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Reading this article at BBConline one has to try to follow the tortuous logic of a journalist trying to justify after the event the BBC’s skewed approach to the news, in this case to ‘Questions of Murder’. As Dumbjon points out, the notion of challenging authority doesn’t apply when the BBC agrees with that authority- when, for example, the race-based news quota method is applied.

Anthony Walker died, and that’s sad, and I have a different feeling about what priorities should be employed concerning such cases from the floundering BBC journalist who drew the short straw of attempting a Beeb apologia. I feel that all cause celebre murder cases should be left to the few gutter press publications who can really thrive on them. There should be no Danielle Jones, no little Rorys, no Holly and Jessicas etc- and no Anthony Walkers- on the BBC, and thus less likely to be such a style of journalism in the rest of the media. Instead there should be some dedicated continuous coverage of murder cases on a daily basis- complete with court records, legal diaries, verdict analysis etc (I suspect this would really be the reintroduction of certain features of coverage which have been dropped over the years). If the BBC want their moral leadership role (which they pride themselves on in bringing ‘social value’ to the British people) to count for them in the debate over their future, that’s what they should do.

And meanwhile, they might consider fitting this kind of information somewhere into their grand moral compass:

‘these murders need to be set out one by one, in all their horror, describing their nature and affirming that which is too often forgotten: Saddam was one of the worst tyrants in history and it was urgent to rid the Iraqi people of him.’

Peter Cunningham writes: “The following article on BBC online “US abortion rights in the balance?” ends with the sentence “And for many women with unwanted pregnancies in that southern state, little would change.” It is interesting that the author choose not to use the equivalent, “And for many unborn babies in California, little would change – they would continue to be killed.”

Ritter pointed out this Newswatch article on the higher coverage of the white-on-black murder of Anthony Walker compared to the coverage of the black-on-white murder of Richard Whelan, the asian-on-white murder of Christopher Yates, or various other killings. Ritter writes, “I agree with the editors laying out of the facts in terms of how these horrific murders are covered by the BBC. I don’t agree with his conclusion though. One horrific murder is not much more newsworthy than another simply because it is classed as ‘racist’. But at the BBC, this fact is all important.”

Another correspondent pointed out this story: Gaza gang seizes lion in zoo raid. She writes, “This is an item about how a “mafia-style gang” may be holding a lion-cub and two ‘Arabic-speaking parrots’ – fine as far as it goes. She adds:

But please note the following:

“The BBC’s Alan Johnston in Gaza says human abductions in the Gaza Strip usually end with the victim being freed quite quickly and unharmed”.

There is something soooooooo nauseatingly mild and reassuring about this. It’s saying, well there are kidnappings, but absolutely no need to condemn or worry about them because, don’t you see, nothing happens to the victim, it’s quite lot of fun really for them, takes them out of their boring routine.

Where is the condemnation of such a horrible crime against humans, and awful for animals too?

There have been a number of kidnappings in Gaza, which is in a state of chaos and lawlessness since the israeli withdrawal. Often the kidnap victims are foreign aid workers and journalists. I just wonder if Alan Johnston and the BBC are worried he could become such a victim if he doesn’t say the right things on the BBC website to appease potential kidnappers.

So we are forced to pay for such appeasement through our licence fee.

As usual, could correspondents note that I will quote their names if and as they appear in the text of the email, or, if taken from a comment, using the form of their names that they have filled in the comments box. Let me know if your name has been quoted when you would prefer it was not, or omitted when you would prefer to have it quoted. Do not rely on my memory!

became Archbishop of York on November 30. This report by the BBC’s Religious Affairs Correspondent, Robert Pigott, describes his enthronement. It touches on his political views:

“He denounced the war in Iraq and demonstrated against it. He criticised racism in the police after being stopped and searched eight times during six years as a bishop in London.

“He said of the Church itself that it was socially glued together by a monochrome – white – culture.”

A correspondent notes that this article is striking for its “selection for attention of its [the BBC’s] own favourite litany of left-wing issues … and the complete ignoring of his clear, on-the-record, outspoken and thoroughly newsworthy concern for British tradition and identity.”

