Author Archives: Kerry B

Does Rob Watson have insider knowledge on how the next US presidential election will turn out for Bush? In his giddy report of President Bush’s meeting with the California governor-elect Watson states the following:

Apparently, in his Terminator days, Mr Schwarzenegger had campaigned for the president’s father – also of course a one-time president (emphasis added).

Watson also seems a little confused on Bush’s current state of being.

There was even a little appeal from the actor-turned-governor for any useful advice from the president on how to run a big state – remember Mr Bush was himself a former governor of Texas (emphasis added).

I think he still is.

UPDATE: As one of our excellent commentators notes, a stealth edit has been performed on the first item. It now reads:

Apparently, in his Terminator days, Mr Schwarzenegger had campaigned for the president’s father – himself once a president, of course.

Getting rid of the license fee would put quite a few stealth editors on the street it would seem.

. As Ed Thomas prophesied in the posting below, the headline to Mahathir’s anti-semitic rant story on BBCi has now been altered. Norman Geras couldn’t help but notice some plasticity on this one too.

Amazingly this story fails to mention where the Egyptian twins received their life-extending surgery, though a small hint of the location is dropped in the medical history window. It’s hard to imagine this is a mere oversight since the article later makes much of an “Italy success” to separate conjoined twins. Other national references mentioned in the story include: Egypt, Greece, a “French news agency”, “Guatamalan twins”, “Iranians”, Singapore. This must come under some BBC directive filed under “Don’t mention it if you catch the Great Satan doing good”. Via Andrew Sullivan.

UPDATE: I just had a look at the article in question today (15 October) and am happy to report that a stealth edit has left us with a new, one sentence paragraph (fourth from the top) as follows.

The boys’ successful surgery was performed at the Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, USA.

UPDATE 2: Andrew Sullivan posts an actual response from the Beeb (scroll up) after a generous helping of emails on the subject. And yes, as a Yank, it does strike me as strange whenever I hear BBC newsreaders or read a website referring to “Dallas USA” , etc. It just ain’t the way we talk folks. Note another BBC-related item on Sullivan’s site just below ‘Ed Asner’.

That’s one reason I can think of for this BBCi headline.

BBC: Reagan had ‘evil sex’ angst

Compare this with ABC and Time.

ABC: The Reagan Letters

Time Magazine: The Real Reagan

Of course, it couldn’t be a commercial motive since the Beeb is “above it all” and the license fee keeps the larder well-stocked. Another less charitable possibility springs to mind: a visceral reaction to the man and what he stands for. So, in an article about a new Reagan book which features 1,000 of his handwritten letters, why does the BBC lead with such a stinky headline? My guess is that they do not wish to deal with the other substantive issues in the book which highlight something many leftist elites do not wish to acknowledge–that Ronald Reagan’s vision of freedom has been largely vindicated. And if they cannot discredit Reagan’s record, why not trivialize it?

ABC News is neither pro-Reagan nor non-commercial but it at least gives Reagan’s book a fair shake. BBC small-mindedness plummets lower by the day. Go ahead and compare what the BBC writes about the Reagan book with the ABC News article. As I look back over the BBC article, it’s really not all that bad, but the headline is very misleading. Here is the ABC News piece with the letter from which the Beeb plucked its verbal noogie. (Reagan’s words are italicized.)

Perhaps the most surprising letter in the collection is one that Reagan wrote in 1951 to Florence Yerly, an old friend from his hometown in Illinois. Florence had just been through a bitter divorce, and wrote to Reagan that she was giving up men ?— permanently. Reagan told her she was making a big mistake. He explained why it was important that she have a man in her life. And then he explained the importance of love and sex.

My personal belief is that God couldn’t create evil so the desires he planted in us are good and the physical relationship between a man and a woman is the highest form of companionship. If I can, I want to say all this to my daughter. I want her to know that nothing between her and the man she loves can be wrong or obscene, that desire in itself is normal and right. The world is full of lonely people — people capable of giving happiness and love is not a magic touch of cosmic dust that preordains two people and two people only for each other. Love can grow slowly out of warmth and companionship and none of us should be afraid to seek it.

As he closed the letter, Reagan admitted to feeling a bit queasy about giving such explicit advice:

Now I’m going to seal this letter very quickly and mail it because if I read it over I won’t have the nerve to send it.

Have a look at the Time cover article here.

blogleagues never sleep. Bran at Blog Irish continues to hold the Beeb to account whilst Norm at Normblog goes after those clueless Beeb apologists.

would have averted all this trouble.

“We goofed.” Those two little words, uttered by the BBC early in its latest escapade in biased journalism — falsely claiming the Blair government “sexed up” its intelligence reports during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion — would have saved a lot of time, a lot of money, and at least one life. Instead, we have the BBC’s bloated buddy, Andrew Gilligan, admitting, in the Telegraph, what everybody knew: that he committed lousy journalism, and the Labor Government promising, in the Guardian, that the world’s most arrogant media institution (pace, New York Times) was going to become accountable at long, long last. Maybe the empty suits mismanaging the Corporation will even be fired. That would be good. Next Thursday, the Hugely Expensive Commission charged with investigating the suicide of a Gilligan source, will conclude its wildly disproportionate inquiry. It will be the most expensive correction notice ever published.

