Author Archives: Natalie

[I wrote most of this post on Thursday 24th. Unfortunately I did not have time until today to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and post it.]

Deference was alive and well when James Naughtie interviewed Joe Wilson on Radio Four this morning. Naughtie started risibly by describing Valerie Plame as a “deep cover” agent – clearly he had no idea what the phrase meant. I laughed out loud, but that isn’t my complaint. My complaint is that throughout the interview Naughtie gave no indication that he had ever read or heard anything other than the standard American Democrat line on this affair. Republican “takes” on the Wilson/Plame affair abound. I referred to this WSJ article to write this post; hundreds of others would have done. Yet my impression is that Naughtie’s only significant source was a quick skim of Wilson’s own book.

All this is very much an American scandal. I don’t claim to have followed it in any detail. This Q & A by Paul Reynolds gives the basic story. (The American Expatriate, who has followed this affair, says it’s pretty good, and given the somewhat acrimonious exchanges on this very issue between Messrs Callahan and Reynolds in earlier AmEx posts and comments, that is not empty praise.) The point I want to make is that I am aware, just from casual mentions and links from Republican-inclined blogs, of all sorts of aspects to the story that don’t seem to have reached the Today programme. For instance it is all over the news that Bob Woodward of Watergate fame has come out and said that he knew Valerie Plame was an agent and it wasn’t Scooter Libby that told him. No mention of Woodward from Naughtie, although of course he did mention Scooter Libby.

When I became aware that this might make a B-BBC post, I scribbled down as best I could various of Naughtie’s words that caught my attention. My transcriptions are reasonably accurate but I don’t know if I can quite get across the extent to which nearly everything Naughtie said came across as being a prompt to allow Wilson to get across some talking point from his message. Because this is a blog about the BBC rather than about US politics, I have concentrated on Naughtie’s supportive questioning rather than Wilson’s answers. Here are some examples:

• Naughtie asks in tones of sombre shared disbelief at presidential folly, “Why did the president use it?” [i.e. Why did the Persident refer to the disputed claim that Iraq sought uranium yellowcake in Niger in a speech.]
  Wilson answers righteously, as Naughtie must have known he would, “That’s a question for the president.”
  Naughtie responds with a chummy laugh: “Ah, but he’s not here so you’ll have to do.”
• “What conclusions did you reach?” In principle, questions like this that just encourage the interviewee to talk more are fine – we listen to interviews with people to see what they have to say, after all. But in this interview there was almost nothing else.
• “So the bureacracy was being harnessed to The Cause?” Naughtie’s speech tone while he said “the cause” was heavily ironic. The only possible answer to this was yes, they were, and that Wilson duly gave.
• This next one was a contender for the toady of the week award: “Reading your book, it’s impossible to miss almost the sense of shock…” [that anyone would be so wicked.]
• “Are you still mystified that this happens?” [Again referring to the wicked, wicked ways of Capitol Hill]
• “Explain (apart from your personal distress) why that matters so much?” Another prompt, this time for Wilson to say how dreadful it was to reveal his wife’s cover. The personal distress bit was said in tones more appropriate to a bomb victim.
• “When you became a hate figure…” At this point, only my iron digestion, the result of wholesome living, prevented a distressing breakfast time event.

I didn’t expect or want to hear an unremittingly hostile interview with Mr Wilson. But I would have expected to hear one or two questions that raised issues that might at least speed up his heartbeat for a minute. Such as “Why did you tell the Washington Post that you had seen documents suggesting an Iraq-Niger deal (and recognised them at once as obvious forgeries) months before you could have possibly seen them, since they did not reach US intelligence until later – and if the answer to that is a fault of memory, why not extend your tolerance for faulty recall to Scooter Libby?”

Or “What do you say to the criticisms made of your behaviour by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including several Democratic senators? This Committee said that nepotism had been involved in your wife’s recommendation of you for the Niger mission, when you had said that she had had nothing to do with it.

Or “If breaching your wife’s cover was so bad for you how come you immediately leapt into print to breach it more widely? Anonymity is a continuum, not a glass that breaks once and forever.”

Or Naughtie could have alluded to the fact that although Wilson has always said that Iraq did not buy uranium from Niger, he has become strangely unclear over the question of whether Iraq sought it – another point brought out by the Senate Intelligence Committee. But not by Mr Naughtie.

