Author Archives: Natalie

. West ‘risks new Ethiopia famine’ is the headline to this BBC story. Attracted, in a train-wreck sort of way, to the assumption that it’s the West risking a new Ethiopia famine rather than Ethiopia risking a new Ethiopia famine, I took a look. The article is a mouthpiece for the views of Dr Tewolde Egziabher, an Ethiopian government scientist, who says, no less than four times, that the private sector is the problem. Here’s a quote from the start of the article.

“Will Ethiopians starve again?

“Ethiopia’s efforts to feed itself and avoid another famine are being fatally undermined by Western policy, a senior scientist has told BBC News Online.”

“Will Ethiopians starve again?” That’s an interesting question. Here’s another interesting question, not mentioned in the article and certainly not put to Dr. Egziabher by his ever-respectful interviewer:

WHY THE HELL DO YOU THINK ETHIOPIA STARVED THE FIRST TIME?

Sorry. Sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever descended to leaning on the caps lock button before, but the thought of the monstrous thing that killed one million Ethiopians going unnamed made me angry.

Give the BBC some credit. The answer to my question can be found on the BBC website, although you have to put the separate bits together yourself because the BBC won’t exactly lead you to this conclusion. Here is the country profile for Ethiopia. And here, in that profile, is the answer to my question:

In 1974 this helped topple Haile Selassie. His regime was replaced by a self-proclaimed Marxist junta under which thousands of opponents were purged or killed, property was confiscated and defence spending spiralled.

Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, now Zimbabwe… In Africa*, where Marxism has gone famine has followed. “Property was confiscated” may not sound so bad but those three words were the death knell for millions. If farmers, black or white, know that if the reward for high production will be having their produce or their very farms stolen from them, why then they won’t produce much. Not exactly rocket science is it?

Naturally, my assessment of the causes of famine is not shared by everybody, and I wouldn’t expect the BBC to talk as if it were. However the role of private property rights as a bulwark against famine is one of the major arguments kicking around the world poverty debate at the moment. Yet it came as no surprise that neither the interview with Dr Egziabher nor this analysis of why famine stalks Africa, nor this one of why Ethiopia faces another famine address the issue at all. The nearest we get is that the first story has a tiny, tiny mention of how under the “present terms of trade African agricultural exports command low prices and cannot compete on world markets.” Nice try but exactly wrong. Under the present ‘terms of trade’ i.e. the monstrous barriers to trade put up by the BBC’s beloved European Union, African exports are commanded to have artifically high prices, otherwise known as tariffs, in order to protect French farmers. That’s why Africans can’t compete on the world market.

Like my argument on insecure property rights being a cause of famine, the argument I have put forward on tariffs, while not universally accepted, is a major contender in the debate, put forward by people far more eminent than I with such force of evidence and logic that even deep-dyed anti-capitalists like Ken Livingstone have reconsidered their opinions. So don’t expect to hear much about it at the BBC.

for Last Night’s BBC News. Read this blog.

In this post left wing pro-Iraq-war blogger Harry Hatchet writes about John Pilger’s recent comments on the BBC. Harry writes:

But the idea that the Radio Four’s Today programme was pro-war or even comparible to the flag-wrapped cheerleading of Fox News, is hard to take seriously. But then Pilger is capable of believing anything to convince himself of the rightness of his postures – he is, after all, the man who described the Bush administration as “The Third Reich of our times”.

Pilger’s complaints are part of a highly irritating tendency on the part of the anti-war movement to pretend that they have been marginalised from the debate over Iraq. It may suit their self-image to portray their movement as ignored by the powerful pro-war media but the facts rather dispute this.

…BBC doesn’t let the facts of its own story get in the way of a headline

bemoaning American police racism…

The headline: Cincinnati death blamed on police

The exerpt: [The coroner, whose report is the focus of the story] added that the ruling should not be interpreted as implying inappropriate behaviour or the use of excessive force by police”.

Note the photo of a crying relative at the bottom, next to this:

“Police talk about Skip like he was animal,” his grandmother said. “But he

wasn’t. Skipper was just a good, old, fat jolly fellow.”

It’s not mentioned anywhere in the story that Skip Jones was high on PCP, which _does_ cause people to behave like animals. It’s the same substance, mind you, that Rodney King was on during his high-profile arrest and several subsequent arrests. Of course this is an awful experience for the relatives,

but the guy wasn’t exactly trying to stay out of trouble.

The BBC recently reported a “Google Bomb” which linked the words “miserable failure” to a biography of Bush. Fair enough, it’s a story. However the BBC refer back to the famous “These weapons of mass destruction cannot be displayed” web page as an example of something similar. In this post the author of that page, who also happens to write the “Black Triangle” blog, says that the BBC misrepresented him. He didn’t manipulate Google. The page became popular because it was funny and topical. Incidentally, he was not against the war.