Read the rest of Denis Boyles’ non-Beeb-related EuroPress Review here.

wasn’t caught in a hurricane but he was blown away just the same…undoubtedly a rare occurrence.

Now that Sambrook has done his sandbagging and Greg has put his finger in the Dyke, Andrew Gilligan is pressed by Lord Hutton on the meaning of “Absolutely yes“. It must be hard for the mighty Beeb to have this story cycling in and out around the globe. Now the ‘storm surge’ approaches as even traditional BBC allies advocate greater accountability. Quite a storm.

The theme of Tom Carver’s advocacy piece seems to be his wish that Americans would be as distrustful of George as Brits are of Tony. Here’s how the teaser on the front page reads (at the time of writing)–

“Case for war: Why has Bush escaped anger facing Blair over intelligence on Iraq?”

And here’s the caption (at the time of writing) under President Bush giving the State of the Union speech to Congress–

Some of Bush’s claims have been disputed, but there is no US inquiry

Is the BBCi caption writer hoping for an American version of the Hutton proceedings? Sadly, for the BBC at least, there is no such inquiry in the USA.

Carver raises the usual arguments against the overthrow of Saddam (no WMD found, unwarranted claims of uranium purchases from Africa, etc.). Conveniently, there is no mention of the barbarity of the Baathist ‘thugocracy’ and its use of chemical weapons on its own people along with some thirty years of a human rights nightmare. It would be educational for Mr Carver to simply read Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview on NBC’s Meet the Press which aired yesterday. What does Cheney say about these ‘uranium in Africa’ charges? Here’s his answer to the interviewer, Tim Russert.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I guess the intriguing thing, Tim, on the whole thing, this question of whether or not the Iraqis were trying to acquire uranium in Africa. In the British report, this week, the Committee of the British Parliament, which just spent 90 days investigating all of this, revalidated their British claim that Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa.

And later-

MR. RUSSERT: If they [intelligence assessments about Iraq WMD’s] were wrong, Mr. Vice President, shouldn’t we have a wholesale investigation into the intelligence failure that they predicted…

VICE PRES. CHENEY: What failure?

MR. RUSSERT: That Saddam had biological, chemical and is developing a nuclear program.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: My guess is in the end, they’ll be proven right, Tim. On the intelligence business, first of all, it’s intelligence. There are judgments involved in all of this. But we’ve got, I think, some very able people in the intelligence business that review the material here. This was a crucial subject. It was extensively covered for years. We’re very good at it. As I say, the British just revalidated their claim. So I’m not sure what the argument is about here. I think in the final analysis, we will find that the Iraqis did have a robust program. How do you explain why Saddam Hussein, if he had no program, wouldn’t come clean and say, “I haven’t got a program. Come look”? Then he would have sanctions lifted. He’d earned $100 billion more in oil revenue over the last several years. He’d still be in power. The reason he didn’t was because obviously he couldn’t comply and wouldn’t comply with the U.N. resolutions demanding that he give up his WMD. The Security Council by a 15-to-nothing vote a year ago found him still in violation of those U.N. Security Council resolutions. A lot of the reporting isn’t U.S. reporting. It’s U.N. reporting on the supplies and stocks of VX and nerve agent and anthrax and so forth that he’s never accounted for. So I say I’m not willing at all at this point to buy the proposition that somehow Saddam Hussein was innocent and he had no WMD and some guy out at the CIA, because I called him, cooked up a report saying he did. That’s crazy. That makes no sense. It bears no resemblance to reality whatsoever.

Carver’s article (on BBCi at this writing) uses the subheading “Hoax” when discussing the issue of uranium in Africa and the aluminium tubes cited by Colin Powell, quite a serious and unsubstantiated charge. To quote Carver–

That was mentioned by the president in his State of the Union speech in January, which the White House now admits was based on a hoax.

It would have been good of Carver to point us to the relevant admission by the White House. Just as Gilligan seems to have done with Dr. Kelly’s off-the-record chats, such an admission would be difficult to pull out of thin air. The Hutton inquiry has Dyke in the dock about just this kind of thing. So I ask– Can the BBC change its spinning, spiteful ways?

BBC reporter Stuart Hughes has my sympathy and best wishes for recovery from his landmine injury in Iraq. I’m not very sympathetic, however, toward the BBCi editors who insist on pushing an opinion piece disguised as ‘news’. It may be an analysis but news it ain’t! Hughes writes:

The United States is at the centre of the debate over landmines. The US remains the largest donor to mine clearance projects, giving more than $70 million last year. Even so, the US has slashed its mine action funding in recent years and has yet to conclude a review of landmine policy begun more than two years ago. Washington urgently needs to show leadership by signing up to the mine ban treaty.

Maybe Hughes is right. He is entitled to his opinion. Just give it a proper label.