• Adloyada has an important post on what she has said in comments to the BBC’s Israel/Palestine impartiality review. The deadline for submissions is tomorrow.

  One of the BBC pages she cites is this page of statistics about the Intifada. As Adloyada observes, the BBC breaks down the statistics of Israelis killed by Palestinians into civilian and military but all the Palestinians killed by Israelis are placed in one large group. Says the BBC, “There are no figures to show the proportion of Palestinians who were combatants and those who were civilians.” Why, then, are the Israeli dead so divided in the BBC figures? The fact that the Israeli dead are divided into two groups and the Palestinian dead are undivided has two effects. Firstly it means that you see a long line of icons representing Palestinian victims and mentally contrast it with the fact that none of the several lines of icons representing Israelis are remotely as long.

  Secondly, pretty well everyone regards it as less bad to kill soldiers than civilians. So most readers, even those sympathetic to Israel, will discount somewhat the group representing Israeli soldiers. There is no equivalent group of Palestinian combatants to be discounted. That absence is, of course, a consequence of the fact that the Palestinian way of waging war is to wear no uniform. Given that the BBC does see fit to add a little reminder to an article about the Israeli disengagement from Gaza to the effect that that Israeli settlements there were in violation of international law I would have thought that this repeated Palestinian breach of a far more fundamental international law was also worth a mention.

  An even more severe criticism is that the BBC’s statement that “There are no figures” to show the proportion of Palestinian combatants to non-combatants is not true. What the BBC means is “our source provided no figures and we did not care to look further.” Astonishingly, B’Tselem, the “Human Rights Group” (see what Adloyada says about them) who provided this data to the BBC described all Palestinians killed in the Intifada who were not wearing PA uniforms as being “civilians” – in other words even members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad killed while carrying out suicide bomb attacks were described as “civilians.”

  It seems this was too much to stomach even for the BBC, hence their disingenuous statement that there were “no figures.” Of course there were figures: Adloyada links to one analysis telling a very different story to B’Tselem’s, in the Middle East Quarterly. Or the BBC could have checked out the statements made by Hamas, Al-Asqua Martyrs’ Brigade and Islamic Jihad themselves claiming responsibility for suicide bombings. Surely this task would not have been beyond the BBC, seeing as we are always being told what a world leader among news organizations it is.

  UPDATE: Here is more about the statistics of the intifada, including a link to a paper by Don Radlauer of the Institute for Counter Terrorism that provides exactly the sort of figures that the BBC said were not available.

• Right for Scotland reports how John Simpson’s use of the phrase “misguided criminals” to describe the July 7 bombers won a poll for most politically correct phrase of the year. Then the BBC told the Daily Record that the claim that he’d used these words was “nonsense”. Too busy commissioning artwork to search, I guess. (Hat tip: Dumbjon)
• This they call news? Commenter Jack says, “This is the type of thing I’d expect to see in an email doing the rounds, not on this world news site supposedly representing Britain.”

. But I must make time to draw your attention to the BBC’s Israeli-Palestian impartiality review.

the Panel invites written submissions from any individual who would like to comment on the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and will take account of these contributions as part of its process. You can write to the following address:

Israeli-Palestinian Impartiality Review

BBC Governance Unit
Room 211, 35 Marylebone High Street
London, W1U 4AA

Or send an email to israelipalestinian.review@bbc.co.uk

The closing date for receiving responses is 5pm, Friday 25th November 2005.

Well-reasoned, polite letters that give specific instances of bias are the ones most likely to do good.

Thanks to several bloggers and commenters who have pointed this out.

Here is a BBC account of excavations in Gaza.

These were the bones of the ancient Greek city of Antidon. And they were testimony to the extraordinary richness of Gaza’s past.

Not only the Greeks passed this way. The Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, the Persians, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Turks, the British and many others left their mark on Gaza.

Missing anyone?

Now I don’t pretend to know whether Israel should have disengaged from Gaza, but to write a piece on the history of that area and and talk as if Jews were never there is downright sinister. This article describes the history of Jews in Gaza.

Keep reading Alan Johnston’s BBC piece. Napoleon gets a mention, but you won’t find Judah, who “took Gaza with the coast threof” somewhat earlier in history (Judges 1:18). You won’t find Jews mentioned at all.

