Author Archives: Natalie

This looks interesting. I had an email from a chap called John (not sure if he is the proprietor or not) pointing out a new … truth to tell I don’t know what to call it. Blog? Computer programme? RSS-feed type thingy? Whatever it is, it’s called News Sniffer.

John writes:

It has 2 main projects.: ‘Watch your mouth’ detects censored comments on the BBC ‘Have your say’ section, and ‘Revisionista’ tracks changes to news articles (bbc, the guardian and the independent).

I’ve found lots of interesting examples of their censorship policies (some examples of which are in the blog)

John.

In this post, Little Bulldogs contrasts the text of a BBC story that reports that the Red Cross raised “concerns and questions” about the US anti-terror law. However the BBC headline reads “Red Cross Lambasts US terror law”. The author writes, “There aren’t even quotation marks.”

Further to yesterday’s post, there are one or two things to point out about the discussion of the Tet Offensive on the Today programme. (For now you can listen here but this link will change.)

• First go to the 0717 clip. “President Bush admits for the first time that there are parallels between Vietnam and Iraq.” Note that “admits.” That’s exactly the sort of thing this site is about.
• This was revealing: Justin Webb said, “Commentators here have been trying to work out why President Bush broke with previous practice and accepted a comparison between Iraq and Vietnam.”

  The fact that it was something that the commentators that the BBC staff hang out with had to puzzle over tells us how little contact they have commentators outside their own political circles. Conservatives have been lamenting for years about how an offensive that the North Vietnamese thought had been a disaster for them was converted into a success by Walter Cronkite and the rest of the US media.

• Naughtie’s phrase “…violence in contemporary Iraq could be similar to the once- famous Viet Cong Tet Offensive” has a couple of things wrong with it.

  1) The Tet Offensive was not carried out primarily by the Viet Cong. This Wikipedia article says that it involved “battalion strength” elements of the Viet Cong but “divisional strength elements” of the North Vietnamese Army. The left always overplays the role of the Viet Cong in the Vietnam war because it prefers the picture of the Americans being brought low by peasant guerilla fighters springing from the people to what actually happened, which is that the North conquered the South by conventional military means. The North was supported by the Soviets. The South was abandoned by the US.

  2) Our Department of Snark wishes to ask “Violence in contemporary Iraq” would refer to, what, the Ba’athist coup of 1968 in which Ahmad Hasan al Bakr overthrew Abdul Rahman Aref?

• Lee Moore comments: “We also get an expert introduced as “Lawrence Korb is a writer on defence issues, he is also a former Assistant Defence Secretary under Ronald Reagan and a Vietnam veteran” from which one would naturally assume that he is likely to be sympathetic to Mr Bush (and so you would be particularly swayed by his criticism of Bush’s policy – candid friend and so on)…so long as you don’t know anything about Lawrence Korb. He was indeed an Assistant Defence Secretary under Ronald Reagan, but he had a very public bust up with the Reagan administration in 1986. He is a long standing anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war pundit, who works for a left wing pro-Democrat think tank, and who has utterly reliable opinions for a progressive media outlet like the BBC.”
• Now scroll down to the 0830 clip. “We speak to US Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried about parallels between Vietnam and Iraq.”

  I thought that Fried was mealy-mouthed and did not put up much of a fight. But, as commenter archduke says, listen to the change in tone between that part of the clip and the interview with John Pilger that follows afterwards. Friends all round it is now. Listen to how the two BBC interviewers chuckle along with Pilger when Pilger says, “who knows what he meant?” Then in comes Naughtie with, “Can he remember?” What wit. Pilger then says that he doubts if Bush knew what country he was in or has even heard of the Tet offensive and the merriment is shared once again.

• Then Pilger finishes up by saying, twice, that the Americans have built fourteen secret bases in Vietnam. Tell me this is a mistake, Vietnam for Iraq. Whatever it was it was weird. You’d think someone would pick him up on it. The BBC response to this astonishing statement? “John Pilger, thank you very much.”

• There is a discussion called “Vultures of Vietnam” going on at the BBC website here.

says the BBC.

As Instapundit says,

Are the terrorists trying to pull a Tet in Iraq? Of course. And the media are trying to help them. “Not surprisingly to me but shocking to many, the President obviously knows more history than his interviewer.”

