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A GOOD NEWS story from Iraq by the BBC.

Jonathan Marcus wants us believe everything Human Rights Watch has to say about the “avoidable” deaths of civilians in Iraq. He seems happy to photocopy everything the HRW report has to say about American and Coalition tactics. Mr Marcus should read Steven den Beste’s devastating critique of HRW here before touting them as worthy of our trust. The trouble with the BBC approach is that HRW is a highly partisan, anti-war, anti-Bush organisation. Fairness and accuracy in reporting and analysis should dictate some mention of this by the BBC, but, alas, we hear only the voice of a parrot.

Somehow I don’t think a critical template was applied to this recent article about a conference in Geneva where the correspondent saw ‘vintage’ Robert Mugabe, whose speech ‘stood out’. As Natalie said about Ethiopia, to be fair the BBC do have some critical coverage- in this case some angles on how bad Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is. But why don’t they hold him to account personally, instead of permitting an article to fawn over him just because he stands out from the other leaders? Yes, he does stand out, amazingly enough in a continent with such corrupt and ‘colourful’ leadership. Maybe those leaders weren’t performing the ‘old classics’ about inequality and colonialism for their Swiss hosts because they still care about being included in a sane and potentially lucrative political discourse.

They wouldn’t take this ‘neutral’ a stance at the BBC if the vast bulk of their reporters didn’t look to blame ‘the West’ (and in this case us, the British) first, or if the vast bulk of reporters had any sympathy with the real deprivations of Zimbabwe. Where there is blame to be laid, you can guarantee it won’t be understood, let alone tolerated, by an intemperate despot like Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean Head of (a suffering) State. If you take any lead from such a man, the real story is already lost to you.

nb. I am aware the BBC has been banned from Zimbabwe by Mugabe- which in theory would limit their coverage. This only increases the bizarreness that the BBC are willing to talk of ‘vintage Mugabe’- the same vintage Mugabe that banned them I suppose. And by the way, no mention either of Mugabe’s travel ban (part of EU sanctions intended to affect him personally). A big thank you to the Swiss then, with an assist to Chirac who set the trend by inviting Mugabe to Paris- but didn’t shake his hand in a very, er, French compromise.

reported a demonstration of about 200 former Iraqi army personnel in Basra today. They were protesting over what they said was the failure to pay them pensions over the last few months. They lit tyres and made plenty of noise. This incident made the headlines.

Are the BBC in the business of mocking the thousands of people that marched against terrorism several days ago in Baghdad, without so much as a mention on any BBC News report that I’ve heard of? Of course, one of the negative Beeb’s key themes of the moment is the strife over the dismantlement of the Iraqi military, and the US’ attempts to revive it in a much smaller form (- not that they’ll examine that foundational reality until they’ve squeezed some negative headlines out of it). But in the meantime, why allow facts on the ground to spoil a good story, or two?

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Dos and donts

Good Luck!

Meanwhile, far removed from this sparring, Instapundit presents some sensitive observations on the US media coverage, or lack of coverage of Iraq. I wonder how much Greg Dyke’s criticisms of the media there have impacted on their approach recently. Come to that, I wonder how much the BBC’s attitudes generally have proved trendsetting. Do they [those attitudes] run deeper [and have more influence] than the [typical liberal] US media reluctance to back their Republican leader? [To clarify, have the US media been unwarrantably ‘shamed’ by Dyke’s comments and specious statistics about what I believe he called ‘flag-waving’ US coverage of the ’21 days’ conflict?] Another, British, commentator, has his own reflections on Iraq somewhat contrary to the BBC in-crowd (thanks to Donald Sensing for the link). [update. I’ve updated some of my comments in brackets, because I was beginning to forget what I meant by them! Blogger’s prerogative, I trust.]

. West ‘risks new Ethiopia famine’ is the headline to this BBC story. Attracted, in a train-wreck sort of way, to the assumption that it’s the West risking a new Ethiopia famine rather than Ethiopia risking a new Ethiopia famine, I took a look. The article is a mouthpiece for the views of Dr Tewolde Egziabher, an Ethiopian government scientist, who says, no less than four times, that the private sector is the problem. Here’s a quote from the start of the article.

“Will Ethiopians starve again?

“Ethiopia’s efforts to feed itself and avoid another famine are being fatally undermined by Western policy, a senior scientist has told BBC News Online.”

“Will Ethiopians starve again?” That’s an interesting question. Here’s another interesting question, not mentioned in the article and certainly not put to Dr. Egziabher by his ever-respectful interviewer:

WHY THE HELL DO YOU THINK ETHIOPIA STARVED THE FIRST TIME?

Sorry. Sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever descended to leaning on the caps lock button before, but the thought of the monstrous thing that killed one million Ethiopians going unnamed made me angry.

Give the BBC some credit. The answer to my question can be found on the BBC website, although you have to put the separate bits together yourself because the BBC won’t exactly lead you to this conclusion. Here is the country profile for Ethiopia. And here, in that profile, is the answer to my question:

In 1974 this helped topple Haile Selassie. His regime was replaced by a self-proclaimed Marxist junta under which thousands of opponents were purged or killed, property was confiscated and defence spending spiralled.

Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, now Zimbabwe… In Africa*, where Marxism has gone famine has followed. “Property was confiscated” may not sound so bad but those three words were the death knell for millions. If farmers, black or white, know that if the reward for high production will be having their produce or their very farms stolen from them, why then they won’t produce much. Not exactly rocket science is it?

Naturally, my assessment of the causes of famine is not shared by everybody, and I wouldn’t expect the BBC to talk as if it were. However the role of private property rights as a bulwark against famine is one of the major arguments kicking around the world poverty debate at the moment. Yet it came as no surprise that neither the interview with Dr Egziabher nor this analysis of why famine stalks Africa, nor this one of why Ethiopia faces another famine address the issue at all. The nearest we get is that the first story has a tiny, tiny mention of how under the “present terms of trade African agricultural exports command low prices and cannot compete on world markets.” Nice try but exactly wrong. Under the present ‘terms of trade’ i.e. the monstrous barriers to trade put up by the BBC’s beloved European Union, African exports are commanded to have artifically high prices, otherwise known as tariffs, in order to protect French farmers. That’s why Africans can’t compete on the world market.

Like my argument on insecure property rights being a cause of famine, the argument I have put forward on tariffs, while not universally accepted, is a major contender in the debate, put forward by people far more eminent than I with such force of evidence and logic that even deep-dyed anti-capitalists like Ken Livingstone have reconsidered their opinions. So don’t expect to hear much about it at the BBC.

for Last Night’s BBC News. Read this blog.

. As Tim Blair reports, Iraq’s anti-terrorism demonstrations are ‘all over the internet’. Sadly, as well as missing out on coverage in newspapers, the demonstrations have somehow eluded our national broadcaster’s World edition website, renowned though the BBC is for its World Service. When you think of how they like to get the opinions of ‘real’ Iraqis, it’s strange they haven’t interviewed any of the marchers to see why they were risking their lives by defying the vicious Baathist losers. Funnily enough, this ‘crucial’ story hasn’t missed out, and nor has this opportunity to paint the USA in its usual colours. Update. To reinforce the picture, Nicholas Vance presents us with a good round up of what was not, and what was, the Ten O’clock News on the BBC last night (10 Dec. post).

. There is a difference of opinion between BBC journalists John Simpson and Nick Gowing over the deaths of journalists in Iraq- and it’s worth noting. When Simpson says that any journalists not ’embedded’ with troops became ‘potential targets’, he does not mean that they were deliberately targeted. Nick Gowing does- he believes in an Orwellian kind of conspiracy to ‘take out’ journalistic opponents. No steps are taken to separate the two forms of accusation that are currently circulating- presumably in order that the mud should stick more effectively. Simpson calls it, strikingly, the ‘ultimate act of censorship’. I suppose that would lead me to question whether in fact there is a disagreement between the two men, since they are happy to create the same impression through differing arguments in different outlets.

A month or two back I watched Simpson’s lengthy, atmospheric documentary about being the target of friendly fire in Northern Iraq. He did not spare to mention that the BBC failed to provide enough flak jackets to give protection to his Kurdish assistants. What he didn’t examine was whether he himself was culpable for trying to emulate his march into Kabul during the Afghan campaign, or whether they were sensible to be so near contested territories that they could be indistinguishable from the military when viewed from a distance- or whether they might have unwittingly contributed to the incident by expanding the convoy they joined. There was an old-fashioned high minded arrogance that the journalists are indispensible to the proper conduct of a conflict, and that the professional journalist ‘knows best’. There was a corresponding kind of patronising contempt for the honesty and integrity of the military. With such a frankly low opinion of the authorities and their men and women, I honestly wonder why Simpson put himself and his crew in the way of their ignorant sights. I also wonder why he thinks we should listen to him, and in fact how he can show his face at all.

Finally, I can’t help wondering what the BBC think they’re doing allowing journalists (often the same people that pick up Baftas and present television shows for extraordinary fees) to claim and define for themselves an exalted status and security in any warzone they might wish to enter. Can the same people who routinely parade errors of judgement and accuracy for the world to see persuade us that, far from being unlucky, or targeted, they themselves didn’t contribute to their own downfall? Meanwhile, their antagonists, soldiers, are ordinary people on ordinary pay, fighting- a thing that isn’t attractive or tidy. And anyway, Mr Simpson, try selling this spiel to the North Koreans, the warring Sudanese or Somalis next time you drop in on one of their military camps unannounced to check on the uprightness of their conduct. (Thanks to PJF for the Guardian article, and for his fine comments following my ‘more caterwauling’ post).

In this post left wing pro-Iraq-war blogger Harry Hatchet writes about John Pilger’s recent comments on the BBC. Harry writes:

But the idea that the Radio Four’s Today programme was pro-war or even comparible to the flag-wrapped cheerleading of Fox News, is hard to take seriously. But then Pilger is capable of believing anything to convince himself of the rightness of his postures – he is, after all, the man who described the Bush administration as “The Third Reich of our times”.

Pilger’s complaints are part of a highly irritating tendency on the part of the anti-war movement to pretend that they have been marginalised from the debate over Iraq. It may suit their self-image to portray their movement as ignored by the powerful pro-war media but the facts rather dispute this.