Author Archives: Natalie

the communist authorities ordered the construction of millions of backyard iron furnaces to forward the revolution. Nearly all this vast effort was useless. You can’t make industrial-quality iron from mud-brick furnaces. I thought of this when I read in Christopher Booker an item (scroll down) about

Another ludicrous example of how the BBC now pushes its own cock-eyed agenda was an item on Radio 4’s You and Yours last week on wind turbines. The message was that, if you install your own turbine, you can make money by selling the surplus to the National Grid.

All five contributors, including the energy minister, Mike O’Brien, were wide-eyed lobbyists for wind power. A man from Kent who has erected a 45-foot turbine at the bottom of his garden, at a cost of £25,000, was asked how much electricity it produced. He admitted that, thanks to the vagaries of the wind, it did not average more than “two or three kilowatts”. The BBC carefully did not explain that this is only enough to power a couple of electric fires, or boil a few kettles.

Just above that there is an item about the BBC downplaying of the tsunami relief work of the US and Australian Navies in favour of reports about the views of politicians on the disaster, the EU’s three minute silence and so on.

Do more people read the blogs than watch BBC Digital? Speaks for itself.

Second comes a wee snippet about the Kirsty Wark affair which in turn links to this post from Freedom & Whisky. (Some of our US readers, or indeed some of our English readers, may not have been following Warkgate. You should. It’s something like Celebrity Big Brother for the Scottish ruling elite. Check out Ed Thomas’s recent posts. Kirsty Walk is the BBC Scotland presenter who does their election night specials and lots of other political work. And holidays with the First Minister. And helped approve the designs for the famous and astonishingly costly Scottish Parliament building. And who refused to hand over footage from a documentary about the building and its astonishing cost to the inquiry about the same, a refusal backed up by the then controller of BBC Scotland, John McCormick, who said surrendering the tapes would clash with the BBC’s policies.)

The Bunny has up a third post that includes the wonderful line “it was as if Grima Wormtongue had been banished for the day.”It’s about the BBC when it was Auntie.

writes:

Just have a look at this. The Hizbollah attacks an Israeli army vehicle in Israel, Israel shoots back and the headline is “Israel mounts south Lebanon raid.” Not “Hizbollah attack Israeli army vehicle” or anything similar.

Bloody Trots.

UPDATE: That was the headline when I wrote the post. Now it’s different. David B comments:

“Looks like they changed it to “clashes erupt on Lebanon border”. Let’s blame both sides instead…. that’s fair isn’t it?

Sleep on it, they say. Sleep on it and you’ll feel calmer in the morning. I did and I don’t. Yes, I’m talking about the BBC peddling conspiracy theories about Diego Garcia and the tsunami again. Again because I find it more disturbing the more I think about it, and because I have a few more links to add. Actually, this is going to tie into one of the most heartfelt complaints against the BBC: its reluctance to use the word “terrorist”.

To recap:

The British Broadcasting Corporation, funded by the British taxpayer considers it an open question whether, ten days ago, between one hundred thousand and a quarter of a million people were at best deliberately not saved or at worst murdered by the United States Government.

You think I’m exaggerating? Read the BBC story again. “Or was some malign hand at work…” If that “malign hand” does not mean either that the Americans started the tsunami and by some devilish means made it circumvent this island (strange and costly mercy amid such vast ruthlessness!) or warned their own servicemen while deliberately leaving others, including American tourists, to die, then what does it mean?

The British Broadcasting Corporation, funded by the British taxpayer, publicises this proposition and invites its millions of online readers worldwide to debate it in a non-judgemental fashion.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, funded by the British taxpayer, declines to give an opinion as to whether these rumours are true.

Many of those readers, both from the West and the East, are uneducated scientifically. Many of them are living in countries and cultures where paranoid conspiracy theories about the Americans and/or the Jews are common currency (even more than they are in certain left-wing circles here in the UK.) Many of them move in circles where the wish to kill an American or many Americans in revenge for this colossal crime which, they are told by their neighbours and their own newspapers, the US has perpetrated on their people need not remain a fantasy.

“Why did mother die, father?”

“Because of the Americans, my son. Some say they let off an atom bomb under the sea. Others only that they knew a great wave was coming but left us to die while warning their own people.”

“My teacher says that’s propaganda. For all that they are foreigners, for many years we have known that the BBC is more trustworthy than the papers here. We should see what the people at the BBC say.”

“Even the BBC dare not deny it.”

