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– a BBC continuity announcer (in the London area) this evening, announced that tonight’s Panorama will be about the Beslan atrocity, and that it will, get this, “look at what the terrorists did and why they did it”. I hope that this terminological rectitude reflects a change of BBC policy rather than an inadvertant blip, although I expect that even once the broadcast wing of the BBC finally ‘gets it’ that the proto-Guardian wannabes at News Online will continue to treat their work as an ongoing portfolio for jobs at the aforementioned newspaper, recent examples including:

1) A fixation this weekend with events in Chile commemorating the overthrow of Allende 31 years ago. Worth a mention perhaps, but not worth being the first item on the News Online home page under ‘Americas’, nor worth being one of the four items on the ‘Latest:’ news ticker, especially when there is so much current ‘Americas’ news to report on;

2) Earlier today the News Online home page had a headline Boy shot dead during fox hunt, linking to a story with the same headline. This is yet another ambiguous News Online headline. Fox hunting, the sort with horses and hounds, is a contentious issue – so the headline could easily be misinterpreted, negatively, as having something to do with the perennial leftie fixation with ‘toffs in pink coats’. The reality is that the boy who was tragically killed was engaging in ‘lamping’ – hunting at night with rifles – the kind of fox ‘pest’ control that will become more common once the left finally get their way in banning hunting with hounds. Hours later the story and headlines were amended to read Shot boy was ‘mistaken for fox’.

Neither of these stories are necessarily biased in themselves, but they are both examples of a subtle bias that permeates News Online, the giving of undue prominence to leftie cause-celebres here (in the first case) and ambiguous headlines with negative connotations for another there (in the second case). Just the sort of slant that you’d expect to see on news in The Guardian or The Observer. No surprise there then, but not what you’d expect from a supposedly impartial news source.

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Kevin Myers has written a sterling article on the BBC’s coverage of Northern Ireland. Some might say that the BBC’s coverage of terrorism in that country is the prototype for their muddled and misguided coverage of terrorism worldwide.

Myers has some harsh logic for those who see BBC bias as insignificant, who preach that it’s not worth getting uppity over Aunty and her wee antics:

‘We really shouldn’t be too surprised by anything the BBC does these days: the Dyke legacy has taken a terrible toll, and so there is no point in being angered by what we see on our screens. After all, it’s only television, isn’t it? Except it’s not.’

‘One of the central and abiding problems of Northern Ireland is the role of perception in influencing politics. For the BBC to be subsidising a Sinn Fein version of the history of the Troubles isn’t merely wrong in itself, but is profoundly irresponsible, a kind of down payment on further conflict in the future.’

Following this theme up, here’s a post I found at A Tangled Web, agreeing with Myers in no uncertain terms:

‘I have yet to see a BBC drama illustrating Provo detritus in a poor light. Everything is done to facilitate the maximisation of republican interpretations of history relating to the Province. The majority of the population in Ulster is pro-Union; thus, the majority of licence payers in the Province will also be pro-Union. When are they going to get something in return for the extortion which passes for the BBC licence fee?’

Why was our national broadcaster so keen to get taken in by a likely fraud (likely to be exposed as such despite the protestations of a Rather biased fellow)? When and how will they begin to retract their unambiguous presentation of the story as hard news? Why did they imply at the beginning of their smearticle that the documents came from the Whitehouse (‘The documents released by the White House show the suspension also resulted from his failure to take his annual medical test as required.’) when the Whitehouse was just passing on what had been passed to them, as the Beeb smearticle notes in its third from last paragraph?
John Podhoretz explains the controversy and how the accusatory evidence against Bush is unravelling online, and suggests why certain people were such suckers for this one. I am reminded just how reluctant and slow the BBC were to report the SwiftVet allegations until long after it was being reported by ‘respectable’ (I use the term advisedly) outlets.

Update: Take it away, Mr Steyn.

This is what the BBC says Cheney said about Kerry the other day.

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has said a vote for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry could make a terror attack on the US more likely.

Julian Sanchez, though not fond of Cheney, corrects the record for the sloppy (or deliberately misleading) Beeb. First, the full quote by Cheney:

Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we’ll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we’re not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us.