Knowing more history than most journalists is no great feat.

Instapundit is quoting from and links in turn to Tigerhawk, who says:

Not surprisingly to me but shocking to many, the President obviously knows more history than his interviewer. When President Bush “accepts” the analogy of the surge in violence in Iraq to the Tet offensive in Vietnam, he is not “accepting” that Iraq is an unwinnable struggle against a noble enemy. He is saying that victory or defeat in Iraq will not be a function of the amount of violence that the enemy is able to do during any given period, but our will to keep fighting notwithstanding that violence. In that one regard, Iraq is dangerously similar to Vietnam, which fact the mainstream media would know if the typical editor read military history instead of the journalism pretending to be history that fills the bestseller lists.

Tigerhawk’s complaints about the word “accepts” refer to ABC news, but it’s no surprise that the same can be said about the BBC headline and coverage. Nor is that one word at all unrepresentative of the whole tone of the BBC article. It says both in the text and a subhead that Tet was a “huge pyschological blow”, and that it “eroded support” – while not laying quite such stress on the fact that the people who made that blow land were the media with their false reports that the Tet Offensive had been successful.

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.

Commenter Lee Moore may have got the BBC’s attention.. His comment here said:

The BBC’s 2006 party conference page is well up to the usual standard. The first thing I noticed was that the zone at the bottom has specially titled sections leading you to more stories about Labour, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Greens, and Respect.

Curiously, there are no slots for more stories about UKIP or the BNP. At the last general election UKIP got more than twice as many votes as the Greens. The BNP got nearly three times as many votes as Respect. And as far as regional parties go, the DUP got about 40% more votes than Plaid Cymru, and as many seats as the SNP and Plaid Cymru put together.

The second thing I noticed was that while the stories on Labour and the Conservatives had a mix of positive and negative headlines, all the headlines about the Lib Dems were positive.
And last but not least, the links to Have Your Says are to Labour, Conservatives, Lib Dems and Greens. No link to the UKIP Have Your Say.

I suspect that this isn’t somebody deliberately saying to themselves, let’s not link to stuff about the right wing fringe and regional parties (well maybe as far as the BNP is concerned.) It’s more likely that the Beeboid who is in charge of the page just naturally thinks “UKIP, BNP = fringe”; “Greens, Respect = small, but serious, parties”.

His comment here says:

And whaddya know – within 24 hours they’ve added a slot for extra stories about UKIP ! Yo, Beeboid ! How about that link to the UKIP DHYS ?

Andrew Ian Dodge writes about the latest episode of Spooks.

Guess who are the bad guys now? Yeah you guessed it…the Israelis. Not even a rogue element, but proper Israeli agents trying to stop a nuclear power deal with Saudi.

The sheer amazing astoundingness of this shock ending leaves me amazed and astounded.

Jonz and Archduke also flagged this up.

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 blog and its commenters has had hard words for the BBC’s Justin Webb many times. Sixteen times, a quick search tells me, so I won’t bother linking. But our hard words are as nothing compared to the response he got from Democrats for this post saying that the Foley scandal might end up being a trap for the Democrats.

Some of these people seriously need a cup of tea and a nice lie down.

wrote:

Presumably you’ve heard the story of the 14-year old arrested for “racism”.

The BBC report doesn’t mention any of the details i.e. what she supposedly
did or said that was racist. Can’t imagine why.

I’ve been busy, and by the time I came to look at this post and follow the link the BBC story had improved considerably. It now has many of the strangely-missing details, only, oh, a day or so after everyone else.

Here’s a link to the Little Bulldogs post.

My serene confidence that Little Bulldogs, a newish blog of which I only became aware in the last few days, correctly describes the original BBC story is based on experience. They do this. After a while you get to spot the prim, repressed tone that says they’d rather you moved on from this particular story as soon as possible.

It does not help the people they think it helps. All it does is create an atmosphere of distrust.

Sure, if details are still emerging, make that clear. But practically every other news outlet in Britain managed to report what Codie Stott claims happened as soon as they heard about it. In other circumstances the BBC is quite capable of indicating that it does not necessarily endorse what someone asserts.

UPDATE: Now that the comments are working again I’ve seen this comment by “pounce” on the same story.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Back after the weekend, Little Bulldogs provides a screenshot.