Rumours like this have started race riots, pogroms and even wars. Once started they go on for decades. There is no more fertile soil for terrorism than a sense of historical grievance. Fifteen years from now I expect young men now children to be blowing up aeroplanes because they grew up believing that hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists were killed by the Great Satan. The BBC will have played a part in that.

(And if it wasn’t yet obvious to you that it is all rubbish, if you are inclined to take literally the splendidly sarcastic first comment to the previous post from Bob Gleason, “As a Yank, I want to confirm that the U.S. military can, indeed, start a tsunami at will, but then have it go around any installations we might have in its path. My tax dollars at work. Damn, we’re good!”, ask yourself why, if the Yanks can and would do that, did they waste their time directing their tsunami at Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. Why not North Korea? There are lots of earthquakes in the Sea of Japan to work from. There was one Thursday before last.

You might also take a look at a new blog I found via our referrer logs, Shadow Chaser. The author, Michael Gill, has up two posts about all this, here and here.

Mr Gill points out more BBC misinformation. This BBC story about the effect of the tsunami on Somalia says

The small Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia – home to a US naval base – escaped unharmed as it was forewarned by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii.

This account from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association does not say anything about the reason for Diego Garcia escaping unharmed being that it was forewarned. It merely says that the US Navy at Diego Garcia reported to the US Navy Pacific Command at 8.20pm Hawaiian Standard Time that it had not observed the tsunami then.

And as Mr Gill says, Diego Garcia scarcely needed a warning from Hawaii, as the tsunami had hit the shores of Thailand and Indonesia hours before it reached Diego Garcia. Look at the animation of the tsunami he links to. Diego Garcia is that dot in the bottom left corner. (Strictly speaking that dot must be the whole Chagos Archipelago group of islands, of which DG is one. It’s at 6.34S, 72.24E if you want to use the latitude and longitude scales at the side.)

It’s a damn shame that nothing like the Pacific warning system was in place in the Indian Ocean. Those NOAA guys seem to have tried, but – “I’m a scientist! Get me the President of Indonesia!” Sorry, the world doesn’t work that way. Or it didn’t ten days ago when tsunamis were considered rare in the Indian Ocean; it might today. The fact is that a monitoring station in the wrong bloody ocean which was never set up to work outside its area was never going to be able do that much. The systems were not set up. Tsunamis move at 500mph. Sad, very sad. Not evidence of a malign hand.

So how does a conspiracy theory about the tsunami link into use of the word “terrorist”?

The answer to this is tied into the answer to another set of questions: What is the BBC for? Why do we have to pay for it?

Recently in an effort to be more accountable the BBC instituted Newswatch. This Newswatch story about why the BBC will not refer to ETA members as terrorists confirmed what many here already knew: that the BBC’s policy is to admit the existence of something called “terrorism” in general but not to ever call anyone terrorists, even if they are admitted to have carried out what the same writer, Matt Holder, calls “atrocities”. Presumably the outburst of uses by the BBC of the word “terrorist” applied to specific individuals at Beslan, commented upon in this blog, was in violation of those rules. Here is the reason Matt Holder gives for the policy:

It [the BBC] avoids labels wherever it can. And its credibility is severely undermined if international audiences think they can detect a bias for or against any of those involved.

Actually that isn’t what credibility means. You have credibility when people think you are truthful, not when you successfully conceal from them what you think good or bad.

The only reason why we should care about the credibility of the BBC; why our society should see it as enough of a Good Thing to pay for it out of a particularly unpopular hypothecated tax, is that the credibility of the BBC provides some social good.

The social goods that the BBC claims to provide are ensuring people are well informed (an ideal that rests on the proposition that truth in itself is good) and making people better citizens – that is more peaceable, more tolerant, more law-abiding, better able to participate in society. Oh, and in so far as the non-UK audience is being considered, less likely to kill Britishers.

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. Don’t kid yourself. All public broadcasting is ultimately advocacy.

If truth in itself matters, then you don’t abuse your position of trust to pass on a known and dangerous lie, pretending that your hands are clean so long as you don’t actually endorse it. That is what the BBC did in spreading the tsunami conspiracy theory.

On to the T-word: 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? Or about rape, or theft, or racial attacks or any of the other crimes that disfigure the body politic? Some section of our own British audience – quite a large section if the BBC is to be believed – cheers on racist attacks and presumably objects to any bias against those involved. Why does the BBC not strive to maintain its “credibility” with them?

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

What is the BBC saving up its credibility for anyway? The mere pleasure of contemplating the high regard in which it is held? The BBC audience figures are no concern of mine. If the BBC is striving to keep that segment of its international audience that thinks it OK to take children hostage and shoot them comfortable with its beliefs, then would that the figures were lower! The basic reason for me, the taxpayer, wishing for you, the BBC, to be trusted is so that you can change that sort of thinking. So that when there is an important truth you must convey you are believed. So that when it it is necessary to save lives you can say, “this rumour is not true” and they’ll take it from you, because you are truthful.

