British Spin has an excellent riposte to the now hysterical Beebbashing spewing forth from right-wing US bloggers.
Spin says: “I mean come on. Forget 60 years of relentlessly clear reporting. Forget the fact that the BBC has never been a simple propaganda tool for the British government, instead aspiring to be something more complex and more ambitious, a reporting of objectivity and fairness of the world around it. BBC reporters dare to be rude to Generals, they question whether things are going well, they curl their lips, they sneer, they pronounce words diferently to Americans, They.. *shudder* give air time to the Iraqi’s.”
And I might add they don’t have union jack flags fluttering on their news channels – with ‘OUR BOYS IN BATTLE – Day Five”.
Its all good stuff from Spin and I highly recommend it all, especially to American readers.
I have been pondering what has been behind this sudden wave of criticism of old Auntie Beeb from the blogosphere and, at the risk of going into amateur psychology, I think there are some possible explanations that can be offered:
In the case of Andrew Sullivan a hard right US-based British expat commentator, it is clearly part of his going native ritual.
But for the real Americans I think there are other things at work. For a start the idea that you can have a public broadcasting service which is widely watched, popular and quite often very good, goes against everything that the US right stand for. How can it work? How can people like it? There are no advertisements, the market is not really operating and it is a public venture which is not censored by the state? Surely some mistake?
Ironically they are actually calling for a form of state censorship by constantly harping on about how the BBC are asking tough questions, broadcasting Iraqi statements and even allowing critics of the war to be allowed on to the airwaves. They want the Beeb to broadcast our government’s line. Well I think we’ll leave that kind of thinking to the Iraqi regime.
Also lets face it this is a way for a bit of disguised Brit-bashing. They have had a pop at nearly everyone in Europe who has opposed Bush’s policy on war, the Axis of Weasels, the Frogbashing, Old Europe etc etc but our support means we have been off limits.
So they can get their anti-British prejudice out of their system via blasting our media.
It really makes me wonder what we would be reading if Blair had done, as many were urging him, and turned round a couple of weeks ago and said “Sorry George, no UN, no UK”. What would have been screaming forth from the septics then?
“We defended them from the Ruskies”, “Blair is Marxist after all, just goes to show you can never trust..”, “they drink warm beer”, “what is that game they play over five days?”, “They ran away from Dunkirk” “We saved their ass from the Krauts and now this is the thanks we get….”
What? You don’t think so?
