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Everyone’s piling in on him. A reader writes:

BBC correspondents in America have a huge canvas to draw on. So Justin Webb obviously decided he had found a story that had a moral for British voters when he filed for the Radio 4 6pm News on April 1 that those in Arizona who were worried about a flood of illegal immigration for Mexico – and concerned that the federal government was doing nothing to stop the tide – had formed a group of modern-day “Minutemen” to watch the borders.

Mr Webb’s main point, though, was not to impart how many immigrants there were, why border controls were not working, or other such facts that would have given the story context and proper meaning. Such crucial details were entirely absent from the report. Instead, he focused firmly on that there were opponents of the group who had labelled the new Minutemen as “irresponsible” and potentially violent “vigilantes”. In BBC liberal speak, beware all those who are worried about immigration…they are not nice people.

In the comments to the post below this, Alex criticises him about his interview with Dan Rather. And in the comments to the post below that everyone but Alex is teed off about this piece on the Schiavo case.

”America is often portrayed as an ignorant lazy sort of place, full of bible bashers and ruled to a dangerous extent by trashy television, superstition and religious bigotry, a place lacking in respect for evidence based knowledge.

I know that is how it is portrayed because I have done my bit to paint that picture, and that picture is in many respects a true one”

However, according to our commenters, his description of the legal position is in many respects not a true one.

Actually I thought that Marc Landers was a little harsh on the BBC’s David Reid in dealing with his treatment of Iranian bloggers. Blogging has improved freedom of speech there, despite the recent appalling state persecution of bloggers. The tone of the BBC article when writing about Chinese and Iranian bloggers was not objectionable to me.

However Marc Landers hit the Beeb fair and square when it got to Rather and Jordan. The BBC talks as if Rather was eased out of his job merely for some error of fact such as any journalist (or blogger) is statistically certain to make every now and then. Wrong. He lost it for sustained, reckless, arrogant, obviously partisan refusal to confirm the authenticity of a major political story both before and after it was broadcast. All bloggers did was make that obvious to the public and his employers. The BBC also makes it sound as if there is room for significant doubt as to what Eason Jordan said to get him fired. As Landers says, if Jordan feels he has been misquoted he has only to release that tape.

And hasn’t David Reid discovered the many highly political blogs on the left?

It’s been awhile since former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s embarrassing shenanigans splashed across the newscape. He has been given a mercifully light sentence after perjuring himself in a Washington court. For some strange reason the Beeb repeats Berger’s ‘inadvertent’ defense in this story as if it is still Berger’s claim. Did Berger just accidentally walk off with those documents? Here’s how the Beeb puts it.

Former national security adviser Samuel Berger has admitted taking copies of a classified memo to prepare for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission.

Mr Berger has said it was “an honest mistake” and apologised. He has agreed to give up his security clearance and co-operate with the investigation.

Here’s how Bloomberg puts it.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger pleaded guilty today to removing classified documents from the National Archives while reviewing anti-terrorism efforts by President Bill Clinton’s administration.

In pleading guilty to the misdemeanor in federal court in Washington, Berger, 59, reversed his earlier claim that he took the documents inadvertently. He agreed to surrender his security clearance and cooperate in the government’s continuing investigation, the Justice Department said.

Here’s how the Scotsman puts it.

A top national security aide to former US President Bill Clinton pleaded guilty today to removing and destroying classified documents from the National Archives.

Sandy Berger admitted in a Washington court that he had deliberately taken three copies of the same classified document and cut them up with scissors.

Here’s how the Washington Post puts it.

The deal’s terms make clear that Berger spoke falsely last summer in public claims that in 2003 he twice inadvertently walked off with copies of a classified document during visits to the National Archives, then later lost them.

He described the episode last summer as “an honest mistake.” Yesterday, a Berger associate who declined to be identified by name but was speaking with Berger’s permission said: “He recognizes what he did was wrong. . . . It was not inadvertent.”

I don’t know whether this is a case of bias or just sloppy journalism.

Update: See Natalie’s post of Clark T Irwin’s email in Comments.

Update 2: The original BBC article was stealth-edited within an hour or so of the original post. The “inadvertent” is completely gone and the article has been substantially re-written to reflect Mr Berger’s guilty plea as being justified. Still no mention of his shredding documents with lowly office scissors.

Another reader writes:

There was an extraordinary example of presenter bias on WATO yesterday about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s warning on the politics of fear ( i.e. don’t mention right-wing issues!).

Nick Clarke: Now, have you seen evidence in the campaign so far of the exploitation of fear?

Rowan Williams: Well, of course the campaign hasn’t formally started yet, has it?

NC: I accept that – in the pre-campaign then, there’s been plenty going on, have you seen any evidence so far?

