Category Archives: Uncategorized

A correspondent points out that the Beeb are to carry out an exercise to check themselves for pro-EU bias. Though you could save yourselves a bob or two, guys, by just asking us.

Eric Svane has started Le Monde Watch. It’s mostly in French, but English translations of selected articles can be found at the fine multi-lingual group blog which often focusses on bias in the French media, No Pasar&aacuten!

OK. Someone tell me the HTML code for one of those upside down exclamation marks.

I must give another mention to another media scrutiny blog, Oh, that liberal media. Two of the contributors, Stefan Sharkansky and Patterico, have come up with a phrase “The Power of the Jump™” (I’m pretty sure that TM is ironic) to describe the practice where the bit of the story that the New York Times or whoever doesn’t like is buried at the end of the column after where it says “Turn to page A64.” Your Beeb-watching will be even more productive if you bear this technique and its internet and televisual equivalents in mind.

Media scrutiny blogs are quite a sub-genre now, and I think we can learn from each other.

UPDATE:

¡Gracias!

B-BBC commenter Rob Read, and others, have noticed that BBC reporting can be selective on which stories it highlights. Why is the BBC so quick to note the endorsement of John Kerry by Warren Buffet but unable to find space for the damaging story from Kerry’s fellow Swift Boat veterans who find him unfit for office. The Beeb is happy enough to report on Air America, a liberal alternative to conservative talk radio (which pretty much owns the medium at this point). Could the BBC find the resources to update their articles of 1 April to note that the fledgling network has had, shall we say, major funding issues? Why does the BBC have so little to tell us about the latest developments on the UN Oil-For-Food scandal and current stonewalling by Kofi and Co? Why does this highly-funded media monopoly sit on the WMD story coming from Jordan over a couple of weeks when some 20 tonnes of chemicals were intercepted by authorities? Where, as Rob mentioned, are BBC stories on the opposition to al-Sadr?

Why, with all the public monies at its disposal, is the Beeb being so economical with these stories unless it is that they are simply less appealing to the palate of media elites?

While I’ve been away from blogging I caught what little news I did mostly from Ceefax. This comes from Monday’s Ceefax page 117:

The Western firm targeted in the shooting that killed six in Saudi Arabian city Yanbu is evacuating its foreign staff.

Two Americans, two Britons, an Australian and a Saudi national died in Saturday’s gun attack at the offices of engineering firm ABB Lummus.

Note the careful delineation of the nationalities of the six victims. Note in contrast that ABB-Lummus is merely described as “Western.” Actually it it Swiss-Swedish, having been formed by a merger in 1988 of Swedish company Asea and a Swiss company with the confusing initials BBC, standing in this case for Brown, Boveri & Cie. (Why “& Cie”, which I thought meant the same as “& Co.”, should get its own initial is a mystery to me.)

True, ABB-Lummus is a now a multinational company with a mutinational workforce. But the BBC never has any trouble about specifying the American roots of US multinationals. I rather think the reason they slurred the national origin of the company while laboriously spelling out the national origins of the murdered men is that the deaths of Americans, Britons and Australians suggest that terrorism is a punishment for the forces of those nations being in Iraq where as the targeting of a Swiss-Swedish company suggests that terrorism is directed against all infidels.

says Nick. Denis Boyles gets a few licks in at the America-hating European press. Among several examples of media bias he refers to a Harper’s magazine article penned by the BBC’s Nicholas Fraser.

That leaves the rest of the magazine to annoy and pester — including, in the current issue, a piece by Nicholas Fraser. Fraser, who works for the BBC, defends the BBC. The article isn’t online — they’re practically giving the magazine away by mail, for crying out loud — but Harper’s + BBC = you know the story: We get a lede so over-upholstered in digressions that you could jump out of a fifth-story window, land on it, and walk away unharmed, and a side order of big-huge stats (BBC annual income: $6.5 billion, 28,000 employees, 82 years old, etc.). But then the predictable spiral: a novel dig at Lord Hutton’s report (“whitewash”), slams at Fox (“moronically celebratory”) and at CNN (“not…immune to the spirit of jingo”), with the amiable old Beeb shambling “along in the middle ground.” This leads to an anecdote using al Jazeera as a model of journalistic integrity, followed by an interesting question: “Who would…believe that a tax, the non-payment of which is punishable by a jail sentence, is the best way of subsidizing public liberties?” The answer: Guys who work for the BBC and write really long articles about it for Harper’s — that’s my guess. “The BBC is the last bastion of intelligent speech and therefore of mass intelligence,” writes Fraser.

