Monday, 31st March 2008
Left-wing bias
The BBC World Service are at it again. Their left-wing bias was made evident again in a broadcast by a John Simpson who chose to review the worldwide role of the United States in the most biased and uncomplimentary of ways, which does little credit to the BBC's reputation of objective and fair reporting of current events.
His technique was to focus on all the dubious areas of American foreign policy and cast doubt on American influence in the Middle East and blame a renewal of the arms race on the United States. And who does he cite to press home his opinion?
None other than Vladimir Putin, the President of a country which, for over 50 years, kept the world in a state of anxiety over the Cold War.
Mr Simpson found it more important to spout his anti-US propaganda then to acknowledge America's sacrifice of 4,000 lives in order to preserve his freedoms and liberty to criticise the greatest nation on earth. Mr Simpson and others like him owe a huge debt of gratitude to the United States for living in a world made safer by its endeavours.
One wonders why the BBC is exhibiting this left-wing tendency and straying farther and farther away from its precepts as set down in its Charter.
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Comments
This is like blaming today's Austria for the First World War.
Of course John Simpson is doing what a journalist should - look at today's facts.
There are many of us in the UK who have perceived the BBC's news agenda as right-wing over the years; just shows that they can't win. If one's perception of news comes from the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, the BBC will seem leftist, but only in comparison to the highly selective reporting by these organs.
Just rejoice that we are able to see different opinions and draw our own conclusions - people in North Korea would see our differences as trivial.
Mike
But what gets me most in this letter is not about the BBC but about the US. Surely the writer has been living in another planet. The US is the cause behind a lot of what has gone wrong in the world ( excluding earthquakes and floods) since the end of World war Two. Need we mention Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba, Iraq twice. Can we ignore their continued propping up of dictatorial regimes in Pakistan,Egypt and Saudi Arabia or the billions of dollars spent annually protecting their Middle East oil interests by arming Israel with nuclear missiles and insisting that no other country should have such arms. Come on Mr Borg leave your set loudly tuned to the BBC . It might wake you up from your dreams.
Oh and by the way while of course everyone is sorry for the waste of 4000 US lives you might have at least mentioned the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost to protect US oil interests.
I usually don't have a problem with (clearly stated) bias, but this case, coming from a supposedly "unbiased" entity, funded by the British taxpayer, is unacceptable.
In the UK many journalists such as Melanie Phillips and Tom Gross deal with this issue and there is actually a website (Biased-BBC) which keeps an eye on proceedings.