Is the BBC biased toward Iraq (as Andrew Sullivan claims) or is it just reporting 'neutrally'?
My own view is that it is the latter, of course - no surprise if you've been reading my recent postings. Naturally I may be completely deluding myself and Andrew Sullivan may be completely correct in writing again about what he descibes as the "Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation", but I seriously doubt it.
Of course, some people think that, even if the BBC is reporting 'neutrally', it should not be doing so in time of war. Such people, I suspect, think that in time of war the only acceptable behaviour by our media is to report exclusively favouring the 'coalition' point of view, as espoused by the British government. There is certainly an argument to be made for this, when our national security is at stake, even if I believe ultimately that the benefits in the longer-term of the BBC always reporting as 'neutrally' or 'even-handedly' as possible far outweigh the benefits of exclusively pro-British reporting, irrespective of what is really happening. Not having been alive during WWII, I am not in a position to comment from my own knowledge about how the BBC reported news relating to the war at the time, but from what I have gathered from my study of history, and from what those who were alive at the time have told me, is that whilst news was heavily censored it was not actually 'falsified'. I have no doubt that release of 'bad' news was at the very least delayed, or simply blocked completely, but I have not heard that completely false news was reported knowingly, even if 'disinformation' was released with the intention of confusing the Nazi enemy.
Now to get back to the current war with Iraq, the article that Sullivan focusses on in his latest anti-BBC diatribe seems to me fairly even-handed - it reports what all the parties said about the incident in question (the supposed 'execution' of two British POWs after their capture) in what I believe to be an even-handed manner - read the BBC article for yourself, if you like.
A flavour of what this article does say, despite the claims of Sullivan, can be had from the following two brief paragraphs:
"Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram took the opportunity of a news briefing for journalists in London to express his "regret" for any distress caused." (about the claim by Prime Minister Tony Blair that the two POWs had been executed)
"According to the Daily Mirror newspaper Sapper Allsopp's sister Nina said: "His Colonel told us he was not executed we just can't understand why people are lying." "
I have no idea what the truth is about what happened, nor (I suspect) does Sullivan. There are many hypotheses possible, perhaps. Assuming that the two were 'executed', it may be that the army Colonel referred to above thought it would be 'kinder' to let the families believe the two men had been killed 'in action', rather than 'executed' in cold blood. The army may or may not have precise information about how the two died. At the very least, though, I think it reasonable to wish that the British military authorities (ie. the Army) had coordinated what was being said about this incident with the British civil authorities (i.e. the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister). If Tony Blair was going to state baldly that the two had been executed during the Camp David Press Conference with President Bush, it would have been much better, not to mention less confusing and hurtful to the men's families, to have ensured that the British army had passed on the news in similar fashion.
Sullivan of course is an unimportant 'pundit'; I doubt very much if his ignorant so-called analysis of what is going on in the Middle East is regarded highly by anyone who really matters (in the US or elsewhere), but it is unfortunatley true that he is widely-read and his regular peddling of misinformation is therefore widely disseminated. This incident is yet another blatant example, however, of how little respect this man appears to have for objectivity and balanced commentary.
