What's wrong - and what isn't - with the BBC
The Telegraph reports:
The BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombings to avoid labelling the perpetrators as "terrorists", it was disclosed yesterday.Early reporting of the attacks on the BBC's website spoke of terrorists but the same coverage was changed to describe the attackers simply as "bombers". The BBC's guidelines state that its credibility is undermined by the "careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments". Consequently, "the word 'terrorist' itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding" and its use should be "avoided", the guidelines say.
Let’s say, again, what is and is not wrong with this.
The problem is not that the BBC is politically biased – a charge I have never made and do not believe. Only last week I received a request from an American documentary filmmaker asking for an interview in which I would recount instances of BBC bias over Iraq. I had to reply that I was unable to do this, because I do not consider there is any consistent pattern of that type. Indeed one BBC journalist, John Sweeney, has done as much as any foreign reporter over the past 20 years to make known the barbarities of Saddam Hussein’s regime and to expose the tyrant’s mendacious anti-sanctions campaign. The BBC has been guilty of many things in its coverage of Iraq – notably a causal abnegation in the Andrew Gilligan affair of every principle of critical inquiry, and gross managerial incompetence – but bias is one charge of which I will acquit it.
The problem is not that the word ‘terrorist’ has special significance and must always be invoked. When used to describe al-Qaeda, it is clearly correct; but it refers to the incidental methods rather than the murderous ideology. Our struggle is not so much against terrorism as against totalitarianism. The problem is not that the BBC uses the words ‘bomber’ or ‘militant’, both of which have their uses.
The problem is that the BBC is oblivious of the first requirement that journalists, subject to partial information and subjective assumptions as they are, nonetheless describe the world as it is. The BBC’s priority, by contrast, is to try to avoid disturbing the sensibilities of its viewers and listeners. The most reliable way to accomplish that end is to introduce language that so far from eschewing ‘value judgements’ merely fails to discriminate among them. The noun ‘bomber’ might refer to the murderers of 52 civilians in London, whom all civilised people execrate, or to the airmen who flew missions into Germany in WWII, whose heroism we have celebrated this week. The noun or adjective ‘militant’ might refer to political violence or it might refer to a strictly verbal form of protest. Listeners can pick and choose what interpretations they like; but what is lost is anything resembling journalistic precision. Someone who expresses his political opinions immoderately but non-violently is not the same type of activist (to use another catch-all phrase favoured by the BBC) as someone who explodes a bomb on a rush-hour bus. As the international historian Walter Laqueur observes in his study of modern terrorism No End to War (pp. 236-7)
To call a terrorist an ‘activist’ or a ‘militant’ is to blot out the dividing line between a suicide bomber and the active member of a trade union or a political party or a club. It is bound to lead to constant misunderstanding.
That is the point: the BBC is guilty of bad journalism that betrays the corporation’s purpose of advancing public understanding.