All you’ll find is this piece of BBC boilerplate:

In line with Israel’s plan to “disengage” [What are the scare quotes for? – NS] from the Gaza Strip, it abandoned the settlements that it had built here in breach of international law.

In case you forgot.

Hat tip: My Right Word.

Villepin “seemed to strike the right note” says the BBC. Suckups. Can anyone confirm the impression I got from a commenter that for a while the link text leading to this story actually said, minus the “seemed”, “Villepin strikes the right note”?

The American Expatriate analyses the evolution of the BBC’s coverage of Wilson’s trip to Niger. This post is extremely detailed and supplies copious links. [UPDATE: There’s a follow up post and the BBC’s Paul Reynolds says in the comments that he’s preparing a response.]

Scott Burgess both defends the BBC against an accusation of pro-American bias …

Yes, you heard. He then, ever impartial, criticises Sarah Montague for misrepresenting Jean-Marie Le Pen in a radio interview.

This “personal view” by historian David Cannadine is a strange mishmash of an article. To start with, I’ve never heard of this “Guy Fawkes Day”. Bonfire Night is presumably what he means.

It is explicitly stated to be the personal view of the author, so it can be held to a somewhat less stringent standard of impartiality than the BBC’s main output. Somewhat. (Although see this comment by PaulC, who says that the BBC is fond of plausible deniability in its selection of experts.) Just how willing do you think the BBC would be to publish an appeal for prejudice against any other nation than the United States?

And the Americanised Halloween is sweeping all before it – a vivid reminder of just how powerfully American culture and American consumerism can be transported across the Atlantic.

But here, perhaps, is an opportunity for the revival of 5 November. For those who wish to protest at the ever increasing Americanisation of our world might take up Bonfire Night as their cause.

Huh? I, too, would like to see Bonfire Night revived – but Cannadine’s argument that this traditional British festival should be revived because too much attention is being given to American ways of celebrating another festival the week before is just a near-random excuse for anti-Americanism.

The BBC and other media outlets gave a good deal of attention to the Islamic festival of Eid-al-Fitr that took place this year on November 4. Yet the BBC would not publish an article containing a call for people to take up Bonfire Night in protest at increasing Islamisation. Even if the BBC would publish a serious “personal view” article by someone arguing that increasing Islamisation was either undesirable or happening at all, which I doubt it would, it would never even consider allowing a someone writing in that context to advocate pointless needling for the sake of it. (“Making faces at Uncle Sam”)

But how comparable are the two? At this point I started off on a breakdown of the respective risks to public order of whipping up anti-Muslim and anti-American sentiment. Then I decided to omit it on grounds of space. Summary: immediate risk higher for anti-Muslim prejudice, long term risk higher for anti-American, and the risk is non-trivial in both cases. Yet we – even I, who make quite a point of complaining about it – have got so used to anti-Americanism that I scarcely notice it any more. Don’t judge Cannadine too harshly: not all of us can step clear of the prejudices of our class and era.

It’s a pity. Cannadine does describe the positive historical reasons for wanting to celebrate Guy Fawkes’ failure, albeit far more half-heartedly than he speaks of his sterile wish to “make faces at Uncle Sam”. Also he makes some good points about the real reason Bonfire Night has been downvalued: not trick-or-treating a few days earlier but endless safety nannyism. First they said that you were an irresponsible parent if you dared let off bangers in your own back garden and that all would be well if you went to a public display, then they made public displays more and more burdensome to run by means of firework restrictions and insurance premiums. Oh, and, as Cannadine himself says, another reason for the downgrading of Bonfire Night is that Britain is “now a multi-faith society.” At this point my more sharp-tongued relatives might point out that there is no “now” about it; the Catholics have been in Britain somewhat longer than the Protestants, actually. Blimey, just when the Irish component of Catholicism in Britain had finally just about let its historical grievances become history, along comes the victim culture to tell ’em to get resenting again. Cannadine seems half in this and half out of this: he wants Guys to be burned in every back yard again – yet he says:

It’s possible to be a Catholic Briton and admire Nelson; it’s hard to be a Catholic Briton without wincing at the sight of an effigy of Guy Fawkes going up in flames. I’m not a Catholic, but I do rather sympathise.

