Author Archives: Ed Thomas

Ok. Well, it appears I was wrong in the observation posted here about the lack of BBC coverage of a pro-Israel march. Sorry folks. Thanks to those who pointed out BBC coverage such as this. I heard all about the anti-Israel marches that had been held just before; nothing about this. It’s impossible for me to evaluate the coverage and say whether it was proportionate in the light of what’s emerged so that’s my testimony.

Referring to the other matter I mentioned, I think that giving coverage to 60 protestors against an arms fair is to open the way to inconsistency: how many more protests with a strength of 60 will they ignore in the future? How can they justify it?

And btw the BBC’s search facility sucks completely. No hard feelings though.

As part of its services to the chattering classes, the BBC has been preaching teaching how to say “Qana”. Important stuff, I am sure, for making up anti-war chants and for feeling comfortable in that after-dinner conversation mode.

The Beeb have also been quick to help define what we’re to associate with “Qana”- an Israeli ‘war crime’.

Once more this brings into question why the BBC gives such prominence to the views of pressure groups. Why pressure groups and not blogs like this or this? Blogs after all have their international associations and expertise, just like pressure groups.

Unlike the BBC and HRW these blogs have emerged because they give credit to details. It’s detail that reveals the truth of things. It used to be known as “journalism”, but since that word has been misappropriated into meaning ‘making a difference’, maybe we’ll have to think of a new word that means reporting what happens. Suggestions welcome in comments.

(all links from other people: Ritter, Archduke, Melanie Phillips. Hat tips to all)

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.

This article in the Jerusalem Post points to this BBC article as encapsulating a point of view regarding Israel which dominates at the BBC. Basically, it is Israel as regional bully-boy,

Such a thing is, of course, a little bit more complex than it seems at first sight. I searched Nick Thorpe on the BBC website and found that, while in the article already cited he caricatures Israel’s experience of Hezbullah missiles as ‘like pinpricks in the ankles of a giant, taunting him to stamp back with his big, US-issue army boots.‘, he was also the author of this article (back in Feb this year).

In it, he decribes the effect of Palestinian Qassam rockets falling from Gaza onto the southern Israeli town of Sderot. He himself describes a local kindergarten which had ‘lost two children – on their way here in the morning – to rocket attacks in the past few years.’

Of the kind of more deadly thing Hezbullah have been firing, Thorpe says (in the July 15th article), “Even to my untrained eye, a Katyusha rocket is a world apart from a Qassam.”

So how can a journalist who has reasonably borne witness to the anguish of children in Sderot revert to the kind of imagery which is gleefully spewed out by, among others, Guardian cartoonists? (See here for a shocking example -though in truth I have known Guardian cartoonists were sick for some years now).

Well, even in the eyewitness report from Sderot Thorpe slips all too easily into caricature: “The people of Sderot are mostly immigrants, Jews from far and wide coming home to Mother Israel for a cheap house, sunshine and prospects for the children.” (might as well be sun, sea and sand- the reason why Palestinians cling to Gaza; btw- I wonder what drives the land prices down? Can’t imagine.)

It’s obvious from this spin that he finds the concept of a Jewish home state at best rather kitsch, and at worst retrogressively nationalistic. He has slipped from observation to ideology- a slip that is so familiar and exacerbated in the current circumstances. But, really, Nick Thorpe, “pin pricks”? Didn’t you see with your own eyes the fear of the kindergarten children? Haven’t you acknowledged that the Katyusha is far worse? Where’s the proportion, man?

Last point: I do agree with the JP article that Thorpe’s mindless caricaturing is representative of the BBC’s coverage in general. How this happens amidst the BBC’s luxuriant resources overseen by an army of pretty well-qualified people is a source of fascination. One I’d rather not have though. You can find an alternative view, or rather a big waffle, at Comment is free here (thanks to commenter). In addition, here is a very good analysis of Israel’s position vis a vis Hezbullah which you won’t find on the BBC.

From time to time it occurs to me, and to others who frequent this site, that the BBC holds to its news managing agenda with a kind of religious fervour- with of course some more evangelical than others. Who better than the devil to break one of the commandments, then? Here he is taking on the BBC’s tenacious adherence to “thou shalt consider Britain a racist country” as it appeared last night in a BBC programme concerning the Stephen Lawrence murder case, where they reheated an old allegation about corruption in the man who led the investigation into the murder.

As the devil says “For the BBC to repeat these 10 year old allegations as new evidence in an attempt to boost ratings for a program that features a talking head that is wheeled out every time Auntie wants to bash the Met is a gross abuse of the licence fee.”

Incidentally, it was this murder case- with the Macpherson report following it accusing the police of ‘institutional racism’- and the BBC’s coverage of it, which alerted me to an interesting possibility: what if the BBC were institutionally biased? Sauce for the goose etc. Or maybe an eye for an eye would be more appropriate.

The BBC accepts the words of a pressure group and its local Palestinian friends concerning a vague report of Israelis using ‘human shields’ against terrorists (who obviously would be mightily put off by such tactics). The pressure group has the declared aim of changing Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. Meanwhile the BBC lavishes no articles and wastes no keyboard work over the fundamental importance of human shields to Hezbullah and other terror groups.

That’s disproportionality.

(Do scroll down; we’re building a nice little series on the BBC’s behaviour over the Lebanon situation. The general point seems to be that when the stress is even slightly on, the Beeb reveals its activist colours. Maybe it’s partly that yours truly awakes to them; who knows such things?)

++++++++++++++
Escalation, Beeb style

The trouble is, they’re dying to interfere, aren’t they? DFH notespossibly an even worse example where the BBC twists an interview, reporting robust Labour minister Kim Howells in a way which seems to ride roughshod over the thrust of his comments.

