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Do more people read the blogs than watch BBC Digital? Speaks for itself.

Second comes a wee snippet about the Kirsty Wark affair which in turn links to this post from Freedom & Whisky. (Some of our US readers, or indeed some of our English readers, may not have been following Warkgate. You should. It’s something like Celebrity Big Brother for the Scottish ruling elite. Check out Ed Thomas’s recent posts. Kirsty Walk is the BBC Scotland presenter who does their election night specials and lots of other political work. And holidays with the First Minister. And helped approve the designs for the famous and astonishingly costly Scottish Parliament building. And who refused to hand over footage from a documentary about the building and its astonishing cost to the inquiry about the same, a refusal backed up by the then controller of BBC Scotland, John McCormick, who said surrendering the tapes would clash with the BBC’s policies.)

The Bunny has up a third post that includes the wonderful line “it was as if Grima Wormtongue had been banished for the day.”It’s about the BBC when it was Auntie.

writes:

Just have a look at this. The Hizbollah attacks an Israeli army vehicle in Israel, Israel shoots back and the headline is “Israel mounts south Lebanon raid.” Not “Hizbollah attack Israeli army vehicle” or anything similar.

Bloody Trots.

UPDATE: That was the headline when I wrote the post. Now it’s different. David B comments:

“Looks like they changed it to “clashes erupt on Lebanon border”. Let’s blame both sides instead…. that’s fair isn’t it?

The BBC must be the only people on the planet who are. Big Mike made sure his loyal wacko fans stuffed the ballot box. That’s fair enough, but the Beeb could at least mention this less than obscure fact. Leave it to one of those money-grubbing American broadcasters to let us know the fuller picture.

Last month Moore posted a letter on his Web site, www.michaelmoore.com, asking fans to vote for the movie, in part to annoy conservative critics of the documentary, which is critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Iraq war.

Moore’s win was greeted by catcalls as well as cheers.

I guess things are looking up in Beebdom.

I noticed Greg Dyke’s recent book, Inside Story, being sold off in Waterstone’s for half price, only three months since it was first published. Amazon.co.uk have it for even less – a mere £8 – 60% off the list price!

A quick search of the web turns up an article by Andrew Donaldson in the South African Sunday Times that throws some light on the matter:

This was a year when the big hitters in the book industry paid vast sums for huge, often very self-important books which swiftly wound up in the remainder bins.

Penguin, for example, forked out £600,000 for Revolution Day, by the ‘handsome’ BBC Iraq reporter Rageh Omaar. It has sold just 16,000 copies — and, according to observers, recouping just 5% of the publishers’ advance.

HarperCollins doled out £600,000 for Shooting History, the memoirs of Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow, and £500,000 for Inside Story, the bitter confessional by former BBC director-general Greg Dyke. Snow’s book sold about 9,000 copies, while Dyke’s sales almost hit the 6,000 mark. Not good, to say the least.

It seems that British readers aren’t buying Greg (or Jon or Rageh).

Presumably this is because the book market in Britain is a free market – no one is compelled to buy a particular state-specified book just so they can read some other book – unlike their television viewing equivalents – forced to pay the BBC’s tellytax just to watch something else.

(never like doing that), but last time I mentioned Kirsty Wark at any length, I happened to remark, amongst other things, that ‘the public knows little (by the Beeb’s own definition) about the BBC’s ‘contacts’, and would probably be disillusioned if it did’

Now, of course, we know more about those close contacts- and what we find out is particularly disquietening, as forecast. The matter at issue is the official enquiry into the exorbitant cost of building the Scottish Parliament, and the potential subversion of that enquiry by Scotland’s most eminent female BBC presenter.

Scottish opinion here.

. Richard North at his EU Referendum blog caught a live one:

‘Nick Clarke, interviewer for BBC Radio 4’s World at One, ran an outrageous puff for the EU constitution on today’s programme.

Well, at least we know where he stands.‘

Is it necessary to add that the BBC have no business expressing their opinions on this matter, certainly not in such a context?

Sleep on it, they say. Sleep on it and you’ll feel calmer in the morning. I did and I don’t. Yes, I’m talking about the BBC peddling conspiracy theories about Diego Garcia and the tsunami again. Again because I find it more disturbing the more I think about it, and because I have a few more links to add. Actually, this is going to tie into one of the most heartfelt complaints against the BBC: its reluctance to use the word “terrorist”.

