BBC One’s news broadcasts on Monday (1pm, 6pm and 10pm, 04OCT04) featured reports from Margaret Gilmour, their Home Affairs Correspondent, on the detention without trial in the UK of foreign terrorist suspects who cannot be deported for legal reasons. The report on the 10 O’Clock news ran for a lengthy ~2m 43s, opened by Huw Edwards with: The highly controversial powers to detain foreign terrorist suspects without charge or trial … Continue reading →

B-BBC commenter, Susan, notices the friendly demeanor of our Beeb toward Mr Rumsfeld now that he seems to have strayed from the fold of Bush and Co. Unfortunately, Don has issued a clarification to what appears to have been a very mistaken inference. For a while there, he was singing their tune, and the BBC was feelin’ groovy. I hope this doesn’t ruin the day for Jonathan Marcus now that … Continue reading →

Melanie Phillips reports the BBC’s latest contribution to misunderstanding the Israeli-Palestinian situation. When the BBC fail to report the reality of the dangers faced by Israel and instead turns attention to the ‘feelings’ of the Palestinian people, you know you are getting the official BBC Mid-East interpretation. Truth is left by the wayside. Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Jim Miller has up a post on that old favourite, BBC reports of the Christian Peril. Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

(Henry V 3.7.102, Constable to Orleans). Norm Geras finds John Pilger in discovery of a new friend for Tony and George. Unbelievable! Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

* is an interesting article by Philip Webster in The Times today about John Humphrys radio interview with Tony Blair yesterday (as also covered by Melanie Phillips in her diary). Here’s an excerpt of the relevant bits: IT WAS the interview he had been seeking for three years. But when John Humphrys finally got the Prime Minister in front of him for a Today programme grilling yesterday, the country got … Continue reading →

The BBC should know better than to serve up dodgy opinion as news. These three pieces feature the ‘Florida voting disaster’ of the 2000 presidential elections. I wonder if the BBC, singing the tune of MSM, now looks to discredit the US electoral process altogether. The articles fail to note a few key facts: The machinery of an anxious democracy Florida: Getting out the vote Carter fears Florida vote trouble … Continue reading →

– so asks Nick Robinson, formerly of the BBC, now ITN, in his Notebook column in The Times last Friday. This isn’t strictly about the BBC, although it is quite relevant to recent topics on Biased BBC. Here’s the rest of what he says on this subject: WHAT a foul, nauseating stench of a week. Day after depressing day I have waited for a man to be brutally murdered as … Continue reading →

A sorry spectacle: all those who thought Greg Dyke would never say sorry, think again. Yesterday, speaking to an audience in Glasgow, he apologised unreservedly – for having once given Tony Blair £5000 to help him win the leadership contest in the Labour party. Mr Dyke said he now saw that Tony was “the worst sort of prime minister.” Greg’s repentance for having assisted him in the past was total. … Continue reading →

So says The Blogfessor in The Australian. Glenn Reynolds calls attention to the power of “open-source journalism”. Here are the final graphs: If there’s an analogy to this phenomenon, it’s probably the open-source software movement, which tends to produce far more reliable products via the same process of distributed criticism and relative freedom from groupthink. But I’m afraid that the internet’s threat to cocooned old-media organisations is far greater than … Continue reading →