What are we going to do about the BBC?

Well, of course, I know the answer to that or, rather, I know the answer to a slightly different question: how can we stop subsidizing this appalling organization. However, I am aware that many of our readers, for reasons I cannot divine, still pay attention to what goes out from Broadcasting House, TV Centre and other suchlike constructions.

That being so, I really must point out yet another piece of egregious behaviour on the part of the BBC. Actually, it is doubly egregious.

On the one hand, there seems to have been no reporting of the continuing ethnic and student demonstrations, turning into riots, in Iran or the brutality with which they are being put down. This is a subject we shall have to cover in greater detail but, for the moment, it is worth having a look at Gateway Pundit, who has been following developments.

So much for the sin of omission. Now for the sin of commission. Undoubtedly, our readers would have noticed that the BBC is salivating at another supposed massacre of Iraqi civilians by American troops.

The Americans are saying that a building collapsed under heavy fire, the fighting having taken place because of a tip-off about a visit by what the BBC describes as an “al-Qaeda supporter”. (Do they, by the way, report when various highly placed al-Quaeda officials are either killed or arrested?)

The Corporation and its star broadcaster John Simpson (the only man who still believes that staged gun-fight in Bucharest was for real and who managed to report the 1999 events in Kosovo from a hospital bed in Belgrade) know better.

“The video material obtained by the BBC shows a number of dead adults and children at the site with what our world affairs editor John Simpson says were clearly gunshot wounds.”

Excellent journalistic work, you might say. Isn’t it? Well, no.

“The pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces which has in the past been accused of having links with al-Qaeda.”

An entirely unbiased source, of course. Even those rather odd individuals at the BBC must have realized that this did not sound too good. So they buried the paragraph at the end of the website story and added the following rider:

“Our correspondent says the BBC was not given the footage but had to dig it out, adding that the group was not interested in Western news organisations and may have intended the pictures to go to al-Qaeda sympathisers abroad.”

Gosh! And wow! They had to dig it out! Double wow! Out of what? A pile of rubble, where it had been carefully placed by the aforementioned hardline Sunni group, perchance? By the way, who is this hardline Sunni group? Not the Ba’athists by any chance?

No matter who they are, they seem to have found their target if they really were looking for sympathizers abroad.

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