To recap:

The British Broadcasting Corporation, funded by the British taxpayer considers it an open question whether, ten days ago, between one hundred thousand and a quarter of a million people were at best deliberately not saved or at worst murdered by the United States Government.

You think I’m exaggerating? Read the BBC story again. “Or was some malign hand at work…” If that “malign hand” does not mean either that the Americans started the tsunami and by some devilish means made it circumvent this island (strange and costly mercy amid such vast ruthlessness!) or warned their own servicemen while deliberately leaving others, including American tourists, to die, then what does it mean?

The British Broadcasting Corporation, funded by the British taxpayer, publicises this proposition and invites its millions of online readers worldwide to debate it in a non-judgemental fashion.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, funded by the British taxpayer, declines to give an opinion as to whether these rumours are true.

Many of those readers, both from the West and the East, are uneducated scientifically. Many of them are living in countries and cultures where paranoid conspiracy theories about the Americans and/or the Jews are common currency (even more than they are in certain left-wing circles here in the UK.) Many of them move in circles where the wish to kill an American or many Americans in revenge for this colossal crime which, they are told by their neighbours and their own newspapers, the US has perpetrated on their people need not remain a fantasy.

“Why did mother die, father?”

“Because of the Americans, my son. Some say they let off an atom bomb under the sea. Others only that they knew a great wave was coming but left us to die while warning their own people.”

“My teacher says that’s propaganda. For all that they are foreigners, for many years we have known that the BBC is more trustworthy than the papers here. We should see what the people at the BBC say.”

“Even the BBC dare not deny it.”

Rumours like this have started race riots, pogroms and even wars. Once started they go on for decades. There is no more fertile soil for terrorism than a sense of historical grievance. Fifteen years from now I expect young men now children to be blowing up aeroplanes because they grew up believing that hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists were killed by the Great Satan. The BBC will have played a part in that.

(And if it wasn’t yet obvious to you that it is all rubbish, if you are inclined to take literally the splendidly sarcastic first comment to the previous post from Bob Gleason, “As a Yank, I want to confirm that the U.S. military can, indeed, start a tsunami at will, but then have it go around any installations we might have in its path. My tax dollars at work. Damn, we’re good!”, ask yourself why, if the Yanks can and would do that, did they waste their time directing their tsunami at Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. Why not North Korea? There are lots of earthquakes in the Sea of Japan to work from. There was one Thursday before last.

You might also take a look at a new blog I found via our referrer logs, Shadow Chaser. The author, Michael Gill, has up two posts about all this, here and here.

Mr Gill points out more BBC misinformation. This BBC story about the effect of the tsunami on Somalia says

The small Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia – home to a US naval base – escaped unharmed as it was forewarned by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii.

This account from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association does not say anything about the reason for Diego Garcia escaping unharmed being that it was forewarned. It merely says that the US Navy at Diego Garcia reported to the US Navy Pacific Command at 8.20pm Hawaiian Standard Time that it had not observed the tsunami then.

And as Mr Gill says, Diego Garcia scarcely needed a warning from Hawaii, as the tsunami had hit the shores of Thailand and Indonesia hours before it reached Diego Garcia. Look at the animation of the tsunami he links to. Diego Garcia is that dot in the bottom left corner. (Strictly speaking that dot must be the whole Chagos Archipelago group of islands, of which DG is one. It’s at 6.34S, 72.24E if you want to use the latitude and longitude scales at the side.)

It’s a damn shame that nothing like the Pacific warning system was in place in the Indian Ocean. Those NOAA guys seem to have tried, but – “I’m a scientist! Get me the President of Indonesia!” Sorry, the world doesn’t work that way. Or it didn’t ten days ago when tsunamis were considered rare in the Indian Ocean; it might today. The fact is that a monitoring station in the wrong bloody ocean which was never set up to work outside its area was never going to be able do that much. The systems were not set up. Tsunamis move at 500mph. Sad, very sad. Not evidence of a malign hand.

So how does a conspiracy theory about the tsunami link into use of the word “terrorist”?

The answer to this is tied into the answer to another set of questions: What is the BBC for? Why do we have to pay for it?

