July
2, 2003, 10:40 a.m. EuroPress
Review
Boxing
the kangaroo.
By Denis Boyles
edfellows
make such strange politics. Take, for example, the bizarre spectacle of
the BBC, normally a human-resources tool for New Labour politicians, going
to war against Tony Blair, the man whom the BBC helped elect not so long
ago.
As battles go, the
Blair vs. the BBC bout resembles a man boxing a kangaroo: The fight is
much more interesting than who wins the match, especially to the British
media. The man, in this case, is Alastair Campbell, former journalist,
now Blair's communications director. Campbell is called a "spin doctor"
and hugely disliked by most of his former colleagues, including BBC
types, like Nicholas
Jones, and the leader-writers
at the Guardian. They despise his "snarling delivery
and jabbing finger." He has given rich nourishment to other people
who write spin, like Hugo
Young, who enjoy portraying Blair's evil shadowman spoon-feeding the
nation "corrupted Horlick's" (it's sort of like Ovaltine, folks).
The charge: Campbell has been accused of "sexing-up" (a British
term if ever there was one) an intelligence
report last September as part of the effort to swing public opinion
in favor of supporting the war in Iraq. Campbell is said to have added
language to the report at the last minute to make it appear Saddam was
capable of mounting an attack on Britain in 45 minutes or so.
The kangaroo is a
controversial BBC reporter named Andrew Gilligan, sketched
neatly in the Daily Telegraph and much more heroically
in the Guardian, who broadcast
the charge against Campbell last May on the strength of a single, unnamed
source. Some readers will already be familiar with Gilligan, the little
buddy of Baghdad, whose blind faith in the injustice of the Coalition's
cause made him miss the very story he was sent to Iraq to cover, as I
have detailed elsewhere.
The widespread criticism of the BBC's miserably bitter and biased performance
before, during, and after the war has driven the world's largest broadcaster
into a defensive corner where it is now forced to put its reputation on
the line for the sake of Gilligan. And Gilligan is not exactly Edward
R. Murrow. Or even Woodward or Bernstein, as David Aaronovitch made clear
in last Sunday's Observer. But then Greg Dyke's no Ben Bradlee,
either, according to this report
in the Guardian.
It's a fight that
won't end without somebody getting hurt. On his side, Campbell has the
prime minister, the foreign secretary, the head of British intelligence,
and, apparently, a parliamentary committee charged with looking into the
matter, all of whom say (or, in the case of the parliamentarians, according
to the Telegraph, appear
to be ready to say) that Campbell didn't do it. On the side of the 'roo,
we have the BBC, because they can never say they were wrong, and most
British journos, because they hate Blair for liking Bush and they hate
Campbell for liking Blair. If the man wins, the BBC will receive the chastisement
many feel it has deserved as a consequence of its awful job reporting
the war in Iraq, not to mention its grotesque institutional arrogance
— and it will give great impetus to those who are arguing that the
BBC must learn to survive in a fair and open market. If the kangaroo wins,
the prime minister may have to find new work.
As the Downing Street
campaign demonstrates, the bias of the BBC isn't a narrow right/left ideological
bias. It reflects a much wider worldview that positions the U.S. and its
allies as an evil force in the world. The BBC might as well be French.
The goal is to isolate the U.S., and the issue of WMDs, as NRO's Jed Babbin
noted here
yesterday, is the bar they hope to use to pry loose the Atlantic alliance.
So the focus, as seen in Le Monde's editorial
on the dignity of M. Blix, or in this rant
by the IHT's overemployed William Pfaff, must be on the
Coalition's "lies." Why? Because for the Euro-Left, legitimacy
— or the lack thereof — is the metric by which American virtue
must be measured. For journalists, this is always a no-risk gambit.
After all, if the WMDs are found, will Pfaff and Le Monde surrender
their legitimacy? That's a big mais non, good buddy. (For more
on the Gotcha syndrome, see Eugene Volokh's recent NRO piece here.)
