13 July 2004

BBC CULTURE

Yesterday, a new business campaign against the North East Regional Assembly was covered on the front of The Journal, a Newcastle paper. Many well-known people from the region were among those listed. The BBC’s Look North programme covered the story as follows: a new campaign was launched today but the real story is how they are all arguing with themselves; there is individual X, individual Y, and the BNP; interviews with X,Y, and the BNP regional coordinator explaining how they are applying to the Electoral Commission to be the official ‘no’ campaign; wrap up - the next few months look as though they’ll be dominated by rows between these three people about who is the ‘no’ campaign.

There was no reference whatsoever to the nature or scale of the organisation announced yesterday, and in its attempt to portray the new organisation as on a par with the BNP without even describing who was supporting the new organisation, the BBC broke its own rules on fair election coverage as well as being guilty of blatant misrepresentation. This is no surprise - one of the BBC’s most senior journalists in the region said to one of the Assembly’s opponents recently that if the North East campaign was lost, "I think we have less chance of winning the other two." Notice the "we".

This is a classic of its kind - the BBC is dominated by a culture that regards differing points of view on issues such as regional assemblies, the EU, business, the role of markets in providing services, Iraq and WMD, as immoral. In their worldview, having certain views = immoral = more or less racist. The privileged closed world of the BBC needs to be turned upside down and its very existence should be the subject of a very intense and well-funded campaign that involves bringing out whistleblowers armed with internal memos and taped conversations of meetings.

This incident has obvious implications for the Constitution referendum.

Watch the broadcast at the link below. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/default.stm

Cultural snapshot II - what the BBC does not report on Iraq et al.

The Senate Committee report stated that: "The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgements related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction."

Clinton and many of his senior officials repeatedly stated not only that Saddam possessed WMD but also that there were operational relationships between Al Qaeda and Saddam. The legal indictment of Bin Laden issued in 1998 described some of the connections between the two.

The Senate report also rejected the allegations of Joe Wilson (who went public with attacks on the Administration and provoked a White House investigation) that claims regarding Saddam seeking nuclear materials in Africa were bogus.

The Iraq Survey Group has found a great deal of evidence concerning WMD programmes including missile programmes and actual biological agents that were explicitly contra 1441. It appears as though we feared his programmes were more advanced than they were and there remains the mystery of what happened to various stockpiles: why risk a war over things that you secretly destroyed? Were they shipped to Syria or elsewhere either before or during the war last year? Did he really destroy them in the mid-1990s and if so, where is the evidence? What will the wharehouses full of untranslated documents reveal? The oil-for-food scandal.

Nevertheless, the BBC insists on repeating accusations that the Bush administration lied; it does not tell the public that the Clinton administration supported all the key assertions; it repeats that Saddam had no nuclear programme even though this is not correct; and it does not report what the Survey Group has actually found.

As on Europe and other complex issues, it is much easier for journalists to ignore the difficult complexity of reality and reduce everything to cock-ups, attacks, pictures, and polls - as Roger Ailes famously defined media coverage of politics.