Author Archives: Natalie

David Duke, Neturei Karta and Holocaust Denial.

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I do not have a means of checking the quotation from the Newsnight e-mail preview quoted in the following comment by “will” but have no reason to disbelieve it. In fact, in light of the post from Adloyada that follows, I have good reason to believe it. The comment from Will first:

Newsnight on Iran’s Holocaust Conference (from their e-mail preview)

In the face of international condemnation, President Ahmedenijad has hosted a conference in Tehran entitled “Review of the Holocaust”.

We’ve been speaking to some of the delegates who include the former Republican congressman and one time Grand Master of the KKK David Duke.

In Washington? No, he was a congressman in the Louisiana state government.

(Willful misrepresentation by Newsnight?)

& all Republican’s are closet KKK men? Well see who Duke overcame to win his state seat

In 1989, he ran as a Republican for a seat representing Metairie in the Louisiana State House of Representatives. He defeated fellow Republican John Treen, the brother of David C. Treen, the first Republican to be elected governor of Louisiana since Reconstruction, by a narrow margin of 51-49 percent. Duke’s victory came despite visits to the district in support of John Treen’s candidacy by President George H.W. Bush, former President Ronald Reagan, and other GOP notables.

– Wikipedia entry on David Duke

Now follows the post from Adloyada, who writes:

The BBC Radio 4 PM programme broke new ground this evening in offering David Duke airtime to justify his participation in the Iranian Holocaust conference on the grounds of “free speech” without alerting listeners to his Ku Klux Klan background, his convictions for fraud and his publication of virulently anti-semitic propaganda. It also gave an even more extended airtime opportunity to a leader of the Iran and Hamas supporting Neturei Karta, without letting its listeners know that the man was anything more than the rabbi of “an anti-zionist orthodox congregation in Vienna”.

Read the rest of the post to learn just how unrepresentative of Jewish Orthodox opinion Neturei Karta are.

I also note that the 2003 BBC article about David Duke that Adloyada links to seems to get his history wrong in just the same way as the email “will” quotes. The article says:

David Duke – who once held a seat for Louisiana in the House of Representatives

– I freely admit that the political system of Louisiana, which involves a “jungle primary” unlike any other in the United States, confuses me. But so far as I can see David Duke has never won office in the US House of Representatives. He has held office in the Louisiana State House of Representatives. There is a difference, you know. Oddly, a later sentence in the same article gets that aspect of things right:

Duke hit the Louisiana political scene in 1988, winning a seat as a Republican in the Louisiana House of Representatives after running on a “white rights” ticket.

But, wouldn’t you know it, that same sentence describes his party affiliation in such a way as to make the Republicans look as bad as possible. First off, Duke didn’t hit the Louisiana political scene in 1988 as a Republican – he first hit the Louisiana political scene in 1975 when he ran unsuccessfully for the Louisiana State Senate as a Democrat. He later ran for President, again as a Democrat. (And again unsuccessfully, in case anyone’s wondering.) Of course the BBC does not mention the official “reproval” from the Republican party nor the fact, quoted by “will” earlier, that the elder Bush and Ronald Reagan campaigned against Duke.

I would not bother quoting this old article at length were it not for the fact that the BBC seem to be making similar inaccurate statements now, possibly having got their “facts” from their earlier article.

Bishop incident “was not mugging”

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Bishop incident “was not mugging” says the BBC. OK. What was it, then? The Beeb, not normally so solicitous of Christian men of the cloth, ain’t telling.

The Guardian is.

The Rt Rev Tom Butler, 66, one of the Church of England’s most senior bishops and a pillar of Thought for the Day on the BBC Today programme, says he has no idea. Others say he was seen sitting in the back of a Mercedes chucking children’s toys out of the window and announcing: “I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do.”

I like that slogan.

Open thread – for comments of general Biased BBC interest

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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.

Curb your enthusiasm.

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This article by the BBC’s education correspondent, Mike Baker, was published in November: “A way all children can be readers.” The article is one long exhalation of praise for a reading scheme called Reading Recovery aimed at children who are failing to learn to read. Mr Baker writes:

Is this the biggest missed opportunity in education?

Imagine if virtually no child left primary school unable to read.

Or if no teenager bunked off school and ended up in trouble with the law because their reading skills meant they could not cope.

If these things could be changed, how much might be saved?