Example of said intelligent speech: “The growing contempt or indifference with which most media are regarded is the truest symptom of the growing malaise of democracy in our time.” Exercise: Which word should be replaced by the word “journalism” in the preceding sentence?

Ummm, let me guess.

BBBC Reader Andrew has been scrutinising some BBC coverage, and via E-mail it’s here for your interest:

BBC News Online published an article on Friday 23rd headlined US concern over war dead photos about the controversy in the US over the publication of photos of flag-draped coffins on the web – the photos were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act, contrary to the wishes of the US Government.

There are two troubling aspects to the BBC’s coverage of this story:

1) The publication of the photos on the web has aroused further controversy – it turns out that a good number of the images on the site the BBC links to are actually those of the remains of NASA astronauts killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia accident – the reason for this is that the FoI Act request was for all such photos from 01FEB2003 to the present – the Columbia accident occurred on 01FEB2003. More than four days after this significant additional information has appeared across the web and wire services, the BBC story has still not been updated to record this fact. (Link)

2) More troublingly, the bottom third of the story, under the heading ‘War President’, covers the publication of a ‘mosaic’ of President Bush “composed from photos of US service men and women killed in Iraq”. The BBC states that the image is by “an anti-war activist” and that it is published on his web site American Leftist.

What the BBC doesn’t tell us, its compulsory customers, is that the image was first published on April 4th (scroll up one line). It’s not news – it’s more than three weeks old. It’s a satirical political image that some lefty BBC hack has tacked on to the end of a vaguely related news item, under the guise of news, because it looks good and is in line with their Guardianista sympathies (i.e. anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war). Moreover, reading the website of the image author and the comments of others, it seems that the photos are of coalition dead, not just US dead, that a number of the photos are repeated several times over and that there is even doubt over whether or not they are all actually dead.

All of this dodginess aside, making an image like this is not difficult with modern software – it’s basically an image imposed over a montage of smaller images, changing the colour tones of the smaller images to reflect the larger image – so it doesn’t even qualify as news on the grounds of artistic merit. And if anyone from the BBC cares to suggest it does, can we respectfully request the inclusion of similar ‘satirical montages’ to complement other news items – here are a few suggestions for starters:

– Moqtada Sadr – composed of dead coalition soldiers;

– Sheik Yassin – composed of victims of suicide bombings;

– Martin McGuinness – composed of victims of the IRA;

– George Galloway – composed of victims of Saddam’s reqime;

– Tony Blair – composed of victims of NHS waiting lists;

and so on, depending on one’s political whim. It’s not difficult to come up with these wheezes. And it’s not news, except on the BBC, paid for through a compulsory television tax. Remember, it’s not your BBC, it’s their BBC!

from this headline

Kerry queries Bush on Vietnam

that the story is really about John Kerry’s truth-twisting, charmless weakness as a candidate that’s putting his campaign in the ditch. It was the ABC network which dug up the 30 year tape giving Mr Kerry problems, not Karl Rove. But, I’m sure the BBC is above being partisan. There must be a reasonable explanation.

UPDATE: There are left-leaning news outlets reporting John Kerry’s flip-flops (BBC excepted). C’mon, even the Village Voice is criticising Kerry.

whether the press is doing its job. It was occasioned by Bush’s handling of the White House press corps at his recent Q & A. The discussion centers on American media but fits the Beeb perfectly.

is giving credit to Radio 4 for getting it right on the UN Oil-For-Food scandal. Hmmm…maybe those Daily Ablutions do help.

More on the BBC ‘US Terror Poll’ over at the Daily Ablution