Sanchez’ observation:

Most of the reports either omit the rest of the quotation entirely, or append it elsewhere, as though they weren’t part of one long, multi-clause sentence. As I read this, he’s not saying the danger is that if we elect Kerry, then the danger is that we’ll be attacked. He’s saying that if we elect Kerry and we’re attacked, then the danger is that we’ll treat it as a criminal act rather than an act of war. And in context, it’s actually pretty transparent that this is what Cheney intended. So transparent once you look at the full transcript, in fact, that I wonder whether some of the misreading isn’t deliberate, either as a partisan tactic or an attempt to generate a news story.

Not too flattering for the Beeb either way.

Note: I failed to note that I first saw the Sanchez article at Instapundit. My apologies to the Blogfessor for this oversight!

UPDATE: Commenter David Field disagrees with my take on this, and I take his point. Deacon over at Power Line does too, differing with his fellow blogger, The Big Trunk, on this one. The blogger who first noticed this, Patterico, is sticking to his guns …that the AP (which the BBC often apes) got it wrong. Hugh Hewitt takes it the way the AP/BBC did. I am more inclined to agree with David Field on this.

UPDATE 2: Cheney ‘splains himself here. As ‘W’ would say, you gotta take him for his word.

Further to Andrew Bowman’s post below, take a look at this: UK on Terror Alert. I think the starkness of the atrocity at Beslan may have prompted a change of policy. If so, better late than never.

But was there ever a policy of avoiding the world terrorist? Readers here may not be in much doubt. We’ve been tracking this very issue for months, and when we do find a use of “terrorist”, marking it specially, until the BBC change it back.

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber — a blogger for whom I have a lot of respect – has posted this criticism of a Daniel Pipes piece in which Pipes scornfully cited various euphemisms for “terrorist” in the media. [ADDED LATER: for those who didn’t follow the link, the criticism of Pipes is IMO justified] My post here was partly prompted by Chris Bertram’s but is not a comprehensive reply to it. His post was about the Pipes piece but I concentrate on the BBC, since that’s what this site is about. For the record, though, I am in no doubt that the strained avoidance of the word terrorist by Reuters, the Associated Press, the Guardian, the Independent and other privately run organisations does take place and is morally wrong. I have been told by an employee of Reuters that it is company policy not to use the T-word, and that the policy causes anger among many employees.

But I object less strongly in the case of these private organisations than I do in the case of the BBC, because, as Andrew says, unlike Reuters et al the BBC is paid for by a compulsory tax on the British people. It goes out under the name of my country. Come charter renewal time, the domestic BBC justifies the license fee by saying that we, the British people, are getting a public good (“The public interest must remain at the heart of all the BBC does.” – Michael Grade, Chairman.) Likewise the BBC World Service, funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the same Vote as the British Council, explicitly presents itself as bringing a benefit to Britain and the world.

But there is no more rock-bottom public good or benefit than not being randomly murdered. The BBC is obliged by its Charter and accompanying agreement to show “due impartiality” between political opinions but this is specifically stated not to mean “detachment from fundamental democratic* principles.” The BBC has no more right to be impartial between a victim of terrorism and a terrorist than it has the right to be impartial between a rape victim and a rapist. (Although it must be careful to respect the right to a fair trial of those accused of rape, terrorism or any other crime.)

This website is devoted to uncovering cases where the BBC expresses an improper partiality between parties and ideologies within the covenant, so to speak, and cases where it displays an improper impartiality between those within and those without. Impartiality or partiality is expressed through language. Hence the fuss that this website makes over quite small distinctions of language. The question at issue today is one word, terrorist, and its derivatives.

I can’t think of any other reason to avoid the T-word other than improper impartiality.

So. Is the BBC avoiding the word “terrorist”? I don’t mean in quotes from others, I mean in its own voice. To find out I have done a search through all the BBC News stories that used any of the words “terrorist”, “terrorists”, or “terrorism” from 1 September until today, 9 September. The results confirm my opinion that there is either a policy or a habit at the BBC of avoiding referring to terrorists as terrorists, but I think I do see a slight change since Beslan. Here they are:

“Massive blast at Jakarta Embassy.” (8 Sep.)Refers to “Indonesia’s wave of terror” and “The threat of a terrorist attack” (on Australia). Other uses of the T-word are quotes.

