when dealing with the Great Satan. Here’s how the teaser reads: Manila’s Catch 22 The Philippine choice between saving a life and angering the US The question of how this will encourage further terror is lost on the Beeb. Philippine President Gloria Arroyo was faced with an awkward choice – to save the life of a Filipino held hostage in Iraq or support the United States by keeping Philippine soldiers … Continue reading →

The great unwashed are less than pleased with the Beeb. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan) Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

On Thursday I saw an article on BBC News Online headlined Diplomats mind their language, timestamped Thursday, 15JUL04, 15:03BST. It’s an amusing article about diplomatic faux pas’. One thing that caught my attention was this blatant lie: Margaret Thatcher, again a woman unafraid of speaking her mind, was reported to have told Jane Byrne, mayor in 1960s Chicago, that “the Irish, they’re pigs”, before remembering her host’s family background and … Continue reading →

.  How long will it be until the BBC corrects the record on the Iraq-Niger yellowcake story? It must be hard when the ‘Bush lied’ subtext crashes like Joseph Wilson’s house of cards. It is not surprising that Paul Reynolds, in his ‘analysis’,  fails to mention the discredited Wilson/Plame story, so gladly trumpeted by the BBC. Uranium: Here the report stands by the SIS report that Iraq had indeed sought … Continue reading →

On Monday 12JUL04, much of the BBC’s UK news featured parts of a story headlined on BBC News Online as ‘Shocking’ racism in jobs market. Five Live’s Ian Shoesmith was interviewed on BBC1’s lightweight Breakfast programme. The story was also on BBC News Online, BBC One O’Clock News, and as a lead item on the BBC London news at lunchtime, 6.30pm and 10.30pm. Watching and reading the various takes, it … Continue reading →

Seeing the headline BBC Iraq war coverage criticised on BBC News Online’s UK page was puzzling – had the penny dropped at last? Or are they reporting someone else’s criticism of their lamentably biased coverage last year? No fear! The story, appropriately enough in the Entertainment section of News Online, reveals that: “BBC coverage of the Iraq war did not treat military sources with enough scepticism, the corporation’s annual report … Continue reading →

Yesterday, Mon 12JUL04, BBC News Online published a story headed History spurs anti-English tirade. The first version of the story, online for five and a half hours, was simply about a moronic tirade by a moronic councillor, thrown out of a Scottish pub for being obnoxious to English patrons during the recent England/Portugal football match. On reading it, I wondered why such a moron was being given coverage on the … Continue reading →

You have to wade through almost to the end of this BBC story of July 10th “Bush military records destroyed” to see that the destruction took place in 1996 or 1997. This fact makes it all less suspicious. Compare the BBC story to this New York Times account of July 9th. Many things are similar, but the point that the destruction accidentally occured in 1996 or 1997 comes in only … Continue reading →

So far as I can see the only permitted ways of sorting the comments are chronologically or reverse-chronologically, irrespective of post. This makes it very difficult to search out a particular comment in order to edit it. Is there a way of sorting comments according to the post they are connected to? I note that the premium service offers a word search facility, but we don’t have that level of … Continue reading →

The BBC provides 170 news-based lesson plans for teachers. Some strange force drew me towards the section on the EU. In this “myths or facts” quiz the pupil is asked to say whether each of five reports in which it is said that the EU does or does not wish to ban, change or rename some aspect of British life, are facts or myths. It turns out that number four … Continue reading →