It’s nice to know one is not alone in one’s views. At about 5.50pm today Radio Four had on one of those “listeners’ feedback” programmes. It said that “few of those who wrote in supported the Plain English Campaign.” Then it replayed the Rumsfeld clip, followed by audio clips from three members of the public saying nice things about how Mr Rumsfeld was clear and concise.

I was left feeling quite benign towards the Beeb.

But as the Great Cham of the Blogosphere says, the BBC still hasn’t mentioned the other award Rummie won recently.

The Plain English Campaign gave a gobbledegook award to Donald Rumsfeld the other day. If you are interested, I gave my plain opinion of the Plain English Campaign on my blog here. In this post I’d just like to point out, that of course the BBC zoomed in on this story like flies to honey. As usual, the Beeb did not waste any valuable sneering energy on actually examining Rumsfeld’s remarks to see if there might, after all, be something in them. And, as usual, they got the story slightly wrong in a characteristic direction. On Radio 4 News yesterday the announcer, revelling in it, hastened to say that George Bush and John Prestcott were runners up. No they weren’t. According to The Scotsman “the awards always attracted nominations for Mr Rumsfeld’s boss US President George Bush as well as British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott ” – i.e. the Great British Public, or the letter-to-the-editor-writing subdivision thereof neglect no opportunity to be smug. But even the Plain English Campaign, ignorant though it is of the complexities of either intelligence work or the philosophy of the limits of knowledge, can differentiate between a tendency to verbal slip-ups and the obfuscatory language that should be its main business. The BBC doesn’t seem to be able to. On occasion it might not care to – there is material for a dozen Golden Bull awards in this blog.

I was surprised and pleased at some aspects of the phrasing in this feature about Israeli checkpoints.

“Since the beginning of the three-year Palestinian uprising, or intifada, Israel has significantly increased the number of roadlocks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in response to rising Palestinian violence.

“In September 2003, a group of 20 aid agencies issued a statement calling for the removal of the travel restrictions, which they said were limiting Palestinians’ access to schools and medical care, increasing frustration and destroying hopes for peace.

“Israel sees the barriers as vital to stop suicide bombers flooding into its cities to terrorise the civilian population.”

Emphasis added by me. It’s fairly unusual to see Palestinian violence described as Palestinian violence, but that use of the verb to terrorise really made me blink. Time was when I was an admirer of the BBC. The first letter to an MP I ever wrote, when I was still at school, was to ask that funding to the World Service not be cut. If there is one single thing that turned me into a maddened termagant given to adding “Ceterum censeo BBC delenda est” to observations about the weather, it was the BBC decision not to use the word “terrorist.” It made me sick. The BBC (not to mention Reuters) does not pretend to be “above” moral judgements when discussing murder, or rape, or child porn, or racial harassment. It also inserts moral judgements into reporting of poverty, war and politics; sometimes with the platitudes appropriate to a tax-funded organisation, but often in a manner so partisan as to violate its Charter. It certainly pushes the line that continued state funding of the BBC is desirable for the “public good” i.e. on moral grounds. But after all that it still frequently pretends to be “above” morally judging people who, in defiance of the laws of war, hide among the civilian population to blow up families in pizza parlours. In refusing to judge them the BBC show themselves traitors to the civilisation they claim to represent.

But if this small instance is the start of a return to the common values, I will soften my line.

In the next paragraph the writer reverts to the “militant” usage, which is a vile insult to all the extreme but basically non-violent Trotskyists and Leninists in the British Left who were the previous people designated by the term “militant”. But hell’s bells, look at it again: “terrorise”. Implying that those doing it are terrorists. It’s a start.

UPDATE: Might’ve known it was too good to last. Regular commenter PJF has observed that the reference to rising Palestinian violence has disappeared, along with the whole first paragraph I quoted.

of the multi-lingual blog “any criticism of Jewish people is still a taboo in Germany.”

Nicht war! Like, if an Israeli programmer wrote some bad code for the program you are using, no German can say so, and if a Jewish hairdresser in Hamburg gives you a haircut with a wonky fringe you must tip heavily and not mention it, and if the 1998 winner of the Eurovision Song Contest appeared to you to be lacking in talent your lips must be sealed, and if Ariel Sharon’s policies seem to you mistaken then not one word must be said until you are safely across the Rhine and standing on French soil?

That surprises me very much. Or it would if it were not a load of cobblers. Germans of all ranks from Chancellor downwards can and do make all sorts of criticisms of Jewish people, both Israeli and non-Israeli, and it’s not taboo at all.

The thing that is a leetle bit sensitive given events from 1941-1945 is when some jerk says that the Jews orchestrated the killings by the Russian revolutionaries, and compares that to the Holocaust.

picked by the BBC to profile in order to given an impression of daily life in Iraq. Or was she? Darren Kaplan dug a little deeper. (Via Instapundit.)