Author Archives: Natalie

The treatment of the just-ended “Fair Trade Fortnight” on the Children’s BBC website could do with one or two words of dissent from the chorus of approval. The treatment of trade issues as a whole on the CBBC website is one long hymn of praise to the anti-globalisation movement.

This piece, “What is Fair Trade?” presents the “fair trade” initiative as an unquestioned good. Children would never guess that there are respectable arguments against the project: for instance that by disguising price signals it encourages African farmers to ride for a fall. The farmers get a false impression that coffee or chocolate is a safe bet when this isn’t true. This post from the Adam Smith Institute blog by Alex Singleton has more. Incidentally, that post is so straightforwardly written that it could be understood by a young audience. It gives an impression of the sort of pro- free trade arguments that the BBC could put on its children’s website to balance the anti-free trade arguments it does provide – if the BBC were so minded, which it isn’t.

I don’t want to be too critical of the young authors of this report, “Think twice when you buy a chocolate bar.” Encouraging children to think and write about current affairs is a good thing, and it is a rare thirteen year old that knows anything whatsoever about economics (although, come to think of it, the CBBC website does nothing to alleviate the general ignorance when it could do so quite easily). Still, a responsible grown-up should have been found to either edit out or add a correction to the piece of misinformation with which Imogen and Juliette conclude their report:

When you eat non-Fairtrade chocolate, it may have come from a cocoa farm where they use slaves.

Were the authors older I would call that scaremongering. Modern chattel slavery is a phenomenon of marginal, traditional and isolated societies. It is not an issue in the more developed and cash-based African economies that produce chocolate and coffee for Western consumers. Furthermore the proportion of farmers participating in “fair trade” schemes is tiny; to suggest to children that to buy non-fair trade chocolate, i.e. the vast majority of the chocolate on sale, is to be guilty of abetting slavery is irresponsible. I don’t blame Imogen and Juliette for not knowing this. I do blame their BBC editors.

The next page I looked at in the four-page CBBC section on trade issues is called “Why do some people protest?” There isn’t a page presenting any arguments against the protestors.

I personally am not a big fan of the World Trade Organisation, or of any trans-national bureacracy. But even I wonder why this piece “What is the World Trade Organisation?” gives the first half of the page to an Orwellian-sounding description of the WTO’s supposedly awesome power, the second half to yet another list of reasons why some people protest against it, and no space at all to its defenders. Nor was there a link to the WTO website to let viewers see how the organisation itself defends its existence.

In this page, “What are transnational corporations?” we finally had half a sentence suggesting that this trade stuff might be useful sometimes:

Such companies can provide work and enrich a country’s economy – or some say they can exploit the workers with low pay and destroy the environment.

That little whisper of praise was of course instantly quashed by an anti-globo riposte.

The two links provided are to Fairtrade itself and a body affiliated to Oxfam called Make Trade Fair. As I mentioned above, there were no links to the WTO itself or to any robustly pro-trade organisation. It is a measure of how biased CBBC’s approach is that Make Trade Fair looks pro-trade in comparison. At least it acknowledges that trade can lift countries out of poverty.

Trade is basically good. Countries that trade a lot get rich. Countries that do not trade stay poor. Trade happens because both sellers and buyers want it to happen. You would never guess from the CBBC treatment of the subject that these opinions are held explicitly by most economists and politicial leaders of the democratic right and left and implicitly by the billions of people who engage in international trade.

Rather the CBBC treatment is dominated by the views of a loud and ignorant minority.

The BBC reports

A Moroccan trainee teacher has been denied a job in Italy because school authorities feared her headscarf might scare children, local media reported.

Put like that, the decision of the authorities in Samone sounds an utterly pathetic example of Islamophobia. The arguments offered by an official trying to defend the decision do nothing to change that impression:

“(Children) might have been scared and it was better not to run that risk,” official Christina Ferrari said.

I imagined her making a ritual gesture to ward off the Demon of Risk plus a genuflection to The Children™ while she said it. Heaven protect the bambini from seeing terrible headscarfs!

Then I thought, wait a minute. Rural Italy is full of women wearing headscarfs. Even in big cities I saw dozens of grannies in black headscarfs. Headscarfs are not, just not, a big deal in Italy. No one could claim even for a minute that children would be scared of them.

I started to wonder if there was more to the story than met the eye.

