Author Archives: Natalie

As you can see from Andrew Bowman’s post further down, Kevin McNamara, a left-wing Labour MP, has distinguished himself by saying that Michael Howard’s views about gypsy encampments and the planning laws have “a whiff of the gas chamber about them.” For various reasons I am not Michael Howard’s biggest fan, but I do think that saying that to a man whose grandmother was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is… well, in the light of Ken Livingstone’s recent remarks, shall we settle on newsworthy?

The news has reached Australia.

At the time of writing, four minutes to midnight, it hasn’t yet reached the BBC website.

to Andrew Bowman’s earlier post about CBS reporting of the meeting between President Bush and the McCartney sisters, I received an email from Fausta Wertz of the Bad Hair Blog, pointing out this post.

Shamefully, this morning’s BBCA newscast, after reporting on the above, invited a former SF/IRA public relations man. His position was that the women were puppets of political opponents, nearly the same exact words Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator told the same BBC earlier this week. The BBC reporter had previously concluded his report by saying, “When it comes to Northern Ireland, there’s no longer much to celebrate.”

To the contrary. It’s time to celebrate the courage of six women.

To be fair to the BBC, it seems to me at least possible that their intention in running the Sinn Fein guy was to give him rope to hang himself with, metaphorically speaking. Hard to tell. Very hard to tell. The record of the BBC in regard to Northern Ireland is uneven. Good reporting has often been combined with determined efforts to shoehorn the conflict into a colonials-versus-natives template.

In a comment to a previous post Rob directed our attention to this link from Melanie Phillips. It may shock you. Yes, even you, longtime Biased BBC reader, who think you have seen it all.

Now scroll on to the BBC’s TV coverage on sunday of the Tel Aviv bombing, in which five people died and 49 were injured. Using a clip entitled ‘A family in mourning’, the family it showed was not one of the Israeli dead but of the human bomb terrorist instead.

BBC panjandrums are embarrassed enough to put their hands up to this one. In what it coyly calls a ‘correction’, the Beeb has posted up the following comment by Roger Mosey, head of TV news:

‘The programme editors and I agree it was inappropriate to begin the report with footage of the suicide bomber’s family in mourning.It was also inappropriate to include this footage without coverage of the suffering of the victims’ families. Using this picture sequence in this way was a mistake. However, the report’s coverage of the political ramifications of the bombing and this week’s London conference was balanced and fair – and we did, of course, report fully the events in Tel Aviv in our bulletins on Friday night and Saturday.’

No, Mr Mosey, it was not ‘inappropriate’. It was grotesque, outrageous and despicable. And a ‘correction’ just won’t do. It does not begin to address the moral deformity of BBC journalists who, when Israelis are murdered, automatically direct their compassion instead at the family of the bomber. For BBC journalists, Jewish victims, Jewish dead and Jewish grief just don’t seem to exist.

See what I mean about being shocked? (Bold type added by me.)

Several people pointed out this piece by Justin Webb about deducing the innermost soul of America from half a dozen guys you met in a ski-lift gondola*, too. It seems the same piece was spotted (in its first incarnation as a Radio Four broadcast) by Myrna Blyth of NRO. (Hat tip: Hazel Stein.)

Actually, I’ve got a soft spot for Justin Webb. No one who can write

Faced with another round of exquisite jellied meat products I heard a secret service agent expressing in pithy terms a desire for hamburgers. Very old white house.

can be all bad, although the subeditor who left out the initial capitals on “White House” deserves to be ejected into space or Manchester.

During the three days of his Tour Diary, Webb also praises President Bush’s jokes and carries a torch for Condi. Against that, I have to say that the line where he worries that the entire Muslim world can see cheerleaders on TV is tediously over-earnest in a very British way. What say you, comrades? Shall we spare him, come the glorious day?

*Talking of extrapolating the American psyche, I read the wonderful Lileks Olive Garden screed when it first came out. But all you get is this 404 page. New link, anyone?

Several people have pointed out this Normblog post linking to, and quoting from, an article by Bartle Bull in Prospect Magazine.

Iraq is not about America any more. This has been increasingly true every day since last June, and the failure – or refusal – to recognise this has underpinned much of the misleading coverage of Iraq. In the evenings leading up to the election, I sat on carpets on the floors of a variety of shabby houses in the Baghdad slums. But the daily BBC message I watched with my various Iraqi hosts never budged. The refrain was Iraq’s “atmosphere of intimidation and violence,” and the message was that the elections could never work. What about the “atmosphere of resolve and anticipation” that I felt around me? Or the “atmosphere of patience and restraint” among those whom the terrorists were trying to provoke?

Interestingly, Mr Bull reports for the New York Times, a paper that is often seen as having a similar line to the BBC.

You’ve probably seen this article from the Times. As Neil Craig of A Place To Stand On says, it’s “generally going round the anti-green bits of the net”

SOD OFF SWAMPY

WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.

What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.

“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”

Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.” Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.”

Neil Craig writes:

“I only caught his side of the story today from the net & it is only published in this form by the Times & Washington Post. When I first heard it on the BBC (Radio Scotland but I assume elsewhere too) they reported a successful attempt by Greenpeace to occupy the Exchange. So the BBC were, at best, taking Greenpeace’s report verbatim & putting it out as news.

