BBC caves in to complaints

Posted on 25th November, 2005 by

The BBC reports that its governors have caved in to pressure from hundreds of “listeners” and found that a From Our Own Correspondent report on the final departure of Yasir Arafat from Ramallah breached its guidelines. One might note that the report on the governors’ decision lacks any link to the original report (which is still there), nor even to the FOOC home page. There is serious cowardice on display here; it perhaps reflects on the organisation’s timidity, remarked on in both the New Statesman and the Spectator in the past few weeks (the reports will have been removed from free view), which has been brought on by the Hutton report. Personally I can see how the reference to the author’s personal emotions was out of the ordinary for the BBC, but it could only have provoked hundreds of complaints if a group of people who had an axe to grind decided to organise a letter-writing campaign.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Possibly Related Posts:


FacebookTwitterIdenti.caDeliciousDiggStumbleUponWordPressShare
MediaPermalink
  • Old Pickler

    Great news. Silly fool crying over the death of that corrupt old terrorist.

  • http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/ Yusuf Smith

    Well, I deliberately avoided making any comment on Arafat, for whom I don’t have much time myself. I certainly wouldn’t have shed tears over him; the point is that hundreds of compalaints were received which suggest that the letter-writing wasn’t entirely spontaneous and that the objection really wasn’t to the author betraying her emotions in a report for the uber-objective BBC.

  • http://ginnysthoughts.blogspot.com Ginny

    Assalamu alaikum, I don’t get it, though I’d like to know why the journalist “wanted to cry”. It seems,though, that if there were such a problem with the original report, why did it get put on the air in the first place. If you are reporters, and that is what you do, then you, or at least your superiors, would know if any kind of journalistic integrity was breached. So why do you need a bunch of supposedly irate listeners to tell you that?

    As far as Yasser Arofat supposedly being a terrorist, I don’t think he’s any more or less of a terrorist than Ariel Sheron (sorry for the spelling if it’s wrong” would be.

    Though I’d almost say that Sheron might be responsible for more deaths than Arofat.

  • http://ginnysthoughts.blogspot.com Ginny

    Assalamu alaikum, so what were the “objections”? The only thing noted in the article is that the reporter broke editorial policy becauase she wasn’t “objective” or osmething like that. That was what the report found, but what did the so-called “complainers” have a problem with?

  • http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/ Yusuf Smith

    As-Salaamu ‘alaikum Ginny,

    My apologies - I sort of imagined that it was obvious who objected and why. It was a particular ethnic lobby with connections to “the other side” in the dispute in which Arafat was involved. I’m not sure if Sharon was ever a terrorist as such (as opposed to being a war criminal), but certainly Mandate-era Zionists were not shy of using terrorist tactics to achieve their aims. Nobody has ever bothered to explain why it was OK for Jews then but not OK for Arabs now. The piece was rather more personal than BBC reports (even FOOC reports) normally are, but the objection was because it was Arafat.

  • Old Pickler

    Oh, of course, silly me. It was the Jewish lobby again. Not people writing in because they thought it was disgusting that this silly woman got upset over the death of that corrupt old terrorist and that the laughably pro-Palestinian beeb just let it past.

    Orla Goebels is part of this Jewish lobby too, isn’t she?

  • Ben

    Pickler, despite his flaws this man did attempt to make peace and was democratically elected, two things you can’t say about many leaders in the Arab world.

    Though he was deeply flawed and there is even more hope for peace now that he is gone, I really don’t think the adjective ‘terrorist’ was applicable to Arafat, at least not in the later years.

  • DrM

    PRickler, isnt it time to take your meds? If only racists had access to potassium chloride…

  • Ann

    Assalaamu alaikum,

    I don’t know anyone who liked Arafat - and that includes Palestinians - and I didn’t shed any tears. But I could see where someone who knew him might feel some pity for him when he was finally taken out of his compound, close to death… a sick old man who never achieved what he wanted to, and who had been essentially trapped in this compound for - what was it, years?

    But would there have been any controversy if she admitted having shed a tear at the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, for example? It would show the same lack of objectivity, but I think we can safely assume that there would be no complaints - certainly not from the same people who complained about this.