Author Archives: Natalie

I copied down by hand one of today’s Ceefax stories, currently running in the world news digest page 142 (page 2 out of 6). I had to wait for it to cycle round to the right page twice because I couldn’t write fast enough. After all that I found that the entire Ceefax story was merely the first four paragraphs of this web page.

Dispute hits UN rights watchdog

A session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission has been suspended for a week amid disagreement over plans to reform the Geneva-based body.

The commission meets annually to examine global human rights standards.

The US has condemned the reform plan, but it has broad support from European, Asian and African countries.

Members with poor human rights records have recently discredited the commission’s work, the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes reports from Geneva.

That’s where the Ceefax story stops. The impression is given that the reactionary US wishes to block reform of the UN Human Rights Commission; that it wishes to perpetuate the present situation whereby countries with poor human rights records discredit the commission’s work. A reader who did not already know would never guess that the substance of the US objection is the opposite of this. The US contends that the proposed rules of entry for the new Human Rights Council, the body that is meant to replace the current Human Rights Commission, are too weak. It argues that countries with poor human rights records will be able to get seats on the new body as they did on the old and subvert the Council as they subverted the Commission.

But perhaps this wrong impression is merely an unfortunate result of the strict word limits on Ceefax stories, and the full picture is given in the story as it appears in the web page?

No. The full, website version of this story only says that “the US says the plan has major deficiencies.” What the US thinks these deficiencies are is not said.

Never mind, I expect the story linked to on the sidebar under the heading “See Also”, “US rejects UN rights council plan” explains why the US is being so obdurate?

It does, eventually. But first we must hear that the US thinks the new plan is unacceptable, that Bolton thinks it has manifold deficiencies, that the US would vote No if the vote was put now, that Bolton is disappointed, again that Bolton says, “we don’t think it is acceptable”, and again that Bolton thinks it has manifold deficiencies.

Only after this hammering of negativity do we learn that “the US ambassador questioned whether the proposal would keep human rights abusers off the new council.” I wonder why the writer thought we had to be told six times that the US did not like the plan before we got one sentence as to why.

says the Sunday Times.

THE BBC is to be forced to promote British citizenship and a sense of community under a new royal charter to be unveiled this week.It will redefine the purpose of the BBC, entrusting it with a far wider brief than its established mission to “inform, educate and entertain”.

You might think that I’d be cheering. I don’t know what the opinion of my co-bloggers will be on this issue, but speaking for myself, I think this new charter is a bad move. We shall be doing well if nothing worse happens as a result of it than it being ignored and laughed at; a slightly more probable result is that the BBC will become more PC.

Don’t think that I don’t see the problem this new Charter is trying to overcome. In September 2004, after the BBC had displayed its usual reluctance to call anyone a terrorist even after the slaughter of children at Beslan, I wrote:

… unlike Reuters et al the BBC is paid for by a compulsory tax on the British people. It goes out under the name of my country. Come charter renewal time, the domestic BBC justifies the license fee by saying that we, the British people, are getting a public good (“The public interest must remain at the heart of all the BBC does.” – Michael Grade, Chairman.) Likewise the BBC World Service, funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the same Vote as the British Council, explicitly presents itself as bringing a benefit to Britain and the world.

But there is no more rock-bottom public good or benefit than not being randomly murdered. The BBC is obliged by its Charter and accompanying agreement to show “due impartiality” between political opinions but this is specifically stated not to mean “detachment from fundamental democratic principles.” The BBC has no more right to be impartial between a victim of terrorism and a terrorist than it has the right to be impartial between a rape victim and a rapist. (Although it must be careful to respect the right to a fair trial of those accused of rape, terrorism or any other crime.)

This website is devoted to uncovering cases where the BBC expresses an improper partiality between parties and ideologies within the covenant, so to speak, and cases where it displays an improper impartiality between those within and those without.

And in January 2005, after the BBC pandered to conspiracy theories about the tsunami, I wrote:

No media service, not even a privately-funded one, should be indifferent to these kind of values. A tax-funded media service in a democracy cannot be, unless it wishes to deny its own justification for existence…..

…if the maintenance of liberal values in Britain and the world matters, that objective being what the BBC claims it is for, then you don’t play neutral to the most basic liberal value of all, the right to continue living without being blown up at random. If neutrality is possible or desirable, why is the BBC not neutral about ordinary British murders?

