BBC

Look no further than NewsBusters for complete coverage of Katie Couric’s debut as the anchor of the "CBS Evening News." The MRC’s Brent Baker began the week by noting a previous Couric claim that she’s not biased, but Fox is. Additionally, the new anchor has hired liberal Douglas Brinkley as the show’s historian. On September 5, Couric appeared on "The Early Show," only to apparently forget the program’s name! (Perhaps the perky anchor should do some homework on her new network.)

Ms. Couric wasn’t the week’s only big news. On September 6, "Hardball" host Chris Matthews talked to a Green Party candidate who called for President Bush’s execution. He later told the man, "I like you already." Somewhat ironically, this was only a day after Matthews wondered if Republicans would be using "fear tactics" and other extreme strategies to get elected. (Perhaps calling for the President’s execution could be an example?)

In another Chris Matthews story, NewsBusters Editor Matthew Sheffield talked to the host and was told the Valerie Plame story is now too complicated for coverage. In international news, Mr. Sheffield also noted the BBC’s continuing refusal to disclose the religious background of terror suspects.

Last month, bloggers (including NB's Bob Owens), caught the BBC flat-out admitting its complicity in a staged photo shoot with a Lebanese boy posing next to what the broadcast said was an "Israeli bomb lying unexploded" in someone's living room.

Admitting to participating in news manipulation was bad enough and doing it while endangering a child was even worse. Further compounding things, though, was that in an accompanying photo essay, the Beeb breathlessly identified another Israeli munition left behind in a Lebanese house as an anti-personnel mine. Trouble is, it wasn't:

From SUSANNA BRANDON, copy editor, USA Today: BBC correspondent Martin Asser, reporting Aug. 21 from Southern Lebanon, caused something of a photo-staging and child-endangerment stir when he informed readers: "The shell is huge, bigger than the young boy pushed forward to stand reluctantly next to it while we get our cameras out and record the scene for posterity."

But deeper into the accompanying photo essay, titled Lebanese Villagers Return Home, was something equally amiss: a device breathlessly identified in photo No. 9 as an anti-personnel mine. One is led to assume that the mine was left behind by the Israelis to maim these innocent civilians returning home.

First it was "asian men" behind the plot to blow up British airlines headed for America, now it seems "men under the age of 30" were plotting terrorist attacks in Denmark, at least according to the BBC where informing readers of the religious identity of fanatical Muslims seems to be taboo.

Danish police have arrested nine suspected terrorists, the country's security intelligence service says.

The suspects, believed to be all men under the age of 30, were picked up during overnight raids in Odense, Denmark's third largest city.

The country's Justice Minister, Lene Espersen, said it was likely they were planning an attack in Denmark.

According to less-timid news sources, the men arrested were Islamic fundamentalists. The BBC knows this as that information is public domain. It could easily have been included in the article linked above when it was written or updated subsequently. I guess it's about the public's right not to know. (Hat tip: LGF.)

Looking at the headlines for the September 1 test of the missile defense system, I decided to look at how two reliably biased and un-American news outlets covered the news: the BBC and al-Jazeera.

While the former nudged viewers with a bit of bias in the headline "US missile defence test 'success,'" al-Jazeera conceded the test went off without a hitch.

"U.S. successfully tests missile shield," it read.

Oddly enough it was the BBC that noted in its write-up that the test did more than Missile Defense Agency planners hoped it would, albeit towards the end of its story:

Elitists will scratch their heads, unaware of which fad to uphold. Glaciers are good, right? Reports the BBC:

Researchers at Newcastle University looked at temperature trends in the western Himalaya over the past century.

They found warmer winters and cooler summers, combined with more snow and rainfall, could be causing some mountain glaciers to increase in size.

The findings are significant, because temperature and rain and snow trends in the area impact on water availability for more than 50 million Pakistanis.

Researchers focussed on the Upper Indus Basin, which is the mainstay of the national economy of Pakistan and has 170,000 sq km of irrigated land - an area two-thirds the size of the UK.

Little Green Footballs found an item from the New York Sun about BBC reporter Orla Guerin.

Daniel Freedman at the New York Sun remembers a previous encounter with BBC reporter Orla Guerin (recently caught playing fast and loose with the truth in Lebanon): How Orla Guerin Ruined My Afternoon; or, BBC Bias Exposed Archives.

I would have expected nothing less from her, since I’ve been on the receiving end of Guerin’s hatred toward the Jewish State myself. About six years ago, while wandering through the Old City of Jerusalem with a friend, I chanced upon Guerin preparing a broadcast. After quietly standing and watching Guerin and her crew for about one minute, we heard her cameraman ask her: “shall we start?” To which she replied, “not till these troublemakers leave.”

The Jerusalem Post reports that some Israeli diplomatic officials say that the BBC "reports we see give the impression that the BBC is working on behalf of Hizbullah." The government boycotted the BBC during violence in 2003 and is considering it again.

The Foreign Ministry is under pressure from Israeli citizens to resume its boycott of the BBC and to withdraw credentials from its reporters due to "one-sided" reports on the war in Lebanon, Israeli diplomatic officials said Wednesday.

For seven months during a wave of Palestinian violence in 2003, Israeli officials boycotted BBC news programs, declining interviews and excluding BBC reporters from briefings. The boycott was ended after the BBC appointed a panel to oversee its Middle East coverage and to ensure it would be unbiased.

