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Denis Boyles wonders if the BBC might want to spew its newslurry in other direstions.

A report in the Guardian isn’t very encouraging: “Today, a senior BBC news executive will make a controversial case for desanitising the presentation of war on British television. In a speech to a conference of broadcasters in Budapest, Mark Damazer, deputy director of BBC News, will say the current position is a ‘disservice to democracy’.” The problem? Not enough dead people — and, of course, not enough bias. Dear Deputy Director: How about desanitizing the presentation of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism? Or “a certain type of late-term abortion”? Or the effects of hypertaxation on the entrepreneurial spirit? Or how about sanitizing the way the BBC is funded and managed?

Mr Boyles makes an instructive point here. If TV news is to be desanitised, let us hear more about the driving philosophy of islamofascists just as thoroughly as the BBC pursues those “radical republicans” advising President Bush. Just let the truth be told.

. It can be expressed in the approach and assumptions made about a subject. It can also be much more subtle, such as in the choice of subjects it gives airtime to, or those that receive no airtime at all. One of the more subtle forms of bias is the ‘wrongly imprisoned’ articles which crop up frequently on BBC radio networks. The ‘wrongly imprisoned’ are always concerning subjects close to the BBC’s heart, and are usually treated with undue respect.

So it was on Radio 4’s Today programme on 6th November. Ed Stourton introduced an item about an ‘anti-capitalist protestor’ arrested in Greece called Simon Chapman. I do not know (and neither does Stourton) if he was going to commit or committed acts of violence – what I do know is that this man travelled to protest at Thessaloniki where the usual groups of violent hooligans were congregating to destroy other peoples property and fight running battles with the police. Chapman has been on hunger strike for four weeks.

The Greeks allege he was arrested with a bag containing molotov cocktails, an axe and a hammer, and is now charged with ‘rebellion’ and G.B.H. Liberal MEP Sarah Ludford has taken up Chapman’s case.

Stourtons first question was real hardball – ‘So you think these charges are dodgy then?’

Ludford is then allowed to complain that Chapman has not been given bail, and that ‘it does seem that he has been fitted up’. Stourton does not interject anything here, or point out that anyone likely to abscond bail like a foreign national (especially on such serious charges) has a poor likelihood of bail. The assertion of ‘fitting up’ is not challenged either. I’d rather like to see the evidence for this myself.

The Greek justice system is then trashed by Ludford, and the Greek police accused of ‘beatings’. The item then ends abruptly.

It’s hard to imagine a more one sided account, and I am at a loss to see why this was included at all on a news programme, but I would contrast this with how a far-right thug in the same situation would be treated by the BBC. I’d have like to known for instance if Chapman travelled alone, or as part of a group. Has he any previous convictions for violent protest? I don’t know – I simply was not informed. It was really a soapbox piece presented as news, with one leftie (Stourton) chatting to another (Ludford).

I was surprised and pleased at some aspects of the phrasing in this feature about Israeli checkpoints.

“Since the beginning of the three-year Palestinian uprising, or intifada, Israel has significantly increased the number of roadlocks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in response to rising Palestinian violence.

“In September 2003, a group of 20 aid agencies issued a statement calling for the removal of the travel restrictions, which they said were limiting Palestinians’ access to schools and medical care, increasing frustration and destroying hopes for peace.

“Israel sees the barriers as vital to stop suicide bombers flooding into its cities to terrorise the civilian population.”

Emphasis added by me. It’s fairly unusual to see Palestinian violence described as Palestinian violence, but that use of the verb to terrorise really made me blink. Time was when I was an admirer of the BBC. The first letter to an MP I ever wrote, when I was still at school, was to ask that funding to the World Service not be cut. If there is one single thing that turned me into a maddened termagant given to adding “Ceterum censeo BBC delenda est” to observations about the weather, it was the BBC decision not to use the word “terrorist.” It made me sick. The BBC (not to mention Reuters) does not pretend to be “above” moral judgements when discussing murder, or rape, or child porn, or racial harassment. It also inserts moral judgements into reporting of poverty, war and politics; sometimes with the platitudes appropriate to a tax-funded organisation, but often in a manner so partisan as to violate its Charter. It certainly pushes the line that continued state funding of the BBC is desirable for the “public good” i.e. on moral grounds. But after all that it still frequently pretends to be “above” morally judging people who, in defiance of the laws of war, hide among the civilian population to blow up families in pizza parlours. In refusing to judge them the BBC show themselves traitors to the civilisation they claim to represent.

But if this small instance is the start of a return to the common values, I will soften my line.

In the next paragraph the writer reverts to the “militant” usage, which is a vile insult to all the extreme but basically non-violent Trotskyists and Leninists in the British Left who were the previous people designated by the term “militant”. But hell’s bells, look at it again: “terrorise”. Implying that those doing it are terrorists. It’s a start.

UPDATE: Might’ve known it was too good to last. Regular commenter PJF has observed that the reference to rising Palestinian violence has disappeared, along with the whole first paragraph I quoted.

of the multi-lingual blog “any criticism of Jewish people is still a taboo in Germany.”

Nicht war! Like, if an Israeli programmer wrote some bad code for the program you are using, no German can say so, and if a Jewish hairdresser in Hamburg gives you a haircut with a wonky fringe you must tip heavily and not mention it, and if the 1998 winner of the Eurovision Song Contest appeared to you to be lacking in talent your lips must be sealed, and if Ariel Sharon’s policies seem to you mistaken then not one word must be said until you are safely across the Rhine and standing on French soil?