…

Because, and never mind the name of this blog, in that sense it has no business being unbiased.

So why do I think this well-intentioned new Charter is a bad idea? Because I remember the National Curriculum. It was one of the most instructive episodes in modern British politics. Forgive me for quoting myself yet again; this family of issues is something I’ve thought about many times and I haven’t the time to keep thinking up new ways to say the same thing. Last November I wrote about why you should never, ever have a national curriculum:

She [Margaret Thatcher] was enraged by excessively trendy schools churning out PC semi-literates who knew about whale song but not Waterloo. “I’m not having this,” she said to her officials, “Get out there and make me a national curriculum.” She imagined it as being written on one side of a piece of paper: reading, writing, ‘rithmetic. A key point was always to include major kings-n-battles. Stories of spectacular historical ignorance on the part of schoolchildren were a major factor motivating supporters of the national curriculum.

Inevitably, this mildly repressive tool turned in her hand. Sure as eggs is eggs the national curriculum was taken over by the educational establishment, made monstrously detailed, and suffused with its values. Thatcher herself later admitted that the nationalisation of the curriculum was one of her biggest mistakes.

And sure as eggs is eggs the BBC establishment will take over all these new “purposes for the BBC” listed in the new Charter. The Sunday Times article lists these new objectives as including:

promoting education, “stimulating creativity”, “representing the UK, its nations and regions”, and “bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK”.

Amuse yourself in thinking up ways to make these rather nebulous objectives into tools for expanding the BBC bubble.

Personally, I think the BBC ought to be privatised tomorrow. (Don’t worry, lurking Beebfolk, this needn’t mean melting down all the master tapes of the David Attenborough wildlife documentaries, like you always hint it will. You could even keep the name “BBC”, like they kept the names “British Gas” and “British Airways.”) If, for some strange reason, it is thought best not to feature the immediate launch of a “Tell Sid” advertising campaign for shares in BBC Plc as the centrepiece of tomorrow’s White Paper, the next best thing would be to persuade the BBC to act in the the spirit of the Charter it already has.

UPDATE: Stephen Pollard looks at the other theme of the White Paper, the replacement of the BBC Governors with a “BBC Trust”, promoted by Tessa Jowell as “the voice of the licence-fee payer.” Pollard writes:

Forgive me for spoiling the party in White City, but I have an alternative suggestion — a more direct means by which my views and interests can be expressed.

Both Expat Yank (hat tip: David H in comments) and Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day spotted something odd about the reporting of a recent BBC poll on Iraq.

Hello? Three-quarters of the tyrant’s former subjects are thrilled that the old monster is behind bars, but the BBC buries the fact at the very end of the report on its own poll. Talk of selectivity! Talk of bias!

, I have decided to put USS Neverdock’s BBC bias reference page from January last year on the sidebar among “other links”. Lots of good stuff there, although Marc ought to note that the infamous CBBC page on the Holocaust that didn’t mention Jews has since been amended.

I know, I know, ought to clean out all the other links that don’t work. Don’t like doing it, for some reason.

It is said of many a failing company that it was not just the occasional faults in their products that trashed their reputation but the arrogant and evasive way they dealt with complaints.

This BBC article says, twice, that terminations were made legal in the US by the 1973 court decision Roe v Wade. In other words it is factually wrong in a typical BBC way.

The American Expatriate spotted the mistake and complained. The response made by the BBC’s Louise O’Doherty was far more astonishing – and revealing – than the initial error.

I can assure you that factual accuracy is the essence of news reporting and the BBC aspires to the very highest standards of journalism but in many cases, particularly with breaking news stories, facts can be scarce or conflicting.

Nevertheless I do realise the frustration this supposed error must have caused.

Read the Expatriate’s response.

UPDATE: The BBC have now corrected the article in question, and state that the initial response to the question “will be raised as a training issue.”

They are the ones with a “nose” for a story. Hard-bitten, often hard-drinking, they are the ones
who “just happened” to be there when the war started or the government fell – or the story first broke that the world would eventually know as “The Oldham Horror”…

Extremists have been blamed after a cartoon featuring the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban was put up in a housing office in Oldham.

Tim Blair is on the case.

that got the feminists at Harvard so angry?