RW: I think it’s inevitable that there’s an emphasis on this campaign to go that way, and the temptation is to hit that first, I think.

NC: So when, for instance, I know you’re not going to be party political, but the Conservatives have raised, quite often, haven’t they, immigration and crime and so on, that’s the sort of thing that worries you, is it?

RW: It’s a cross-party phenomenon, but yes, that’s the sort of thing that worries me.

Dr Williams had to correct Nick Clarke (!), who assumed, as BBC presenters so often do, that the raising of issues such as immigration is beyond the pale.

Reader Alex writes in with some observations from March 31 2005

– Whilst Sky News for the most part treated the Prince Charles story as a bit of fun, The BBC took a very serious tone indeed and on News 24 invited the Royal Correspondent of The Mirror to comment, he took an even more serious line (well, he would wouldn’t`t he). Amongst his remarks was “…they cost us a lot of money”, no mention of the fact that the BBC cost us quite a bit too.

-Also News 24, and who is invited to comment on Blair’s Political Cabinet….Michael White The Guardian. Quel Surprise!

– Later on The World Tonight, invited to give her comments on Terry Schiavos death, why its NPRs` Diane Roberts. D`oh……

– On radio bulletins PM and also on Radio 4 after midnight, a breathy and uncritical piece about the rehabilitation of Stalin across the former Soviet Union. If a left wing genocidal mass murderer is rehabilitated its reported through misty eyes with sentimentality, imagine the outcry had it been Mussolini or Hitler.

your blog does important work, keep it up.

– the BBC.

Missing headline alert launched by Countercolumn (“All Your Bias are Belong to Us.”)

(Via Instapundit.)

I just heard a BBC reporter say this, without much qualification, and giving the impression that this was a very credible claim.

This claim was apparently based on a report by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment team (who were funded by – who else? the UN), although the BBC simply reported this as “a team of hundreds of scientists”, without even saying who they were (had to go to the BBC website for that), or reporting on the strongly political nature of the report

I haven’t yet found any such claim in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s report, although it may be in there somewhere. But I’ve no doubt that the reporter was given this figure by someone connected with the report, though whether this was one of the scientists involved (and some distinguished scientists like Robert May are involved), or just a secretary or PR person, I don’t know.

Anyway, it’s grossly irresponsible. Two-thirds? Whatever some green-leaning biologists may think, any economist could tell you that this is rubbish. After all, the great proportion of our consumption of resources has occured in the last 100 years. If we’ve used up most of the two-thirds in that time, that means they’ll all run out in about 30-50 years. In fact, given the increased prosperity of the developing world, and the increasing consumption in the developed world, we should run out well before that, if this claim is correct.

So in about twenty years time, we can expect there to be no steel, no sugar, no water, no rice, no wood, no plastic, no farmable land, no cotton, no oil, no energy, no fruit-bearing trees, no aluminium, no wheat, no copper, no rubber, no nothing’. Now, you don’t have to be Julian Simon to think this is a scare story. (In fact, the very opposite is more likely – in 20-50 years time, these resources will more cheaper and more plentiful than ever.)

Update 30-3: The Guardian also has a Two-thirds of world’s resources ‘used up’ headline.

Tim Worstall, meanwhile, has noticed that the report is calling for solutions that sound decidely, well, free market-ish.

in yesterday’s Scotsman. It concludes:

Further evidence of Beeb blinkers was the fact that story of its own 176 job cuts was the lead on Reporting Scotland last Monday. On the same day, Babcock at Rosyth announced 320 job losses and this didn’t merit a mention. Is this the kind of quality journalism that Mr Low seeks to maintain?

Who was the typical attendee? Here are some pictures of the crowd and their banners. Note the preponderance of “Free Palestine” signs. (And the ones saying, “Victory to the Iraqi Resistance!”) However the BBC quotes an ex-soldier and a lady from CND.

(Via Rottweiler Puppy – read his comments – and House of Dumb)

UPDATE: Following Rottweiler Puppy’s links, I see that the BBC ran not one but two picture-series illustrating the demo. (I don’t remember them doing that for the ten times bigger Countryside Alliance march.) This series of ten pictures consists of: (1) Side view of the crowd, (2) Man with lots of badges, (3) Lady with sign saying “Make Tea not War”, (4) Crowd shot from front, centred on a Trade Union banner, (5) Two ex-soldiers carrying symbolic model coffin – note the caption states as bald fact that 100,000 people have been killed by the war, a highly controversial claim, (6) Peace choir, (7) Coffin guys again, (8) Hippy with quirky sign, (9) “Women say no to war” sign carried, not surprisingly, by women, and finally (10) a shot from the speech platform where Messrs Benn and Galloway graced the multitudes.

