How anybody (who doesn't work for the Beeb) can say that the BBC's coverage is most reliable is astounding. I listened to the BBC radio all through the Iraqi war, and they were unable to tell me that the coalition forces were winning. They were always sure that the casualties were serious setbacks, that the quagmire was right around the corner. The day that the minders failed to show up for work seemed to take the BBC correspondents quite by surprise.
They covered their asses quickly in the recap of the war, of course. But getting war coverage so consistently wrong would seem to me to be a major black mark against any organization's reliability. Did you read Rod Liddle's piece
Why is the BBC So Scared of the Truth?
spectator.co.uk
Where did this political correctness come from, and why is it swallowed and then spat out so unquestioningly? It’s a sort of terror of the truth, arrogant in its assumptions because it believes ‘ordinary’ people cannot cope with the truth and need it either sweetened or altered entirely.
You could see it at work during the war in Iraq. Now, I was opposed to the war but I was aware that the military campaign was carried out with devastatingly brilliant precision and speed. And yet, watching television — Channel 4 or the BBC or, for that matter, Sky — there seemed a determination to present at every juncture the worst-case scenario as if the war, because it was inherently ‘immoral’, could not therefore possibly be expedited with success. Maybe it is just my imagination, but I seem to remember being told, every night, that the prospect which awaited our troops was a ‘quagmire’ of ‘hand-to-hand street fighting’. Where’s the quagmire, huh? Where are the fights? I don’t object to the speculation; just the one-sided nature of the speculation — as if it were in some way indecent to have someone suggest that the war would be over by the end of next week and very few people would be killed.
Now, Rod Liddle is on the left himself, and is an old hand in British media. This isn't some slam from a neocon. This is a lament about institutionalized political correctness run amok. And the trouble with political correctness is, it is a self-inflicted blinker system - those who share in it, cannot see it to remove it. |
