Different angles of approach

…but the same conclusions. Helen Szamuely and The Rottweiler Puppy take on the BBC over bias. Helen reports the work of Robin Aitken, former BBC journalist: ‘Robin Aitken is writing a book on the BBC bias. He has already done a good deal of the research and marshalling of the material for a dossier he presented to the Governors in the 1990s. It was comprehensively ignored…’ Click through to read … Continue reading

Gunning for Bolton

, the Beeb sees setback for Bush as a “blow by powerful Senate group”! (Surprise, the Senate is a political body comprised of Democrats, Republicans and one “Independent”. What is so surprising about a renegade Senator from the rustbelt who rocks the boat?) If you really want to know what’s happening, look elsewhere for factual reporting. The only surprise here is that Senator Voinovich, a Republican, did not vote to … Continue reading

Craig writes

: The BBC’s story on Galloway contains this little gem: ”UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has been criticised over his son’s work with the programme, but he himself, in an interim report by a UN committee issued in March, was cleared of wrongdoing.” Of course, he was not cleared at all: “I thought we criticised him rather severely. I would not call that an exoneration,” Volcker told US network Fox … Continue reading

“Dennis, I’d guess, had never been challenged. Not by the researcher, the producer, the editor, his pals, not by anyone.”

David Aaronovitch, in his final column for the Guardian, describes what happened when he, a left-winger, decided not to oppose the Iraq war. All of a sudden I began to experience the left from the outside. And the first thing that struck me was its capacity for smug certainty and uniformity of response. Look at the cartoonists, whose work trumps debate. You may have Blair the poodle, Blair with blood-stained … Continue reading

Melanie Phillips

says that one of her correspondents tried sending similarly-worded posts referring to “racist/apartheid Israelis” and “racist/apartheid Palestinians” to a BBC messageboard in order to see which ones were removed. Since individuals are fallible, and different moderators will be on duty at different times, some inconsistency is to be expected. However there did seem to be a definite bias against Israel in the results. Click through to read and contribute comments … Continue reading

Clear now?

Tim Blair has some choice quotes from an ABC interview with Phil Rees. Rees says: When I joined the BBC, by the way, 20 years ago now, it was assumed, it was a basic standard, that you adopted the idiom that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. And If you use terms like militants, insurgents, guerrillas, you are not saying these people are evil. The word ‘terror’ conjures … Continue reading

“Why do so many people in the USA have guns?”

asks the Children’s BBC website. This treatment is plenty better than it was the last time I posted about CBBC coverage of the subject. This time if you follow the list of links to related mini-stories you’ll see they explicitly give the pro-gun side a hearing! Still, it’s fairly pathetic that the article does not even mention the very different laws in different states. Handguns are practically illegal in some … Continue reading