The late Dr Kelly, reports the BBC with an audible sigh of relief,
… said it would take Iraq “days or weeks” to deploy weapons of mass destruction.
Whole days, eh? Sheesh, what’s all the fuss about then? No one cares about what happens days or weeks from now.
His view, at odds with the claim Iraq could launch weapons in 45 minutes, is in a previously unbroadcast interview to be shown in a BBC Panorama special.
And with those words “at odds with” the BBC is vindicated. Isn’t it?
I don’t know if this one represents BBC bias or simply shows how little I know. Perhaps better-informed readers can tell me.
Here’s the item: the answer to question 3 of this BBC quiz on the US presidency says:
“President Truman had an 85% approval rating at the beginning of 1945, but that sank to a little over 30% after he ordered two atomic bombs to be dropped on Japan.”
I was very surprised at this. My impression was that the news of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing the surrender of Japan within days, was greeted in the US (as it was in the UK) with awe and a certain amount of heartsearching, but that the overwhelming reaction was relief; relief that the war was so suddenly over without the need for a massive attack on a fanatically-defended Japan. In support of Truman’s decision, Churchill said:
“To avoid a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.”
While I am certainly aware that there were a few on the Allied side who opposed the Bomb in 1945, in general my impression was that Churchill’s reaction was atypical only in its eloquence. I wondered if the BBC’s explanation of Truman’s unpopularity was not an attempt (possibly unconscious) to impose modern BBC disapproval of the atom bomb onto the Americans of a previous generation.
UPDATE: Good heavens! Whoever reads this site for the Beeb, congratulations on your fast response. I had just pressed “publish” and clicked the link to check it worked – and found the reference to the atomic bomb had gone. It now reads:
President Truman had an 85% approval rating at the beginning of 1945, but that sank to a little over 30% in the wake of the Korean War and domestic problems.
Thing is, now I know I was right and it wasn’t true that the the reason for Truman being unpopular was the Bomb. The question remains how this error came to be made in the first place. Know what I think? I think it was BBC bias.
In the comments to the previous post reader Lee Moore said this:
A beautifully balanced tale of how the Lebanese have returned to the barbarity of the death penalty:
We hear about protestors, we hear about the former Prime Minister who refused to approve executions, we hear about Amnesty’s objections, we hear about other “human rights” groups’ objections, we even hear about the EU’s objections. Nothing is omitted, except…..
surprisingly we hear nothing about the views of other Lebanese people, either the people who did approve the sentences or about public opinion. Nor do we hear that Amnesty and friends are, on this subject, a minority opinion in this country.
I wonder why. Oh, all right, I don’t really.
The Lebanese government ought to hire some terrorists, sorry “militants” to burst in and blow up the three condemned men in the name of Free Palestine. Then the Beeb would bend over backwards to understand the killers.
(Hat tip to Rich.)
Stephen Pollard in the Evening Standard and Fiona Govan and Chris Hastings in the Telegraph have both written on the Kilroy-Silk affair.
Apologies for repeating myself, but I say again: the BBC’s offence in withdrawing ‘Kilroy’ was not that it exceeded its rights but that it was demonstrably biased and hypocritical given its tolerance of Paulin and many other commentators who have made less murderous but still vituperative blanket condemnations of Israel, the US or Britain.
The average viewer of ‘Kilroy’ doesn’t give a stuff about the issues that engage the average visitor to this blog, but does get annoyed when his or her favourite show is canned at the PC establishment’s say-so. Kilroy will become a hero to many. He’s not quite the hero I would have nominated for popular veneration, but it ain’t me that chooses. That the BBC is biased has been made clear to a previously apolitical segment of its audience.
UPDATE: A couple of Kilroy-related posts from Public Interest round-up this roundup nicely. To start with he lambasts the Guardian for claiming that Paulin’s case is different from Kilroy’s because, like, Paulin is a proper critic but Kilroy is merely a talkshow host.
Making up the rules as they go along, ain’t it? The Guardian’s own Aaro hosted a radio show on Radio 2 last week – called David Aaronovitch, no less – John Humphreys and Libby Purves of the Sunday Times and the Times regularly host shows on Radio 4, and they all opinionate like it’s going out of fashion. Come on Guardian! You can do better than that.
There’s more. You know I said how as the ‘Kilroy’ fans and our own wonderful selves were quite separate groups? Er, actually, not quite.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Mark Steyn also comments. That Paulin meme gets around, doesn’t it?
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As you probably know, Robert Kilroy-Silk’s talk show has been taken off the air following outrage against an anti-Arab article he wrote for the Sunday Express.
You can see what I think about his article in this Samizdata post here. You can see more about the case in this BBC article here including a quote from Perry de Havilland, of Samizdata and Libertarian Alliance fame.
The CRE threatening the police to prosecute Mr Kilroy-Silk is an outrageous assault on his free speech rights. However the BBC cancelling his show is not a violation of his free speech. The BBC are not obliged to buy anyone’s show, particularly if they think it will bring them into disrepute.
That said, the BBC are obliged by charter to be even handed. So why, as an anonymous commenter to this blog asked, is Tom Paulin still regularly appearing? Paulin specifically said that Jewish settlers should be shot. If Robert Kilroy-Silk’s comments were incitement to racial hatred, Paulin’s were incitement to murder.
UPDATE: Fiat iustitia, ruat caelum… I have criticised the BBC before now for not including both sides of the story in the external links offered with their reports. I must do so now, painful though it be. The BBC only includes two links to the report linked to above, one to the Sunday Express and one to the Libertarian Alliance (of which I have the honour to be a member)… would it have been so hard to also include one to F.A.I.R. or the Muslim Council of Britain, just for balance?
regarding this piece about Gadaffi and WMD. This is what he said:
“This biased opinion piece is just that – biased opinion. The obvious interpretation that Libya acted in response to the Iraq example
rather than sanctions which have long been in place is ignored.
Do publish biased opinion if you think that’s your role (I don’t) but do not present it as disinterested analysis. Your social and political biases have lost the BBC its reputation which was not rightly yours to throw away. This is copied to the “biased BBC” blog which I trust you read.”
this website has an idea for a way to legally make it uneconomic for the TV licence to continue.
Meanwhile Biased-BBC blogger Toby Blyth has his own new blog at Bilious Young Fogey.
Another “Yer Wot?” moment, this time brought to us in one of those ‘From our own correspondent’ semi-personal pieces by Bridget Kendall. This is the bit that had me Yer Wotting:
The French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, another formidable orator, took the floor.
His speech was equally ardent, arguing that the world did not necessarily have to follow America’s lead.
Then something extraordinary happened.
As he finished there was a ripple of applause. Not something usually allowed in the Security Council chamber.
It felt like a muted gesture of open revolt.
Cor, she makes it sound like Moses laying low the Egyptian overseer or Rosa Parkes refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Did I miss something or wasn’t upshot of the momentous day she describes that… that’s right, I remember now! The US said ‘thanks but no thanks’ to M Villepin and toddled off and invaded Iraq anyway. OK, there’s a respectable argument that the US, in enforcing compliance with the million and a half UN resolutions violated by Saddam Hussein was actually saving the United Nations from itself, but, even so, “The day the UN didn’t matter” might have been a better heading.
