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That’s just my little joke. Scott Burgess quotes a BBC report which is slightly less alarming. Slightly.

Ceefax is a bit of a poor relation nowadays. Even so they ought not to let this through: yesterday’s page 120, headed “Algeria’s leader wins landslide” said,

Mr Bouteflika is credited with taming an Islamic insurgency which has claimed some 100,000 lives in two years.

No dout the insurgents themselves claim to be the true representatives of Islam. But there is no reason for the BBC to underwrite this claim. Their bitter opponents in the Algerian government are also overwhelmingly Muslim. Millions of other Muslims from other countries would also object to the description of the insurgents as simply “Islamic”, just as I would object if the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda were described as simply “Christian.”

A reader writes:

As of 00:21 UTC this story is linked on the BBC’s front foreign web page:

“End of an era: Debate still rages over the toppling of Saddam’s statue”

To his credit, Mr. Wood includes his firsthand recollection that the crowd at the Saddam statue (which some have claimed was faked) was in the several hundreds. To his shame, he mentions that wide shot of the square as if it shows anything like what the activists claim.

Here’s the wide shot, folks:

link Notice that the BIG, BLACK STATUE is nowhere near its pedestal, and therefore the picture could have been made any time AFTER the event.

Typically, the BBC Online editors spin the story as a “raging debate,” in which the firsthand account of the BBC correspondent carries as much weight as a photograph scribbled on by someone thousands of miles away.

I propose a photoshop contest in which people prove that other historical events did not occur by scribbling on well-known photographs in Indymedia fashion.

I think Wood’s own testimony clearly and deliberately debunks the conspiracy theory – which was feeble even by the usual standards of such things. It was a pity that he doesn’t seem to have looked at the famous wide shot very hard or read the many criticisms of it written at the time. Like, it’s getting dark yet the statue fell in bright sunlight. Read this post by Josh Chavetz of Oxblog for more analysis.

As so often with the BBC the link text or the headlines let the actual reporting down. When I linked to this article the headline was “The Day Saddam’s Statue fell.” I think the reader who sent this is saying that the original headline was the one mentioning debate as still raging. If so, it’s good that they’ve changed the headline.

The reason I have no trouble believing that the original headline gave credence to the conspiracy theory is that the link to this article under the under the heading “Analysis” (in the right hand column common to all this clutch of articles) is still offering a leg-up to the conspiracymongers.

At 11.20 BST it says “Toppled But questions remain about the iconic moment when Saddam Hussein’s statue fell. “

Excuse me, no they don’t. Not unless you think your own reporter – all of your own reporters – and several dozen others from many countries – and several hundred Iraqis – and dozens of US troops – have all agreed to tell the same barefaced lie and have maintained it with superhuman consistency for a year since.

Incidentally, having tracked a number of BBC stealth edits I know that the the “Last updated” field at the top of web stories means nothing.

isn’t so happy. He recounts one of those little gems of newsreader wit that the BBC fondly imagines make the newsreaders more lovable. The post below about the three headed toad is also interesting.

Today I found a little scrap of paper upon which I had written these words. Shows you how often we tidy the coffee table. However, better late than never I must say the word of praise to the BBC that I wrote the note to remind myself to do.

A few weeks ago I caught the end of Crufts dog show. Just as a dog made of candy floss was joining the line-up of finalists, loud boos broke out from the audience. Gosh, I thought, unjustly as it turned out, I thought all these doggy people were more sporting than that. As if they’d read my mind the BBC announcers said (all this is from memory and so these aren’t exact words): “The reason you can hear booing is that some people are staging a demonstration over to our right.” Then with a weary sigh I waited for the camera to swing right and give the demonstrators the attention they wanted.

But it never happened. All we had was a shot of some stewards running out of camera range, then the female announcer said with unmistakable satisfaction, “Ah, that interruption seems to have been dealt with very promptly. On with the show!”

UPDATE: I pushed my luck and looked up the story here. Oh well, I suppose they have to report what the protest was about somewhere. If ever, for instance, the disagreements between the British and American Kennel Clubs as to the proper angle of a Lithuanian Mop Dog’s ears were to break out into thermonuclear war that laid waste Western Europe, even I would concede that the story would qualify as news. But I am glad to see that not every wannabe agitator who disrupts a non-political event is given time on camera. The announcers and cameramen handled it professionally.

If you are like Lawrence, the bloke who ventures to utter a valid criticism at BBC news coverage, be warned. The drones in the ‘editing’ cubicles are just waiting to ‘balance’ it for you. They’ve got their Jack Thomases at the ready.

The media give undue prominence to such actions. And because of that the militants and terrorists take the actions to exploit the media coverage. Would they be doing it if there were no cameras and coverage? I thought the BBC’s recent documentary and surveys at the time of the 1st anniversary of the war showed that the majority of Iraqi’s wanted no part in such militant action. So why does the BBC then give so much coverage. Come on BBC, focus on the positives instead of the negatives for a change.

