Author Archives: Natalie

, can I draw your attention to a fiery post from Dash Riprock:

…after ignoring the incitement story for, oh, ever, the Beeb dutifully reports on the “Jews are HIV, Jews are Cancer” sermon broadcast on the official Palestinian Authority television station. Unable to resist, they then gratuitously add this:

The state broadcaster is only watched by an estimated one percent of Palestinians, who prefer Arab satellite channels.

Well then, no harm, no foul! I mean, it’s almost like the BBC thinks that a national station can broadcast murderous propaganda, as long as it’s limited to Jews and Israel, and there are other channels to watch…hey, wait a minute!

I don’t think the BBC deliberately broadcasts murderous propaganda. I do think it has a blatant double standard regarding other people’s murderous propaganda. Watched by few it may be, but this sermon came from the official Palestinian Authority station. And you might be forgiven for getting the impression from the BBC that the “Arab satellite channels” that the Palestinians prefer to the PA channel are preferred because they are less extreme. Since one of the most popular is Al-Manar, which is run by Hezbollah and recently featured a series called Al-Shatat (The Diaspora), a drama that portrayed Jews seeking out Christian children for ritual slaughter, I don’t think so. MEMRI churns out translations by the bushel of similar incitement to racial hatred from government and mainstream sources all over the Arab World. It is all considered scarcely worthy of comment by the BBC.

The following article by Scott Norvell ran on May 20th in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal. It mentions Robin Aitken, Justin Webb and this blog. There is also quite a bit about the coverage of Malcolm Glazer’s takeover of Man U.

Robin Aitken has nailed it.

Those of us who pay the BBC’s annual £120 license fee but grit our teeth every time we watch one of its news programs have floundered for some time in search of a term to describe what ails the corporation. Mr. Aitken, a 25-year veteran reporter now retired, has put his finger on it: institutionalized leftism.

The phrase is a play on one — “institutional racism” — currently in vogue among the professionally aggrieved. It’s frequently lobbed when the forces of multicultural goodness can’t point to specific proof of racism in an organization but just know deep down that something is amiss.

Mr. Aitken told London’s Daily Telegraph (and subsequently confirmed in a telephone conversation) that Britain’s taxpayer-funded behemoth, arguably the most powerful media brand in the world, sports a world view remarkably at odds with a good percentage of the population to whom it purportedly answers.

The BBC’s world is one in which America is always wrong, George W. Bush is a knuckle-dragging simpleton, people of faith are frightening ignoramuses, and capitalism is a rot on the fabric of social justice. Through this prism, the United Nations is the world’s supreme moral authority, multiculturalism is always a force for good, war is never warranted, and U.S. Republicans sprinkle Third World children over their Cheerios for breakfast.

One could be inclined to dismiss one voice on this topic, but Mr. Aitken is hardly alone in his frustration. British conservatives complain constantly (largely in vain) about the political bent of the BBC, and bloggers, like the gang at Biased BBC (www.biased-bbc.blogspot.com), maintain exhaustive online records of its ideological imbalances.

The task isn’t a difficult one. Let’s just listen to the BBC’s U.S. correspondent Justin Webb: “America is often portrayed as an ignorant, unsophisticated sort of place, full of bible (sic) bashers and ruled to a dangerous extent by trashy television, superstition and religious bigotry, a place lacking in respect for evidence based on knowledge.”

“I know that is how it is portrayed because I have done my bit to paint that picture,” he confesses, “and that picture is in many respects a true one.”

Whole article here. It’s about the Schiavo case. To be fair, Webb is saying that America is, in his opinion, not always trashy, superstitious etc.

The recent takeover of Manchester United by American sports magnate Malcolm Glazer was the perfect platform for these biases to poke through. The hostile takeover of a football team is obviously more emotional than the takeover of, say, a car manufacturer, but the Beeb has so far proven itself to be everything a public broadcaster shouldn’t be on the topic.

Not being into football – sorry, guys – I hadn’t really thought of this one as a B-BBC issue. (One ought to be equally annoyed by bias when it concerns matters where one has no axe to grind, but without the oomph given by personal belief it’s harder. I do think the BBC is biased in favour of legalizing drugs, which I also favour.)

On the evening Mr. Glazer’s two-year effort to take over the club gelled, the flagship Ten O’Clock News’ take on it was a two-minute ad for the anti-Glazer camp. Effigies were burned. Angry fans marched. League officials expressed dismay. The correspondent closed the report claiming the deal would be bad for shareholders, bad for fans and bad for Manchester. Bad bad bad.

I’m guessing some of our commenters might agree with that verdict. But, as Mr Norvell goes on to say, it’s not the BBC’s place to speechify on the issue. This article, What options do United fans have? reads like a Green Paper issued to help the anti-Glazer fans settle on the best strategy. The very title assumes that no one who is a United fan will be indifferent to or actually support Glazer’s bid.

