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This morning’s BBC Breakfast News has been noticeably sombre so far – Natasha Kaplinsky (daughter of South African political refugees and former employee of Labour leaders Neil Kinnock and John Smith, for those who don’t already know) looks as if she’s in mourning. Barbara Plett and Lyse Doucet, reporting from the West Bank, are both suitably attired in black (a privilege the BBC didn’t have the grace to afford to the Queen Mother when she died), Plett looking as if she’s shed more tears for Arafat (“when the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry“) etc.

We are told by Kaplinsky that Arafat’s health “has declined steadily over the last few days”. How does she know? I haven’t seen any BBC reporters (or disinterested parties for that matter) saying anything definitive about Arafat’s health amidst all the speculation over the last few days.

In an oft repeated summary of responses from around the world, the usual suspects (Tony Blair “condolences”, George Bush “condolences”, Kofi Annan “deeply moved”, etc.) are quoted, juxtaposed, in suitably disapproving tones, with an abridged quote from a rather less well known Israeli, Justice Minister Tommy Lapid, who said that it is “good that the world is rid of him”, tsk.

Their correspondent in Jerusalem, a man I don’t recall seeing before, seems to be taking a more objective line though – even going so far as to quote Tommy Lapid referring to Arafat as a terrorist. I wonder how long he’ll last. (Actually, not long it seems – he was on once around 6.45am and hasn’t appeared since (it’s now 8.30am), even though other segments have been re-run two or three times. Lapid is quoted at greater length by Australia’s ABC.

Meanwhile, Kaplinsky has just fed a question about the nature of Arafat’s death to an Arab journalist on the sofa with her, who solicitously opines that “it is indeed puzzling” and that “nobody is willing to go on the record, not the hospital, not the doctors… one of the best hospitals in the world for this sort of thing…” etc. etc. – thus propagating all the wild conspiracy theories of the day (in contrast to this more measured item of record where it is stated that “It has not been made clear what illness the Palestinian leader was suffering from, though doctors ruled out cancer and poisoning”).

I fear, as with Mr. Arafat, that things will steadily decline from here…

How does the BBC portray him? The usual patterns quickly surface.

1) Sneer at his faith. So, being a serious Christian makes one illegitimate to govern? The whole article is shot through with this kind of anti-christian bias. Former NY Times reporter, now conservative pundit, Cliff May reports on his recent BBC interview re Ashcroft:

But the TV interviewer essentially took the position that perhaps Mr. May is correct to claim that there has not been a single terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, and maybe John Ashcroft had something to do with that (or it could be an odd coincidence, hard to say, sticky wicket and all that), and maybe it’s true, as you assert, Mr. May, that violent crime is down to a 30-year low.

But, Mr. May, it’s also true, is it not, sir, that John Ashcroft has been known to conduct prayer breakfasts?

Yes, yes, yes! I confess! It’s true! It’s all true! Oh, the scandal! The horror! The shame!

Christians, who needs ’em?

2) Repeat unsubtantiated rumour. I refer to the bogus ‘naked statues’ story which flew around the MSM and has now become urban legend. Leave it to the BBC to resort to this kind of pettiness.

3) Overlook principled behaviour and imply illegitimacy.

The BBC states: Mr Ashcroft was chosen by Mr Bush after failing to win re-election as US senator for Missouri in November 2000. That was despite the fact that his opponent, Governor Mel Carnahan, had died in a plane crash three weeks earlier. Mr Carnahan’s widow, Jean, accepted appointment to the Senate in her husband’s place.

At face value, the people of Missouri elected a dead man over Ashcroft. Ashcroft suspended campaigning for the final week of the election and a last-minute Democratic ‘sympathy vote’ plan took effect. And don’t forget Ashcroft’s refusal to dispute the election in the face of strong vote fraud evidence and late poll closings in Saint Louis. Mr Ashcroft ran the gauntlet of Senate confirmation in a hostile atmosphere on Capitol Hill and was approved. The reporter stacks the deck in failing to report the whole story. It’s all too familiar a pattern.

4) Impugn his motives and good faith efforts to do his job. Michelle Malkin answers this one as well as I’ve seen: He was the most underappreciated, most maligned, most ridiculed, and most demonized member of the Bush cabinet. He endured a brutal, vicious nomination process. After 9/11, he was damned for doing his job too aggressively, and damned for not doing his job aggressively enough. He withstood the secular Left’s assaults on his deeply-held faith, and devoted himself to his tasks to the point of exhaustion. In short, he bore all of the blame for the War on Terror’s shortcomings, won little credit for its successes, and earned undeserved and largely uninformed scorn on both sides of the aisle. It will be the same way for whomever replaces him. God bless Mr. Ashcroft. And God help his replacement.