That was the first line of an email from a reader. He or she then directed me to this:

“Why did US base escape tsunami?”

After outlining a current conspiracy theory about the tsunami mysteriously sparing the US base in Diego Garcia, the BBC article says:

Is America a power for good or ill in the world? Was there a malign hand at work, or has America’s role in the crisis in fact been a model of humanitarian leadership.

Let us know what you think. Is this just anti-US sentiment on the web or something more worrying?

You can read and send us your views from this page.

Contemptible. And now a public service announcement: have you remembered to pay your licence fee? This webpage will enable you to give £121 to the BBC, as you are legally obliged to do, with the minimum of inconvenience. Avoid any unpleasantness by paying now. Remember that the BBC relies on its “unique system of funding” in order to fulfil its vision of becoming “the most creative, trusted organisation in the world.” Come to think of it, why not pay twice? Then perhaps the the BBC might favour us with yet more internet conspiracy theories presented as neutral topics for discussion. I don’t think we’ve had the 4,000 Israelis or Operation Monarch yet.

The published comments were a mixture. There were some sceptical voices, but the usual run of earnest semi-literate cultists also jumped in. David Moore asks:

“Could it have been an attempt by the Neo-Conservative Christian Right to let set off an atom bomb, in order, to open the gates of hell and put out the flames with the water.”

Own up. Which one of you was it?

Children’s BBC is shocked and traumatised.

Children as young as 10 are on their way to becoming addicted to shopping, according to a new report.

A thousand girls and boys were asked about their shopping habits and eight out of 10 in the 10-12 age-group said they enjoy shopping.

But the same number admitted they buy things they don’t need, in the survey by the National Consumer Council.

The horror! The horror!

Meanwhile the villanous Blithering Bunny revels in the sheer evil of it all.

“Young Emily fell into a cesspit of visiting attractively-presented stores where well-made and stylish consumer goods were available at reasonable prices. Little did she realize the lasting damage that was being done to herself and society as she tried on a wide variety of good-looking clothes, before deciding to purchase some of them. Later on unspeakable evil was done as she listened to music CDs on her new CD player while talking to friends on her new mobile phone. Despite the atrocities she had committed, she wanted to do this again. And again. She knew that she would always be drawn to these shadowy, looming edifices called… shops. Her desires could not be quelled. Nokia and Nike owned her soul and she would not resist”.

Due to pressure of work I have only just read this email which arrived last week from L Rogers of Zimbabwe. The BBC, to its credit, is now persona (organisatia?) non grata in Zimbabwe. It was not always so. Mr Rogers writes:

My own experience with the BBC arises from the events in Zimbabwe concerning the “so-called” Land Question. I hope you will not find it too lengthy. If you do, and you find this account worth publishing, then please edit and let me know what you have done.

In fact, although it is somewhat longer than most of our posts, I am publishing it uncut. As with all the reader’s letters we publish, it does not necessarily represent the opinion of this blog, but it struck me as a very interesting and all-too-plausible mini-history of institutional bias. – NS

After Zimbabwe’s independence, Mugabe was the darling of the BBC, the leftwing media and other leftists. The potential problem of “Land” was rarely raised by Mugabe. Indeed after independence he, and his ministers, invited white farmers to stay and farm for the benefit of the country. .

Towards the end of the 1900’s, Zimbabwe started to experience economic and other problems arising from Mugabe’s poor governance and Mugabe started to lose popularity. At this point, in order to deflect criticism and to shore up his political standing, Mugabe started to raise the question of “Land”. He used the same tactics as Hitler used. Blame a minority. Hitler blamed the Jews – Mugabe blamed the whites – in particular the white farmers. Using blatantly racist language, he proclaimed the whites to be “enemies of the state”, and claimed “the whites” owned/occupied too much of the country’s land and the “millions of suffering peasants” were discontented with this situation. Mugabe propagated as a “fact” that white farmers (commercial) farmers owned the bulk of the land in Zimbabwe. The figures varied but generally it was said that whites owned “75% ” or “80% ” of the land or “75% of the fertile land” or “80% of the best land” and so on.