Was it “Lawrence Summers lost the first vote in March last year after suggesting women had less “intrinsic aptitude” than men for science.”? That’s how this BBC report described what he said.

Butterflies and Wheels is scathing about that over-simplification.

(Via comments to this post at Crooked Timber)

How many times does a BBC writer laugh at a piece of satire in the Wall Street Journal?

Three times. Once when he reads it, once when it is explained to him and once when he understands it.

This post from the American Expatriate will make you smile.

And if you want to hear the audio of the “torture in Gitmo is established fact” issue of Any Questions, it was covered by TAE here – and his link works.

Hat tip to Ritter, who spotted this story: French ‘anti-Jew gang chief’ held

I don’t take any pleasure in repeating the same stuff again and again. Trouble is the BBC keeps doing the same stuff again and again and I sort of feel obliged. So I’ll just repeat words from my earlier post as often as need be.

If the religion of the victim is relevant to understanding the crime, then so is the religion of the perpetrator. The BBC would not dream of leaving it unmentioned when a religious or religious/political hate crime is carried out by a Jew. The BBC had no trouble saying Asher Weisgan was Jewish, and no trouble quoting the view of a commenter that Weisgan’s murder of four Arabs was the “wild grapes produced by Israel’s extreme right.” The BBC had no trouble mentioning the Jewish skullcap worn by Eden Nathan Zaada as he killed Israeli Arabs on a bus, and no trouble reporting on his extremist political views.

Yet all that the BBC gives us about Yussef Fofana is his name.

The BBC’s longstanding reluctance to even mention that most modern European anti-Jewish violence is carried out by Muslims, let alone discuss it, has made a small but dishonourable contribution to the legitimisation and normalisation of such violence.

B-BBC commenter Eamonn was in amusing form over today’s Today:

The Today team (pbut) is in fine form this morning. James Naughtie (pbuh) gives an Iraqi henchman of radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr a few minutes of prime time (around 7.15am) to peddle the most ridiculous conspiracy theory i.e. the CIA planted the bombs in the mosque. Rather than dismissing this (as he would any statement made by a law abiding centre-right politician)Naughtie (pbuh), rather than dismissing this, presents it as a possibility that we should sort of add to the possible narratives. For goodness sake Naughtie (pbuh)!

The BBC’s (pbut) idea of balance would be to interview David Irving (pbuh and taking a break from writing his version of “My Struggle” in prison) to hear his contrary view that it wasn’t the CIA, but the Jews (death be upon them) who planted the bombs. That’s the BBC idea of balance.

A couple of comments later, Michael Taylor explains why the acquiesence of the Today programme in this conspiracy theory is not actually that funny. Excerpt:

This is, I’d say, merely silly, if slightly dangerous. We may, after all, merely conclude that the interviewee was off his head. But having allowed the allegation to be made on their flagship morning program, the BBC has a journalistic duty to get a response from the accused. Ie, they are duty bound to fetch up some weary US army spokesman to point out that the allegation was barking. So why was no comparable effort made to secure a response from the party accused?

There are two possible responses (discounting the possibility that no-one would comment). The first and most likely is that they didn’t want to bother because the allegation was so ludicrous. If that’s their view, why did they allow it to propogated via the BBC’s prime morning programme in the first place? The second is that they didn’t want to because their point in running the interview was deliberately to slander and defame the US forces via al Sadr’s spokesman. In other words, those who made these choices (and who are they, let’s have names: Jim Naughtie was the presenter, Kevin Marsh was the editor) are either idiots or reckless slanderers.

And in this light, let’s hear again from Kevin Marsh on how he decides what gets on air: “I make up my own mind based on mine and the team’s assessment on the facts we have. We question everyone as thoroughly as we can, write our running orders based on our own judgements and invite the guests onto the programme who we think have something to add to the running stories.”

So, let’s have some answers, Mr Marsh. What was “the team’s assessment of the facts” in this case, and do you feel happy that your invitation to this particular guest had “something to add to the running stories.”

As it is, what we’re left with is an outrageous slander, which will quite possibly add to the death toll in Iraq, invited to be made, unanswered and unsupported, on the prime morning time programme of the taxpayer-funded broadcaster.

Emphasis added by me.

The invaluable Adloyada also caught the programme.