“Terror subjects held until Friday.” (9 Sep) Uses the T-word impersonally in headline.

European Press Review. In the intro there is one quote that, despite putting the word “terrorists” outside the quote marks (“Moscow’s threat to carry out pre-emptive strikes against terrorists “anywhere in the world” draws criticism…”), does not, I think, amount to the BBC using the word in its own voice. All other uses of the T-word were clearly quotes.

Russia bites back after seige. Includes the quote “Questions about the roots of terrorism and the clumsy handling of the siege were put aside.” This implies, albeit in a very BBC context, that the Beslan killings were terrorism. Incidentally, the author couldn’t resist a bit of editorialising on the side. He says that “not one senior official in Moscow, from the president down, has said sorry to the parents of Beslan.”

I’ve realised that in order to get this done in the time I have I’m going to have to stop typing in the links. The stories are there if you search the BBC news archive.

Hampshire terror suspects held. (8 Sep.) Earlier version of story above.

European Press review. (8 Sep.) All uses of T-word were quotes and don’t count.

Mass rallies for Beslan victims (8 Sep.)Includes “…rallied against terrorism”, which implies some took place. All other uses of the T-word were quotes. From now on I will use the acronym AUTWQ standing for “All Uses of the T-Word were Quotes.”

Press bares Russian soul. (8 Sep.) AUTWQ.

Arab Journalist Attacks Radical Islam. (8 Sep.) AUTWQ.

European Press Review (8 Sep.) AUTWQ.

Mass rallies for Beslan victims. (8 Sep.) Reference to “rallied against terrorism”. From then on AUTWQ.

Arab journalist attacks radical Islam (8 Sep.)AUTWQ.

European Press review. (7 Sep.) AUTWQ.

Voters’ Views: Jorge Caspary (6 Sep.) AUTWQ.

Voters’ Views: Laura Stietz (6 Sep.) AUTWQ.

Analysis: Russia’s Caucasus Quagmire. (6 Sep.) Direct use of the T-word by the author, Dr Jonathan Eyal. (A visiting expert rather than a BBC employee so far as I can see.)

Chechnya: Why Putin is implacable (6 Sep.) “Mr Puttin also added into this complex mix the spectre of international (by which he means Islamic) terrorism”. “Terrorism” also used as a section heading.

School seige: Russians react (6 Sep.) AUTWQ.

World Press veiws Beslan fallout (6 Sep.) AUTWQ.

Europrean Press review. (6 Sep.) AUTWQ.

Mid-East press appalled by seige (5 Sep.) AUTWQ. And not all of them were appalled.

Excerpts from Putin’s address. (5 Sep.) AUTWQ.

School seige: Russians react (3 Sep.) Earlier version of 6 Sep. story. AUTWQ.

In quotes – Russia crisis reaction. (3 Sep.) AUTWQ.

Terror accused in year trial wait. (3 Sep.) Direct use of T-word by BBC in own voice by BBC. But see below.

Terror laws targeting criticised. (3 Sep.) Refers to “terror laws”. In common with similar stories this usage could be not-ncessarily-approving shorthand for the actual name of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts, or could be an implication that terror really takes place.

Weblog: Republican convention (3 Sep.) AUTWQ. The intro refers to “radical groups” and “kidnappers”.

European Press review (3 Sep.) Use of T-word in abstract in the intro “… question the government’s ability to tackle terrorism.”

Full text: Bush’s address. (3 Sep.) AUTWQ.

Analysis: the US and Russia on terrorism. (2 Sep.) The author, Jonathan Marcus, used the phrase “war on terror” without the customary quote marks.

Full text: Dick Cheney’s speech. (2 Sep.) AUTWQ.

Russian press in agony. (2 Sep.) AUTWQ.

European press review. (2 Sep.) AUTWQ.

Press laments Beersheba bombers. (1 Sep.)AUTWQ.

