British journalist Melanie Phillips reports, in detail, that the BBC's news reporting has finally gone off the deep end.
Over the past few days, the BBC’s virulent bias over Iraq, America and Israel has gone into an utterly astounding overdrive. The scandal over the ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners has clearly destroyed the last vestiges of any attempt at fairness as hysteria has descended on our public disservice broadcaster. Item after item has mounted attack after attack on America, hyping up the distorting defeatism over Iraq and continuing to promulgate the view that Israel, the victim of the most barbaric atrocities, is instead the root of the problem in the Middle East.What all this shows is that the BBC has become far more than a redoubt of Guardian and Independent values; far more than a journalistic disgrace; far more than betrayal of the concept of public service broadcasting. It has become nothing short of a national menace, an enemy of this country’s interests and a fifth column in time of war. There is no doubt in my mind that a major reason why otherwise sane and sensible Britons have totally lost touch with reality, believe the US and Israel are the source of all evil while people who play football with the heads of Jews are the victims of injustice, and are on the way to pressurising the British government to pull out of Iraq, denounce America and thus hand victory to religious fascism, is because of the influence of the BBC, our secular church. And because of its immense global prestige and the fact that it is trusted to tell the truth, the BBC is now helping poison the discourse of the world.
If the BBC had behaved in this way during World War Two, we would have lost it. If it is allowed to carry on in this fashion, we may lose against the new fascism that threatens us.
The American press is still making a pretense of fairness, but is, for the most part, just as warped. The Boston Globe showed last week how to do it with a laughable lack of intelligence. Things will get much, much worse as the presidential campaign continues.
Posted by Alan at May 16, 2004 01:16 AM