The BBC gleefully jumped onto the Mugabe bandwagon, quoting these figures in support of Mugabe’s assertion that whites indeed owned too much of Zimbabwe’s land and that this inequity was causing mass discontent among the millions of “suffering peasants”. What Mugabe was doing they agreed, was to redress a basically inequitable situation – even though what he did – and is still doing – was racist and illegal. Besides, the leftists in the BBC were not about to criticise one of their own – someone they admired and had supported all those years before – a black socialist revolutionary leader.

Of course, if one uses these figures, then it does seem entirely reasonable for Mugabe to redress the situation. By holding on to the bulk of the land to the detriment of the millions of suffering peasants, the white farmers were made to look greedy and callous. Who could blame Mugabe in the circumstances?

During the years that followed, this data and Mugabe’s claims were used frequently by the BBC TV and World Service radio. Joseph Winter, the BBC World Service representative stationed in Harare at that time, often and indignantly used this data to justify the Zimbabwe government’s illegal action against white farmers. The basic argument was, “you can’t blame Mugabe for taking action against 4000 white farmers. It is wrong for so few people (whites) to occupy the bulk of the land in Zimbabwe, when millions of suffering peasants are crammed onto such a small area and with such poor land”. This was extended to include the accusation that 100 years ago, the whites stole/seized the land from the blacks who were simply taking it back.

When being interviewed on the BBC, the same dishonest “facts” are repeated by Mugabe’s agents, ambassadors and ministers and used as justification for what they are doing. Rarely is this data disputed by the interviewers.

As the only respected international broadcaster based in Zimbabwe, one can be reasonably certain that the BBC’s endorsement of Mugabe’s data gave respectability to what Mugabe was doing. After all, you can trust the BBC to tell the truth.

This theme, using the same or similar data was seized upon by others in the media, and used by the press in South Africa, by Reuters, AFP, CNN and others, whenever the problem of “land in Zimbabwe” was a news item. As a consequence, the plight of the white minority, received little sympathy in the worlds media as Mugabe, for short term political gain, illegally and violently dispossessed nearly 4000 white farmers of their lawfully acquired land and in the process created unemployment and starvation for more than half a million farm workers and their families, and long term famine for the country. Thus he created rampant unemployment and poverty in the country.

After 2000, the BBC and Joseph Winter were expelled from Zimbabwe because Mugabe did not like the way the BBC reported on Zimbabwe’s elections. Despite this Joseph Winter still managed to report on World Service on the Land question leaving listeners in no doubt that he was sympathetic with the reasons given by Mugabe in order to redress a “colonial wrong”. The data on land occupation in Zimbabwe were used by the BBC for a number of years until the full consequences of Mugabe’s policies became apparent.

But what is the truth?

1. The truth is that white farmers, under Zimbabwe’s laws, may only occupy farm land set aside by the government as “Commercial” farm land. Commercial farm land comprises 11 million hectares and amounts to about 20% of the total land area of the country. It is never mentioned that Black Commercial farmers also own a substantial share of the same “commercial” farm land. Where I live in Zimbabwe, a number of black commercial farmers own large farms unhindered by the government while their white neighbors have been dispossessed. White farmers probably occupied about one sixth the land in Zimbabwe. This may nevertheless be a large area considering that they comprised only about 4000 individuals, but a far cry from the figures being bandied about by the media and the government and is not unusual in agriculture based countries. What is never mentioned is that the largest landowner in Zimbabwe is the government itself. Almost all government owned agricultural land is undeveloped and underutilized but has never been used to meet the needs of the peasants.

That white farmers occupy “almost all of the best or most fertile” land is also a myth. Commercial farm land includes ranch land in arid areas with little water where cattle struggle to survive and suitable only for game and wild life. It includes land with poor soils and granite mountains on which nothing can be planted or grazed. Large areas of fertile land are reserved for and occupied by black subsistence farmers.

As far as the colonial “stealing” of the land is concerned, most white farmers (80%) bought their farms in Zimbabwe during the years after independence, with the encouragement of the Mugabe government.

Another myth is that Mugabe intended to redistribute the white land by giving it to black farmers. In fact Mugabe gave most of the former white land to his friends and cronies. That this was happening, and would happen in the future, was apparent to Mugabe’s critics but ignored by the BBC and others.

A further fact which was ignored by the BBC was the harm that would be inflicted on the workers employed by the white farmers. The Commercial farmers pointed out that more than half a million farm workers would lose their only means of livelihood and, after including their families, millions would be destitute. The BBC chose to ignore their plight and instead believed the government when it promised the workers they would also get their free piece of Zimbabwe land. Besides the whites did not treat their workers well, they said. In fact, Mugabe regarded the farm workers as contaminated by the opinions of their white employers and therefore as political enemies who would never support him anyway. Today millions of former workers beg in the streets of Zimbabwe’s towns or have fled the country altogether.