The tone has persisted. The BBC’s online product continues to portray the takeover as an effort by a rogue financier with a funny beard and no heart, who wants to “take Manchester away from the people and into the hands of market forces.” Never mind that Man U has been a public company for 14 years and, as one of the most valuable sports brands in the world, market forces are as much part of the team as red face paint and the smell of stale lager.

The wrong here is not that the BBC is portraying Mr. Glazer and his bid as unpopular — they are. It’s that the BBC’s mandate is not to pander, tabloid-style, to its audiences or use the story as a springboard for its anti-free market ideology. Its mandate explicitly calls for “impartial” coverage, and that’s not what I and millions of other U.K. residents are getting for our license fee in this and many other cases.

Nor is it wrong that lefty voices are heard on the BBC. There is a place for them, but not to the exclusion of rightish ones. Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly. And those who hate us can take solace in the fact that they aren’t subsidizing Bill’s bombast; we payers of the BBC license fee don’t enjoy that peace of mind.

Fox News is, after all, a private channel and our presenters are quite open about where they stand on particular stories. That’s our appeal. People watch us because they know what they are getting. The Beeb’s institutionalized leftism would be easier to tolerate if the corporation was a little more honest about it.

Few with a grip on reality believe that there is a cabal at BBC House wringing their hands and plotting the re-nationalization of the coal industry or state-mandated racial sensitivity training for all six-year-olds.

Dunno about the coal industry, but the state-mandated racial sensitivity training for six-year-olds is up and running. It’s called Children’s BBC. That’s OK by me, done with a light touch. It’s the state-mandated Gaia worship that makes me long for an Establishment Clause.

But there is little doubt that, as Mr. Aitken puts it, a center-left groupthink dominates at the BBC and colors its entire output. It’s not deliberate. It’s worse. The producers just can’t imagine that someone could possibly oppose European integration or any of the other left-wing causes because to them, and their friends, these are self-evident truths. It simply doesn’t even occur to them that reasonable people could disagree with them.

The influence of this groupthink goes far beyond the BBC and now permeates the cliquish world of British broadcasting in general. Almost everyone in the television business has worked for the BBC at some point, sipped the Kool-Aid, and now carries the torch of institutional leftism. With few exceptions, every newscast in the country looks and sounds like a knock-off of the Ten O’Clock News, and the nation is not better for it.

Mr. Aitken is said to be the first BBC insider ever to come out of the conservative closet, and he is now putting his opinions into book form. He says that he tried to convince his bosses at the BBC of the problem, going to the trouble of documenting the bias for its Board of Governors, but none of them could be bothered.

If for nothing else, Mr. Aitken deserves high accolades for his contribution to the lexicon and his willingness to challenge a status quo that serves no one except the people who perpetuate it.

Mr. Norvell is the London bureau chief for Fox News.

Anon writes:

Natalie, whoever moderates this site.
The day the left-wing bottom feeders decide to slough off work, whilst promising a summer’s worth of skiving, all the while HOOVERING up licence fee cash from people they threaten and imprison, and this is the best you can do…’Robert Ayers writes to say that you can read an interview with three prominent Iraqi citizens here’…?

Caaaaam on, let’s be having you.

**Lady, if you can’t do it, don’t have the time, etc., then step away from the website.

Actually, I am not that interested in the strike. Sure, I think the Beeb is extravagant, that its extravagance is made far worse by its having money on tap from the taxpayer, and that it should be less extravagant. But if the strike ends in complete victory for the management who then go on to make such savings that the licence fee is not only kept static but actually reduced (not that anyone has seriously suggested that’s gonna happen), you know what? I’ll scarcely care. My beefs with the BBC are:

(a) The very existence of a government funded news and entertainment service. Ugh. Only familiarity blinds us to the banana-republic awfulness of this idea. It it should be consigned, along with the idea of government-run newspapers, to the great cat litter-tray of history.

(b) Contrary to its Charter the BBC is not impartial. It’s the Guardian on stilts yet unlike the real Guardian I cannot choose not to buy it.

(c) It justifies taking money by force on the grounds that it promotes the national interest, liberal democratic values and the public good and then affects to be neutral between this country and its enemies and between random killers and their victims.

If one of my fellow posters wants to disagree, that’s fine. Debate is good. If the comments boxes are radioactive with schadenfreude over the strike that’s fine too. For me, though, I am concerned by the waste in the BBC’s budget only in the same way that I am concerned by waste in the NHS or in the schools. It’s a bad thing. But not what I want to blog about.

writes to say that you can read an interview with three prominent Iraqi citizens here.

Part way through, Nasir Flayeh Hassan is discussing the pluses and
minuses of the American occupation, and remarks:

What I think is definitely an American failure is the inefficiency of their media, comparing with the anti-American media, like Algazira and Alarabia, BBC (especially the Arabic department), Radio Monte Carlo, etc. This was a very serious point which gave a wide free space for all those who hate the Americans to ruin the deeds, changing continuously the scales of things, especially in such a critical period. This point cost us and the Americans much.