The BBC just doesn’t get it. Will they ever?

UPDATE: Just noticed this piece de-bunking the NY Times treatment of Ashcroft. I think the shoe fits the Beeb perfectly.

“U.S. Inspires World With Attempt at Democratic Election”–headline, the Onion, Nov. 3

“U.S. Vote ‘Mostly Free and Fair’ “–headline, BBC Web site, Nov. 5

(Shamelessly lifted from James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today)

A reader writes:

Wanted to draw your attention to another case of BBC bias on the Today Programme this morning. [Monday 8 November] In an interview with the Director of OFFA, Sir Martin Harris, the BBC presenter attacked OFFA from a left-wing point of view. No mention at all was made of the argument that favouring state school pupils might lead to a lowering of standards. The only criticism from the right was a mention that Chris Patten and Michael Beloff had said that this was a crude form of social engineering; note the implied position that Oxford is being elitist – others have made the same criticism of OFFA, but curiously were not mentioned. A transcript of the presenter’s questions is below. You can see how many questions were left wing attacks, compared with the one right wing criticism. Note that Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and Michael Beloff, President of Trinity College, Oxford, also appeared on the programme later on, and the same presenter let them say what they wanted to say.

Here are the presenter’s questions:

“You’ve said that you hope universities can be persuaded to spend £200 million a year on bursaries. Will that be enough to encourage a broader spread of admissions?”

“Wouldn’t it make more of a difference if you could actually control admissions? You can’t do that can you, you do have limited powers to control these bursaries but you’ve already been criticised because you don’t have enough powers.”

“But is there any real onus on the universities to increase and broaden the spread of admissions because if you can’t actually affect the admissions policy, if you can’t put quotas, for example, down, what is there to make the universities do what they should?”

“Well, do they, though?” [in response to Sir Martin’s point that universities respond to incentives and challenges]

“But how do you respond to the criticism that you’ve faced already so far. It’s like you’re damned before you even begin. For example, Michael Beloff, President of Trinity College Oxford, and Chris Patten, the new Chancellor of Oxford University, they say that this type of meddling is a shoddy attempt by the Government at social engineering”.

“Are you prepared to impose fines and at what point will you make that decision?”

“You’re sounding very reasonable [Sir Martin’s point that disadvantaged students will have a better change of getting to university], but that’s exactly why some people have criticised a softly softly approach, and they would like somebody like you to come down hard on the universities and say ‘you have to take in a certain number of students from poorer backgrounds.’”

“Are you a little too close, though, to the institutions that you’re supposed to be monitoring? You are a former Vice-Chancellor of the leading Russell Group universities.”

“You won’t find it too hard to impose your restrictions on your former colleagues?”

It’s a mistake to concentrate only on the answers given in an interview. The questions asked are often just as revealing. – NS

to joke about assasinating Bush. This clip gets to ‘kill Bush’ stuff about 3 minutes into the broadcast. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

– the picture below (in a radical new departure for Biased BBC) is an unretouched screen grab of Richard Perle being interviewed in the third part of the BBC’s recent series The Power of Nightmares*. Note how Perle was filmed with a bright window behind him and little, if any, lighting in front of him – leaving one side of his face washed out and mis-shapen, the other dark and sinister, like a thug with a black-eye.

The Power of Camera Tricks – Richard Perle with a BBC style black eye.

Needless to say, no other interviews in the same episode were filmed as poorly as this. Co-incidentally, the programme credits list the same name for ‘Camera’ and ‘Assistant Producer’.

There are many manipulative camera tricks that sharp-eyed viewers can spot from time to time in the media, including using unusual camera angles, fish-eye style lens filters (to subtly distort facial features) and so on – do keep an eye out for them!

* – a subject to which I intend to return when I have time. Suffice it to say for now that it was a mish-mash of opinion presented as if it was a factual documentary.

On Friday morning BBC Views Online’s front page News Ticker’s headlines included:

Commons speaker’s press chief quits after secretly colluding with the Conservatives

This then linked to a story headlined Speaker’s aide quits in Tory row.

Both of these headlines suggest some Conservative, sorry Beeboids, Tory skulduggery or wrongdoing.

The real story – in fact, there are three real stories – is that, according to the BBC’s own report (once you read through the spin), John Stonborough, an employee of Michael Martin, the Commons’ Speaker, tried to send an email to the Conservatives’ Guy Black, following last week’s publication of MPs expenses, suggesting that the Conservatives attack the Labour Party over their MPs expenses because “Most of the abuse was Labour”.

Except that the clot sent the email to ‘T. Black’ – Teresa Black, who works for a Labour MP – thus prompting his resignation because the Speaker and his office are supposed to be impartial (link for the benefit of Beeboids!).