Recently in an effort to be more accountable the BBC instituted Newswatch. This Newswatch story about why the BBC will not refer to ETA members as terrorists confirmed what many here already knew: that the BBC’s policy is to admit the existence of something called “terrorism” in general but not to ever call anyone terrorists, even if they are admitted to have carried out what the same writer, Matt Holder, calls “atrocities”. Presumably the outburst of uses by the BBC of the word “terrorist” applied to specific individuals at Beslan, commented upon in this blog, was in violation of those rules. Here is the reason Matt Holder gives for the policy:

It [the BBC] avoids labels wherever it can. And its credibility is severely undermined if international audiences think they can detect a bias for or against any of those involved.

Actually that isn’t what credibility means. You have credibility when people think you are truthful, not when you successfully conceal from them what you think good or bad.

The only reason why we should care about the credibility of the BBC; why our society should see it as enough of a Good Thing to pay for it out of a particularly unpopular hypothecated tax, is that the credibility of the BBC provides some social good.

The social goods that the BBC claims to provide are ensuring people are well informed (an ideal that rests on the proposition that truth in itself is good) and making people better citizens – that is more peaceable, more tolerant, more law-abiding, better able to participate in society. Oh, and in so far as the non-UK audience is being considered, less likely to kill Britishers.

No media service, not even a privately-funded one, should be indifferent to these kind of values. A tax-funded media service in a democracy cannot be, unless it wishes to deny its own justification for existence. Don’t kid yourself. All public broadcasting is ultimately advocacy.

If truth in itself matters, then you don’t abuse your position of trust to pass on a known and dangerous lie, pretending that your hands are clean so long as you don’t actually endorse it. That is what the BBC did in spreading the tsunami conspiracy theory.

On to the T-word: if the maintenance of liberal values in Britain and the world matters, that objective being what the BBC claims it is for, then you don’t play neutral to the most basic liberal value of all, the right to continue living without being blown up at random. If neutrality is possible or desirable, why is the BBC not neutral about ordinary British murders? Or about rape, or theft, or racial attacks or any of the other crimes that disfigure the body politic? Some section of our own British audience – quite a large section if the BBC is to be believed – cheers on racist attacks and presumably objects to any bias against those involved. Why does the BBC not strive to maintain its “credibility” with them?

Because, and never mind the name of this blog, in that sense it has no business being unbiased.

What is the BBC saving up its credibility for anyway? The mere pleasure of contemplating the high regard in which it is held? The BBC audience figures are no concern of mine. If the BBC is striving to keep that segment of its international audience that thinks it OK to take children hostage and shoot them comfortable with its beliefs, then would that the figures were lower! The basic reason for me, the taxpayer, wishing for you, the BBC, to be trusted is so that you can change that sort of thinking. So that when there is an important truth you must convey you are believed. So that when it it is necessary to save lives you can say, “this rumour is not true” and they’ll take it from you, because you are truthful.

That was the first line of an email from a reader. He or she then directed me to this:

“Why did US base escape tsunami?”

After outlining a current conspiracy theory about the tsunami mysteriously sparing the US base in Diego Garcia, the BBC article says:

Is America a power for good or ill in the world? Was there a malign hand at work, or has America’s role in the crisis in fact been a model of humanitarian leadership.

Let us know what you think. Is this just anti-US sentiment on the web or something more worrying?

You can read and send us your views from this page.

Contemptible. And now a public service announcement: have you remembered to pay your licence fee? This webpage will enable you to give £121 to the BBC, as you are legally obliged to do, with the minimum of inconvenience. Avoid any unpleasantness by paying now. Remember that the BBC relies on its “unique system of funding” in order to fulfil its vision of becoming “the most creative, trusted organisation in the world.” Come to think of it, why not pay twice? Then perhaps the the BBC might favour us with yet more internet conspiracy theories presented as neutral topics for discussion. I don’t think we’ve had the 4,000 Israelis or Operation Monarch yet.

The published comments were a mixture. There were some sceptical voices, but the usual run of earnest semi-literate cultists also jumped in. David Moore asks:

“Could it have been an attempt by the Neo-Conservative Christian Right to let set off an atom bomb, in order, to open the gates of hell and put out the flames with the water.”

Own up. Which one of you was it?

In a lengthy speech on media bias, Melanie Phillips examines the awful consequences of biased reporting regarding Israel and Iraq. The speech runs to 17 pages in a pdf document on her website. Here are her observations on the BBC.

But probably the greatest single reason for the obsessive and unbalanced focus on Israel,along with the irrationality over Iraq, is the hostility and prejudice of the BBC’s reporting.

