THE STAR TRIBUNE’S PAUL MCENROE, back from Iraq, says that the BBC’s bias was evident:
CP: What about the foreign coverage? Was it more objective?
McEnroe: I don’t know. I thought the BBC was completely biased. Three days into the war, they were calling everything a quagmire, and reporting that everything was bogged down. I thought, “Boy, you’re really jumping the gun here.” There hadn’t even been a week’s worth of war and they were already coming to a conclusion. That didn’t strike me as very professional.
He’s not crazy about Fox or CNN, either.
UPDATE: Here’s more on the BBC:
The BBC’s Andrew Gilligan quoted a source–who turned out to be the scientist David Kelly–as criticizing the government. Kelly later refuted how his comments had been portrayed by Mr. Gilligan to a parliamentary committee. Then Kelly committed suicide. Now the BBC has to either admit that it misquoted a mourned scientist or call him a liar.
That’s the scandal in a nutshell. What led to it is the BBC’s all-out campaign to validate its world view. Because the mass graves and accounts of torture by Saddam’s regime are too real, the BBC has grabbed onto the fact that WMDs have not yet been found to justify its animosity toward the liberation of Iraq. And this animus sprang from the consensus that the West is always wrong. . . .
This is not hyperbole. The BBC can be a formidable foe. It has, in its own words, “the most widely watched national news bulletins in the UK.” Thus when the BBC decides to manufacture a story, or ignore another, it forms reality for millions in Britain and world-wide.
Yes, and that’s why it matters, even to us Americans. Or, perhaps, especially to us Americans, given that anti-Americanism is the state religion of the BBC.