Terror reports grip Russian media. (1 Sep.) “Terror” is in the title, as you see.

Tears of anger in Nepal. (1 Sep.) AUTWQ, but the intro did refer to the “murder” of 12 Nepalis in Iraq even though one man’s murderer is another man’s militant.

Well there you are. This month there have been a few uses of the T-word by the BBC in its own voice. But mostly the word appears only as a quote. A large proportion of the citations were press reviews of one sort or another. I didn’t find any references by the BBC in its own voice to those who carried out the killings at Beslan as being terrorists. They were hostage-takers, rebels, radicals – the same word they use for the young Alan Milburn.

The BBC refers to those who behead Nepali hostages on camera, not to mention killing Turkish and American hostages, as “militants”, the same word they use to describe striking miners. If the BBC can’t tell the difference how can they claim to be fulfilling their purpose to “educate and inform”?

I noticed a greater willingness to refer to terrorism/terrorists in the abstract or in the future as opposed to specific terrorist acts that have already happened. I got the impression that the BBC was waiting for a terrorist act bad enough to merit the description. Maybe in Beslan it finally found one. We’ll see.

One thing I have not yet done but will if I have time is carry out an archive search for the word “terror”. This would take more time and more selectivity because there are many non-political uses of the word, and even a person who will not acknowledge that the Beslan terrorists were terrorists probably will acknowledge that the hostages felt terror.

Can I pre-emptively knock down some straw men that came up in the Crooked Timber comments?

– I don’t expect detachment from democratic (or indeed human) values from a broadcaster claiming to offer a public service, but I don’t expect excessive emotionalism either. It is not the place of the BBC to call terrorists scum. Just say what they are.

– I’m not saying literally every mention of terrorists in an article about terrorists should use the word “terrorist.” Again, compare it to the case of rape. An article about a rape will usually sometimes also use other words like “attacker” or “assailant.” But if it strove to avoid using the word “rapist” for fear of appearing judgemental, you’d start to wonder.

– Neither am I saying every that all those who, for instance, attack coalition soldiers in Iraq, should be referred to as “terrorists”. “War criminals” would do fine. (The guerillas don’t wear identifying marks as required by the laws of war.) The distinction between guerilla warfare and terrorism is discussed by Michael Walzer in his valuable book Just and Unjust Wars. One could imagine a Venn diagram of semi-overlapping sets for such words as “guerillas”, “insurgents”, “rebels”, and terrorists. If, say, Fatah or Hamas restricted themselves to Israeli military targets I would still want them to lose – and ask what happened to declarations of war – but a defensible case could be made that they were not terrorists. They don’t so they are.

There may be borderline cases, but those who shoot fleeing children in the back for political reasons are not one of them. It isn’t that hard to tell. Those who fly planes into skyscrapers are terrorists. Those who blow up pizza parlours and buses are terrorists.

I’m quite aware that US bombs dropped during the Iraq war killed civilians. The difference was that the US would have been delighted if they could have killed Saddam but not killed those civilians. That difference still applies whatever you think of the Iraq war.

The distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello isn’t that hard to understand either: the launch of bombs or missiles against US or Coalition forces by the Iraqi forces was not in any way a terrorist act.

The rights and wrongs of the Chechen conflict do not alter the terrorist nature of the killers of Beslan. So why is the BBC so leery of describing them as terrorists?

*”Democratic” here implicitly means “democratic as understood in a modern liberal-democratic state” i.e. that individuals and minorities retain certain rights even if the majority hate them.

– over the last few days David Chater of Sky News has been using the word ‘terrorist’ to describe the terrorists involved in the Beslan massacre. This evening another Sky News journalist, Juliet Errington, also used the word terrorist in a Beslan report. It’s good to see Sky News moving away from the dishonesty, deception and moral equivalence of describing anyone with quasi-political grievances, guns and bombs as ‘militants’. I suppose it’s too much to hope that the BBC will be honest enough to start describing people who are clearly terrorists (by dint of causing terror, whatever their alleged grievance) as terrorists – even if they confine themselves, for now, to describing those who shoot children in the back rather than let them live another day as ‘terrorists’. And of course Sky News isn’t paid for by a compulsory telly-tax on every TV viewing household in the land.