This picture series is entitled “French Left split over referendum.” The opening page says:

“A battle is on for left-wing votes as France’s referendum on the EU constitution looms. Most supporters of the centre-right UMP party are expected to vote Yes, ignoring the far-right No campaign.

But many Socialists appear ready to defy party leaders by voting No, with the far-left. BBC News asked a selection of left-wingers for their views.”

Emphasis added.

That is the question asked by The Scotsman’s Jenny Hjul. (Hat tip: Gary.) She says:

His presence in Washington begs two questions: why did BBC Scotland feel it needed to send its own man when (a) it is currently implementing drastic cost cuts and (b) the BBC’s Washington correspondent, Clive Myrie, was already there and more than up to the job?

Also, if BBC Scotland really, really had to send, why did it have to be Wylie, whose friendship with Galloway goes back years and who, as the Diary pointed out yesterday, received an acknowledgement in Galloway’s autobiography?

Wylie is not an expert on Iraq or on American politics. And in this case, he was clearly not impartial, and neither was BBC Scotland. Shame on them.

Oliver Kamm quotes from the Scotsman’s article and comments on it in a post called “British Back-scratching Corporation”. (Hat tip: David H.) Mr Kamm – who has read everything about everything – points out that Wylie and Galloway co-authored a book on the Romanian revolution, “presenting a highly tendentious thesis favourable to the government of the thuggish Communist apparatchik Ion Iliescu.”

I’m rather busy at the moment, so here are some quick links on several subjects all in one fell post.

Coming Anarchy (a blog with the intriguing tagline “Speak Victorian – Think Pagan”) wasn’t impressed with the economic assumptions behind a BBC article called Living in Somalia’s Anarchy.

Norman Geras agrees with many complainers that Jeremy Paxman and other media interviewers are too rude and dismissive to many political interviewees, including George Galloway. Anyone who reads Normblog knows that he isn’t saying this out of any fondness for Gorgeous George.

Dash Riprock is one of many who comment unfavourably on this article by Tim Butcher, “Stigma of life in “Traitors’ Village.”

JC Keiner wrote a formal complaint to the BBC about the same article, copied to us. She cited the way in which reprisals including plucking the eyes out of a corpse were described as “Old Testament-style brutality”. An extract from her letter of complaint:

“It is surely anti-semitism to attribute these brutal atrocities committed by non Jews to Jewish religious law, based on a gross misrepresentation of it. Your web site compounds this by using the words “Old Testament-style Brutality” as a subhead. It is not excusable to defend this as an example of a correspondent’s personal perspective, since the BBC undertakes to avoid anti-semitic or otherwise racist content.”

“Lazy Student” says that this piece on the French Referendum makes “a no vote sound like the end of the world.” (UPDATE 18 May: PJF reports that the phrase “So a No [vote] looks like bad news all round.” has been stealth edited out of this article.)

ADDED LATER: The Newsweek allegation about a copy of the Koran and its fateful consequences have been the subject of a blogswarm. Paul Reynold’s article “Koran story brings US journalism crisis” rounds up this and related stories.

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The BBC’s story on Galloway contains this little gem:

”UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has been criticised over his son’s work with the programme, but he himself, in an interim report by a UN committee issued in March, was cleared of wrongdoing.”

Of course, he was not cleared at all:

“I thought we criticised him rather severely. I would not call that an exoneration,” Volcker told US network Fox News in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.

UPDATE: More on this at USS Neverdock. Marc Landers writes:

Despite Paul Volcker publicly denying that his report cleared Kofi Annan of wrongdoing, the BBC make this false claim on three webpages.

Volcker said: Asked point-blank whether Mr. Annan had been cleared of wrongdoing in the $10 billion scandal, Mr. Volcker replied, “No.”

link to Washington Times article

The three BBC webpages are here:

link 1,

link 2,

link 3

David Aaronovitch, in his final column for the Guardian, describes what happened when he, a left-winger, decided not to oppose the Iraq war.

All of a sudden I began to experience the left from the outside. And the first thing that struck me was its capacity for smug certainty and uniformity of response. Look at the cartoonists, whose work trumps debate. You may have Blair the poodle, Blair with blood-stained hands, Blair the liar, Bush the absurd chimp, but never, ever, Galloway the consort of tyrants or Kennedy the comforter of “insurgents”. Look at the millionaire publisher Felix Dennis, who read out a poem on the Today programme in the middle of the election (a poem, incidentally, written more than a year earlier). “Why do they do it? Why do they do it? Why do they stand on their hind legs, Lying and lying and lying and lying?” This was, he explained, aimed mostly at Blair for having lied. He wasn’t challenged.

It was beyond argument. Dennis, I’d guess, had never been challenged. Not by the researcher, the producer, the editor, his pals, not by anyone. Like a lot of middle-class anti-Blairites, I don’t think he had ever heard the contrary case put.