The clamour of the peasants for more land is also a myth. In a survey conducted by the Social Welfare department of the government itself during mid 1990 most people polled listed a job as their number one priority. The desire for a barren piece of farm land was low down on the list. Four years after the land dispossessions started, the government cannot find enough peasants to actually occupy the seized land, so much so that in many cases the government has used threats against the reluctant peasants. Of the “millions” of suffering peasants who it was claimed were clamouring for land, only a handful have actually emerged to take advantage of the free land actually offered to them.

All this information was available to the BBC at the time but was ignored in favour of supporting their man – Mugabe.

In 2002, Rageeh Omar appearing on BBC TV in Johannesburg, and repeated some of these myths, stating, among other things, that the white farmers occupied “75% of the land” in Zimbabwe. I was appalled that the BBC still repeated this false data and telephoned the BBC in Johannesburg and spoke to the producer of BBC news. The person I spoke to was, I believe, Jane Stanley, who is now based in the US. I told her that the figures used by the BBC are incorrect. She was obviously annoyed that someone should have the temerity to criticize the accuracy of a BBC report but agreed the report should have stated that white farmers “occupy 75% of the most fertile land.” When I persisted in referring to incorrect data being used by the BBC she trumped me by retorting triumphantly that the data had been given her by the Commercial Farmers Union in Harare and therefore was correct!

I was dumbstruck and ended the conversation. I could not believe I had been so wrong and immediately telephoned the offices of the Commercial Farmers Union in Harare and spoke to the CEO, Mr Dave Hasluck. After relating to him my conversation he answered that he had on many occasions communicated with the BBC in order to correct the misinformation they were broadcasting. He had frequently sent them documents with the correct information but the response of the BBC was always the same – they simply ignored the information sent to them and carried on broadcasting the same myths. They did not even bother to contact him or reply.

What the BBC did, at least until recently, was to ignore the truth and knowingly assist the Mugabe government in the propagation of myths and lies to the detriment of a minority ethnic group and ultimately to the detriment of the people of the country as a whole. They were even prepared to overlook the openly declared policies of Mugabe which were blatantly racist, dishonest, and violent. They ignored the truth even when it was pointed out to them in favour of left-wing solidarity. I believe Mugabe was emboldened by the lack of criticism and the apparent seal of approval given him by the BBC in particular and other sections of the media in general.

It is too late now, but what might have been the result if, instead, the BBC and others in the media had adopted principled policies and told the truth. Perhaps Mugabe might have been restrained and some of his worst excesses might have been avoided. Perhaps millions of people, the same ” millions of suffering peasants” and now the remaining urban people as well, some ten million black people, would not have been plunged into an endless cycle of famine, poverty, disease and suffering.

L.Rogers. Zimbabwe. November 26th 2004

for “Best British Blog” in the Weblog Awards. I feel a certain conflict of interest writing this because I also write for Samizdata, another contender. And, dash it, there are many other fine blogs listed, such as all of them. So, er, vote for someone!

“Lobstertom” writes:

Finally they’ve given us a report on the Oil for Food scandal – buried in the Business section.

It is “We discovered this…” and “we found that…” It is an absolute lot of nonsense. And of course with a shot at the Americans in the last line.

Also they fail to mention Kofi Annan at all – as you will know UNSCAM was run out of his office.

If they have changed the “report” I have already taken a copy – I’ll let you know if they change it.

I was amused but not surprised by the headline: “Companies in ‘oil-for-food scam'” True, companies were one end of it. But given that it takes two to tango wouldn’t an equally valid headline have been “UN in ‘oil-for-food scam'”? Equally valid but not equally likely to appear.

Come to think of it another equally valid but not equally likely headline would be “Biggest Financial Scandal in the History of the World.”

According to one of Tim Blair’s readers, Richard Compton, the caption to the picture of Condoleezza Rice on this BBC piece about her appointment as Bush’s secretary of state has been changed.

It originally read “His master’s voice.”

If you scroll down the post there is another useful comment on the BBC article from “Bill”:

Wow, that Beeb piece is off the wall… “the influence of the State Department which tends to take a longer term view of world affairs… [than the president]”

Cause Islamicism and tyranny always just fix themselves if we’re nice to them… the “long-term” view. In fact Theo van Gogh was just saying the other day… oh, wait. No. No, he wasn’t saying anything.

“The State Department has lost power over the past 30 years as influence has moved to the White House.” Errrrrummmmmm…. yah. Last I checked it was and extension of the Whitehouse, not a separate branch of government…