Author Archives: Ed Thomas

, LGF are running a Robert Fisk Idiotarian of the Year Award, and the good news is that the BBC have made the cut for nominations! The bad news is that they are trailing rather shamefully in the voting. There is still time though, and if you feel like it you can go along and vote here if you haven’t already. Thanks to ‘Opinions are like’ for pointing this out. I also like this little poem I found at LGF by Humbert Wolfe which applies almost as neatly to the BBC as to Robert Fisk:

You cannot hope

to bribe or twist,

Thank God! the British journalist.

But, seeing what

the man will do

unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Update. Tim Blair is rounding up the Kilroy-Silk affair which Natalie discusses above- giving yet more reasons to vote for the Beeb at LGF, where time is running out and, although gaining ground, we haven’t yet put the BBC in any kind of respectable finishing place.

, and a good point to make, about that Andrew Marr report on TB’s trip to Basra. Maybe, he suggests, the soldiers were huffy with Blair because of things like this– which might be filed under that broad BBBC section ‘news the BBC couldn’t care much less about broadcasting’ (and yes, I know army men don’t always love a sailor, but I’d imagine they wouldn’t be impressed, for various reasons).

. Greg Dyke has spelled it out in fascinatingly bullish fashion in an email to anxious staff ahead of the Hutton report:

‘ “What is important once Hutton is published is that if the BBC is criticised we learn from whatever is written – assuming of course that we agree with what is said,” Mr Dyke told staff.’

Note- not ‘If we are criticised we must learn from our mistakes’, but ‘we learn from whatever is written’, and then only ‘assuming.. we agree with what is said’. If there was a movement for the dismantling of the BBC, it would feed on such arrogance of unaccountability. (Hat-tip to Mr Sullivan)

. Christmas is a busy time for personal life and a quiet time for news, or rather, news bias. What’s the point in the BBC launching an offensive against their bettes noire or an extensive cover-up of ‘bad news’ when the punters are flat out with surfeit of this or that mind altering substance (even if it’s just the old post-prandial-orgy-chasm their minds have fallen into)? There’ll probably be another absence of posts in the coming days, but you never know. As Mark Steyn helpfully pointed out on his lovely website (not a blog, honest!), BritXmas lasts two weeks. Convenient, huh?

Well, I’ve still been watching the Beeb with my beady eye and my head in my hands (odd angle, but still) and it’s still dire. One general issue I find myself considering at the moment is why the BBC is so much more animated discussing the problems in Iraq compared with their interest in the ongoing Serbian crisis that has dragged on painfully and is enduring its fifth year. Today the Beeb has reported the Serbian election, where friends of Slobodan- the guy the international community is trying to try to try for war crimes in their lovely shiny Hague courts- have cornered over a quarter of the popular vote. Slob’s party, the Socialists, have a respectable 7 percent. Would this have anything to do with the rarely mentioned persecution of Serbs in UN liberated Kosovo, I find myself asking? (in this link you will find a prized Beeb report on persecuted Serbs- notice that they don’t blame the UN, but publish a call for more resources to be given to acronymic police).

Anyway, the Beeb doesn’t run an article on the pathetic failure of UN-led forces to plan for the post war situation, or speculate on whether there’s a connection to the fact that Slobodan and other suspected criminals have yet to be judged and in some cases yet to face a court. It doesn’t blame ‘multi-lateral’ action as weak and corrupt, or discuss the feasability of a ‘multi-polar’ world. It doesn’t even mention that the French and the Germans, and Bill Clinton too (not forgetting our Tone), were the authors of this particular post-spring 1999 chapter of European history. The Beeb in general presents all the pomp of the UN and none of the failings- since here the typical UN trumpeting mysteriously fades away and becomes instead the ‘international community’. It seems more convenient to blame ‘ghosts’ . When these chains of command are conveniently blotted out, exactly who do I write to to complain about these states and affairs? Santa Claus?