The thwarted terrorist plot to kill many Americans through smuggling explosives onto aircraft departing from the UK was apparently the work of "Asian" men, according to the local press (HT Michelle Malkin):

I misheard the annoucement on Today. What the BBC's Stephen Sackur actually said, reading an incoming report, was this: "We understand that it is now being suggested by officials that British-born ... er... men were involved in the alleged plot." Could something else have been written after "British born" that caused Sackur to pause? Whatever the case, I apologise for suggesting that Muslims might in any way have been involved in this attempted terrorist attack. What was I thinking?

Further update. Sackur's missing word? This from Sky News:

A new study says the media have engaged in "climate porn" in its coverage of global warming. The motives are financial as well as ideological.

Reports BBC:

Apocalyptic visions of climate change used by newspapers, environmental groups and the UK government amount to "climate porn", a think-tank says.

The report from the Labour-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) says over-use of alarming images is a "counsel of despair".

It says they make people feel helpless and says the use of cataclysmic imagery is partly commercially motivated.

However, newspapers have defended their coverage of a "crucial issue".

This story got almost no coverage in the US press (and that's because they cannot bring themselves to say a good word about a Bush environmental success), but on June 15th, president Bush signed an order that placed 140,000 square miles of Hawaiian Island waters off limits to fishing and other intrusions.

The BBC report dutifully reveals how happy environmentalists are over Bush's decision to bypass the years long process to negotiate this deal and simply sign an order protecting these waters. Bush has the authority under the 1906 National Antiquities Act to sign a law that protects such sites instantly, bypassing further machinations.

Naturally, they don't seem all worried over THIS exercise of executive power!

The BBC has an article out today claiming they have a “new Iraqi massacre tape“. The most curious thing about this article is not the massacre claim itself, but a line buried 15 paragraphs into the 16 paragraph article:

The pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces.

That’s like interviewing Hitler for his take on life at a concentration camp. Who needs fact-checking when you have such unbiased and trustworthy sources?

Not only are the sources questionable, but so is the motive for re-running this story now... a story that's several months old. The motive is pretty obvious based on what the BBC chose to include above the fold:

Remember the scene in "The Naked Gun" when Leslie Neilsen (as incompetent cop Frank Drebbin) is working undercover at a baseball game as opera singer "Enrico Palazzo," and botches the National Anthem on live TV?

The scene shifts then to the real Palazzo, bound and gagged in a locker room with a TV, writhing in anger and despair as he watches Drebbin butcher the anthem under Palazzo’s name.

It wasn’t quite that dire, but as Biased BBC reports, the BBC’s 24-hour news channel made a similar faux pas a few days ago.

"BBC News 24 cocked things up big time last Monday when they interviewed respected technology commentator Guy Kewney on the outcome of the Apple Computer vs. Apple Music case. Except, rather than place Mr. Kewney in front of lightweight Karen Bowerman, they chose his taxi driver for her to interview instead. Bowerman proceeded to interview the taxi driver, whose Frank Spencer style expressions, when he realises their mistake, are priceless!"

The BBC was told by a commission it hired to not avoid using the word "terrorism" when discussing the Israeli-Palestinian issue. But the panel also said there was no bias in the BBC's reporting on the issue.

Reports the Guardian:

The BBC should not be afraid to use the word 'terrorism' in its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a independent report commissioned by the corporation said today.

The report, which was ordered by the BBC governors from a panel of five independent figures last October to assess the contentious issue, found there was no evidence of "systematic" bias within the corporation.

The authoritarian government of China is well-known for suppressing free speech and sometimes getting American media companies eager to cash in on a huge emerging market to help it do so. Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Time Warner, Fox, and others have soiled their reputations assisting the communist regime's crack downs on dissent.

American media companies don't always back down. Sometimes, however, they're censored directly by the Chinese government itself. Such was the case today when a protestor apparently affiliated with the meditation group Falun Gong managed to get herself close to Chinese president Hu Jintao as he was visiting the White House.

As the woman's voice began shouting out before being arrested by Secret Service agents, Chinese television blacked the screen and muted the audio, according to Matt Drudge. After the event was over, when CNN International (the version of CNN seen outside the United States) began discussing the protestor, its signal was abuptly cut off to Chinese viewers, making some wonder what was going on.

Here's a new one. To add to the media's laundry list of supposed failures in Iraq is a unique allegation by the BBC. Apparently Saddam Hussein had a soft spot for the gay rights movement, and now that Bush has invaded, homosexuals are being persecuted.

To many Hollywood left types, this must truly be the reason we shouldn't of entered Iraq.

"I don't want to be gay anymore. When I go out to buy bread, I'm afraid. When the doorbell rings, I think that they have come for me."

That is the fear that haunts Hussein, and other gay men in Iraq.

They say that since the US-led invasion, gays are being killed because of their sexual orientation.

European Jewish Press reports that the BBC's Board of Governors censured BBC Online for a report saying the United Nations had "called for Israel’s unilateral withdrawal" from all territories gained during the Six-Day War, when in fact the UN only "called for a negotiated 'land for peace' settlement."

The governors report, which specifically singled out the reporting of the UN resolution after the 1967 Israeli-Arab ’Six-day war’, stated that the piece on the BBC news website did not give a balanced view of events.

Absence of factual reporting

The UN Security Council 242 is very specific when it calls for a connection between a "withdrawal from territories" and all nations in the region’s "right to live in peace".

The Programme Complaints Committee of the BBC looked into charges that one of its news reports was unfair towards the Conservative Party. Almost a year after the broadcast, the committee has ruled that the story did indeed breach "the guidelines on accuracy and impartiality."

According to a Friday BBC story, "Governors said rules were broken when Harri said the then Conservative leader was booed, but did not mention the same thing had happened to Tony Blair."

The reporter in question is Guto Harri, who now peddles his fair and balanced reporting as BBC's North American correspondent.