Author Archives: Natalie

Come back, Lord Reith, all is forgiven.

writes:

One story prominently featured over the Easter holiday weekend was the leftie march to Aldermaston, including various puff-pieces in advance (i.e. advertising for fellow-travellers).

Monday’s ‘News front page’ featured two links to stories about this relative non-event. The same story is highlighted a day later on the UK news page:

Joy as nuclear marchers hit base

Deep joy indeed. The story, by Hannah Bayman, features interviews with various protestors, Giulia Giglioggi, 11-year old Leela Levitt (from Southampton “pleading with parents Malcolm and Latha”, Daniel Franceschini and Reverend Hazel Barkham.

Knowing the BBC’s rigourous and honest approach, I did a little Googling for these people.

Giulia Giglioggi returns nothing. Google helpfully suggests “Giulia Gigliotti”, from Southampton, who it turns out is a major organiser of such protests (inc. a letter in the Grauniad signed ‘Giulia Gigliotti, Nuclear Information Service’) – all omitted (or simply unseen) by our scrupulous BBC inquisitor. (‘Nuclear Information Service’ turns out to be www.nukeinfo.co.uk – also based in Southampton).

Reverend Hazel Barkham (Google alternative ‘Barking’!) is also, unsurprisingly, a prominent anti-nuclear activist, popping up around the web and around the world.

So, how could our rigourous BBC reporter omit to mention the prominence of these anti-nuclear organisers whilst writing such a happy, nay joyous, report of this traditional outing?

Another spot of Googling, this time for ‘Hannah Bayman’, reveals a number of interesting Hannah Bayman coincidences:

– Revolutionary Communists “Rock around the Blockade at Guantanamo” (in April 2000 no less), inc. Hannah Bayman “I am really interested in the Pioneers and the UJC (Union of Young Communists)” (Link);

– “Operation Desert Rescue – 9.6m children in danger” – list of supporters includes “Hannah Bayman, Southampton, BBC journalist” (Link);

– Socialist Worker 26Apr03 letters page – an angry rant about Iraqi freedom, from Hannah Bayman, Southampton (Link);

– Globalise Resistance “free Nicola and Richard” petition – signed by Hannah Bayman, freelance journalist (Link);

– The Observer 21Jul02 letters page – Hannah Bayman of London N1 writes “People across the world have marched against Israel’s war in Palestine, including 80,000 in London in May, largely ignored by the mainstream British press. In September thousands more are expected to rally in London against the threat of a bloody war in Iraq. In November thousands of activists will converge in Florence for the European Social Forum, a weekend of demonstrations and debate on the future of the anti-capitalist movement.” (Link)

It seems I’m not alone in doubting the objectivity of Ms. Bayman – Robert Hinkley has posted details of his dealings with her here and here. Note also the picture here which is remarkably like the BBC picture here.

For those with long memories, I wonder if the Chris Blake in the first picture is the same as the one interviewed by Hannah for the BBC here. If so, Hannah seems to have a remarkably intimate interviewing technique – too intimate one might think to ensure the impartiality and objectivity that a Beeb-taxpayer might expect from the “World’s premier news broadcaster”, as they term themselves.

Just to be clear, BBC reporters, like everyone else, are entitled to their personal opinions. However, in the interests of transparency, when a reporter interviews a personal acquaintance (in this case Chris Blake, a former comrade on a political magazine “Resist”), it is, at best, a discourtesy to his or her readers not to mention it.

First we got the bomb, and that was good

‘Cause we love peace and motherhood

Then Russia got the bomb, but that’s okay

‘Cause the balance of power’s maintained that way

– so sung the American satirist Tom Lehrer.But the Beeb tells it differently.

Michael Gill writes:

I visited the following URL: “Still fighting the bomb, 50 years on.” (Typical output from the Beeb)

From that page, I followed the link to “RELATED BBCi LINKS: On This Day 1957: Britain drops its first H-bomb

Now this page did have an interesting bias.

Take a look at the “Timeline: Arms Race” box. Note how we are given dates when the US exploded H-bombs, when the UK exploded H-bombs, when the French exploded an A-bomb, even when the Chinese detonated an H-bomb.

But no dates for the Soviet Union! At all!

[Well, there are lots of dates for the Soviet union participating in talks to reduce nuclear weapons and several mentions of it having missiles and warheads. It just doesn’t say how it got them. I blame the tooth fairy. – NS]

Interesting arms race where one side doesn’t appear to be participating!

Even though the Soviet Union did detonate by far the biggest H-bomb of them all, the BBC can’t find room to mention it.

According to this website the first Soviet test H-bomb was exploded on 12 August 1953. I gather there is quite a difference in difficulty between making a static experimental bomb and one capable of being launched from an aircraft or missile. (Britain, unusually, went straight to this stage.) The first Soviet thermonuclear bomb to be dropped from an aircraft was exploded in Kazakhstan on 22 November 1955. The biggest H-bomb ever, as mentioned by Mr Gill in his e-mail, was exploded by the USSR over Novaya Zemlya on 30 October 1961. Given a very basic general knowledge of twentieth century history, these dates aren’t hard to find via Google. It’s downright odd that they weren’t mentioned in a timeline that includes such relatively obscure details as the date of France’s third H-bomb. And what the devil is the banning of landmines by the UK doing in a nuclear timeline?

