Author Archives: Laban

Until today, that is. To BBC Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen, Hamas are now “Islamist nationalists”.

Jews living in the West Bank ? Well, frankly, some of them are ‘fanatical’.

Nothing like a sense of proportion, is there ?

Hat-tip – MN

A Michael Taylor, in the comments to the previous post, on the BBC. It’s not Paul Reynolds in disguise, is it ?

The agenda-setting is tedious for those who don’t share their world-view, but where it’s accompanied by the hard slog of good journalism – Channel 4 News for example – you agree to disagree and wish them well on their way.

Who believes these are the people to save the BBC?

So say the Civitas think-tank, in a report on a BBC ‘documentary‘ which turns out to be a bit of a travesty of the truth.

“A programme broadcast on 5 October 2005 called ‘Little Kinsey’ manifested such a distortion of its source material that we can no longer depend upon the integrity of the BBC’s factual programmes.”

‘Little Kinsey’ was part of the ‘Lost Decade’ season, focusing on issues relevant to the period 1945-55. Its central argument was that the restrained attitudes towards sexual activity which would have been considered as typical of the era were hypocritical, that men and women were commonly adulterous, that family life was frequently unhappy, that many men used prostitutes and that homosexual activity was common. In fact, the archive, now housed at the University of Sussex, showed no such thing: it showed a society in which most people were still very conservative in their attitudes. Nor do official statistics back up the lurid picture painted by the BBC.

The Civitas press release is here, the full report (pdf file) here.

In this BBC story.

(In justice to the BBC, I’ve looked at the ONS site and I can’t actually find if there will be a category for the English. But if there isn’t, of course, that would be a story in itself – one you’d think a national broadcaster might want to cover.)

Hat-tip to Archduke in the comments.

UPDATE – England has arrived on the page after an intervention by commenter Pete_London – Drinking From Home has the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pages, stealth-edited in the best BBC tradition.

This morning’s Radio Four news headlines tell us that David Mills, husband of Labour Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, will learn soon whether he will face trial on corruption charges.

“Miss Jowell, who is separated from Mr Mills ….”

Well, yes. Since Saturday. Obviously no time for that little detail.

The Today programme page adequately describes the first item after the news at seven.

“Hear the latest news from Washington where the Bush administration has been embarrassed by the comments of its ambassador in Iraq.”

The story, an LA Times interview with the ambassador, is an assessment of the current situation in Iraq, and as such is an important story which the BBC are right to cover. But to the BBC its importance is entirely couched in terms of its potential to embarrass President Bush. I’m not at all sure this is responsible reporting – in fact it’s quite distasteful. Listening to the BBC, you get the impression that dead Iraqis only count when viewed in terms of their impact on Presidential poll ratings.

But yesterday’s Today programme interview with Sheik Yosif al-Nasari, who told us, unchallenged by James Naughtie, how American Special Forces had sealed off the Samarra mosque before blowing it up, doesn’t seem to be available on Thursday’s ‘Listen Again’ page.

Those of you who like their anti-Americanism untainted by reality can still listen to Wednesday night’s arts review Front Row, where Syriana director Stephen Gaghan states that George Bush has personally ordered the killing of ‘lots and lots of people’.

A feature of the Today programme is the succession of Americans from the arts world who invited to tell us just how much they dislike George Bush. Today we were treated to this ‘Today’ interview (RealAudio) with veteran American director Robert Altman, in which he was invited to hold forth at length on American politics (‘the wrong war, wrong time, wrong leader’).

(One tiny note of reality intrudes, where interviewer and interviewee are discussing how a new wave of socially aware films (e.g. Bareback Mounting and .. er ..) reflects the changing political awareness of America. The interviewer points out that though critics loved them, the public weren’t quite so keen.)

UPDATE – Scott at the Ablution points out that this is a double – yesterday the Today programme treated us to a plug for George Clooney’s Syriana.

I think it was on yesterday’s 8 am radio news that I heard the rioters captured and beaten by the British Army two years ago described as ‘demonstrators’, with its comforting overtones of placards, badges and cries of ‘What Do We Want ?”.

Blogger Squander Two noticed it too. He thinks the ‘demonstrators’ were the ‘demonstrators’ described in this BBC report.

That is not to justify the beatings. Were BBC journalists to be attacked, they would doubtless react quite differently. But as BBC correspondents like to remind us, there are two sides to every story.

UPDATE – I’m reminded of the BBCs reporting of the Indonesian riots preceding the fall of the Suharto regime in May 1998. Those burning cars and buildings in Jakarta were described in bulletins as ‘protesters’ and ‘demonstrators’, and one R4 bulletin described ‘demonstrators’ burning and looting, observing that ‘Chinese areas were particularly targeted’. A remarkably restrained description of racist mob violence, and one which it is impossible to imagine the BBC using if the rioters were, say, white Britons. As reports over the next few days pointed to continuous anti-Chinese violence including mass rape, the tone of reporting changed and the ‘demonstrators’ became ‘rioters’ – which of course they had been from the start.

The BBC news site hasn’t room for this story ?

Says the link to this BBC story. It’s currently the main story on their ‘In Depth’ page.

Mental image of another poor chap in a wheelchair, or hobbling along with the aid of a stick.

The story ? “A young Palestinian man with learning disabilities has been shot dead by Israeli troops near the West Bank town of Jenin, Palestinian officials said. Local residents said Mujahid al-Simadi had gone up to the troops with a toy gun and shouted that they should leave the village. He was among a number of children who had surrounded a house occupied by Israeli soldiers and began to throw stones, Palestinian security sources said. The soldiers opened fire from the house and Mujahid al-Simadi hit in the chest and died immediately, they said.”

Two things here. Firstly the characteristation of someone with ‘learning difficulties’ as ‘disabled’, no matter what disability benefits such a person may be entitled to in the UK, is essentially dishonest. To the vast majority of BBC news viewers, ‘disabled’ implies a physical disability. The prisons of the UK are full of people with learning difficulties, but the BBC have not yet taken to describing them as ‘disabled prisoners’. Secondly, the source of the information on his disabled status is apparently ‘Palestinian officials said’. Where are the quotes that traditionally go round such an assertion ?

Strange. I heard what seemed like an important (and depressing) story on the news yesterday, but I can’t find this story on the BBC website yet. “BAGHDAD — The U.S. military has stumbled across the first evidence of a death squad within Iraq’s Interior Ministry after the detention last month of 22 men wearing police commando uniforms who were about to shoot a Sunni man, according to the American general overseeing the training of Iraqi police. The men turned out not to be police commandos but were employed by the Ministry of Interior as highway patrolmen, according to Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who commands the civilian police training teams in Iraq. “We have found one of the death squads,” he said. “They are a part of the police force of Iraq.”

The current Middle East page features … guess what ?. If anyone finds the police story on the BBC, could they let us know via the comments ?

UPDATE – the police story has arrived – just before midday. Thanks to commenter Archduke for the spot. They’ve given it third spot on the Middle East page, relegating the disabled Jenin man to the top of the ‘More from Middle East’ section. Of course, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are still numbers one and two. Rome wasn’t built in a day.