I think there is. The newspaper La Repubblica is one of the sources mentioned in the story. This is what La Repubblica reported. The first paragraph says:

Una donna di origine marocchina, Fatima Mouayche, 40 anni, sposa e madre di due bambini, è stata negata la possibilità di frequentare uno stage presso un asilo nido di un paese del canavese perché aveva il capo coperto dal chador, il velo islamico.

It’s a quarter century since my Italian O Level, but here goes:

“A lady of Moroccan origin [note that La Repubblica does not deny her Italian citizenship, unlike the self-consciously PC BBC], Fatima Mouayche aged 40, married with two children, has been denied the possibility of attending a [here my Italian gave out] in the Canavese area because she had her head covered with the chador, the Islamic veil.

Thought so. It was a full veil, not just a headscarf. The officials and people of Samone are being parochial and small-minded but they aren’t being crazy: I can see why rural children unused to the sight of a woman wearing the chador might be frightened, particularly if it covers all but the eyes. On my first day of school I was seriously frightened because my teacher came in wearing a black rain-cape. I thought she was a witch. Wisely, my fears were not indulged, and by the end of the day I had learned a valuable lesson: that even people who wore clothes that looked strange to me could turn out to be nice. It is a pity that the children of Samone are being denied the chance to learn the same lesson.

This has been a long post over the mistranslation of just one word. The reason I bother is that it’s typical of the way that BBC doesn’t even serve its own better ideals well. In its anxiousness to present this as a story of utterly mindless racism, and of pandering to children’s transitory fears, the BBC missed a chance to tell a story that would have made the same points about tolerance more strongly through giving some acknowledgment to the fears that need to be overcome.

There is a new group blog called Oh, That Liberal Media, somewhat on the model of this one but usually covering US newspapers. However this post mentions this BBC despatch:

The BBC dispatch, however, is astonishingly biased, even considering its source. In about 800 words, there is literally no mention of Hamas’s suicide bombings and, amidst copious quotes from Palestinians, all of five words allocated to the Israeli perspective; the quotation marks around the Israeli Army’s statement that Yassin bore “‘personal responsibility’ for attacks that had killed many Israelis” conveniently doubling as scare quotes. After that, the only mention of Hamas’s violent activities is in the third-to-last graf, a generic mention that “the militant group killed scores of Israelis.”

The other three words representing the Israeli perspective, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Zeev Bolm saying that Yassin was “marked for death,” are, so far as I can tell, in fact a months old quote presented as a new utterance, its misuse falsely representing the Israelis in reveling in death and vendetta.

Now when I read the BBC report linked to by OTLM there was the following mention of suicide bombings:

Israel says were responsible for the twin suicide attack in the port of Ashdod on 14 March that killed 10 Israelis.

Whether Harry Seigel of OTLM missed the mention or the BBC did a stealth edit I cannot tell. But I do know the BBC’s track record on stealth edits.

Dash Riprock also comments on a “glowing obituary” for the late Sheikh.

According to Tim Walker’s Mandrake column in the Sunday Telegraph, the BBC disinvited the historian William Shawcross from a debate at the behest of Tariq Ali.

“The two were due to debate the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war on BBC2’s breakfast news programme Weekend 24 yesterday with the affable presenter Simon McCoy. Then Ali seemingly had a hissy fit and said that if Shawcross was taking part he’d pull out.”

The BBC acquiesced. Malcolm Rifkind and Donald Anderson MP came on in place of Shawcross.

Sorry there is no link; I couldn’t find this online.

new blog Talking Hoarsely will join the list of personal blogs by B-BBC posters just as soon as I summon up the courage to dive into the template.

Ed’s most recent post is headed “Controversy over at B-BBC.” It’s about Patrick Crozier’s post of a few days ago, which was indeed very controversial.

What’s our official collective position, then? Answer: there isn’t one. This blog is a functioning anarchy.

, quoting a BBC article about Sheikh Yassin that says:

“Militant groups like Hamas did initially declare a temporary truce, but that unravelled in July 2003 after Israeli forces killed two Hamas members in retaliation for the suicide bombing of a Jerusalem bus that left 21 people dead.”

Walter comments:

Note how the BBC has got this deliberately and completely a**-about.

The suicide bomb that killed 21 people was not the end of the temporary truce. It was all Israeli’s fault – they should have just copped the 21 deaths sweet and left it at that. Then we’d still have the truce.

