We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Discourage the BBC with a comment here

In accordance with its already stated policy, Samizdata.net offers the comment section under this item for discouraging messages to our BBC TV reporters serving to attack our freedoms and to encourage tyranny over the people of Iraq and the world. The many TV media personnel who read Samizdata.net regularly are sure to forward this to their colleagues.

[Note: If you are supportive of BBC TV coverage in Iraq or elsewhere, you are welcome to post a comment under a relevant story, but please leave this comment section to those who want to heap discouragement, abuse, hatred and curses upon our BBC media personnel.]

22 comments to Discourage the BBC with a comment here

  • S. Weasel

    Don’t know what you’re talking about. Seems to me the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation is only, quite naturally, rooting for their own team.

  • Johan

    I read about a peculiar matter concerning BBC and SVT (Swedish Television – run by the glorious socialist State, mind you). SVT has decided to censor BBC and the reports they have from the Iraq war…..something is wrong here. If a socialist State run television decides to censor BBC, a channel who (which I’ve understood) deliver just the kind of news from Iraq that a socialist government want, then I must say it’s very weird.

    No wonder collectivism doesn’t work, they can’t even agree on a common viewpoint on things. People are all different, and this I take as a proof that socialism, and all the nice chitt chatt on how nice it would be if Everyone were brainwashed to think the same, doesn’t work because internally they can’t even agree. A naive argument many of you might say. Yes indeed. A naive argument against a naive ideology.

  • Sergio

    Dear sir,

    Here in Spain we are also seeing how leftists parties, the unions and the public television are rallying behind Saddam’s Baath Party.
    Their behaviour is so outrgerous that someone has sent this
    video to the socialist party.
    Although it is in Spanish, I think the content and intent are evident to those who don’t speak the language.

    Yours,

    Sergio

  • Fred

    The poor BBC, they hate so passionately.
    I have wondered what the BBC tone of voice
    is, self loathing?

  • HG

    The BBC web site seems to have two basic classes of stock photos, one a screaming Palestinian woman, the other, an Israeli with a gun. They tend to show pictures of dead Palestinians, but for Israelis, only the burnt out busses, not bodies. You can find exceptions, but this is the general trend.

    An article of about an Israeli satellite launch was illustrated by an Israeli soldier with a gan.

  • They are also heartless scum when they directly threaten the well-being of someone:

    ENDANGERMENT by beeb

    Bloody Bastards!

  • They are also heartless scum when they directly threaten the well-being of someone:

    ENDANGERMENT by beeb

    Bloody Bastards!

  • Rich Arnone

    Maybe the decent folks in GB can influence their elected politicians to clean house at the BBC. Only the Government can fix a Govt. entity gone awry. Call it spring cleaning. Don’t forget the disinfectant

  • Liberty Belle

    Forgive me, Rich Arnone, but your comment is naive. Do you think the British actually WANT the BBC? That they want to fund this nest of toe-rags and embedded communists? Someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but the BBC is not a government entity. It’s a separate corporation which was set up in the Dark Ages of broadcasting many moons ago and given a remit: Produce programmes of high quality and give current events impartial (meaning fair-minded) coverage. For this, they are allowed to levy a fee. I believe it’s currently around £110 or $160 a year. Mandatory. Even if you wouldn’t watch BBC while holding your nose. If you have a television in your home, no matter if you watch only satellite or cable or one of the other earth channels, you must pay to have a licence and your licence money goes to perpetuate the BBC. People have been pleading to have the BBC privatised for years. The Director General Greg Dyke scored a wonderful own goal when he spoke up against privatisation: “There are only so many advertising pounds to go around …” meaning, he recognised that the BBC would not attract advertisers and thus wouldn’t survive privatisation. Needless to say, socialist governments love it as it is a willing conduit for socialist propaganda. Margaret Thatcher, had she lasted just a little longer in office, would probably have privatised it.

  • Robert M.

    While I don’t understand the blatent anti-American slant of the BBC, I accept it for what it is, the mindset of a certain class of effete intellectuals and default position of most Francophiles. The thing that truly puzzles, no, befuddles me is the blatent anti-British view being broadcast by the BBC during the war, or at least anti-British military. Doesn’t BBC stand for British Broadcasting Co.? Aren’t the fees and other costs mandated by your government to support the company paid by the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and friends of the troopers in harms way?

  • S. Weasel

    The thing that truly puzzles, no, befuddles me is the blatent anti-British view being broadcast by the BBC during the war

    It’s not just the during the war. You expect the BBC to be anti-American, but it’s stunning how anti-British (no, let’s be more precise: anti-English), say, Radio 4 can be. It pervades everything from drama to the food program.

    This has gone way beyond humorous self-deprecation to something dangerous and pathological.

  • Given the increasing number of intelligent people spreading the word about the BBC and other sources of propagandized reporting it would behoove your organization to wise up before you go the way of the dinosaur. After all, in this age of the internet your game is totally transparent to all and your services are becoming less needed and more often the object of derision instead of a source of news.
    Judicious Asininity

  • dave fordwych

    A typical example of sloppy casual journalism yesterday on BBC Breakfast.