Unlike newspapers, the BBC is trusted as a paradigm of fairness and objectivity. In fact, it views the world from a political position which is similar to that of the Guardian or Independent. In other words, its default position is the left. And since it regards this as the political centre of gravity, it cannot acknowledge its own bias. The BBC is thus a perfectly closed thought system.

When it comes to Israel, it persistently presents it in the worst possible light. It language and tone are loaded, it handles Arab and Israeli interviewees with double standards, and panel discussions are generally skewed with two or three speakers hostile to Israel against one defender or, more often, none at all.

The BBC’s bias against Israel is simply staggering. A 30-minute BBC profile of Arafat

described him as a ‘hero’ and an ‘icon’, and spoke of him as having ‘performer’s flare’, ‘charisma and style’, ‘personal courage’, and being ‘the stuff of legends’. Ariel Sharon, by contrast, was subjected to a mock ‘war crimes’ trial. It constantly presents the Israelis as the aggressors and responsible for the violence in the

Middle East — the opposite of the truth. And it wears its heart on its sleeve for the

Palestinians who are presented not as aggressors motivated to murder by brainwashing in hatred of Israel and the Jews, but as innocent victims. For example, BBC Radio News said of Israel’s raid into Gaza last autumn to stop the rocket attacks from there upon Israeli citizens that this was ‘making Israeli streets safe perhaps, certainly making life miserable and intolerable for the Palestinians of northern Gaza’.

A previous radio news bulletin reporting Israel’s killing of 14 Hamas terrorists was an object lesson in bias. Reporter Alan Johnston’s language made it sound as if the event was on a par with the recent murder of Russian schoolchildren in Beslan. Thus there would be ‘many funerals’ today for the Hamas ‘faithful’, much ‘anger and grief’. And then came the following startling assertion: ‘The movement is struggling to end Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank’. Thus Johnston presented Hamas as some kind of heroic freedom fighters ‘struggling’ — a loaded word if ever there was one — against colonial oppression. But Hamas of course does not seek merely to end Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank. It aims to eradicate Israel altogether as a Jewish state.

That particular week, the Today programme broadcast a total of 17 items on the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, four items hostile to Israel, and one item complaining that money for the poor was being diverted to the war on terror. It broadcast no items on the murder of six Israeli soldiers and the subsequent murder of five more in Gaza that week, events which were mentioned in passing; no mention of the fact that Palestinians had played football with the heads they cut off murdered Israeli soldiers and even placed one of the heads on a desk while being interviewed; and merely two items, on the same day, on the decapitation in Iraq of the American hostage Nick Berg. Thus the BBC’s objectivity and sense of balance and, indeed, moral values.

Read the whole thing.

Hat Tip: Power Line

It has come to our attention that the tiny state of Israel is doing yeoman’s work in the tsunami disaster effort. Unfortunately, very few people would have heard this, for you have not reported it! You and your colleagues received a press release (Dec 27) to this effect. Where are your reports? This is not looking good.

Ms Guerin, since you are a lover of truth, please note the following points from a website you are sure to love.

* The Israeli organization Latet (‘To Give’) filled a jumbo jet with 18 tons of supplies.

* A medical team headed by four doctors from Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital arrived in Sri Lanka on Monday night (Dec. 27), carrying medicine and baby food. The doctors specialize in rescue operations, trauma and pediatrics.

* An IDF rescue team is now on its way to Sri Lanka with 80 tons of aid material, including 10,000 blankets, tents, nylon sheeting and water containers, all contributed by the IDF.

* A ZAKA rescue-and-recovery team arrived in the disaster areas Monday night, armed with its specialized equipment for identifying bodies.

* A Health Ministry contingent left for Thailand on Monday night to aid in rescue efforts. The group includes doctors, nurses and four members of the IDF.

* Israel has also offered its assistance to India — a search-and-rescue team from the Home Front Command, as well as consignments of food and medicine.

Since the BBC website features an article which gives an incomplete picture [Tsunami Aid:Who’s giving what], maybe you or Barbara could try and get with it and simply report the news,…even if it goes against the grain. Oh, and one more thing, with your colleagues carping about the slow US response, wouldn’t it be a refreshing contrast to mention how quick off the block the Israelis have been in response to this disaster.

UPDATE: In fairness to the Beeb, on 28 December they did report the cancellation of the IDF team offered to Sri Lanka, apparently refused by the Sri Lankan government. Thanks to “Anon” in comments.

Hat tip: FrontPageMag.com