: Melanie shoots another fish in the barrel– again this incident I saw, being a Newsnight item where the appearance of John Redwood brought out the spiteful worst in the Newsnight team, as they repeatedly mocked him for not knowing the Welsh national anthem when Welsh secretary years ago. An oldie but a goodie for the Conservative-haters at the Beeb.

Melanie Phillips is back on her beat– and angry at the bias of the BBC.

The first item deals with the distortion of the facts about terrorists threatening Israel’s existence. The second (an episode I saw myself) where Newsnight loaded a discussion of abortion with two people who both agreed on the fundamental rightness of the abortionist’s cause. One of the participants thought this represented a cultural step forward. Paxman you could see tended to agree, but was a little embarrassed to have it pointed out so brazenly by the dozy lady he’d invited on his programme. Follow links for more.

It took me ages to get that last post out, if I have at all. (It’s not showing up when I look at the blog, but that’s not conclusive.) There is little point in emailing me at the moment. My apologies.

, children, is that no actual murders of children took place. Some of them may have been caught in the crossfire and some of them may have just died in unspecified ways, but, so far as I can see, Children’s BBC coverage of the massacre does not treat it as a massacre at all.

Russia holds first seige funerals.
Russian troops “end school seige”.

Timeline of Russian school seige

I support a certain amount of censorship when describing these horrors to children. For instance in the Timeline linked to above I would not include “Boy asks for water. He is bayoneted.” But to omit all mention of the twenty or so adult men who were killed at the beginning of the seige (some of whose bodies lay outside the building for two days, so don’t anyone argue that the BBC didn’t know that anyone had been killed at the time this story was written), let alone to omit all mention of the fact that the terrorists machine-gunned hundreds of fleeing children, is not protecting children from trauma but lying to them.

Re-read that timeline. You’d think the killers were the Russians.

In contrast… Israeli missile attack kills 14.

When troops die in Iraq the exact circumstances seem in one sense insignificant. But I think it’s worth pointing out that the seven US troops who died near Fallujah today were killed by a car bomb which the BBC, in reporting both before they identified the cause of destruction as being a car-bomb, and afterwards, defined as an ‘ambush’.

This seems wrong to me, because for one thing it is unclear whether this might in fact have been a suicide bombing- I think it likely that it was- and for another a definition of ‘ambush’ generally includes the sense of an attack involving personnel, and would seem not be applicable to a booby trap or a stationary roadside bomb.

So, why is this piffling issue significant? Well, if the car was stationary in the road where the troops passed it would be evidence of incompetence on the part of the military if such a vehicle had been capable of wreaking such casualties.

Secondly, if the car was not stationary and we are talking about a suicide bombing then that is a favoured tactic of al Qaeda- and we know that al-Zarqawi is believed an active presence in Falluajh. This fact would also bring into focus the military’s use of precision bombing strikes on safehouses in the city.

So it matters whether as the BBC say this was an ambush, or a carbomb from a stationary car, or a suicide bombing. The latter seems the most obvious explanation- which would explain the deaths of so many without implying incompetence, shed light on the Fallujan ‘resistance’, and likely be a cause for the deaths of US servicemen in a War on Terror far more publicly acceptable than any Michael Moore-like notion of the Fallujan ‘minutemen’ would be.

The question is whether the BBC is geared to report the real events in Iraq, or the Michael Moore docu-drama that many wish they could report.

After writing the above I decided to trawl for the facts about the Fallujah bombing. Using Google News I found the most recent articles, and found reports such as this one from the AP, headlined

‘Apparent suicide car bomb kills seven U.S. Marines, three Iraqi soldiers near Fallujah’

This to some extent settles my mind- it seems the only logical explanation for the casualties- but if I read the BBC site alone I would have likely been misled.

Update. The Commissar is questioning the numbers of injured for August cited by the BBC in the same article (following the WaPo it would seem. Via Patterico).

Update 2: Looks like this is what really happened. Why did I need to go to Fox News for the story?