Well, my parents were devout Catholics of Irish descent and throughout my childhood our family always burnt a Guy come November 5, as did the families of my equally Catholic schoolfriends. Why? Because Guy Fawkes was a terrorist. That’s not just what I say now, it’s what we said then.

Happy Bonfire Night.

. Here, shorn of the odd rude word, is commenter Ritter’s view on this BBC story by Hugh Schofield: Sarkozy’s tough talk misses mark

His analysis is summarized thus: Sarkozy is a right winger. Therefore he is wrong or in Hugh’s words “out of kilter” with public opinion. Chirac & de Villepin are to the left of Sarkozy. Therefore they have got it right.

Hugh’s analysis is contradictory. He asserts that, even if the majority of the French public support Sarkozy’s line on the Paris riots, actually they don’t really because deep down, they are socialists!

“Even if a majority believe hardline measures to be necessary to quell the disturbances, most French also have hot-wired [He means hard-wired. Hot-wired is what criminals do to make stolen cars go. Sounds like a Freudian slip – NS] into them a deep sense of social justice.

They expect a certain tone from their leaders – one that recognises there may be an “issue” at stake, and “underlying causes” to be tackled. They actually quite like the “langue de bois”. “

Really?

Not that Hugh knows what the facts are regading what the public think, as he doesn’t reference any recent polls on French public opinion to support his ‘analysis’. And actual ‘facts’ like that could spoil his story. This isn’t any actual analysis going on here. This is a news ‘event’ being passed through the painfully predictable BBC ‘world-view’ prism [left wing = good, right wing = bad]. Sadly this passes for ‘analysis’ at the BBC.

Hugh ends his analysis on a confident note:

“So for once, Mr Sarkozy finds that his tough-talking is out of kilter with the national mood, which urgently wants a return to quiet and knows that the best way of getting it is if the government makes the right kind of gestures.

That’s it, I’m off down the bookies to put money on Sarkozy being the next French President……

is posting away merrily. Like it says on the can, this blog is by an American expatriate, and he is particularly strong on American affairs.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back is not the pamphlet of that name written by Lenin but a careful critique of an amended piece by the BBC’s Paul Reynolds on the Wilson / Plame / Libby affair. Scott Callahan argues that the amendments were not improvements.

In Just the cold, hard facts he describes the way in which a couple of BBC types will start off with a remark of the unfalsifiable “it is widely believed” type, toss it to and fro between them for a minute and come out with an “expert” consensus. He also slams Justin Webb’s “Banana Republic” quip, which has also been mentioned here by commenter “Big Mouth”.

And in Small but Important he nails down an error I keep seeing in BBC reporting of American legal matters. The only thing wrong with the post is that Scott Callahan apologises for it as sounding pedantic. It is nothing of the sort. The separability of the two questions of whether a law is good and whether it is constitutional is itself a crucial point. The BBC blurs the two issues for the same reasons that the Democrats (or more accurately those with the “unconstrained vision” in Thomas Sowell’s terminology) do. The distinction comes up again and again. The degree to which it is observed or ignored has vast practical effects on how America is changed by changes in its law.

As Vladimir Ilyich put it:

When a prolonged, stubborn and heated struggle is in progress, there usually begin to emerge after a time the central and fundamental points at issue, upon the decision of which the ultimate outcome of the campaign depends, and in comparison with which all the minor and petty episodes of the struggle recede more and more into the background.

.

Before I start, I’ve changed the text at the sidebar dealing with telling this blog about examples of bias from “aagh, don’t email me, I can’t cope” which is basically what it’s said for the last few months to the slightly more optimistic:

You can send it to the Letters Editor at nataliesolent AT aol DOT COM, and it is at least possible that I will not lose it or ignore it. A generally better option is to post it as a comment, even to an unrelated post, preceded if appropriate by the words “Off topic”.

While I was away “Captain Bill” pointed out a story about the recent referendum in Brazil on whether it should be legal to buy guns. He wrote:

Saw your post on the defeat of the UN-suggested total gun ban, just after I read:

Personal security dominates Brazil poll

“…And yet the Brazilian people have voted in a referendum to reject a proposal to ban the sale of firearms.