    A Muslim academic was taking part in a discussion on the war.At one point he stated that the war was being seen in Muslim countries as an attack on Islam because of the language being used in London and Washington.Now I might have missed something but I have heard no one in HMG say anything which could – rationally- be interpreted in this way.In fact I’d say they have bent over backwards to avoid doing that ,as have the Americans.

    Yet, amazingly,neither of the 2 presenters asked him to give some examples of the kind of thing he was talking about. His[highly contentious] statement was simply accepted as fact and the discussion moved on.

    This type of thing goes to the heart of what many feel is the problem at the BBC. Time after time anyone who challenges their Guardianista view of the world is subjected to intense scrutiny of their views,yet those who are on [BBC] message routinely express the most outrageous opinions without comment ,let alone challenge.

  • G Cooper

    A headline from tonight’s BBC news online says it all: ‘ “I want to go home” Tough conditions sapping US marine morale’.

    The accompany story (either extremely poorly written,or subbed by a barely-trained chimp) could have been dictated by a Baath party propapagandist.

    With few exceptions, the Corporation’s coverage of both the pre-conflict situation and the war itself has fully lived down to expectations – something, one gathers from Thursday’s Telegraph, that at least one BBC insider has admitted.

    Perhaps, when Saddam has been toppled, the allies could turn their attention to a regime change at Broadcasting House?

    But no, I jest. The problems at the BBC are that it is rotten to the core – staffed almost to a man by Guardianistas, Leftists and statists, fine products of our socialist-dominated university system. In truth, there is no cure – it simply has to go.

  • Actually, even many socialists hate the BBC. Harold Wilson was known for an almost paranoid dislike of it. I’ve posted on England’s Sword about the known sympathies of certain BBC reporters. I find it disturbing that Andrew Marr’s publicly let known that he wanted to go on the anti-war march, but carries on reporting on its effects as an ‘impartial’ witness. Sounds a lot like the journalistic equivalent of insider trading. Why not go for balance? I think seeing Bruce Anderson v. Rod Liddle would be a great show.

  • Anonymous Coward

    BBC is evil! BBC is the devil! We should hunt down and destroy this menace to us all immediately! Shooting’s too good for them! Throw them into a tank of boiling sharks (with fricken lasers on their heads)!

    By the way, what’s a BBC?

  • Zhang Fei

    Isn’t the BBC the house organ of the Labor Party? How is it that they’re getting away with biting the hand that feeds them? Maybe the pro-Saddam war coverage is just what Blair needs to get with the Conservative Party to privatize the BBC. OK. Maybe not. Back to the real world…

  • The government doesn’t control the BBC, but it does (at least indirectly) control the BBC’s funding. However, in recentlyyears the government has actually allowed the licence fee to increase at a rate greater than inflation. (This is supposedly to help the BBC launch new digital channels). Every few years the government also gets to decide whetehr the licence fee funding model should be renewed, and until now it has done so.

    And it remains the case that a large portion of the population thinks that the licence fee is worth paying and the BBC is worth the money. Just yesterday I read this (in the Times – a newspaper that belongs to Rupert Murdoch – who himself detests the BBC). (Many people are not going to be able to read the whole article due to The Times’ subscription policy, sadly. The whole article is actually arguing that poor people should be charged a lower rate than rich people).

    While anyone can complain about the quality of individual BBC programmes, there is little doubt that British society as a whole benefits hugely from the licence. The range and diversity of programmes is demonstrably greater than that produced by wholly commercial systems.

    It’s stated in the sort of tone that believes that the statement is beyond contradiction, and in the UK I still this sort of reaction a lot. In Australia we do not have a licence fee, and I find being required to pay one in order to watch DVDs to be outrageous. However, when I explain this in Britain, the usual response is for people to attempt to justify it. That is the real victory of the BBC, I think. They actually have managed to create a situation where people think it is good that they are taxed outrageously. (The tone of the BBCs programming drives me mad.(“Television is a low class medium and we rather look down on ourselves for working in it, but we will do out best to raise it somewhat. Therefore we will give you what our blinkered middle class tastes perceive as quality, and our biased perception of the news, and you will like it. This is except on the occasions when we will produce unbelievably crass programming because we know what that is what people less educated than us want to watch”).

    Australian television is bad in a different way from British television, but at least it lacks this type of attitude.

  • mike

    In America we have the publicly funded NPR, whose editorial slant is similar to the BBC.

    But then hardly anybody listens to it.

  • nick mallory

    Anyone else noticed how BBC interviewers always talk about ‘when the war is over’ never when the war is won? It’s like whenever the cold war is mentioned it’s never actually acknowledged who won it. I think everyone who works for the BBC has to enter the words ‘growing humanitarian crisis’ into every report too.

    Apparently we’re bogged down in the war when we’ve advanced three hundred and fifty miles in a week, 250,000 allied troops are on the verge of defeat thanks to a few baath nutters with rifles and the Iraqi’s tactics of using their own civillians as human shields makes us the bad guys.

    Why is it that reporters in Baghdad always go native in the first ten seconds. This is Stockholm syndrome gone mad. You half expect to see them waving an AK 47 in their reports, pledging to die for uncle Saddam.

  • siobhan Begley

    Privatize them now. Can some please get rid of that hack with the trumpeting ego -Andrew Gilligan