Category Archives: Uncategorized

. Greg Dyke has spelled it out in fascinatingly bullish fashion in an email to anxious staff ahead of the Hutton report:

‘ “What is important once Hutton is published is that if the BBC is criticised we learn from whatever is written – assuming of course that we agree with what is said,” Mr Dyke told staff.’

Note- not ‘If we are criticised we must learn from our mistakes’, but ‘we learn from whatever is written’, and then only ‘assuming.. we agree with what is said’. If there was a movement for the dismantling of the BBC, it would feed on such arrogance of unaccountability. (Hat-tip to Mr Sullivan)

Another “Yer Wot?” moment, this time brought to us in one of those ‘From our own correspondent’ semi-personal pieces by Bridget Kendall. This is the bit that had me Yer Wotting:

The French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, another formidable orator, took the floor.

His speech was equally ardent, arguing that the world did not necessarily have to follow America’s lead.

Then something extraordinary happened.

As he finished there was a ripple of applause. Not something usually allowed in the Security Council chamber.

It felt like a muted gesture of open revolt.

Cor, she makes it sound like Moses laying low the Egyptian overseer or Rosa Parkes refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Did I miss something or wasn’t upshot of the momentous day she describes that… that’s right, I remember now! The US said ‘thanks but no thanks’ to M Villepin and toddled off and invaded Iraq anyway. OK, there’s a respectable argument that the US, in enforcing compliance with the million and a half UN resolutions violated by Saddam Hussein was actually saving the United Nations from itself, but, even so, “The day the UN didn’t matter” might have been a better heading.

Norman Geras writes:

…Marr presented Blair as now going for the humanitarian dimension of the Iraq intervention because of how things had turned out with WMD and as though he had just discovered it. This is becoming one of the major components in the anti-war party’s current mythology. But that’s what it is: mythology. Blair stated the humanitarian argument plain as day, albeit as subsidiary.

Incidentally, there is no such thing as trespass in the noble sport of Beeb hunting. On the contrary. Extra spears always welcome.

One is wielded by Brian Micklethwait iin this Samizdata post. Actually, I think the likeliest explanation for this one is that offered by Dr Johnson when asked why he defined ‘pastern’ as the kneee of a horse. “Ignorance, Madam. Pure ignorance.” The writer just didn’t know what “rally” meant. Something to do with Indianopolis, innit?

I got this one from the comments to the post below. Many, including me, were surprised to note that the audience of Radio 4’s tranzi flagship Today apparently contains a goodly proportion of believers in the right to armed home defence. Laban Tall writes about the way the BBC dealt with this distasteful result.

with some of your emails in the next few days.

, visiting family and letting my poor nerves recover from the stress of Beeb-watching. But I did scribble this one down specially for B-BBC. On 31st Dec, the Ceefax news index on page 102 said “122- Israeli troops shoot protestors.” Sounds bad, said I, thinking about the deaths or injuries implied by the word “shoot”, and grimly set the remote to page 122. It turned out that the only things shot were tear gas and rubber bullets. No injuries, let alone deaths, were mentioned. I assume that rubber bullets and (I think) tear gas canisters are usually dispensed by pulling a trigger and hence the use of the verb “to shoot” may be literally correct. But tell me, given the way the English language is used in practice, do you think the headline accurately reflects the contents of the story?

Denis Boyles does a best /worst of the year list. The Beeb makes the cut in both!

The BBC is the worst in this best of all possible media planets. The Beeb’s grotesque old-Labour bias and blatant anti-Americanism continues apace, despite the mismanagement of the Corporation by Greg Dyke and his sidekicks, all of whom rested the credibility of the BBC on the quality of Andrew Gilligan’s slipshod reporting, captured here by the Guardian.

Pretty sad when the only one bringing up the rear is France 3. All is not lost, though. Boyles is happy to catch the BBC producing an excellent car show.

This just in:

Caroline Thomson, the BBC’s director of policy and legal affairs, said the Today programme report that led to Lord Hutton’s judicial investigation fell short of the “truth and accuracy” that are the “gold standard of the BBC”. She said the concessions made by the BBC during the inquiry had been “spectacular”…

Ms Thomson conceded that the BBC’s regulatory structure, in which the organisation’s editorial impartiality is upheld by its board of governors, was “out of kilter with modern fashions of regulation”.

