questions, saying: “The war was justified legally because Saddam remained in breach of the UN resolutions.

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– so asks Nick Robinson, formerly of the BBC, now ITN, in his Notebook column in The Times last Friday. This isn’t strictly about the BBC, although it is quite relevant to recent topics on Biased BBC. Here’s the rest of what he says on this subject:

WHAT a foul, nauseating stench of a week. Day after depressing day I have waited for a man to be brutally murdered as a spectacle for a watching world. Day after day I have watched a family’s agony. Day after day I have witnessed the Government’s apparent helplessness. How I hate the feeling that we are doing exactly what the hostage takers want. Every video of their butchery, every heart-rending appeal, every breathless countdown to a new deadline is part of a script which could have been written by the men holding a knife to Ken Bigley’s throat.

So why do we in the media play along? Please don’t think for a moment that we cover these events without the most careful thought. Each and every day my bosses at ITV News have issued new guidance to programme teams. Don’t talk of hostages being “executed”, read one, as it implies a legal punishment. Another decreed that we would not use the video and the (dreadful) sound of the moments before hostages die as this robbed them of their dignity. And so on. My boss says that these are some of the hardest editorial decisions he has had to take, for he must decide not only whether to show but also how much.

Why, though, don’t we simply refuse to play the terrorists’ game at all and not broadcast any of it? Why don’t we deny them what Margaret Thatcher once called “the oxygen of publicity”? News organisations do occasionally agree to news blackouts if they are advised that this will help to secure the safety of hostages. But to censor our coverage now would be a political act. We can no more censor images of the appalling deaths of hostages than we can of the victims of war. The Pentagon’s decision to refuse to allow pictures to be taken of coffins returning from Iraq was, I have little doubt, not simply to show respect, as officials claimed.

There is another problem. Even if all the terrestrial broadcasters wanted to we could not black out CNN, Fox and al-Jazeera, not to mention the internet. I have been shocked by the number of people I have spoken to who have watched the gruesome hostages videos on the web. I won’t. It is what they want me to do. It is down to each of us to find our own way of not giving the hostage takers what they want.

– A month ago I asked What’s the difference between an interview and a sketch?, highlighting a lavish News Online puff-piece for George Galloway (“Sir, I salute your courage, your indefatiguability” etc. etc.). A few days later I noted here on BBBC that the continued highlighting of the Galloway ‘feature’ on News Online was well past due for a change.

And, by sheer coincidence, even though the Galloway puff-piece had been featured on News Online’s Politics page for the best part of three weeks, within half-an-hour of my post, it was gone, as if by magic!

Well, fellow BBBC aficionadoes, it has happened again – another piece of leftie-propaganda masquerading as news has become stuck on a News Online index page for longer than is seemly.

The ‘stuck’ article is the specious World ‘wants Kerry as president’, last updated 09SEP04, (allegedly!), featured on the News Online > World > Americas page, where there is a Vote USA 2004 headline summary, which then links to the main Vote USA 2004 page. This ‘stuck’ article has been featured in the Vote USA 2004 headline summary on the Americas page for more than a fortnight – it’s so old now that it no longer even appears on the main Vote USA 2004 page (where it also enjoyed an extended appearance).

Why is it, given that there’s only room for six headlines in the Vote USA 2004 headline summary (and two of those are Key election battlegrounds and Issues-at-a-glance) that the ‘stuck’ article has remained there all this time? Why, especially when there has been so much else going on in the US election campaign (Rathergate anyone?) over the last fortnight? Why does the ‘stuck’ story have so much appeal to the compilers of News Online that it remains on prolonged display?

As last time with the Galloway article, in the interests of thoroughness, I’ve looked at the timestamps on all of the other articles linked to from the Americas page. At lunchtime today (exactly fourteen days since the Kerry article was last updated) there were thirty-two linked articles. Of those, eight were dated 23SEP04, seventeen were dated 22SEP04, four were dated 21SEP04. There were three other articles, dated 13SEP04, 15SEP04 and 18SEP04, respectively, plus the World ‘wants Kerry as president’ article, dated 09SEP04 – much the oldest, as you can see.

Of the other three ‘long lived’ articles, all of them are arguably negative towards Bush’s America – being about, respectively, opposition to the Patriot Act, Religion & Politics in America and the Democrats unwillingness to face Ralph Nader at the polls in Florida (the only one of these veteran articles that still appears on the main Vote USA 2004 page).