The BBC had reported the new Archbishop’s concern for British and English identity, in this report from November 22:

Multiculturalism has left the English embarrassed about celebrating their true national identity, Britain’s first black archbishop has said. Dr John Sentamu, who will be enthroned as Archbishop of York next week, said a failure to rediscover English culture would fuel greater political extremism.

“England is the culture I have lived in, I have loved,” the Ugandan-born cleric told The Times newspaper.

He called for the English to properly mark St George’s Day on 23 April.

– but it was tucked away in BBC North Yorkshire.

news for most of Tuesday:

Bottom boost Testing out the pants that give you a bottom to rival Jennifer Lopez

It’s reassuring that News Online are getting to the bottom of some stories – it’s a pity though that others, such as this one, Christian doctor ‘was forced out’, seem to pass the BBC by.

about BBC editorialising within news items (a habit I often notice and fail to raise consistently owing largely to time constraints). Having reported that Mr Green had been cleared of ‘inciting hatred against homosexuals’, the BBC went on to say ‘He has shown little regret for his comments when addressing the media. He has also said his comments referred to a homosexual lifestyle, rather than individuals.’

Remind me, what was the definition of ‘acquittal’ once again?

The Beeb’s rather lavish and more precise coverage of the Roman Catholic Church’s latest pronouncement concerning homosexuality is something I wrapped into a post about the BBC’s science at my own personal weblog. Please ignore my apparent plug unless this topic interests you enough to follow.

[I wrote most of this post on Thursday 24th. Unfortunately I did not have time until today to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and post it.]

Deference was alive and well when James Naughtie interviewed Joe Wilson on Radio Four this morning. Naughtie started risibly by describing Valerie Plame as a “deep cover” agent – clearly he had no idea what the phrase meant. I laughed out loud, but that isn’t my complaint. My complaint is that throughout the interview Naughtie gave no indication that he had ever read or heard anything other than the standard American Democrat line on this affair. Republican “takes” on the Wilson/Plame affair abound. I referred to this WSJ article to write this post; hundreds of others would have done. Yet my impression is that Naughtie’s only significant source was a quick skim of Wilson’s own book.

All this is very much an American scandal. I don’t claim to have followed it in any detail. This Q & A by Paul Reynolds gives the basic story. (The American Expatriate, who has followed this affair, says it’s pretty good, and given the somewhat acrimonious exchanges on this very issue between Messrs Callahan and Reynolds in earlier AmEx posts and comments, that is not empty praise.) The point I want to make is that I am aware, just from casual mentions and links from Republican-inclined blogs, of all sorts of aspects to the story that don’t seem to have reached the Today programme. For instance it is all over the news that Bob Woodward of Watergate fame has come out and said that he knew Valerie Plame was an agent and it wasn’t Scooter Libby that told him. No mention of Woodward from Naughtie, although of course he did mention Scooter Libby.

When I became aware that this might make a B-BBC post, I scribbled down as best I could various of Naughtie’s words that caught my attention. My transcriptions are reasonably accurate but I don’t know if I can quite get across the extent to which nearly everything Naughtie said came across as being a prompt to allow Wilson to get across some talking point from his message. Because this is a blog about the BBC rather than about US politics, I have concentrated on Naughtie’s supportive questioning rather than Wilson’s answers. Here are some examples:

• Naughtie asks in tones of sombre shared disbelief at presidential folly, “Why did the president use it?” [i.e. Why did the Persident refer to the disputed claim that Iraq sought uranium yellowcake in Niger in a speech.]
  Wilson answers righteously, as Naughtie must have known he would, “That’s a question for the president.”
  Naughtie responds with a chummy laugh: “Ah, but he’s not here so you’ll have to do.”
• “What conclusions did you reach?” In principle, questions like this that just encourage the interviewee to talk more are fine – we listen to interviews with people to see what they have to say, after all. But in this interview there was almost nothing else.
• “So the bureacracy was being harnessed to The Cause?” Naughtie’s speech tone while he said “the cause” was heavily ironic. The only possible answer to this was yes, they were, and that Wilson duly gave.
• This next one was a contender for the toady of the week award: “Reading your book, it’s impossible to miss almost the sense of shock…” [that anyone would be so wicked.]
• “Are you still mystified that this happens?” [Again referring to the wicked, wicked ways of Capitol Hill]
• “Explain (apart from your personal distress) why that matters so much?” Another prompt, this time for Wilson to say how dreadful it was to reveal his wife’s cover. The personal distress bit was said in tones more appropriate to a bomb victim.
• “When you became a hate figure…” At this point, only my iron digestion, the result of wholesome living, prevented a distressing breakfast time event.

