Author Archives: Natalie

I should have posted this ages ago, but better late than never.

You may recall that on June 27 2003 I posted an item about the BBC’s John Willis and US talk show host Michael Savage. To recap, Willis, BBC Director of Factual and Learning, made a speech in which he claimed that Savage said the Arabs must be “snuffed out from the planet, and not in a court of law”. A correspondent to this blog by the name of Peter dug deeper and found that Savage did not say that all Arabs should be snuffed out, he said terrorists should be snuffed out – in an article written two days after the terrorist attacks of Sep 11, 2001. I said on my post that John Willis’s remarks seriously misrepresented Savage.

Since then, Michael Savage, has been in the news. He was fired from a MSNBC talk show slot for telling a homosexual caller that he, Savage, hoped the caller would die from AIDS. His employers were quite right to fire him: that remark contains a level of personal malice that is truly shocking. Protection of free speech does not oblige MSNBC to continue employing someone who brings them into disrepute.

Is John Willis vindicated then? No way.

First point: I can now be more sure than ever that Savage did not advocate genocide against the Arabs. Back in June I did have a moment of doubt. Could it be, I wondered, that even though the article that Peter had dug out clearly referred to snuffing out terrorists, Savage might have made a similar-phrased remark directed against all Arabs on another occasion – say in an unscripted talk radio broadcast which John Willis had heard? After all, I’ve heard that US talk radio can be pretty raw. To check up I took a look at Savage’s website. At that time it contained an interview with an Iraqi. That didn’t sound like Savage wanted all Arabs dead. I decided that Peter was right: such an outrageous remark would have been picked up on.

Well, now I know that it would have been picked up on. For when Savage did make an outrageous remark it was picked up on, and he was fired within hours.

Second point: there was another misrepresentation within John Willis’s speech besides that of Michael Savage. He misrepresented America. He, typically for the BBC, portrayed it as the sort of place where a talk show host can advocate the slaughter of an entire race and yet continue in mainstream public esteem. Yet in fact Savage was fired and widely condemned for a hateful remark against one person. America isn’t the sort of place that John Willis claimed. That misrepresentation goes on daily.

I’ve just noticed something else about the Megan Lane article Peter Briffa posted about two posts down. It says

Conservatives with a small c, too, share this unease about the pleasures of the flesh. In a 1951 letter only now made public, Ronald Reagan revealed his angst about sex. “Even in marriage I had a little guilty feeling about sex, as if the whole thing was tinged with evil,” the man who would be US president wrote to a friend.

Now you’re all thinking that I haven’t noticed that Kerry Buttram has already dealt with all that in a post last Monday. Well you think wrong! So far as I can see the Megan Lane article Peter quoted and the article headed “Reagan had ‘evil sex’ angst” that Kerry quoted are entirely separate.

In other words two BBC journalists independently picked this one-line confession of unease with sex as the most significant excerpt from the letters of one of the most significant presidents in the last half century. Two BBC journalists have misleadingly focussed on that angle and either downplayed or, in Megan Lane’s case, completely failed to mention, that Reagan’s admission of past unease was but the preamble to saying “nothing between her and the man she loves can be wrong or obscene, that desire in itself is normal and right,” a sentiment very different from the repressed attitude that the BBC portrays Reagan as having.

The fact that two BBC writers independently homed in on this one line says it all. There’s no conspiracy. It’s just the BBC worldview. Ronald Reagan simply has to be uptight about sex because, he’s, like, Ronald Reagan. If in reality he wasn’t, so much the worse for reality.

And what’s with the “conservative unease about pleasures of the flesh” lark anyway? Some do, some don’t. Some socialists do, and some don’t – as Robin “penalty rate” Cook and Stephen “socks” Byers could tell you. (You think I’m being crude? Less crude than “To do it is one thing – perhaps whilst wearing a Chelsea strip, or with John Major in a bathtub”) In 1951, when Reagan’s twice-quoted letter was written, the Labour party, outside its metropolitan cadre, was still heavily influenced by Nonconformism. Almost certainly it was more strict in sexual matters than the contemporary Conservative party.

