Thanks for the tidal wave of BBC snippets. I’m even more struck by the anti-anti-Saddam slant. Here’s a recent one, to give you a flavor: a piece posing as journalism focussing on a handful of liberal churches in the U.S. supporting a non-violent removal of Saddam. How would such a removal be accomplished? By encouraging civil disobedience among Iraqis. Here’s the piece. Try not to laugh or cry. Not a skeptical note in it. As a reader noted, the last time the West urged a similar mass protest against Saddam – with leaflet drops in March 1991 – the dictator’s response was to massacre 20,000 Kurds in the North and between 30,000 and 60,000 Shi’ah in the South within a month. For balance, the outside “expert” who gives his take on the idea is a leading former member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (which, of course, doesn’t want to disarm Saddam). It’s a classic Beeb piece – not really news, utterly slanted, with a patina of easily-debunked objectivity.
BAGHDAD BROADCASTING CORPORATION II: Check out this piece of “vox populi” boilerplate from the BBC, going around the world asking people what they think about the Iraqi situation. Barely a single voice in favor of using force to disarm or depose Saddam. No surprise there. But more objectionable are the voices of people in Iraq, presented with no context in exactly the same format as interviews in Paris and London and Washington. As if there weren’t a gun pointed at the back of their head. Yesterday, Paul Krugman blamed the Fox News Network, with an audience in the hundreds of thousands, for slanting America’s views in favor of war. It was the only way he could understand the difference in public opinion between the U.S. and Europe. Meanwhile, the BBC, with a quarter of a billion worldwide listeners and viewers, and a semi-monopoly of television and radio in Britain, churns out anti-American propaganda by the truckload. Hmmm.
The Dish 