Unmissable. Good bit:
Sunday, 8 PM Beeb. Top of the hour roundup. Keep in mind that the key stories in America have been the POW tapes, last night’s televised battle, the rapid advance, and the Muslim member of the 101st who rolled grenades into an officers’ tent. Foxis reporting a chemical factory has been discovered, and two bridges over the Euphrates have been secured.
Overview at the top of the ahhr: Heaviest fighting of the woh, and the Arab world is rallying to Iraqi cause. (The audio backing up the latter assertion is from the Iraqi foreign minister. Surely I misheard this; surely they said that “Iraqis insist that the Arab world is rallying.” I must have suffered Temporary Yank-Centric Deafness, but maybe not; the Beeb runs more Iraqi responses than any other network. While driving around on Saturday, the Beeb ran a clip from a Brit spokesman describing a battle, then ran the Iraqi blabberjaw insisting that Iraqi forces were still engaged in battle, killing the enemy, and that the Loser Zionist Rumsfeld tongue should be accursed and struck with shoes, and we should all hope that monkeys defecate in his moustache, etc. Then came a guest from Warshington, and the presenter said “so who should we believe, then?” A charitable listener would ascribe the brief, stunned pause that followed to the natural lapse in transatlantic communications.)
Or maybe not. Then there’s this:
Fourth: Oscars story. And here is the most beautiful moment of this grim day. The announcer flubs a word, and in doing so she birthed a term of surpassing perfection. She was talking about the Holeywud ectors, their deseyah not to seem out of sync with the mood of the times. Two words must have appeared in her brain simultaneously: frivolity and privileged. And so she said of the actors who declined to appear: “They fear the ceremony will appear friviledge.” Was there ever there was a better description of the lives of the Oscar celebrants, and our betters in the entertainment world? Friviledge.
Love it.
THE BBC VERSUS THE UNITED STATES: Just a smattering of emails from people shocked to hear the BBC for the first time:
I’ve watched BBC coverage from time to time in recent years (I live in New York), but have had occasion to watch it with some regularity this week as the war has begun. I know that the Beeb has been a favorite target of yours and I now understand why. While the coverage itself was informative, if somewhat tilted, what truly shocked me was a fellow named Alan George, who was trotted out as a military analyst. If they could have hired a commentator more contemptuous of the coalition’s aims, it’s hard to imagine how. This morning his remarks nearly rocked me out of bed when he suggested that the Iraqi Information Ministry’s credibility compared favorably to Washington’s and London’s.
No surprise here. Then there’s this:
I am an Emmy award-winning, documentary film producer with 30-plus years of experience on five continents. For the last two years I have been working in Europe and stuck in a hotel that has as its only English-language TV channel, BBC World. Fortunately, I have access via the Web to a far wider understanding of what’s going on in the world. I am more than appalled over BBC’s blatant and incessant propaganda; I am deeply concerned to the point of perhaps being, well, frightened. The BBC is clearly and unambiguously the most corrupt and dangerous English-language media force in the world today … Just one slice of the destruction: BBC’s propagandizing effect of fueling wider European anti-Americanism. There’s a whole lot of folks here on the Continent that think the BBC is the voice of great mid-Atlantic (read “objective, middle ground”) insight into what Americans are all about. Most people here are not so much aware that, yes, Americans and the BBC speak the same language, but that’s as far as it goes. So the propaganda, BBC propaganda, is parroted, and it spreads.
Then the latest obscenity came with the capture and shooting in the head of American POWs:
Watching BBC World Service when this remarkable utterance was made in respect of the captured US soldiers – “In a war where public opinion is as important as what happens on the field of battle today saw a true public relations disaster.” Initially I agreed – openly parading your barabarism should clarify for everyone the nature of the Baathist regime – but it rapidly became evident that in the inverted moral universe of the BBC the public relations disaster they referred to was one that affected the Coalition and the US only – it was a PR disaster that these prisoners had been captured. That some of them had been obviously executed in cold blood and the rest were being put through a course in which the Iraqi intended to break every other Geneva convention with just this small group was not something that would reflect badly on the Iraqi’s – and anyway the Iraqi disinformation minister had said that they were being treated well.
It is important to remember, I think, that the war isn’t just between the West and Saddam. There’s also a political and ideological war within the West. The anti-war crowd have lost the argument about going to war; so they are determined to win the case during and after it. They want this war to be regarded as a disaster. And it’s up to the rest of us to fight back, expose them, and keep people focused on reality, not pro-Saddam and anti-Western spin. I need your help in this, so keep those press clips coming. Blogs are another weapon. We should use them.
The Dish 