Lawrence, UK

To Lawrence, UK : You are asking for the BBC to focus on the positives rather than the negatives. I would rather the BBC focused on the truth, something that I believe they have been doing. I’m sure most Americans would describe their media as ‘positive’ but i’d describe it as biased and misleading.

Jack Thomas, Bangkok, Thailand

: Natalie Solent has already posted below about the BBC’s characterisation of one of its old-time greats, the late Alistair Cooke, as having ‘particular dislike of the shallow flag-waving of the Reagan presidency’. Let me add my testimony.

For several years, from the very end of the seventies though the early eighties, my Sunday schedule let me hear Cooke’s ‘Letter from America’ week after week. Unlike the obituarist, so cocksure that Cooke thought and felt what left-thinking BBC people should, I enjoyed learning from what he actually thought.

The Cooke I heard in those years had insights of the kind that come to someone who prefers to take a genial approach to his subject, thinking first and judging after. If he was, as Natalie sensibly speculates, more naturally a Democrat than a Republican, he was never blind to the faults of the left. Often in those years, I recall him offering not the damning indictment of Reagan that the news online obit would have you think, but penetrating critiques of the kind that that both the American Left and the BBC elite desperately need. I have no book of Cooke’s broadcasts to hand but I don’t need it; thoughts of the quality he sometimes reached stay in the mind.

One ‘Letter from America’ described the U.S. reviews of a new edition of Vera Britain’s ‘Testament of Youth’, which all talked of it in feminist categories. Alistair contrasted them with the British reviews written when it was first published (which he quoted); they talked rather of the author’s attitude to the first world war. More gently and persuasively than this bald summary can suggest, he asked whether the modern reviewers’ fashionable attitudes gave them more insight than the contemporary reviewers or, on the contrary, less. He invited listeners to think about the way in which a reviewer’s mindset can get in the way of their hearing what a book is saying.

Another ‘Letter’ examined a supreme court ruling that laws limiting how one could display the U.S. flag were unconstitutional. In the U.S., such laws were common before the ruling; in Britain, we’ve never had them – you can use the Union Jack as an advertising logo if you want to. Cooke made me smile describing how some world war two British merchants, more eager to promote anglo-american relations (and their sales) than to uphold good taste, found american G.I.s were more often shocked than amused to find the stars and stripes displayed in some unusual product locations.

By the time, he reached the meat of this letter, the listener was in no doubt that Cooke saw no actual need for such laws (and as a fellow Briton, neither do I). Yet he was disturbed by the Supreme Court’s ruling. What does it mean that such laws can be voted by legislators and supported by constitution-proud Americans for 200 years, and yet can be declared already unconstitutional; not able to be made so by some future constitutional amendment but always so? Does it mean that the judges simply described their prejudices as the constitution? Perhaps more alarmingly, does it mean they see nothing alarming in the idea that the constitution is beyond the comprehension of U.S. voters and their elected representatives? What becomes of the constitution as ‘the act of a people constituting a government’ if the court thinks the people cannot understand their act? My bald summary does not do justice to Cooke’s gentler and subtler raising of his concern. Even so, it does not seem a concern that a ‘particular dislike’ of Reagan then or of Bush now would prompt. Now, as then, such radical reinterpretations seem rather the hallmark of those who do particularly dislike them.

As the eighties wore on, I was less and less able to listen to weekly letters from America; my loss. No doubt,Cooke said plenty about Reagan and the Bushes. But the recent letter that Natalie links to reminds me vividly of many I heard; a critique gently offered not to the right but to the left – a thought he thinks they need to ponder. It is a kind of left-leaning regard to be sure, a kind Orwell might have recognised, but far from the dismissive BBC obituarist’s description. And that is what makes such remarks so sad. To ignore hostile criticism is human nature, if human nature not at its best. But I can’t imagine a kinder, gentler, more sympathetic analysis of the failings of political correctness than that sometimes offered by Alistair Cooke, a BBC insider and very much of the breed that gave the BBC such reputation as it has. If his thoughts are beyond the current elite’s grasp, what hope is there for reform at the beeb?

asks whether old B-BBC fave Michael Rosen (“the real world isn’t that simple unless you’re George Bush”) and Marie-Noelle Lamy of the Open University are playing out of their league in sneering at Pres. Bush academically.

how the Radio 4 news starts with a summary and then goes on to cover the same stories in more detail? Well, in today’s 1 o’clock news the summary said that a fax had been sent to a newspaper by the Abu Nayaf al-Afghani group saying that Spain would suffer more terrorism if it did not withdraw its troops from Iraq.

Just Iraq.

I thought it sounded odd, given the name of the group. And so it proved: when it came to the detailed story later (from a female correspondent whose name I did not catch) we heard that the actual threat was that Spain would suffer if it did not remove its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just over-hasty editing? Could be, could be – but just for fun, why not amuse yourself working out a political motive for playing up Iraq and playing down Afghanistan as a motive for terrorism.

And Andrew Ian Dodge has said it.