“Judging news either as something new & unexpected or simply as entertainment the fact that they got kicked out is much the better part of the story but most of our media either chose to print only Greenpeace’s PR without checking or checked & decided to suppress the real story.”

writes:

In browsing the BBC complaints website recently, there is a report on complaints over the last few months, preceded by a statement from Mark Thompson, the Director-General.

In that statement, I found a remarkable sentence. He states:

“Of course there will always be cases where people are dissatisfied with the BBC’s initial response, and the aim then is to give them the opportunity of independent investigation by the Editorial Complaints Unit – and it will be genuinely independent, because we have removed the requirement for the Unit to seek agreement from the management of the programme division before finalising a decision to uphold a complaint. Cases already in the system will be processed according to the old rules, but the Unit’s view on the cases which reach it after 1 February will be final, subject only to appeal to the Governors.”

(I have added italics and emphasis). Is it not incredible that under their pathetic complaints system, if I have understood this correctly, the BBC Complaints Unit had to get the programme division (this presumably means the actual makers of the programme would be consulted and would be dragging their feet all the way) to first agree to a complaint being upheld against them. How likely is that to happen? Turkeys voting for Christmas ?

Just a note to let you know that I am offline at the moment. OK, not at this exact moment because I wouldn’t be typing this from an internet cafe if I were, would I? But in general. So don’t write to me. Computers are evil, bad, useless things anyway; a snare and a delusion.

Neil Craig of A Place To Stand On writes:

I have just been watching the Judge John Deed programme.

While this is not a news item I do believe that the basis of this show is corrupt – each week our hero judge, who is a radical thorn in the side of the grey suited men, goes into court to quite deliberately finesse his duty by finding for some politically correct party in the teeth of the evidence.

(This week’s was awarding ridiculous damages against a nasty company which had been producing dioxins thus leading to the birth of a disabled photogenic kid – in fact there is (as with nuclear) precious little evidence that dioxins are dangerous in small quantities let alone in the circumstances described.)

It is stuff like this which creates a background of bias. The impartiality of the law is a cornerstone of any free society. If the BBC were doing a programme in which the hero was deliberately fitting up communists, moslem fundamentalists, serbs (well maybe not them) without even a suggestion that something was wrong then it would be obvious that the BBC were undermining freedom. The same applies here.

I am far from suggesting that any work of TV drama should be submitted to an “anti-bias” editor before publication. But the extent to which certain vaguely left-wing memes dominate British TV drama can be judged by trying to imagine dramas run according to their opposites.

The results are actually funny; funny because they are so unheard of. Imagine a show with a young hero who goes to church. Imagine a show with a heroine who isn’t trying to make it in a man’s world. Imagine a historical drama where the sympathetic protagonist actually had the attitudes common in his time rather than those of a twenty-first century intellectual. Imagine a drama about a handsome campaigning journalist taking on a fat ugly politician. No wait, you’ve seen dozens of those, but imagine one where the journalist is willing to use any lie to bring down a relatively good man.

Dream on. Back in the real world the BBC describes its hero Judge Deed as “the judge who is not afraid to question the establishment.” Yawn. Who exactly is afraid to question the establishment these days?

The BBC has an article out to commemorate the anniversary of Senator Joe McCarthy’s claim that 205 members of the State Department were Communists: 1950: McCarthy Launches Anti-Red Crusade. There is a link also to Secret McCarthy papers released.

My feelings when writing about McCarthyism are similar to those of Jonah Goldberg expressed in this article. There are two messages to get across.

Message One: McCarthy was a state-backed bully and demagogue who harmed many innocent people. The banning of the Communist party was a disgrace to the freedoms of the US. (Did you know Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors’ Guild, opposed it?)

Message Two: Communist infiltration was rife in the State Department and elsewhere. Many of those McCarthy named were Communists. Some were Communist agents.

The BBC articles linked two are strong on Message One. Message Two – or Fact Two, rather (as since the publication of the Venona Intercepts carried out by the National Security Agency, there can no longer be serious doubt about the extent of Communist infiltration) is nowhere mentioned.

From the first-mentioned BBC article:

He named Dr Owen Lattimore as “the top Russian espionage agent”.

McCarthy’s claim that Owen Lattimore was the top Soviet spy in the US was certainly wrong. The question of whether he was a spy at all is subject to heated debate. There is no doubt, though, that he sucked up to Stalin in the most sickening way. After visiting the notorious Kolyma complex of labour camps he wrote an article for National Geographic magazine in which he commended one commandant for his “deep sense of civic responsibility”. (Scroll down to “Blinded by the truth” on this link.)That pronouncement was not an isolated incident but consistent with his general line. If Lattimore is to be mentioned at all, something of this should be mentioned too.

The article goes on:

His [McCarthy’s] claims were not substantiated, but many lost their jobs or reputations. He used a combination of intimidation and hearsay evidence to browbeat the accused.

The implication is that none of his claims were substantiated. Yet the idea that not all of McCarthy’s victims were innocent is neither new, nor little-known, nor confined to right-wing extremists. Back on 4 April 1996 an article appeared in the Washington Post by the liberal journalist Nicholas Von Hoffman saying “Was McCarthy Right About The Left?” (The link takes you to summary of the article in WaPo archive – you must pay to read it all.) That article became famous, particularly as it came from a left-winger.

Since then there has been a stream of writing on the subject.

You’d never know any of this from the BBC.