Author Archives: Natalie

generated by Matt Well’s now famous piece (Quick! Slap on the “Viewpoint” label!) that I am genuinely not sure whether Rottweiler Puppy’s fisking has already been mentioned on this blog.

The BBC was earlier congratulating itself on having had 400,000 page impressions on this piece over the weekend 3-4 September. Ed gently suggested that even then not all of them might have been from fans – although I am willing to believe most of them were: the sort of person that makes up the audience of Question Time would have lapped this up. It would be interesting to know how high the total is now, and what the referring pages were.

, writing for Tech Central Station, excoriates the Beeb. (Hat tip: the guys at ¡No Pasaran!) Ed’s post here and mine here, and the American Expatriate‘s post on Hurricane Katrina: The Real Story all get a mention.

In a spirit of strict honesty, I have to say that it wasn’t Mr Paxman who said, “This is going very badly for the Republicans.” It was whatsisname.

I very rarely post here simply to vent my emotions. Sometimes I also post to wound, to show off, or to send the children of harmless TV presenters crying home from school. But after the last week I feel compelled to finally let free my inner urge to go the top of the bus and whisper hoarsely to a stranger “George Bush has got a hurricane in his bag, you know.” Why not? It would make me feel better, and everybody else seems to enjoy it. Especially the BBC.

Rob White tipped me off to this piece… From the editor’s desktop:

This week the upbeat messages were for this piece from Matt Wells, a freelance journalist who writes for us quite often. It picked up some 400,000 page impressions last weekend.

It was certainly strong stuff, but it struck the right note for many. One wrote: “I am so grateful to Matt Wells for writing his article ‘New Orleans crisis shames Americans’. It is true to a depth that I can’t begin to express.”

The place that opinion pieces have on the site is a tricky one. Readers respect us for our impartiality and balance, but does that mean we should never carry more strident views?

We won’t be foaming at the mouth and ranting just yet, because that would fox our audience, but as long as we properly signpost opinion pieces they have a place on this site.

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the piece originally went on the site with a straight headline. That was a mistake, and it was amended to make clear it was a “viewpoint”.

How generous of you to make that amendment, Mr Desktop. Wasn’t the bit about Foxing the audience cute?

I caught a few minutes of Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman talking to whatsisname with the blond hair over in New Orleans. There was rather more material for blog posts than I could cope with, but here’s a few extracts:

“…This is going very badly for the Republicans…”

“…Bush is trying to palm off blame on the director of FEMA… but that won’t wash, since the White House appointed the director of FEMA…”

“This is going to have a big impact on the way President Bush is seen by History, isn’t it?”

It no longer surprises me to hear from the Beeb that History, so tight-lipped to lesser mortals, has already confided her judgement to the Newsnight team. But one comment really did surprise me. Whatsisname actually said that it was “extraordinary” of former President Bill Clinton to intervene to criticise Bush. He said ex-presidents just don’t criticise, even implicitly, their successors.

Excuse me?

The BBC’s John Humphrys shot his mouth off about some politicians in a speech to a bunch of PR men on a cruise. Now he faces an exhaustive internal enquiry. Naughty Humphrys. He owes most of his fame to his role with the BBC, so he really ought to wear the mask. Still, boys will be boys, and the internal enquiry would be better directed at what he says on air rather than off it. Sage words from the Times:

Like it or not — and on the whole he seems to like it — Humphrys is a public figure. His views are therefore a matter of legitimate interest. What they are not is a suitable subject for an exhaustive internal BBC inquiry. Michael Grade, the corporation’s Chairman, is said to have requested a full transcript of the cruise ship speech. He should read it, chuckle and move on: he has the more serious issue of institutional bias to confront, and on this score the BBC’s frontline presenters are far from blameless.

And

Humphrys has argued that the journalist’s chief responsibility is to challenge authority. This is necessary, and extremely easy. It is far harder for the journalist to ensure that his own views do not interfere with the presentation, and BBC presenters are all too often impatient with anything other than a soft-left world-view. Humphrys’ performance as an onboard entertainer should not be exploited by the Government to settle old scores, nor by Mr Grade to improve relations with the Government. But it might usefully prompt sober introspection by the BBC’s most senior journalists.

, just stepping in for today and tomorrow before I go on holiday.

What stopped me blogging? As I said earlier, first I was busy, then I was ill. However I have been pretty much recovered for the last week. The thing that repeatedly made me decide that I would get back online tomorrow rather than today was the fact that I was frightened of my by-now enormous pile of unread emails. Eventually I realised that the dragon that lay across my path had to be slain if I was ever to return to the blogosphere. So I deleted them.

You may rebuke me. Be assured that I rebuke myself. But it was the only way.

Meanwhile, I see that in my absence Biased BBC has been tackling high profile, controversial subjects and making national headlines. I too must do my part. I was sorry to see the other day that the actress Barbara Bel Geddes, who played Miss Ellie in Dallas, had died at the age of 82. Whoever wrote the Ceefax report about her life and death knew that the first priority was to tell us that she was a heavy smoker and that this caused her fatal lung cancer.

Those Ceefax boys never let a chance for moral instruction pass by. Incidentally, the US average female life expectancy is 80.67 years.

to readers and fellow posters for my absence. I had a very busy period and then I was ill. I am afraid I am not up to posting or dealing with emails at the moment.

I have been having a busy few days and have got behind with the email. See you* next week.

*Actually that is quite unlikely.

Brian Micklethwait is in sarcastic mode in this Samizdata post :

I am watching the BBC Ten o’clock News, and the lead story is Condoleezza Rice, spelling out the Bush doctrine:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has delivered a forceful call for democratic reform in the Arab World in a major policy speech in Cairo. The US pursuit of stability in the Middle East at the expense of democracy had “achieved neither”, she admitted.

“Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people,” she said.

The BBC’s Frank Gardiner said her comments marked a complete departure for the US, and were “immensely risky”.

Indeed. In order to have seen this one coming, you would have had to have read some of President George W. Bush’s speeches, and in particular his Second Inaugural Address, and to have then made the even greater mental leap of realising that President George W. Bush had actually thought about what he was saying, and had meant it.

Links to the BBC piece and the Inaugural Address are provided in the Samizdata post.

For some reason the numbers in brackets that tell you how many comments there have been on each post seem stuck today. If you click on the links the full complement of comments show up, though.