That’s just my little joke. Scott Burgess quotes a BBC report which is slightly less alarming. Slightly.

Ceefax is a bit of a poor relation nowadays. Even so they ought not to let this through: yesterday’s page 120, headed “Algeria’s leader wins landslide” said,

Mr Bouteflika is credited with taming an Islamic insurgency which has claimed some 100,000 lives in two years.

No dout the insurgents themselves claim to be the true representatives of Islam. But there is no reason for the BBC to underwrite this claim. Their bitter opponents in the Algerian government are also overwhelmingly Muslim. Millions of other Muslims from other countries would also object to the description of the insurgents as simply “Islamic”, just as I would object if the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda were described as simply “Christian.”

A reader writes:

As of 00:21 UTC this story is linked on the BBC’s front foreign web page:

“End of an era: Debate still rages over the toppling of Saddam’s statue”

To his credit, Mr. Wood includes his firsthand recollection that the crowd at the Saddam statue (which some have claimed was faked) was in the several hundreds. To his shame, he mentions that wide shot of the square as if it shows anything like what the activists claim.

Here’s the wide shot, folks:

link Notice that the BIG, BLACK STATUE is nowhere near its pedestal, and therefore the picture could have been made any time AFTER the event.

Typically, the BBC Online editors spin the story as a “raging debate,” in which the firsthand account of the BBC correspondent carries as much weight as a photograph scribbled on by someone thousands of miles away.

I propose a photoshop contest in which people prove that other historical events did not occur by scribbling on well-known photographs in Indymedia fashion.

I think Wood’s own testimony clearly and deliberately debunks the conspiracy theory – which was feeble even by the usual standards of such things. It was a pity that he doesn’t seem to have looked at the famous wide shot very hard or read the many criticisms of it written at the time. Like, it’s getting dark yet the statue fell in bright sunlight. Read this post by Josh Chavetz of Oxblog for more analysis.

As so often with the BBC the link text or the headlines let the actual reporting down. When I linked to this article the headline was “The Day Saddam’s Statue fell.” I think the reader who sent this is saying that the original headline was the one mentioning debate as still raging. If so, it’s good that they’ve changed the headline.

The reason I have no trouble believing that the original headline gave credence to the conspiracy theory is that the link to this article under the under the heading “Analysis” (in the right hand column common to all this clutch of articles) is still offering a leg-up to the conspiracymongers.

At 11.20 BST it says “Toppled But questions remain about the iconic moment when Saddam Hussein’s statue fell. “

Excuse me, no they don’t. Not unless you think your own reporter – all of your own reporters – and several dozen others from many countries – and several hundred Iraqis – and dozens of US troops – have all agreed to tell the same barefaced lie and have maintained it with superhuman consistency for a year since.

Incidentally, having tracked a number of BBC stealth edits I know that the the “Last updated” field at the top of web stories means nothing.

isn’t so happy. He recounts one of those little gems of newsreader wit that the BBC fondly imagines make the newsreaders more lovable. The post below about the three headed toad is also interesting.

Today I found a little scrap of paper upon which I had written these words. Shows you how often we tidy the coffee table. However, better late than never I must say the word of praise to the BBC that I wrote the note to remind myself to do.

A few weeks ago I caught the end of Crufts dog show. Just as a dog made of candy floss was joining the line-up of finalists, loud boos broke out from the audience. Gosh, I thought, unjustly as it turned out, I thought all these doggy people were more sporting than that. As if they’d read my mind the BBC announcers said (all this is from memory and so these aren’t exact words): “The reason you can hear booing is that some people are staging a demonstration over to our right.” Then with a weary sigh I waited for the camera to swing right and give the demonstrators the attention they wanted.

But it never happened. All we had was a shot of some stewards running out of camera range, then the female announcer said with unmistakable satisfaction, “Ah, that interruption seems to have been dealt with very promptly. On with the show!”

UPDATE: I pushed my luck and looked up the story here. Oh well, I suppose they have to report what the protest was about somewhere. If ever, for instance, the disagreements between the British and American Kennel Clubs as to the proper angle of a Lithuanian Mop Dog’s ears were to break out into thermonuclear war that laid waste Western Europe, even I would concede that the story would qualify as news. But I am glad to see that not every wannabe agitator who disrupts a non-political event is given time on camera. The announcers and cameramen handled it professionally.

asks whether old B-BBC fave Michael Rosen (“the real world isn’t that simple unless you’re George Bush”) and Marie-Noelle Lamy of the Open University are playing out of their league in sneering at Pres. Bush academically.

how the Radio 4 news starts with a summary and then goes on to cover the same stories in more detail? Well, in today’s 1 o’clock news the summary said that a fax had been sent to a newspaper by the Abu Nayaf al-Afghani group saying that Spain would suffer more terrorism if it did not withdraw its troops from Iraq.

Just Iraq.

I thought it sounded odd, given the name of the group. And so it proved: when it came to the detailed story later (from a female correspondent whose name I did not catch) we heard that the actual threat was that Spain would suffer if it did not remove its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just over-hasty editing? Could be, could be – but just for fun, why not amuse yourself working out a political motive for playing up Iraq and playing down Afghanistan as a motive for terrorism.