Far from concentrating on the proven problems with getting results against nasty Serb nationalists the Beeb focusses ‘in depth’ on the speculated ‘problems’ in bringing Saddam Hussein to trial. I don’t know why: even the one and a half years mentioned sounds a really good timescale compared to the thinking time lavished on Slobadan and his chums. I also don’t know why they consider that there will be such problems proving the guilt of Saddam, since much of what he did he was so proud of he had it videotaped. The catalogue is so extensive, the Saddam-cult so primary in Iraq’s murderous political life, where’s the problem? Ah, but I am remiss- the Beeb are better at covering speculated problems than real ones.

‘Tony Hall, the U.S. ambassador to the food program… asked one of Mugabe’s top aides: “Why do I get the impression that I have to beg you to feed your people?” ‘ -Michael Grunwald, Washington Post Staff writer, Jan 03

Funny how in this article about famine in Zimbabwe, a certain man’s name is missing. On top of that, they’ve chosen just about the most tendentious ‘fact’ possible with which to launch their story. It is reported that

‘Millions of Zimbabweans will go hungry this Christmas because international donors have failed to provide enough food, the United Nations has warned.’

That ‘Millions of Zimbabweans will go hungry this Christmas’ is a fact I would not want to argue with, and awful if so. Why is a different matter- our unnamed African leader ought to dominate that discussion. However, if the BBC merely wanted to report a shortage of aid from donors, they should have pointed out that because the price of all sorts of grain has risen strongly this year, due to a run of mixed world harvests (and the running-down in years past of surpluses by, for instance, the EU), usual inflation adjusted aid budgets that last year might have been adequate are not any more. So it’s not just a simple case of the ‘selfish West, as usual, stingy as they tuck into their Turkeys’, however the Beeb make it appear to be.

. Hazhir Teimourian has serious worries about BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson’s recent book, ‘The Wars Against Saddam: Taking The Hard Road To Baghdad’, which the Kurdish commentator on Middle Eastern affairs reviewed for the Literary Review (offline at the moment) this month.

Having blamed Simpson’s account for giving Saddam an easy ride, and accused him of blaming the UK and US far too much over deaths caused by UN sanctions, Teimourian points out the preponderance of Shia victims, and states ominously, ‘That was not a mistake’. He says that during the time of sanctions the mortality rate among children in the Kurdish-controlled North of Iraq (also subject to sanctions) actually fell and that

‘Simpson’s explanation that they (UN sanctions) stopped the importation of water-sanitation equipment is simply not true’

He doesn’t stop there. His most interesting comments are about Simpson’s attitude towards Saddam’s regime:

‘In several places, Simpson irritates by expressing gratitude to top Ba’thists who helped obtain visas for the BBC. By describing them as ‘cultured’ or ‘gentle’ (was Goering acceptable, then, because he hoarded paintings?), he invites us to believe that they bore no responsibility for any of the bestial acts committed by their security forces that Simpson himself describes so well elsewhere in the book.

One such man- and Simpson, incredibly, tried to bring him to Britain as an asylum-seeker after the war- is Saddam’s last foreign minister, Naji Sabri. After telling us how much he likes Sabri, he tells us that Sabri once saved his career as a junior civil servant by denouncing his own brother as a traitor. In return for this service, on top of saving his job, Sabri was exempted from taking part in the firing squad. His poor father was not. Sabri went on to serve Saddam so faithfully that he was eventually made a minister.’

Teimourian begins the conclusion to his review by saying:

‘These shortcomings are serious failures of judgement.’

No doubt these ‘serious failures of judgement’ have helped fuel the BBC bias in their coverage of the Iraq conflict and explain why so many journalists (Guerin, Frei, Hawley, Omar, Gilligan and many others) would express anti-US/UK opinion, and even drop apologetic hints for Saddam, without fearing the reaction of their managers.

does the BBC respond to criticism? With censorship, of course. True, in this case it’s self censorship, but they can scarcely ask for more from the public than acceptance of a compulsory license fee (kind of an act of censorship by itself)- so they just have to put up with criticism and find ways of deflecting it.