This series of eight pictures shows (1) Mum & kid, (2) guy with sign saying “End occupation now”, (3) old lady, (4) the “make tea, not war” lady again, (5) gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, (6) family with dog, (7) a young Asian girl in Western dress, bareheaded, (8) Andrew Murray of the Stop The War Coalition. (And of the British Communist Party; not that you’d get any hint of that from the BBC.)

A splendid collection of lovable British eccentrics, eh? The BBC quotes a mother of two daughters who says their father is out there and who thinks it is nice that her girls can be around “people who care.” The Guardian says that, ‘Protesters sang: “George Bush, Uncle Sam, Iraq will be your Vietnam.”‘ Caringly, no doubt, but it is odd what a different tone the Guardian takes talking to the faithful compared to the BBC talking to a general audience.

Notably absent are crowd shots taken from such a distance that you can read a wide selection of banners, though picture (4) does show one “Free Palestine”. Compare them again to the pictures linked to earlier. I am told, though I do not know this from my own knowledge, that the green flags with Arabic writing are Hamas flags.

The BBC, somewhat defensively, mentions that the placards carried by the protesters were pre-printed. I must say at once that I recall from my own days attending CND and Anti-Nazi League marches that the distribution of banners may not accurately represent the distribution of opinion. That said, the banners do represent the people that the marchers are willing to be seen with.

All but one of these eighteen pictures focused on white people. Other reports of the march suggested that among the crowd there was quite a high percentage of non-white people, overwhelmingly Muslims. Many have enthused about the way Muslims have been brought into politics by this very issue. The Muslim Association of Britain, along with CND and the Stop the War Coalition, was one of the three organisations that organised the march. I fully support the right of people of all races, all religions and all opinions to peacefully demonstrate. But it is striking that the BBC, an organisation that usually goes out of its way to illustrate racial and religious diversity, should under-represent minorities and Muslims in traditional dress in its pictoral record of the demonstration.

Viewers of BBC3 were recently treated to a showing of Castaway – complete with “an on-screen message promoting Casanova… for the duration of the film”, which, apart from being annoying, presumably obscured some of the more, shall we say, revealing aspects of the film.

According to BBC Complaints, people were unhappy, and “some viewers found this ‘programme pointer’ distracting”. What a surprise! They continue “We do not usually put such pointers over films but on this occasion wanted to draw people’s attention to Casanova and felt this was a useful service”.

Aw bless! The poor old BBC, doing its best to provide a useful service to those ungrateful viewers! What utter tosh. It’s the same old BBC arrogance that we see time and again, obsessed with promoting itself and its expanding media empire before all else.

The BBC’s constant adverts for itself are a constant source of irritation – taking up more and more of our already paid for viewing time. It’s not unusual for a programme break to feature: 1) closing titles with a split screen and voice over trailing something else; 2) a ‘coming next’ clip (i.e. next after the adverts!); 3) a lengthy trail for the BBC; 4) another lengthy trail for the BBC; 5) a summary of what’s on other BBC channels; 6) a voiceover about what’s coming up after the programme that’s about to start; 7) a BBC ‘ident’ – e.g. on BBC1 we get one of the red themed artsy people prancing around to simpering music idents (what was wrong with the popular hot air balloon idents featuring beautiful landscapes from around our beautiful country? Presumably they weren’t red enough or artsy enough or non-British enough for the comrades that run BBC1). We’re even getting BBC adverts stuffed into the previously non-existent gap between the Six O’Clock News and the local news!

On terrestrial commercial TV in the UK, advertising is limited, on average, to a maximum of seven minutes per hour. I read recently that the BBC currently spends up to five minutes per hour advertising itself. If this is really the case, the BBC’s case for refusing paid for advertising is weak – they could replace some of their own blather with paid-for adverts – and we viewers wouldn’t notice the difference.

Well, actually, we would notice a couple of differences: 1) The Telly Tax (a.k.a. licence fee) would be cheaper; 2) there’d be less repetition of boring BBC adverts*. Additionally, TV advertising would be more plentiful, which might open up UK TV advertising to more smaller, leaner businesses rather than the high-price high-cost operators who currently dominate TV advertising. Before anyone asks, ITV, C4 and Sky are all more than big enough to look after themselves in a changing world!

* Technology will soon deal with boring, repetitious adverts – a PC could filter out crap advertising as soon as it spots it – e.g. by turning down the volume or by automatically switching to another channel and then back again when the programme resumes and so on (just imagine, no more of those slit your wrists “The Big Game. You know it… blah blah blah” adverts that Sky News insist on running month after month!). Adverts that work will then have to be either useful and informative or amusing and entertaining, or, at the very least, not plain irritating.