So the coverage of
the war in Iraq by the BBC was essentially the same coverage we would
have witnessed if billions of dollars had been given not to some typically
boring liberal organization, like, say, NPR. No, the BBC's war coverage
was like something out of Pacifica.
It was newscasting as it exists in Paul Wellstone's afterlife. It wasn't
just liberal, whatever that may mean. It was radical in a goofy, rich-college-kids-on-the-radio
kind of way. It was, as Janet Daley noted
in the Telegraph, making the news fit the BBC's programs.
The normal rules of journalism were — and apparently still are, judging
from this latest Gilliganism — frequently jettisoned for the sake
of a good spin. Attention, BBC: Single-sourcing a news item intended to
discredit an entire government just isn't smart journalism. Neither was
the frequent practice used by the BBC during the campaign in Iraq of bringing
on "experts" and "analysts" to comment on wartime
events — "pure American imperialism!" analyzed one such
fellow — without making clear the affiliations and biases of the
analysts. Often, I discovered, these people came from organizations like
the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU),
an extremely well-connected,
London-based, pro-Palestinian lobbying group whose network of supporters
in government and the press suggests the entangled sympathies of the British
left. CAABU's website used to be a little more revealing than it is now
— during the war, you could at least see the names of the BBC types
on their board — but it's still possible to get a sense of where
their money comes from: "In 1998, CAABU came near to closure due
to dwindling funds. After appeals for help in the Arab press in particular,
we were saved mainly through two very generous and anonymous donations"
and instantly an off-shore Trust Fund was set up. Ask, as I did, for a
few specifics — like, how generous is "very generous",
roughly speaking? were those donations made by governments or by individuals?
— and you will get silence. So for all we know, CAABU's coasting
on Saddam's benevolence, providing helpful experts to the BBC. Until the
BBC knows, it might find a better source for its "analysts".
No wonder, reported
the Guardian, the Israeli government has decided that its
life will be better — and certainly much more fair — if it just
didn't deal with the BBC at all.
If nothing else,
the criticism of the BBC from its left flank has highlighted what many
critics, such as Andrew
Sullivan, have been saying for some time: Only competing for survival
— instead of living large off of one of the most regressive taxes
on Earth — can cure what ails the BBC. You can't get good journalism
by making people pay hundreds of dollars in "licensing fees"
just to own British TV sets, which is how the BBC is over-funded. If a
country like the United Kingdom can privatize its drinking water, its
post office, and its subways, for crying out loud, it ought to be able
to figure out a way to privatize the BBC. If it succeeds, cool. If it
doesn't, it goes
the way of another white elephant, British Airways. Until then, Gilligan
and his ilk should be seen as what they are: bureaucrats on taxpayer-funded
soapboxes.
ITEMS The Euro-Left
is weeping softly inside because, as La Repubblicanoted
sadly, Silvio Berlusconi, the right-wing Italian leader, is taking his
turn to serve as EU president, replacing the dutifully liberal Greeks. French
defense: The U.S. is discovering the "limits of uniliateralism"
in Iraq. The next step, saysLe Figaro, is to call on the U.N. (read: France) for help.
That's called "giving up," technically. Figaro's source
for this American epiphany? The New York Times, of course. Mad-science
report: According to this value-free report
in the Independent, the lab boys have found yet more byproducts
to be harvested from aborted fetuses: more fetuses. Just think,
in a few short years, we could create a whole genealogy of dead children.
You'll be relieved to know that the study, conducted by a medical center
and a university veterinary department, enjoyed "Full ethical
approval." Why isn't stupid a crime?
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edfellows
make such strange politics. Take, for example, the bizarre spectacle of
the BBC, normally a human-resources tool for New Labour politicians, going
to war against Tony Blair, the man whom the BBC helped elect not so long
ago. 
The Euro-Left
is weeping softly inside because, as La Repubblica 