Fair & Balanced?

[mrph]

I think this one speaks for itself...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4257190.stm

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

If Rupert Murdoch hates the BBC, it must be doing something right!

[zotz]

"Known liar claims someone trusted marginally more than himself criticised the beeb" shock.

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

The only real question about it is whether Murdoch or Blair is more full of shit.

Personally I don't have any personal antipathy towards America. Geographically speaking, it's as pleasant a twin continent as one might expect to meet on an M-class planet.

[mrph.livejournal.com]

I liked the "us" comment, too. Didn't initially occur to me, but didn't he only move to the USA last year? Still, I guess he probably didn't wish to draw attention to that point...

[jruske.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... That's a hard one. The BBC does usually try to stay impartial (from an American's eyes at least). But the US coverage has been so uninformed (they couldn't read the FEMA regulations and response codes for goodness sakes) and blatantly biased against Bush that it's hard to see how the BBC could have not unintentionally reiterated some of that bias.

Underlying all of this is a different problem - it's easier and more politically correct to blame a politician than local people. The "don't blame the victims" campaign started early and hard in the USA. Yet at the same time some fo those "victims" were no more than thugs and criminals taking advantage of a relative collapse in local authority.

Hard stuff.

[mrph.livejournal.com]

...and Murdoch, as commented, is definitely coming to this with an agenda. And whatever the facts of the matter, I suspect he shouldn't be repeating off-the-record comments from Blair as an after-dinner speech. [Although if Blair was dumb enough to make those comments to the man who owns Fox, Sky and The Sun, what did he expect to happen?]

I don't know if you saw the link to the BBC's reply, but I'd be interested to know what you think of it.

[jruske.livejournal.com]

Viewers and listeners expected to get the benefit of correspondents' experience, putting the story into context with a sense of how it fitted into the history and politics of a situation.

While I agree with this, my impression is that most "correspondents" have insufficient detailed knowledge to do a good job and feel they must oversimplify in order to communicate to their audience. That problem is blatantly apparent in the US where the latest news clips have people saying everyone will move back to New Orleans because of how great the food is.

The BBC has usually done much better. But the historical, political, and social context of Katrina seems to have not included comparisons to prior natural disaters nor any discussion of the roles and responsibilities as defined by law and mandate for FEMA, state, and municipal officials nor any discussion of why specific disaster planning and exercises were left underfunded by state officials nor what other army corp of engineer projects have been delayed or underfunded in other parts of the country, etc.

In fact I was somewhat shocked no discussion of Army Corp failures managing the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the St. Louis area was brought up at all. There's an entire town/small rural city abandoned south west of St. Louis because of flodding leading to massive pollution in the early 90s. Why isn't that mentioned for instance?

So it's a bit strange all around to read the response about correspondents' responsibilities when I saw most of the coverage while I was in the London and it was largely a toned down version of hyperbole targeting the federal gov't for not stopping, preventing, or otherwise overriding the local gov't when they made bad decisions right up front.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

Couldn't have put it better myself.

[zarbi.livejournal.com]

The owner of the company that produces Fox News criticises the quality of reporting by the BBC.... how ironic!

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

He said reportage!