I didn’t expect or want to hear an unremittingly hostile interview with Mr Wilson. But I would have expected to hear one or two questions that raised issues that might at least speed up his heartbeat for a minute. Such as “Why did you tell the Washington Post that you had seen documents suggesting an Iraq-Niger deal (and recognised them at once as obvious forgeries) months before you could have possibly seen them, since they did not reach US intelligence until later – and if the answer to that is a fault of memory, why not extend your tolerance for faulty recall to Scooter Libby?”

Or “What do you say to the criticisms made of your behaviour by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including several Democratic senators? This Committee said that nepotism had been involved in your wife’s recommendation of you for the Niger mission, when you had said that she had had nothing to do with it.

Or “If breaching your wife’s cover was so bad for you how come you immediately leapt into print to breach it more widely? Anonymity is a continuum, not a glass that breaks once and forever.”

Or Naughtie could have alluded to the fact that although Wilson has always said that Iraq did not buy uranium from Niger, he has become strangely unclear over the question of whether Iraq sought it – another point brought out by the Senate Intelligence Committee. But not by Mr Naughtie.

Biased BBC in the background of a Paul Mason Newsnight report about ‘Web 2.0’, online companies that are making serious cash, with B-BBC, co-incidentally or not, on screen as he mentions the possibility of people seizing back control from large corporations. View via Newsnight’s pages until Monday night (B-BBC is 15’15”-18″ in). Thanks to commenter SiN.

“Well for those of you wanting more news on the weather, I’m sorry, but for obvious reasons we need to spend more time on the George Best story. Police in Cornwall have set up a Gold Control, and for those of you like me who didn’t know what that was, it’s a special incident control room…”

Oh dear. The passing of George Best is noteworthy, but the reality of Hundreds stuck on snow-hit moor is surely pretty urgent here and now for anyone travelling in the south-west, particularly with the evening commute fast approaching! While we’re at it, surely anyone who’s watched rolling-news coverage of any major police operation or the BBC’s own documentaries would have heard the phrase ‘Gold Control’ before, let alone a professional BBC journalist.

BBC defends ‘digital face’ trails, following four hundred complaints about them. They write:

The BBC has defended its adverts for digital TV following criticism from viewers who found them frightening.

Is that an official admission that these ‘trails’ are actually adverts? In common with many telly-taxpayers, I’m sick of the amount of advertising the BBC has loaded onto BBC1 and BBC2 over the last few years. It used to be that the lack of adverts on the BBC was used as a justification for the telly-tax, but those days are long gone.

“They have generated an encouraging level of enquiries, which has vastly outnumbered the amount of complaints received,” a spokeswoman said.

That’s the same lame excuse peddled by dodgy-advertisers everywhere!

“It is designed to be upbeat with cheerful music,” it continued, adding that the trails were not screened near children’s programmes.

BBC heads: ‘Upbeat and cheerful’, or scary and sinister?

If they’re so ‘upbeat’ and ‘cheerful’ why avoid children’s programmes?

However, one viewer complained to the BBC’s Points of View website that the image was “disturbingly psychotic”.

“It makes me feel queasy thinking about it,” wrote another contributor, while a third described it as “absolutely horrible”.

Quite. I don’t know about you, but the BBC’s digital ‘faces’ remind me of the stacks of skulls in photographs from the killing fields of Cambodia or Rwanda – stacks and stacks of individuals, born, nurtured and loved by someone, only to end up senselessly murdered in the name of political ideology or ethnic cleansing. Brrrr.