During the Queen’s Speech Debate in the Commons this afternoon

there was breaking news of a new Fathers4Justice protest at Buckingham Palace. Sky News covered the protest and the removal of the protestor with a split screen – the left picture and the sound covered Charles Kennedy in the Commons, whilst the right picture showed events at Buckingham Palace. Meanwhile, BBC News 24 stuck rigidly with Charles Kennedy. Was it beyond the ability of News 24 to cover the end … Continue reading

“The detention of foreign terrorist suspects without trial has been hugely controversial”

– the intro to a packaged piece by Carole Walker on BBC Breakfast News at 8am this morning. Yet again, nowhere in the package is it mentioned that the people who are ‘detained without trail’ are free to leave the UK at any time (for any other country that will take them – not just their home countries with the allegedly dodgy human rights records). All that is needed to … Continue reading

Ex-detective relives bomb memory

– unfortunately BBC News Online have managed to forget to mention, even in passing, who was responsible for these IRA atrocities in 1974 – not once does the article mention the IRA, Northern Ireland, terrorism, murder or even how many people were murdered or maimed in Birmingham that day. Shameful – shameful incompetence or shameful bias – either way, this shoddy journalism doesn’t justify a compulsory annual BBC Telly Tax. … Continue reading

Compare and contrast…

BBC News Online have a major story (second story on their UK edition homepage this morning) headlined Police ‘can cope’ with hunt ban, complete with a picture of a ‘toff’ drinking, rather than a more relevant picture, such as a fox or hunting dogs (the use of which is to become illegal). BBC News Online informs us that: Senior police officers say they have enough resources to deal with the … Continue reading

Several dollars short and several days late.

“Lobstertom” writes: Finally they’ve given us a report on the Oil for Food scandal – buried in the Business section. It is “We discovered this…” and “we found that…” It is an absolute lot of nonsense. And of course with a shot at the Americans in the last line. Also they fail to mention Kofi Annan at all – as you will know UNSCAM was run out of his office. … Continue reading

Nicholas Vance of LNBBCN has some serious questions

(again) to ask of the BBC’s coverage in Fallujah. Looking at the BBC pages this morning, it did seem to me that the BBC’s coverage began and ended with the notion of a humanitarian crisis caused by the US assault on Fallujah. The question Nicholas raises is, who exactly was responsible for this crisis? Was it really the consequence of US actions? He suggests that one particular angle has been … Continue reading

A racist stereotype hastily changed.

According to one of Tim Blair’s readers, Richard Compton, the caption to the picture of Condoleezza Rice on this BBC piece about her appointment as Bush’s secretary of state has been changed. It originally read “His master’s voice.” If you scroll down the post there is another useful comment on the BBC article from “Bill”: Wow, that Beeb piece is off the wall… “the influence of the State Department which … Continue reading

Last Night’s BBC News

(the blog, not the news) is on a roll. In these three posts the author examines BBC reports from one of their stringers in Iraq, Fadil al-Badrani. He is not without sympathy: Iraqis working with the foreign news media are in grave danger — unless, that is, they report stories in a manner to the liking of the insurgents and terrorists. For example, Iraqi journalists sometimes get tips on upcoming … Continue reading

Before I forget.

A certain amount of illness in our household kept me from recording this when it happened, but I would like to say it now. Last Thursday, November 11th, I caught the tail end of the six o’clock news on Radio 4. I heard a report from Fallujah. To my surprise the report made explicit (a) that some insurgents had fired from a mosque; (b) that a group of US marines … Continue reading