It’s a sign of the BBC’s lack of historical perspective that they thought the story about Reagan revealed in his letters was his sexual angst. Actually the surprise is that he expressed himself so freely. In 1951 most ordinary Britons or Americans (once again, I exclude the literary and metropolitan elites) of either left or right would, if anything, have been somewhat shocked at Reagan’s daring to put down such advanced views in a letter to a woman – and, moreover, one with whom he was not having a relationship. That sort of talk was for the locker room or the public bar.

the links from us, but this Beebwatch makes some fine points. (Registration needed.)

Radio 4’s World Tonight attracts smaller audiences than Today and is rarely criticised for bias, yet few BBC programmes are so slanted towards the Left.

… There was a 17-second clip from America’s UN ambassador, John Negroponte; then a 77-second interview with the Arab League’s ambassador and 170 seconds with Phyllis Bennis from the violently anti-Bush Institute for Policy Studies.

…Item three: “There’s been a lot of talk about the role played by religious schools in the Islamic world – the Madrassahs – for allegedly fomenting extremism. But it’s not only in Pakistan and Afghanistan that there are flourishing religious schools. They also exist in the US, where many are run by Protestant evangelicals…” Note the “allegedly” and the implied analogy between evangelical colleges and schools that recruit suicide bombers.

comments about a BBC story on the ‘danger’ of referenda.

in this BBC quiz about Islam. Perhaps that has led me to look kindly on it. It’s very much the BBC view, but I accept a certain delicacy is necessary here. In several cases I gave the answer I knew they wanted while maintaining reservations. Jihad certainly can mean interior struggle -but the non-PC “holy war” translation is enthusastically accepted by many Muslims. That figure for the projected US Muslim population is based on figures for the present population that are contested; estimates vary by a factor of three and the BBC has gone for the higher end. Divorce can indeed be initiated by man or woman, but what they do not say is that the rules are not symmetrical. Finally, I found it a little odd that there wasn’t a “Muslims believe” wrapped round the statement that “Islam began in the Arabian Peninsula in 610 when the prophet Muhammad began to receive his revelations of the direct word of God,” but I attribute that to a condescending mindset that is willing to humour all religions equally rather than to acceptance of the tenets of Islam at the BBC.

As Raj noticed, I tried to dodge getting all the B-BBC bias letters for a bit, because of other commitments. What I think I’ll do is every now and then make a post like this one that invites anyone who wishes to tell the world about examples of bias they have seen. Of course it’s impractical for us to track them all down and check the details; this is a amateur website. Think of it as political conversation at a social event. Just as in party debates, speakers will add to their credibility if they are moderate in tone and give details (e.g. time, channel, speaker, a hyperlink where appropriate) where they can. Polite disagreement also welcome.

writes (originally a comment to the post below):

I’m writing as someone who in general believed the BBC to be biased over the war but otherwise find most complaints of bias petty.

The BBC Breakfast news today had a piece on hunting today just before 8am.

First there was a prefilmed piece which was presumably put together by the BBC.

You heard 2 anti hunt protestors putting forward their point of view with no opposing questions and it seemed to include footage filmed by these protestors.

Then there was an interview with a hunt member. He was asked quite aggressive questions & was interrupted in order to get as many questions over as possible. The difference between allowing one side to present it’s argument uninterrupted & having the other side being interviewed by a seemingly sceptical interviewer was in my opinion almost certain to give the anti hunt side a more favourable press than the pro hunt side.

says that only when we lose the BBC will we realise what we have lost. Not so. I know perfectly well I will miss this blog. Come the glorious day all the B-BBC posters will feel some of the emptiness that must have touched Carl Bernstein’s soul when he realised that, truly, he no longer had Nixon to kick around any more. With Othello we will bid farewell to the pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war and lament that our occupation’s gone. I may even find a little tear trickling down my cheek as I take my £116 to the bank.

Sweden had a referendum today on whether to join the Euro. Voting was overshadowed by the murder of Anna Lindh, foreign minister and leading voice of the Yes campaign. The BBC had six quickie quotes from Swedes exiting the polls, clearly gathered before the result was known. How come five out of the six people whose views were quoted had voted Yes? The No campaign led the polls throughout, and in the end won.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see some hurried revision of this story. So, just for the record, the people quoted were Per Schonborg, Halldis Hag Andersson, Beatrice Janzon (the sole No), Jon Lagerberg, Annika Schwarts and Roger Charmete.