Author Archives: Natalie

John from North Carolina

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a.k.a. John Hawkins of Right Wing News writes:

What’s not OK is that the BBC’s World Have Your Say radio program does something that is very annoying and also, in my opinion, a little dishonest. They have guests on and then they have what sound like callers, who are actually ALSO unidentified guests booked on the show.

They have done this to me (and for that matter, other bloggers) before — asked me to be a guest on their show and then announced me as “John from North Carolina,” as if I had just called in to the show.

(Via House of Dumb.)

That’s just not on, whether it’s done for invited blogger callers from the Right, as in this case, or from the Left, as I suspect is more common. (We have several instances recorded on this blog of Joe Activist being passed off as Joe Public.) A few years ago the BBC might have had the excuse that no one knew what a “blog” was, but those days are gone.

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I don’t think they were truly committed to a non-judgemental therapeutic approach to offenders, either.

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I thought the caption to the top picture of this piece from Rod Liddle about the sanguinary characters that have occupied both the dock and the bench during the long history of the Old Bailey was rather a laugh. I doubt the caption was written by Liddle; he has his faults but prissiness isn’t one of them. [CORRECTION: “Newshour” points out that it is Rob, not Rod Liddle who wrote this.]

UPDATE: The caption now reads, “Before newspapers, the Proceedings were widely read by the public”. Bo-ring. And not, I think, really true – newspapers really got going at about the same time as the Old Bailey’s Proceedings did. Still, that’s by the by. Back to that changeable caption. The google cache gives the orginal version, namely:

Judges were exclusively male and drawn from the public school system

Hat tips: PaulS and Moonbat Nibbler.

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No Paradox

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. Instapundit seems pleased with this story by the BBC’s Justin Webb. Mr Webb has been a frequent target of this blog, as you’ll see if you do a search for his name. Nonetheless recently there has been a conscious effort by Mr Webb to address mindless anti-Americanism, and the BBC’s anti-Americanism in particular. Good for him.

But he isn’t out of the bubble yet. Mr Webb sees the fact that lots of guns can be combined with a safe atmosphere. He sees it and reports it – many of his colleagues have not stretched the skin of the bubble so far. However the only cause suggested for this tranquility is the lack of public drunkeness. For all I know that is so, but it is far from unusual for people outside the bubble to put forward another cause: the guns themselves. As Instapundit quoting Heinlein said, “An armed society is a polite society.”

I’m not saying Mr Webb should have stated that hypothesis as fact. But it could, and should, quite easily and naturally have been included as another potential explanation. After all, an apparent solution to a paradox ought to be part of a story about a paradox.

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Gunnar comments,

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“Seriously, can you please point to some sources were the people who detonated themselves in Pizza restaurants, or at wedding parties or on the London underground were called “militants” by the liberal media (your term) and not terrorist.”

OK, I will.

Pizza restaurants first. Here are are some BBC stories about the attack on the Sbarro pizza restaurant.

Link 1. “Hamas, the hard-line Palestinian militant group, said one of its members had been the bomber.

Link 2. It starts, “With Palestinian militants continuing to carry out suicide attacks in Israel…”

Later, happy Palestinians staged the Sbarro show – no mention of terrorists there in the BBC’s own voice either. Why don’t you google through bbc.co.uk for Sbarro and look for the word “terrorist” in the BBC’s own voice, rather than in quotes?

Incidentally, the father of a 15 year old girl murdered at Sbarro, commented on this blog here.

Now for a wedding party. Here are some BBC stories about the 2005 suicide bombing of a wedding in Amman, Jordan.

Link 1 – “At least several hundred people have marched through Amman to denounce the bombers and show loyalty to King Abdullah II. “Burn in hell, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” they chanted, referring to the Jordanian-born militant believed to lead al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

Link 2 It refers to “bombers”, but not terrorists. Again, why don’t you have a look through the BBC website for stories regarding this crime and see if you can find the bombers described as terrorists in the BBC’s own voice?

Finally, here’s something about the London Underground. In the immediate aftermath of the “7/7” London bombings of 2005 certain BBC staff did use the word terrorist several times. “Terrorist atrocity”, even. As in the case of Beslan, it looked for a moment like a change of heart. But this indelicacy contradicted policy. So the BBC went back through the stories and changed “terrorist” to “bomber”.

For proof, Harry’s Place got screenshots. This story was discussed in the Telegraph, which named the BBC official responsible as Helen Boaden. She was worried the word terrorist might offend the World Service customers.

(Links to old Biased BBC posts take you to the relevant month. You may have to scroll down to see the relevant post.)

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It was serious for Isiah Young-Sam.

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Via Instapundit, I found this article on race relations. In general I think it strives to be fair, even sounding a note of regret over the way that until recently any politician raising the issue was labelled a racist. However given that I am more pro-immigration than many on this site, perhaps commenters will disagree. Be that as it may there was one paragraph in the article that showed how even a well-intentioned BBC writer tends to leave out stories that don’t fit the preferred narrative:

Britain’s last serious race riots – when violent clashes erupted between white and Asian youths in northern England – happened seven years ago.

Bad as they were, I don’t recall the riots between whites and Asians of 2001 resulting in any deaths. In contrast the riots between blacks and Asians in the Lozells area of Birmingham in 2006 resulted in the unprovoked murder of Isiah Young-Sam, a black IT worker.

I would have described the riots in 2006, not those of 2001, as the “Britain’s last serious race riots”. They were more serious and more recent. I suspect that, probably unconsciously, the writer of this article did not consider them because whites were not involved.

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Clarify?

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Via Photon Courier, I found this report from CAMERA about a false news report run by the BBC. Photon Courier writes:

On Friday, March 7, 2008, the BBC World News aired footage purporting to show the demolition and burning of a house belonging to to the family of Ala Abu Dheim, the terrorist who murdered eight Yeshiva students and wounded nine others. The BBC announcer stated that the demolition had been done by “Israeli bulldozers.”

On March 11, CAMERA (the Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) posted about this news program and observed that the story could not possibly be accurate, inasumch as the house in question was still standing.

Yesterday, March 13, the BBC made an on-the-air statement admitting that its original story had been incorrect and that the images shown were of another demolition.

CAMERA are in fact too kind to the BBC. The last paragraph of the CAMERA report says that the BBC “has forthrightly corrected” the original report. However the word used in the BBC announcement was “clarify.” That word was anything but forthright. There was nothing unclear about the original report; it was simply untrue.

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General BBC-related comment thread:

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Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may be moderated. Any suggestions for stories that you might like covered would also be appreciated!

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E-day fixe.

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Dunno if you noticed, but “E-Day” was the day when the great British public was asked to turn off the lights to tackle climate change. Perhaps this was a good proposal, perhaps not – the British public appeared to hold the latter view – but it was certainly a political proposal.

Bishop Hill asks why the man behind the campaign (who was also the guiding spirit for the cancelled Planet Relief) had quite so much support from the BBC.

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General BBC-related comment thread:

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Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may be moderated. Any suggestions for stories that you might like covered would be appreciated!


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