Their new policy, apparently, is not to let anyone “whose main profile or income comes from the BBC” write newspaper columns about politics. This is verboten, as I say, unless you can prove your ‘main profile or income’ doesn’t come from the BBC. In other words, it’s a gag on non-senior journalists- who will be much more firmly under the thumb with this selectivity on the part of the Beeb- plus some high-profile, senior ones who will magically, imperceptibly almost, come to have greater ‘responsibilities’ and need better remuneration than their current settlement allows. Slander, me? Nooo. ‘Creativity’ in job description could well become the key, that’s all.

Of course, the great ‘El Dorado’ of BBC journalism will be to prove that your image and income transcends the BBC’s patronage- something, say, Kirsty Wark might be able to claim in Scotland, or Peter Snow on the subject of elections, or Michael Fish, on the political effects of the weather (heh). So, in conclusion, one might say that the answer to criticism is not to come clean but to complexify to bamboozle the oiks who criticise you. Sounds like a BBC policy to me.

The DT is equally sceptical.

. Hazhir Teimourian is a writer and journalist, and he reviewed BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson’s latest book ‘The Wars Against Saddam: Taking The Hard Road To Baghdad’ for the Literary Review this month (unfortunately offline at the moment). Teimourian’s review is headed ‘The BBC Tribe At War’. The headline caught my attention, and what he had to say held it completely.

Teimourian is of Kurdish origin, but has lived in Britain and been associated with the BBC for over thirty years. He is an accepted expert on Middle Eastern conflict. Nevertheless, he approaches Simpson’s book warily because he believes that Simpson, and the BBC World Service,

‘loses no opportunity to denigrate Britain’.

While praising the ways that in parts of the book Simpson captures events he has been a part of, he accuses him in one place of mounting ‘a tribal defence of the BBC in Baghdad’.

The title of Simpson’s latest book is, he argues,

bound to light up the heart of every Arab nationalist and Muslim zealot, implying that all of Saddam’s wars were imposed on him by the wicked West.

Teimourian also criticises the failure of Simpson’s book to hold to account the Ba’thist hierarchy- including Saddam- for its desolation of Iraq. Simpson, he says,

‘lets Saddam off almost completely’ over the deaths of children during the era of sanctions, and ‘this book will be used all over the world as the considered opinion of the BBC’s World Affairs Editor to ‘prove’ the inhumanity of his country’ (the UK) .

This is the same John Simpson who recently joined conspiracy theorist and BBC World presenter Nick Gowing in his indictment of US forces, accusing them of the ‘ultimate form of censorship’ in killing journalists in Iraq. If the World Affairs Editor of the BBC expresses his views in this way (and there is plenty more ‘rich’ material from Teimourian’s review of Simpson’s new book to be continued…), who can be surprised that the BBC coverage is as it is.

Looking on the BBC website tonight is, ironically, like looking into a battery of indignant peacenik artillery. What have we got? Let me offer the headlines:

‘UN chief demands clear Iraq role’

‘US remains Iraq resistance target’

‘Vatican slams Saddam treatment’

‘Blix sceptical on Iraqi WMD claims’

I mean, talk about rallying the troops.

Now let me offer you the antidote to this poisonous weaponery, courtesy of Mark Steyn in the DT:

‘All these institutions do is enable nickel’n’dime thugs to punch above their weights. The New York Times, sleepwalking through the 21st century on bromides from the Carter era, wants the UN to run Saddam’s trial because one held under the auspices of the Americans would “lack legitimacy”. Au contraire, it’s the willingness of Kofi Annan, Mohammed el-Baradei, Chris Patten, Mary Robinson and the other grandees of the international clubrooms to give “legitimacy” to Saddam, Kim Jong-Il, Arafat, Assad and co that disqualifies them from any role in Iraq. I’ve come to the conclusion that the entire international system needs to be destroyed.’

of Saddam’s capture put everyone in a spin- some media people even trying to ‘head off’ Christmas by sneering about ‘Christmas come early’ for GWB and TB. The difference is that for people who supported the war they can admit to being in a spin- a delightful spin- over the news. Andrew Sullivan is able to admit being in a spin more elegantly than most.