Now this is where it gets complicated Beeboids – collusion means:

A secret agreement between two or more parties for a fraudulent, illegal, or deceitful purpose.

Given that the message was unsolicited (there is no evidence to suggest otherwise) and given that it didn’t get to its intended recipient anyway, where then is the collusion? Why is it a ‘Tory row’ rather than a ‘Speaker’s row’ or somesuch? Is it too hard to resist the urge to spin the facts into ‘Tory collusion’ and ‘Tory row’?

And what of the second and third stories I alluded to? Well, the second story is precisely what Mr. Stonborough attempted to highlight – that Labour MPs appear to abuse, sorry, claim more expenses than other MPs – which isn’t something that the BBC have gone out of their way to investigate. The third aspect is that it is, to coin a phrase, widely believed that the political parties agreed not to attack each other over MPs expenses – presumably because they think they are as bad as each other when it comes to snouts in the trough. That, Beeboids, is where the real story of collusion, if any, exists.

News Online’s first version of the story, timestamped 10.14, was the same as the second version, timestamped 11.56, save for the addition of the final paragraph in the latter – “Mr Black later stressed he had neither requested, nor received, any information from Mr Stonborough.” – which, for alert and persistent readers at least, rather highlights the BBC News Online spin in the story and its headlines.

: with the partial (in both senses of that word) exception of Matt Frei (the BBC’s Washington corespondent, already often featured on this blog), and within the usual limitations of their analysis, the BBC 10’o’clock news handled Bush’s reelection more calmly than his doings in Iraq. I think this is because elections are a part of the world that the BBC accepts; somehow the concept of impartiality in reporting an election is not as alien to them as in reporting a war.

“America keeps faith with George Bush … He won more votes than any president in history … George Bush has won a convincing victory …”

The tone was very sober but you could not complain the chosen words betrayed any bias.

“If Kerry had won, Tony Blair would have been the last war leader left standing”

was a silly remark (Australia’s recent election obviously doesn’t count, or for that matter the other countries where leaders who supported Bush are still in place), but to be fair the same man who said it (Mark, standing outside Westminster), went on to say that:

“Many labour MPs think that only a few weeks ago Tony Blair moved British troops to help Bush’s campaign. I’ve never believed that, I don’t believe that at all but they believe it …”

so he isn’t swallowing every left-wing statement. Even Matt Frei mentioned something he could have omitted. As Bush was declared the next president:

“Sweet words (pause) again and after this election vistory they must sound so much sweeter (pause) to him and to them. [tone makes clear, not to Matt] … George Bush now has a very clear mandate. The question is will he use it to unite (significant pause) or to divide.”

but further on Matt gave us, even if incredulously, an interesting fact:

“There is a curious irony. The Republicans did what the Democrats used to do so well, organising the party from the grass roots. They spent less than the Democrats, can you believe it !!!”

Matt spoke of republican success in reaching out to the blue collar vote

“although Kerry said again and again [emphasis as Matt’s impatience broke through] ‘no tax cuts for the rich, we must help the poor.”

The tone betrayed his incomprehension of those stupid blue collar voters who don’t understand their own interests as well as Matt does, but the facts were welcome. Kerry and Kerry supporters got the lion’s share of the time but perhaps that is not so unfair; we’ll be hearing lots about Bush hereafter. The BBC’s general analysis was of course unable to step outside their worldview. There were many remarks along the lines of:

“… middle America that, just as Matt has been saying, surrounds itself with the flag …”

and much talk of Bush’s ‘radical’ view (implicitly contrasted to Kerry’s, or the BBC’s, moderate one), plus the

usual talk on Israel and on Europe

“… no doubting the interational pressure on George Bush to adjust his tone and tactics …”

However John Simpson’s discussion was, as often, rational and not marked by one-sided bias;

“… they (France and Germany) would have had a much harder time if Kerry had won; then they would have to help out in Iraq …”

John explained that instead they could now continue to do nothing. They had managed without close ties with the U.S. over the last few years and would continue to get along O.K. without such ties. The U.S. equally would manage to do without them. By the time he had finished talking, the divisions that had been much mentioned in the rest of the programme sounded hopeless, but not serious.

:

BBC are determined to say Bush’s inevitable screwup in Iraq will cause high oil prices.

Markets think differently

Stephen Pollard was on a roll as he reviewed parts of BBC coverage of the US elections.

Some trademark Beebisms on display, from ‘no-one wanted to believe this was happening’ to ‘it was the religious nuts wot done it’ to ‘anyway, back to the ‘so-called’ war on terror’ to ‘didn’t everyone want Bush to lose anyway?’. Great stuff, if one can use that phrase about responses to blatant bias.