This is one of those cases of BBC News Online bias where it’s not necessarily what they’re saying that’s biased – the bias here is the lengthy and favoured prominence given to articles that are in tune with the political views and aspirations of the News Online staff – those who decide what is news and what is in the archive. It’s not big, and it’s not clever, although it is harder to spot and thus easier for them to get away with.

is the BBC News Online strap to a pop-up ‘in pictures’ collection of US election bumper stickers. It has been featured on various News Online pages over the weekend, currently appearing on the Vote USA 2004 index page.

But does the BBC keep to the impartial middle of the road ‘driving politics’, or do they pull to the left or the right? Here’s a BBBC round-up of the BBC’s chosen stickers, each with its BBC caption and my assessment:

1. Bush/Cheney ’04

   San Marco, Texas: Bumper stickers in the US are often used to express political views. Here there is support for President George W Bush.
   

   So far, so good – a standard Bush/Cheney bumper sticker. Will it be a standard Kerry/Edwards sticker next?
   

2. a) Stop mad cowboy disease

   b) Somewhere in Texas there’s a village missing an idiot

   Boulder, Colorado: Both sides have come up with witty slogans, like this one suggesting that Mr Bush is a lost village idiot.
   

   Nope. Both sides might have come up with witty slogans, but here we have two anti-Bush stickers for the price of one…
   

3. Support W. for real peace!

   Austin, Texas: Many Bush supporters say his response to 9/11 has made America safer. They fear that John Kerry would not do so well.
   

   This one’s hardly a witty example, but it is pro-Bush…
   

4. MissionNothing Accomplished – Defeat Bush in ’04

   Boulder, Colorado: This sticker mocks the “Mission Accomplished” banner that hung behind Mr Bush when he declared Iraq hostilities over.
   

   Let’s call this one for Kerry – it is a MoveOn production…
   

5. a) Asses of Evil

   b) More Trees Less Bush

   c) Leave No B[illionaire Behind]

   d) We’re Gooder!

   Boulder, Colorado: This driver attacks Mr Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, as well as his education and environmental stances – and verbal gaffes.
   

   Gosh – this must’ve been the BBC van! – four anti-Bush stickers…
   

6. It’s a woman’s job to vote – BPW/Texas

   Austin, Texas: Not all bumper stickers are directly related to the presidential campaign. This one backs causes such as abortion rights.
   

   Er, no, if you go to the web address on the sticker, you’ll find it’s actually the Business & Professional Women’s Club of Texas, Inc., who have 117 pages cached in Google, none of which even mention abortion, let alone express an opinion on it…

7. Texas supports our troops – red, white & blue ribbon

   Austin, Texas: Some bumper stickers avoid endorsing one candidate or another, such as this one in Texas – a state with strong military ties.
   

   Okay, this one’s arguably neutral, but let’s be generous to the BBC and count it as a half point in favour of Bush…
   

8. Pray for our troops – yellow ribbon

   San Marco, Texas: This one uses the motif of the yellow ribbon that families tie in hopes of bringing their loved ones home safely.
   

   I’m not sure that this qualifies as a ‘voter view’ – more a straightforward human plea to a higher power.
   

Okay, that’s twelve stickers in all. So how did the BBC do this time?

Oh dear. Is it just me, or is the BBC’s ‘driving politics’ selection showing evidence of a distinct pull to the left?

Worse, presumably some BBC bod has been wandering around taking these pictures (on salary and expenses, natch), only to end up with such a poor selection (or perhaps, in fairness to the bod, to have them edited poorly).

It might have been worth doing a spot of research on the subject, before leaving home, to find a broader, funnier, selection, such as these or these.

– watching the BBC 10 O’Clock News just now the main story is the tragic and barbaric murder of Eugene Armstrong, one of the Americans kidnapped along with another American and a Briton in Baghdad recently. To their credit, the 10 O’Clock News (in the forms of Huw Edwards, Nicholas Witchell and another correspondent whose name escapes me) was unequivocal in describing this latest atrocity as a murder (all three reporters) and the people who did it as terrorists (Edwards). It is a welcome change from the insipid moral equivalence of terms like ‘killed’, ‘executed’, ‘militants’, etc., although I truly wish this had come about under other circumstances. I hope that other BBC news programmes and News Online follow suit.