What he did in fact do, was to take Claire Short to task over her absurd view concerning Israel’s right to defend itself. At least part of what he said could only be read in terms of a defence of Israel. But the BBC has Howells on the Short side of things, condemning Israel. Can there be anything more absurd than a news organisation which reports the opposite of what actually happens? [I should point out to readers that my computer doesn’t like the BBC options for listening and viewing for some reason- I am relying on DFH’s quoted sections of Howell’s interview. What I think is clear from that is that Howells supports Israel’s right to defend itself- contrary to moonbats like Short and Galloway, whose demos the BBC like to patronise- even if he misunderstands the measures necessary for that. From this page you can follow links to the Howells interview, and also see that the BBC is trumpeting this meme of criticism. I also note that “UK protests over Israel actions” is the BBC’s semantically confusing link to the moonbat rallies, which, as DFH also points out, they also misrepresented in a carefully sanitised set of photos]

In the comments Will and Kerry noted the detail from the report I highlighted that the BBC were claiming that the UK Govt. had condemned Lebanon but not Israel. We are agreed that this is untrue, but that the UK has condemned Hezbullah and not Israel- contrary both to the Williams report and the Howells report.

Not as a footnote but as another example of the BBC getting things diammetrically wrong- in line with their wish fulfilment- Fran drew attention to an admission of failure on the BBC’s part, this time concerning… well, Christians and Palestinians:

‘Fran W, had complained that an item in the BBC’s Sunday Programme reported by Katya Adler, suggested that Bethlehem Christians are treated by the Palestinian Authority as a “protected minority”.

In fact, Christian and other human rights organizations have reported that the Christian Palestinian minority has suffered substantial abuses of human rights dating back several years’

I can understand errors of fact, but manufacturing ‘fact’ is a massive step further. But what’s a lie in the service of a cause, eh?

Oh, and well done Fran! The guilty secret of all B-BBC contributors is that our commenters are often better poised than we are. All it takes is one smooth stone and a little sling (or so Glenn Reynoldsmight say)

Final point- one might call this a roundup- is to point to Stephen Pollard’s frustration over Sunday morning’s BBC coverage. I can well imagine it. I prefer the website, with all its manifest faults…

Final final point: this at Stephen Pollard’s site made me laugh, as did the Observer piecewhere they said that “The BBC is particularly sensitive to accusations of impartiality, however.”

Figures.

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.

Fresh from her ‘could do better report’ concerning bias in coverage of Israel and the Palestians (naturally the report found bias both ways, as you’d expect from a bunch of panjandrums), the Beeb has found it convenient again to slant against Israel. It must be so tempting for Aunty, when EU and Arab opinion knows exactly what it wants to hear, while elsewhere ambivalence reigns so that people just might not notice.

Fortunate then that ambivalence isn’t everywhere.

Melanie Phillips comments on this Jeremy Bowen report, which seems crafted to avoid blaming the Palestinians for their own actions:

‘Israeli military actions in these areas have been necessitated solely by the terrorism inflicted upon Israelis by their inhabitants and Israel’s need to defend its citizens against mass murder. (The other Israeli activity has been routinely treating Palestinians from Gaza in Israeli hospitals, about which the BBC is silent).’

Er, not quite. Bowen says ‘I was shown a cancer patient who can no longer be treated in Israel, who lay in the hospital surrounded by his family waiting to die.’

An unduly negative way of looking at the broader situation, perhaps.

Meanwhile Stephen Pollard catches a new girl on the block crafting similar barriers to understanding. Our old favourite Caroline Hawley is on the beat again, in Jerusalem:

‘BBC correspondent Caroline Hawley in Jerusalem says it is not clear why the army moved against Hamad.’ (nb: perhaps a stealth edit was made which added ‘now’ following this sentence, because it seems unlikely that Stephen Pollard just left the word off, and it’s certainly there now. Even so, the sentence implies that the Israelis could have captured the terror leader at will, anytime. What fiendishly clever fellows they must be!)

Such bias may play well in the EU and Arabia, and pass under the radar of most elsewhere, but it certainly hinders an objective view ot the situation. Business as usual it seems.

Have a look at this recent BBC article about Russian birth rates. Like some unpaid p.r. agency for non-Western nations Aunty pretends that basically things in the Bear’s garden are getting rosier:

‘In the latest in our series about the role of the state in encouraging couples to have more children, Patrick Jackson in Moscow looks at how a rising birth rate is bringing cheer to Russia but mortality rates among adult males remain dangerously high.’

When it was published I thought, eh? Because I read Mark Steyn I felt fairly sure that reporting a ‘population boom’ before setting the scene of a dire decline, and seeing it firmly in that light, was pure misreporting. That’s not to mention the fact that they wilfully confuse reporting Moscow trends with those of Russia as a whole.

Interesting how it takes the Russian President himself to talk about Russian news, rather than our crusading BBC journalists. In his state of the State address, Putin talked ‘about the most acute problem facing Russia – demography’ and ‘The problem of low birth rates’.

It’s not that the BBC weren’t aware, but that they were intent on ‘managing’ the news, diplomatically tip-toeing, balancing the factual blows with rhetorical ‘balance’.

As Mark Steyn would say, there are no ‘fears’ involved (or needed) when interpeting demographics, only the hard reality that children not born now won’t grow up.

The Beeb, it seems, were expecting something different from Putin. They followed what they are now calling the ‘The conventional wisdom… that Mr Putin would concentrate on foreign policy’.

Well, the conventional wisdom was wrong. If you’re going to copy, copy someone who knows what they’re talking about- my definition of bottom line common sense which the BBC seems incapable of, with all their public resources. Now if they would stick to reporting the facts instead of interpreting them (incompletely and wrongly), at least they’d get marks for effort…