So what happened? To outsiders, this referendum looked like a no-brainer.

In a country where one person is killed with a gun every 15 minutes, surely the public would vote in favour of an outright ban on gun sales?

Wrong. By a resounding 64% to 36%, Brazilians decided to keep the gun shops open. …”

Seems to me as if the writer is more of a (biased) no-brainer than the citizens of Brazil. Was this supposed to be a news item?

In defence of the writer, Steve Kingstone, he did give a reasonable summary of the actual arguments of those who supported the right to own guns in the paragraph headed “Black market.” This is an improvement on previous attempts by the BBC to cover the issue of guns, which tended to diagnose the alleged psychological problems of supporters of gun rights rather than engage with what they actually thought. (See here, for example, although I was pleasantly surprised by this a few weeks later.)

Nonetheless the rather superior tone taken by Mr Kingstone with his talk of “no-brainers” is not justified. He does not know “outsiders” in general share his opinions.

And although it is a little harsh to single out Mr Kingstone, his piece says nearly all the things BBC reports always do say when the Beeb thinks the wrong side has won a vote.

• The winning bad guys’ campaign was “slick” (i.e. the ad-men bamboozled the rustics).
• The losing good guys’ campaign was “lacklustre” (i.e. the people would have been persuaded if only the messenger had been worthy).
• What voters really wanted to do was give the ruling party a scare (they weren’t actually saying what the vote seemed to say).

I’m not saying that these factors were not there in the Brazilian gun referendum. Such factors often are very influential. But you can all amuse yourselves by looking back over… hmm, various recent votes on European issues would do, and spotting how important these themes suddenly become when the vote goes awry from the Beeb point of view.

And most of the time, if the bad guys’ campaign happens to spend more than their opponents you can bet you’ll hear it described as “well-funded”. Conversely, if the side of virtue (as defined by the Beeb) triumphs, then the money spent is not usually an issue. Mr Kingstone is not guilty on this count, as he did say that the Yes campaign was “heavy in celebrity razzamatazz, and light in penetrating argument.”

This Times story covers the Birmingham riots which killed one man on Saturday. A second man was shot dead in the same area on Sunday, but it is not clear whether that was related to the riot. The starting point for the riots was an alleged rape of a 14 year old Jamaican girl by a man or men of Pakistani origin. I say “alleged” not merely to cover myself legally – there is, so far, no hard evidence that the rape happened or even that the girl exists.

Inter-communal riots started by rumour of rape. The pattern is age-old. Equally familiar to history is the fate of the innocent man cornered by a mob and killed not for anything he had done – so far as is known the man who was stabbed was simply returning from a night at the cinema – but for having the wrong coloured face. Cold comfort it may be to his relatives, but modern liberal democracies are by historical standards rather good at preventing riots or nipping them in the bud when they do occur.

Why is this? One reason may be that literacy and a free press ensure that we have many sources of reasonably accurate news to hand. Most people in the West nowadays simply have a more accurate picture of the world and are less susceptible to false rumours. When the rumours of crimes turn out to be true we are also able to be reminded that the actions of one member of a group are not the actions of all. Say what you like about the mainstream media, it is notable that those groups most cut off from it are most prone to riot.

That was a longer than average preamble. I thought it worthwhile to explain exactly why despite having no particular criticism of more recent BBC coverage of the riots, I thought it so unhelpful that the first story I saw, on Ceefax, was so evasive. Unfortunately I didn’t note the words of the story down, but it mentioned Birmingham, “disturbances”, a dead man and an alleged rape. The whole structure of the story made it obvious to anyone with half a brain that what had happened was a race riot but there was no mention of race. The nearest it got was a mention of “the community”. “Community” in modern parlance usually signals a pointed lack of it. Anyone wishing to know what had actually happened in Britain’s second city had to go to the newspapers.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. They may mean well but that trick only works in the short term. Yes, I know why they do it. One wants to avoid a situation where, for instance, a burglary by a white is reported simply as a burglary but a similar burglary by a black is reported as a burglary by a black. It is correct to avoid an undue focus on race in reporting general news. But these were race riots. Not to report the very thing that defined the two sides is not prudent, it is dishonest. It is treating adults like children. Worse yet it feeds the very paranoia that it intends to dispel. People think, “What else aren’t they telling us?”