It’s True About the Beeb
David Frum's Diary. "National Review"
So I had my own first-hand encounter with the BBC’s famous bias – and it was indeed breathtaking. I took part in the BBC’s “Newsnight” program with two other guests, Ziauddin Sardar (the author of a foam-flecked book, Why Do People Hate America, and Shirley Williams, a member of the House of Lords and a veteran center-left political figure.
On the BBC, Williams counts as the political “center”: she’s not anti-American, only anti-Bush. (In fact she praised Ronald Reagan ardently – so ardently that I was moved at one point to say that it was a shame that she had kept her admiration for the old man such a secret when he would have been able to hear it). Ziauddin Sardar, on the left, explained that the United States breaks every international law, breaks every international treaty, and treats the lives of non-Americans as wholly worthless: a kind of trifecta of perfect evil.
Before the three of us got to business, “Newsnight” broadcast an introductory video clip. It was that clip that was my perfect moment of news slanting. A reporter at the gates of Buckingham Palace told us that a small crowd was waiting for President Bush, and that its mood was mixed. Cut to clips from three members of that crowd: all negative. (One of the negative voices was American – that was apparently all the balance the broadcaster required.) Now here’s the punchline: I recognized one of the three – I’d seen him earlier that day at an anti-Bush rally in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In the interim, he’d changed into casual tourist clothes – and the BBC was now presenting him as a representative of ordinary British opinion.
I pointed out this distorting selection bias in my first answer to one of moderator Jeremy Paxman’s questions. He was very impatient with me. But I persisted. How can you do a program that purports to study why British people are so hostile to President Bush – without taking note of the state broadcaster’s role in creating and magnifying that hostility? The BBC is not just reporting this story; it is in many ways the story’s most important actor.
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