The little numbers in brackets indicating comments next to some of the posts from a few days ago are behaving oddly again. They now say tiny numbers like (0) and (1) even though, if you check, much larger numbers of juicy comments are still there to be read. So if you visit weekly, you might like to click on the comments even if none are indicated.
I don’t know why this happens.
The BBC continues to flog F911, which is ok. But it should be fair about it and get its facts right, even if Mr Moore fails miserably on both points. The BBC headline ‘Moore film divides America’ introduces an article which notes both the devisive character of Moore and his propaganda. That would be fair enough if the article did not give impression that it is only Republican Bush supporters who have major issues with the film.
Michael Moore’s award-winning documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 has opened to rave reviews – but not among supporters of President George Bush. The filmmaker has made it clear that he wants this film to send Mr Bush crashing to defeat in November’s presidential election. And Republicans have few kind words for Mr Moore. But while praise has been lavished on him following top honours at Cannes, reviewers are beginning to take a more critical look at the film.
Then follows a sampling of reviews, primarily quibbling over Moore’s abrasive style, but never questioning the honesty or factual basis of his ‘documentary’.
Contrast this with the non-right wing, non-Republican reviewers (previously posted by Ed Thomas here) and more recently by Nicholas Kristoff, Richard Cohen, and now, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball of Newsweek —
‘More Distortions From Michael Moore —
Some of the main points in ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ really aren’t very fair at all’
The BBC seems all too willing to accept and promote Moore’s opinion piece with no apparent concern for its basis in fact. Smells like bias to me.
A reader writes:
Unfortunately, I missed the reporter’s name, but this morning on BBC radio Five-Live, Nicky Campbell was discussing the fate of Saddam Hussein, now that he is to be turned over to the new Iraqi government, with a BBC reporter in Iraq. After talking about how whatever is done with him must be very public, the reporter said: “Iraqis won’t believe what they are told. They will only believe what they see, given everything they have been told by the coalition over the last 15 months.”
The BBC would have us believe that Iraqi suspicion of authority and government claims derives not from a lifetime of living under a tyrannical dictatorship, but instead from living for 15 months under the CPA. What a joke.
Spartac.us takes a look at the way the BBC phrased the potted biographies of the participants in a roundup of views on Iraq. I would have thought this trick was now so well known as to be unusable. Seems I was wrong.
Why not search under “bbc” on the Spartac.us blog while you’re there?
, commenters and emailers both, pointed me to this article by Tom Gross about the BBC Living in a Bubble that I got it into my head that it had already been linked to here. It hadn’t but it now has.
Peter writes (regarding the media study mentioned in the post two down):
Following a link provided by a regular leftie Biased-BBC hater (supposedly to point to the error of your ways), leads to this Pilger screed:
link to “How the Media Cover for Israel”.
Pilger mentions the Glasgow Media Group Middle East media coverage study currently in the news. Check the date. The ‘new’ study is actually from May 2002.
Why the sudden interest? Well, the study is being published as part of a new book by leftie publisher Pluto Press. The BBC is effectively hawking the book.
:
Moore can rely on them not to point out that the reaction or ‘backlash‘ against his Fahrenheit 9/11 film goes far beyond Republican loyalists. To name but three Democrat-oriented media figures commonly accessed on the internet- Roger Simon, Jeff Jarvis and Christopher Hitchens. I don’t know about Hitchens and Simon, but Jarvis doesn’t plan on voting for Bush- yet he flays Moore’s film; absolutely flays it.
Simon, a novelist, liberal on just about everything bar Islamofascism, says ‘What bothers is me is that the public is going to swallow this kind of propaganda which, although it is miles below Riefenstahl aesthetically, is nearly her equal in factual distortion’
Reasonable concerns, I’d have thought, from people with liberal credentials, yet the Beeb prefer to say that it’s only Republicans or ‘supporters of President George Bush’ who have ‘few kind words’ to say about Moore. The worst judgement they can find to quote from a liberal source is that Moore’s argument is ‘imperfect‘. The worst technical critique point that Moore sometimes ‘relies on Leni Riefenstahl-style sensationalism’. So, imperfect in argument and sometimes sensationalistic? Sounds like the National Front describing Mein Kampf.
Another interesting fact about the BBC’s reporting here are the quotes they leave out from the sources they use. For instance, A.O. Scott, the Washington Times critic mentioned by the Beeb praising Moore lavishly (and also featuring in Moore’s commercials for the film), also described Fahrenheit 9/11 as ‘an angry polemic’… ‘rashly overstated’ among other unflattering terms. The website Moorelies reviews the reviews and concludes ‘with Fahrenheit 9/11, even the.. ardent fans of Moore’s message are coming to consensus that the methods he employs are to be mistrusted- at best.’ – which is roughly the opposite perspective offered by the Beeb report, where the critics are the partisan ones, not the admirers, and suspect techniques are a glitch in an otherwise top hole film.
(ps. I have a slightly more speculative post on this at my blog if you’re interested)
Update: ABC ask a few tricky questions of Michael Moore (via A.S. ); Jeff Jarvis appears on CNN to discuss Fahrenheit 9/11.
, says a recent study by the Glasgow University Media Group. That’s that then. We pack up shop. Or do we? Normblog looks a little deeper.
writes on BBC reluctance to specify exactly why so many Afghan refugees now feel they can go home.
: under the headline ‘Britons confused about mid-east’, BBC Ceefax informs us that
“A new survey has shown that many people in Britain think the Palestinians are occupying Israeli territory and not the other way around.”
Lest the ridiculousness of any such thought not strike you sufficiently, it immediately adds,
“Despite extensive media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some Britons think Palestinians are refugees from Afghanistan.”
Clearly, the two ideas are at a very similar level of absurdity.
If you read on, you will learn that these are in fact the conclusions of the Glasgow Media studies group (well known for its hard-left stance, though this was not mentioned), but the casual browser might easily get the impression that this was the BBC’s own view (after all, the new survey ‘has shown it’) and though such a casual browser might be just the sort of person the report has in mind, I think they would not be wrong.
Some Britons in the nation’s Broadcasting Centre seem a bit confused about their duty of impartiality. The question of who occupied whose land when, who started the various wars, and how far back in history one looks is very much the issue in that part of the world. Various views are possible. A private media concern may choose a given line. A publicly-funded agency whose charter demands impartiality should not present a given view as fact.
Meanwhile, despite the efforts of the BBC (and the Glasgow Media group), I suspect that Britons will continue to be ‘confused’ as different people focus on different events in the region’s long and troubled history.
