BBC correspondent Katty Kay has a good laugh at Arnie the Terminator, wacky Californian delis, joke candidates and so on. She probably thinks she’s being impartial because she freely admits the incumbent Democrat, Gray Davis, is likely to lose. “Arnie appears to have been given something of a free pass precisely because he is a film star and not a politician. “Which, in the end, may be precisely the reason … Continue reading →

. This “analysis” is by by Barbara Plett – BBC correspondent in Ramallah. The analysis of the analysis is by Robert Hinkley of The Sporadic Chronicle. (The title of this post is by him, too.) Alert readers may notice that that the present BBC text differs from the text Mr Hinkley quotes. For instance, this “Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries are still in an official state … Continue reading →

A reader* wrote this email on Saturday. He or she included the original version of the story. Since then the story has changed, and it does now include mention of who carried out the mass-murder – nonetheless I think our reader makes some valid points about the first version. And the headline is still as ambiguous as ever: I spotted this story on the BBC website this afternoon (Saturday). It’s … Continue reading →

This story about Arnie says in passing that he has long supported the “Jewish Lobby Group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center.” The description “Jewish lobby group” caught my eye. Hmm. The description is defensible, but subtly wrong. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has to do with the Jews and it is a lobby group – but actually its mission is a lot more specific than that. What the Center is famous for … Continue reading →

Got this one from the comments to the last post. Tasty Manatees made a few judicious comments about a BBC story on a riot in Iraq. Then he found the story had mysteriously changed… And, as the next commenter points out, the Telegraph’s Beebwatch has reported another example of a stealth edit. To some extent I think that stealth edits are a natural result of the explosion of written material … Continue reading →

Norman Geras looks at two recent reports on BBC coverage of the Iraq war. “The reason for my scepticism may be concentrated in a single point: the fact that one of the comparative reference points is Channel 4. Allow me a guffaw or three. “

: On 27 September: this link says: “North Korea has called for economic aid and a non-aggression pact with America in return for surrendering its nuclear ambitions, but Washington has consistently refused.” Urm, that would be a bit like the economic aid that was provided by America in the 90s and up to November last year in return for North Korea surrendering its nuclear ambitions but then North Korea turned … Continue reading →

– writes David Steven. That got my attention. It was he who analysed Andrew Gilligan’s blogging as a reporter in Iraq. Now he and a colleague have looked at one of the most successful elements of the BBC coverage of the Iraq war, the Reporters’ Log in a similar manner. This post contains a summary of what they found. A link to the actual report, “Whose Agenda?” is at the … Continue reading →

I should have posted this ages ago, but better late than never. You may recall that on June 27 2003 I posted an item about the BBC’s John Willis and US talk show host Michael Savage. To recap, Willis, BBC Director of Factual and Learning, made a speech in which he claimed that Savage said the Arabs must be “snuffed out from the planet, and not in a court of … Continue reading →

I’ve just noticed something else about the Megan Lane article Peter Briffa posted about two posts down. It says Conservatives with a small c, too, share this unease about the pleasures of the flesh. In a 1951 letter only now made public, Ronald Reagan revealed his angst about sex. “Even in marriage I had a little guilty feeling about sex, as if the whole thing was tinged with evil,” the … Continue reading →