BBC anti-American crusade exposed - again!

In a damning report exposing, example after example, The BBC's anti-American crusade, Tom Gross of The National Review Online, proves why the BBC's charter must be revoked. They have been and still are in serious breach of their charter. The BBC have not learned their lessons from the Hutton report and are beyond rehabilitation.

Here is just a small sample from Tom Gross's article; be sure to read the whole thing.

I'm glad to see main stream media finally reporting on Sheikh Abdur-Rahman but we in the blogsphere reported on Sheikh Abdur-Rahman a week ago.

From NRO

The BBC makes many good programs when it comes to drama, comedy, sport, and science. But its enormous news division is by far the world's biggest is another story. Using lavish public funding (courtesy of the British taxpayer) and an unprecedented worldwide news reach (its radio service alone, broadcasting in 43 languages, attracts over 150 million listeners daily), it is in blatant breach of its own charter virtually conducting its own anti-American and anti-Israeli foreign policy. Anyone who doesn't agree with its policies (Tony Blair, for example) finds himself at the mercy of BBC news coverage.

In January, criticisms made of the BBC in a report by an official commission set up by the U.K. government ("the Hutton enquiry") in regard to its Iraq-war coverage, were so scathing that both the chairman of the board of governors of the BBC and its director-general had little choice but to resign. Since then, the BBC has for a while at least, been a little more adroit at disguising its prejudices. Instead much of its slant now lies in omission rather than in active distortion.

[...]

Some of the foreign BBC staff are quite open about their sympathies for Hamas. The senior BBC Arabic Service correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Fayad Abu Shamala, told a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, (attended by the then Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin) that journalists and media organizations in Gaza, including the BBC, are "waging the campaign [of resistance/terror against Israel] shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people."

And they fired Kilroy-Silk for less.

[...]

The problem is not that every individual correspondent is biased. Whereas some, such as Orla Guerin, make almost no attempt at balance, others, such as James Reynolds in Jerusalem, do make a genuine effort to be fair. The problem is that the culture that permeates the BBC, a habit of thought that has become engrained throughout the network, allows only one worldview, in which the U.S. and Israel are vilified well beyond any reasoned or justified criticism of anything these states have actually done.

Hiring practices reinforce this. Recently, Ibrahim Helal, editor in chief of the much-criticized al Jazeera TV network was hired by the BBC World Service Trust. The job the BBC wanted him for? To advise on balance in Middle East coverage, and head "media training projects," i.e. to train BBC (and perhaps other journalists) into "understanding the Middle East better."

[...]

A GLOBAL PROBLEM
The BBC's Middle East problem is not just a British problem but also an international one. The BBC pours forth its worldview not just in English, but in almost every language of the Middle East: Pashto, Persian, Arabic, Turkish. Needless to say it declines to broadcast in Hebrew, even though it does broadcast in the languages of other small nations: Slovene and Slovak, Macedonian and Albanian, Azeri and Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz, and so on. (It doesn't broadcast in Kurdish either; but then the BBC doesn't typically concern itself with the rights and aspirations of persecuted Kurds in Muslim-majority states like Syria and Iran. We didn't hear much on the BBC, for example, when dozens of Syrian Kurds were killed and injured by President Assad's regime two months ago.)

Throughout the world the BBC enjoys exceptional influence. An article last month in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, for example, quotes a leading Lithuanian campaigner against anti-Semitism as saying that inflammatory and biased international BBC news coverage against Israel was helping to revive anti-Semitism in Lithuania against those few Jews remaining who were not murdered in the Holocaust.

The English-language version of the BBC seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. My friend Kamran al-Karadaghi, an urbane, moderate, and thoughtful Iraqi, who was for a decade the political editor of the Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat in London, and who until last week served as head of Radio Free Iraq, tells me that the BBC Arabic-language service is not just far worse than the English-language BBC. It is "even worse," he says, than al Jazeera, in the vitriol it pours out against America and Israel.

We need a lot more reporting like this to expose the anti-American crusade being waged by the BBC, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, Reuters and others. The combination of media outlets like the New York Times and others in the US coupled with the ones mentioned above are doing immeasurable harm to the US.

So, why doesn't the US do something about it? And what, besides exposing them in the blogsphere, can we do about it? I write to them almost daily to complain. Only once was I able to get them to change a story and apologize. Unfortunately they apologized to me personally in an email and the rest of the world is none the wiser about their disinformation. To the world the original story still stands as the truth.

The BBC is the leading cheerleader in anti-American propaganda. No wonder the world has a twisted view of America. I wish the Bush administration would complain to Blair over this. The BBC must be stopped.
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