The article talks as if all that stopped heaven on earth being established in 1995 was John Major’s Conservative government pulling the plug on funding. Later, confounding hopes placed in it by supporters of the scheme, Tony Blair’s Labour government did much the same.

Not everyone thinks Reading Recovery is wonderful. Most of the critics don’t think the programme is bad in itself. They just think it costs a fortune for the effect it has, and the money could be better spent.

Here are a few links pro and con.

An oft-quoted paper attacking it is Reading Recovery: An evaluation of Benefits and Costs by Grossen, Coulter and Ruggles.

Here is a response from Gay Su Pinnell supporting Reading Recovery.

Reading Recovery: distinguishing Myth from Reality by Tunmer and Chapman. Critical.

Reading Recovery: Anatomy of Folly by Martin Kozloff. Very critical.

Evaluation of Reading Recovery in London Schools by Sue Burroughs-Lange. Supportive.

Every child a reader: Results of the first year. This report is not pretending to be anything other than advocacy in favour of Reading Recovery. That does not make it wrong, of course, and there is plenty of information there. I think this is the document upon which Mr Baker’s article was based.

Although there is evidence that Reading Recovery is helpful it does not justify Mr Baker’s uncritical enthusiasm.

For instance, the paper by Sue Burroughs-Lange compares the results for 234 of the lowest achieving children at several primary schools. It says the group getting RR did better than the control group “who received a range of other interventions.” So the control group was really several very different groups with small numbers of children in each. Furthermore, so far as I could see from the information on page 21 onwards none of the alternatives were anything like as intense as Reading Recovery, so it is hardly surprising that they were less effective. A similar criticism was made on page 7 of this paper by Jonathan Solity of the control groups for Slyva and Hurry’s 1995 favourable evaluation of Reading Recovery.

Although Mr Baker writes,

It [Reading Recovery] is not an alternative to the general teaching methods for whole classes but is, instead, a highly structured intervention strategy for rescuing children who are struggling to take even the first steps towards reading.

True, but in the real world any one use of money excludes other uses of the same money. The strategy of taking children out of class for one-to-one instruction by people specifically trained in Reading Recovery is very expensive. It also (and in the context of teachers’ interests the expense may not be a bug, but a feature) can be used as an alternative to having general teaching methods for whole classes that might gain better results with the use of fewer trained personnel.

(My personal opinion is that the history of the teaching of reading over the last century could be described as one long epic struggle by educators of every clime and tongue to avoid admitting that progressive methods don’t work. A century of toil has almost sufficed to bring us back to the standard reached by the Victorians.)

In the US, Reading Recovery is more politicised than in the UK, there having been a big bust-up over its inclusion or exclusion from a government programme called Reading First. It is seen there as being on the anti-phonics side of the Reading Wars. This is not quite fair. The founder, Marie Clay, sought to minimize the explicit teaching of phonics, but the phonics component has been increased since.

One wouldn’t necessarily expect all that detail to be discussed in this one BBC article, and one certainly wouldn’t expect the state broadcaster to rant away like a common blogger. But the BBC could have done better than just “For the last 10 years there has been no shortage of research evidence showing its effectiveness.”

Kudos to the BBC

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Kudos to the BBC for making several programmes in the last few weeks that covered areas that had previously been neglected or avoided.

  • This story, based on an issue of Radio 4’s Crossing Continents, is about how a young Malaysian woman who has converted from Islam to Christianity is threatened with violence by Muslim fanatics.
  • This BBC investigation looked into sexual abuse of children by UN peacekeepers.
  • Almost from the day that the BBC did a hidden camera exposé of the BNP, commenters to the BBC website asked why the BBC did not do a hidden camera exposé of radical Muslim groups. The joint Newsnight / File On 4 documentary in November did just that. (Full transcript here.)
  • I also approved of this story: Study backs Libya HIV case medics.When plague struck medieval Europe, an uneducated and fearful populace, unable to believe that the catastrophe could have a natural origin, would frequently blame the plague on the deliberate action of foreigners or infidels and launch a pogrom against the Jews. This pattern of behaviour has been followed in many other times and places. A modern example occured in Libya in 1999. In this case the victims were five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor. They were accused of deliberately infecting 400 Libyan children with AIDS and, after confessions were extorted by torture, condemned to death in 2004.I approved of this BBC story because, although it maintained the editorially distant style proper to the BBC, it did not imperil the lives of these victims of hysteria by hedging or showing “balance” between the firemen and the fire. That is how you deal with irrational conspiracy theories. Contrast it with the pandering to the Nigerian conspiracy theory alleging that Westerners had contaminated polio vaccine displayed by the BBC here. Contrast it with the active assistance the BBC gave to spreading an anti-American conspiracy theory about tsunami of December 26, 2004. (More about that here.)I bring the polio and tsunami stories up fairly often, because I think they are the two most harmful examples of BBC bias I have ever come across. There are certainly Nigerian children dead or crippled by polio because the BBC was reluctant to offend some of its Muslim readers. As for the tsunami story, our regular pro-BBC commenter, “John Reith” has said that the BBC’s asking its readers “Is America a power for good or ill in the world? Was there a malign hand at work, or has America’s role in the crisis in fact been a model of humanitarian leadership.” …was actually the BBC squelching the conspiracy theory.

