And when I first came across Biased BBC it was in the wake of the Iraq War - the example Media Lens cites as being a prime example of BBC pro-state bias. I didn't find the BBC to be pro-that-war at all (as Media Lens and those who think like them believe it was). Hugh Sykes' reporting, Orla and Fergal, John Humphrys' questions on Today, the proven dislike of many BBC reporters for Bush, the Blair government v BBC battle culminating in the Hutton report and the resignation of Greg Dyke - those are just some of the things I remember, and they aren't (to me) evidence of the BBC being propagandists for the Iraq War.
As you can see, the name 'Hugh Sykes' was the first which popped into my head when I tried to think of an example of a BBC reporter whose reporting (at the time) gave every impression of being dead against the invasion of Iraq - i.e. as being biased.
That post came back to me because Hugh Sykes has taken to Twitter again today to protest at Save the Children's decision to give Tony Blair an award for his poverty work:
2 #Iraq girls
not saved by #TonyBlair
whose invasion
cost their father
his eyes.
@tonyblairoffice @SavetheChildren pic.twitter.com/7GnBnRt5WP
— HughSykes (@HughSykes) November 26, 2014
Leave it to a veteran Beeboid to use an outlier as proof of everything. He probably gives lectures at the BBC College of Journalism on moral gymnastics.
ReplyDeleteDid he protest about Yasser Arafat getting the Nobel Peace Prize? Or Obama for that matter?
ReplyDeleteHow many Iraqi eyes were saved from the attentions of Saddam's torturers?
It was a benighted land. It may still be benighted. But it is not clear it is MORE benighted. Probably all Shias and the Kurds - in other words a majority of the Iraqi population - are happy that he was removed and only the West could removed him.
Dan Read