…Ms Thomson, speaking on Radio 4’s PM programme, said Andrew Gilligan’s original Today story, in which he reported concerns about the September 2002 dossier that made the case for war on Iraq, was not up to scratch. “Truth and accuracy are the gold standard … but you don’t always achieve it and we rather spectacularly had to admit that we hadn’t got the entire details of the Hutton story, the Gilligan story right.”

It only took an expensive, sweeping government enquiry — which saw the testimony of even the Prime Minister — and the suicide of a good man to get them to admit it.

And people wonder why this website exists…

. Christmas is a busy time for personal life and a quiet time for news, or rather, news bias. What’s the point in the BBC launching an offensive against their bettes noire or an extensive cover-up of ‘bad news’ when the punters are flat out with surfeit of this or that mind altering substance (even if it’s just the old post-prandial-orgy-chasm their minds have fallen into)? There’ll probably be another absence of posts in the coming days, but you never know. As Mark Steyn helpfully pointed out on his lovely website (not a blog, honest!), BritXmas lasts two weeks. Convenient, huh?

Well, I’ve still been watching the Beeb with my beady eye and my head in my hands (odd angle, but still) and it’s still dire. One general issue I find myself considering at the moment is why the BBC is so much more animated discussing the problems in Iraq compared with their interest in the ongoing Serbian crisis that has dragged on painfully and is enduring its fifth year. Today the Beeb has reported the Serbian election, where friends of Slobodan- the guy the international community is trying to try to try for war crimes in their lovely shiny Hague courts- have cornered over a quarter of the popular vote. Slob’s party, the Socialists, have a respectable 7 percent. Would this have anything to do with the rarely mentioned persecution of Serbs in UN liberated Kosovo, I find myself asking? (in this link you will find a prized Beeb report on persecuted Serbs- notice that they don’t blame the UN, but publish a call for more resources to be given to acronymic police).

Anyway, the Beeb doesn’t run an article on the pathetic failure of UN-led forces to plan for the post war situation, or speculate on whether there’s a connection to the fact that Slobodan and other suspected criminals have yet to be judged and in some cases yet to face a court. It doesn’t blame ‘multi-lateral’ action as weak and corrupt, or discuss the feasability of a ‘multi-polar’ world. It doesn’t even mention that the French and the Germans, and Bill Clinton too (not forgetting our Tone), were the authors of this particular post-spring 1999 chapter of European history. The Beeb in general presents all the pomp of the UN and none of the failings- since here the typical UN trumpeting mysteriously fades away and becomes instead the ‘international community’. It seems more convenient to blame ‘ghosts’ . When these chains of command are conveniently blotted out, exactly who do I write to to complain about these states and affairs? Santa Claus?

Far from concentrating on the proven problems with getting results against nasty Serb nationalists the Beeb focusses ‘in depth’ on the speculated ‘problems’ in bringing Saddam Hussein to trial. I don’t know why: even the one and a half years mentioned sounds a really good timescale compared to the thinking time lavished on Slobadan and his chums. I also don’t know why they consider that there will be such problems proving the guilt of Saddam, since much of what he did he was so proud of he had it videotaped. The catalogue is so extensive, the Saddam-cult so primary in Iraq’s murderous political life, where’s the problem? Ah, but I am remiss- the Beeb are better at covering speculated problems than real ones.

‘Tony Hall, the U.S. ambassador to the food program… asked one of Mugabe’s top aides: “Why do I get the impression that I have to beg you to feed your people?” ‘ -Michael Grunwald, Washington Post Staff writer, Jan 03

Funny how in this article about famine in Zimbabwe, a certain man’s name is missing. On top of that, they’ve chosen just about the most tendentious ‘fact’ possible with which to launch their story. It is reported that

‘Millions of Zimbabweans will go hungry this Christmas because international donors have failed to provide enough food, the United Nations has warned.’

That ‘Millions of Zimbabweans will go hungry this Christmas’ is a fact I would not want to argue with, and awful if so. Why is a different matter- our unnamed African leader ought to dominate that discussion. However, if the BBC merely wanted to report a shortage of aid from donors, they should have pointed out that because the price of all sorts of grain has risen strongly this year, due to a run of mixed world harvests (and the running-down in years past of surpluses by, for instance, the EU), usual inflation adjusted aid budgets that last year might have been adequate are not any more. So it’s not just a simple case of the ‘selfish West, as usual, stingy as they tuck into their Turkeys’, however the Beeb make it appear to be.