In the BBC’s distorted world view Hamas can murder but that’s not breaking a truce – that’s just all in a day’s work.

Pardon me while I spew.

UPDATE: In the first comment to this post. La Marquise asks, “Does Ian Paisley ever get called a ‘spiritual leader’ by the BBC?”

about the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist on the Today programme. Laban Tall heard the programme. So did Melanie Phillips. So can you if you click Laban Tall’s Real Audio link.

Your BBC.

Tonight at nine o’clock BBC2 will show a “If… things don’t get any better, a docu-drama set a decade from now in which Andrew Kirk, Britain’s first black Prime Minister (played by Colin McFarlane) confronts rising inequality and crime.

As it happens I have a small but definite reason for wishing the show well. Colin McFarlane’s brother is Kevin McFarlane, who like me is a member of the Libertarian Alliance and has written for it on political theory and scientific issues. I’ve exchanged the odd cordial email with him.

OK, OK, the admirable political opinions of the brother of the lead actor of a show are a teeny bit off topic. You are here for BBC bias and you’ll get some, don’t worry. Let’s not judge the show itself till we’ve seen it, but the website pages telling us about it are firmly in the BBC bubble. The assumptions that run through these pages are the most innocent type of bias – but are all the more pervasive for that. The writers mean no harm. They’ve just never seriously considered alternative intepretations. All the more reason to offer some.

For example, in the link above it says:

Kirk – played by Colin McFarlane – is determined to narrow a rich-poor divide through welfare spending and higher taxes. It’s political science fiction, of course, but the issues are 100% real.

His is an idealism unpopular with middle-class taxpayers, many of whom live in gated communities – a physical divide between the haves and the have-nots with whom they share a postcode.

It is assumed that narrowing the rich-poor divide through welfare spending and higher taxes constitutes “idealism”. It is assumed that the opposition of the middle-class taxpayers is anything but idealistic. One day before I’m old I’d like to read of a BBC drama about how a brave band of middle-class taxpayers idealistically oppose the force-based politics of a prime minister determined to keep power in elite hands by the creation of a welfare-dependent client class.

The assumption that inequality causes crime is also ever-present. For instance, here’s a page with factoids about inequality and crime. Never mentioned: a hundred years ago inequality was much greater and yet crime was much less. Never mentioned: total crime may have fallen but violent crime has steeply increased. Never remotely considered: welfare causes crime and perpetuates poverty.

I’m not saying that this particular programme or any particular programme is obliged to go by my assumptions. But let’s put it this way: “If… things don’t get any better” is the first of a series of similar docu-dramas. It will be interesting to see if any of them look at things from outside the BBC worldview.

. In what looks like a hopeful development, the BBC reports that Kano State is now going to vaccinate, but using Asian-made vaccines – the idea being that Asian vaccines are safe from CIA and Mossad contaminants. This sounds like a face-saver to me, but sheesh, whatever works. Since it is now the case as the story says that “half of the world’s new polio cases originate in northern Nigeria” anything that puts the lid on the epidemic is good.

I’m still deeply disappointed by the fact that the BBC still has up the conspiracy-mongering story I posted about here. I found out something new about that story today, hence this post. When I did a search for “polio” I got this page. At the moment the relevant story is second entry down. Look at the describer line below the heading. It says: Kano state governor gains fame among Muslims for his firm stand against the polio vaccine.

That makes the governor’s policy against vaccination sound brave and admirable, particularly to a Muslim audience. Even the word “stand” subtly points the reader into seeing the issue as one where Muslim pride is at stake.

The BBC’s audience in Africa is large. There is no doubt that Africans do, just as the BBC claims they do, turn to the BBC for an impartial voice. And this is what they got. It can be fairly certain that the fact that the BBC gave some credence to the vaccine conspiracy theory has, in giving the supporters of Governor Shekarau the opportunity to say, “look, even the BBC thinks there might be something in it”, prolonged the vaccine boycott and crippled and killed some Nigerian children.

There is an interesting article in American Thinker magazine. The writer, Michael Morris, contrasts the British media response to the September 11 attacks in the US with the British media response to the March 11 attacks in Spain, concentrating on the left wing outlets. Morris matter-of-factly places the BBC in this category.

(Thanks to Not even on the BBC.