That surprises me very much. Or it would if it were not a load of cobblers. Germans of all ranks from Chancellor downwards can and do make all sorts of criticisms of Jewish people, both Israeli and non-Israeli, and it’s not taboo at all.

The thing that is a leetle bit sensitive given events from 1941-1945 is when some jerk says that the Jews orchestrated the killings by the Russian revolutionaries, and compares that to the Holocaust.

is Radio Scotland’s flagship morning news programme.

Yesterday, the US Government passed a USD87 billion programme for operations in Iraq – of which is USD18.6 billion is for genuine civil and economic reconstruction. This money is paid as grants (not loans), so does not need to be repaid.

To discuss this significant event with the BBC’s Derek Bateman, the BBC wheeled out Martin Lewis, announced as a ‘US-based political commentator’. They could have announced him as ‘arch self publicist and Beatles historian.’ Read more here .

A few things stood out from the bizarre discourse that followed. Firstly, the tone is always to attack the US government for everything, as Bateman says

“The [US] government is spending more on Iraqi healthcare than American healthcare”

This may be true, but an alternative way of looking at this is it shows the commitment of the US to the country it now occupies.

Lewis chips in with

“the package was passed by voice acclamation, without a proper, formal vote…”

which went unchallenged by the BBC’s Bateman. For me, this was a nice little smear, implying a stitch-up in the Sentate to its Scottish listeners. American readers of this blog will be able to explain better than I that there is nothing sinister about this procedure.

And then comes the following from Lewis, again unchallenged

“During the election in 2000, George Bush said he didn’t believe in nation building abroad…yet here he is investing a huge amount at a very time when the American economy is fragile”

I seem to recall four hijacked airliners, around 3,000 dead people, and the most grievous attack on American civilians in living memory. Maybe, just maybe, this caused a total rethink of American diplomatic and defence policy. Also, although the US is building a very large budget deficit, the US economy is reporting very strong rises in GDP and confidence at the moment.

The question is this : is this bias? Possibly, in that the correct angle to approach any story is that US policy is wrong or corrupt (if you work for the BBC). It is certainly lazy journalism, and does not inform or serve it’s listeners well.

. Andrew Sullivan is onto their games in two recent posts (Tues and Mon- scroll down a little).

if the gun-control lobby had a plan which “backfired”?

, the BBC cauldron continues to bubble and burp with a ‘story’ on Bush administration ‘corruption’. (Hint: if you give to GW’s re-election fund, you’ll be sure to get in on the ground floor in Iraq.) As one aptly named myth-buster notes here, the study on which the ‘story’ is based is just plain horsefeathers.

Here is an email sent to Glenn Reynolds in response to his post on this which encapsulates the kind of frustration and discrediting this kind of BBC messing evokes.

So, I am in Kazakhstan, forced to watch BBC World as because aside from the Cartoon Network it is the only channel in English. And as I am reading Instapundit’s blurb on THE CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY, who should appear on TV for an interview but a representative from THE CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY. First hardball question from BBC World Anchor : “So this report is

pretty devastating for the US administration, isn’t it ?” More similiarly probing questions follow, all answers sound like ‘blah blah blah Halliburton blah blah blah halliburton’

Having been forced to watch BBC World for two weeks has been a depressing, enligtening experience. I have lived in Europe and was always fortunate enough to be able to switch to something else and not have to watch BBC. Anti-Americanism is all pervasive on this horror of a channel, the only english language news many people get in many parts of the world. I can’t watch it for more than a half hour without some wild anti-american slur, distortion or lie wanting me to throw something at the TV.

The BBC finds this kind of non-story hard to resist as it fits so neatly with its jaded view of American motives in Iraq (or anywhere for that matter). Daniel Drezner and Stuart Buck provide a thorough de-bunking as well. (Via InstaPundit)

UPDATE 4 November: The BBC, all too willing to parrott the party line, should have a look at Professor Daniel Drezner’s dismantling of the ‘study’ by the Center for Public Integrity in Slate. Someone needs to go back to school.

What do you do when you have a female racial minority employee with a great employment record at the BBC? You sack her, because she sounds ‘posh’.

This highlights the folly of the left’s ardent desire to groupthink (whatever happened to ‘I have a dream‘?). Black people are OK so long as they are left wing, but if they are somehow not proles (or lefties) then the left hates them.

This is racism (what would happen if a black person was sacked for sounding too ‘black’?).

I hope Ms Ahmed sues (not under silly discrimination legislation which would not apply here, presumably because it is OK to discriminate against posh people, but for the breach of an implied term of fair treatment) and makes a packet.

There was a case last year or the year before where the BBC was found liable for discrimination when its Scottish division refused to hire an English person solely on grounds of that person’s Englishness.

The BBC should be abolished.

Where are those highly-skilled investigative Beebots when there is news? Sleeping it seems. First, this postwar anti-war demo was a mere sliver of pre-war and mid-war moonbat confabs. That should be reported, not spun.

The march was thought to be smaller than the mass demonstrations before and during the war. But the BBC’s Jon Leyne, who was at the Washington rally, said it was probably more in tune with the mood of Americans, who are increasingly concerned at the president’s policy in Iraq. (Emphasis added)

Secondly, the sponsoring organisation, International ANSWER, is Stalinofascist to the core. The Beeb cannot resist the urge to describe a counter demonstration as having been sponsored by “the conservative Washington chapter of Free Republic.” Why is there NO curiosity about International ANSWER? Why no simple description of its left-leaning (nearly horizontal) position? I can only conclude that the BBC will put no questions to ANSWER. How else, then, could it remain in the most favourable light?