    No. That is what the BBC squelching a conspiracy theory looks like.

    There has been mounting international pressure on Libya to hear independent scientific evidence.

    International experts say the scientific report used in the trial was nothing but ‘conjecture’ and ‘supposition’.

    Note the absence of a “Have Your Say” forum asking readers whether these Bulgarians and this Palestinian might reallyhave been agents of enemy intelligence services seeking to undermine the Libyan nation by killing its children after all.

    As I’ve said before, never mind the name of this blog, there are times when the BBC has a duty to come down on one side and not the other.

 

Open thread – for comments of general Biased BBC interest:

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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.

Coupla posts

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  • Who-whom? Heard during the course of a segment on Hugo Chavez during The World This Weekend, at about 1.25pm:

    “The US depends on Venezuela for nearly a fifth of its oil imports.”

As Lenin was wont to ask about any political relationship, “Who – whom?” Meaning, who has power over whom? A quick Google is giving me that Venezuela depend son the US to buy between 60 and 80% of its oil exports. But of course the BBC wouldn’t put it that way.

In fact, as I understand it, there is a world oil market, so talk of either buyers or sellers boycotting specific countries is all a bit of a joke. You can either sell the stuff or leave it in the ground: those are the only real choices. About all a boycott of a single nation could do is impose extra costs by making some oil take the long way round, or by obliging refineries to cope with unaccustomed types of oil, or through increased fees to middlemen – but basically trying to control what happens to your oil once you’ve sold it is as futile as trying to control what happens to your dollars once you’ve used them to buy oil.

Be that as it may, the “dependency” of a customer on the guy who supplies him with a fifth of what he needs is much less than than the dependency of a supplier on the customer who buys three to four-fifths of what he supplies.

Hat tip to whoever made this point last time the alleged dependency of the US on Venezuelan oil came up on the BBC.

 

  • “Not bias, just unbelievably shoddy,” writes a correspondent, pointing out this report of a tragedy in Glasgow. The age of the man killed is given as 21 at the beginning of the story, then as 28 half way through. His name is given – but at the end it says that he has not yet been named. UPDATE / CORRECTION: D. Burbage says it’s twoaccidents. Re-reading, he’s right. Archonix says it could have been clearer.

    Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

 

“The BBC was meant to be politically neutral, but …”

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Alex Deane, former aide to David Cameron, at the Social Affairs Unit blog, on a little vignette in a Telegraph Joan Bakewell interview.

(For post-diluvian readers, Joan Bakewell was the Kirsty Wark of her late-Sixties to mid-Eighties day, popping up all over the BBC either as presenter or pundit. Famously described by Frank Muir as ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’).

So brave … so incredibly brave.

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So brave … so incredibly brave.

“We can’t ignore Iraq and the war, it’s as simple as that. I think the writers have been incredibly brave to have taken it on and included it in the script.”

– Keith Allen, who plays the Sheriff of Nottingham in the latest BBC version of Robin Hood, is awed by the courage of the Scriptwriters who Took On Bush.

Those guys – they didn’t fear anyone, you know? Can you believe they went up to a BBC commissioning editor and said, why don’t we use the show to comment on the Iraq war? How they ever got that past the BBC of all people, I’ll never know.

Then they actually dared – and remember, this was in 2006 – to portray a cross-dressing Muslim woman scientist favourably. Though even they stopped short of making her a nutritionist. The audience just wasn’t ready to accept a nutritionist.

Mr Allen’s words of praise for the writers who risked so much was quoted by david t of Harry’s Place in a post called The bien pensant Robin Hood. Read the comments.

Hat tip: Oscar and FTP.