“Crufts demo kudos BBC.”

Today I found a little scrap of paper upon which I had written these words. Shows you how often we tidy the coffee table. However, better late than never I must say the word of praise to the BBC that I wrote the note to remind myself to do.

A few weeks ago I caught the end of Crufts dog show. Just as a dog made of candy floss was joining the line-up of finalists, loud boos broke out from the audience. Gosh, I thought, unjustly as it turned out, I thought all these doggy people were more sporting than that. As if they’d read my mind the BBC announcers said (all this is from memory and so these aren’t exact words): “The reason you can hear booing is that some people are staging a demonstration over to our right.” Then with a weary sigh I waited for the camera to swing right and give the demonstrators the attention they wanted.

But it never happened. All we had was a shot of some stewards running out of camera range, then the female announcer said with unmistakable satisfaction, “Ah, that interruption seems to have been dealt with very promptly. On with the show!”

UPDATE: I pushed my luck and looked up the story here. Oh well, I suppose they have to report what the protest was about somewhere. If ever, for instance, the disagreements between the British and American Kennel Clubs as to the proper angle of a Lithuanian Mop Dog’s ears were to break out into thermonuclear war that laid waste Western Europe, even I would concede that the story would qualify as news. But I am glad to see that not every wannabe agitator who disrupts a non-political event is given time on camera. The announcers and cameramen handled it professionally.

So, you wanna have your say?

If you are like Lawrence, the bloke who ventures to utter a valid criticism at BBC news coverage, be warned. The drones in the ‘editing’ cubicles are just waiting to ‘balance’ it for you. They’ve got their Jack Thomases at the ready.

The media give undue prominence to such actions. And because of that the militants and terrorists take the actions to exploit the media coverage. Would they be doing it if there were no cameras and coverage? I thought the BBC’s recent documentary and surveys at the time of the 1st anniversary of the war showed that the majority of Iraqi’s wanted no part in such militant action. So why does the BBC then give so much coverage. Come on BBC, focus on the positives instead of the negatives for a change.

Lawrence, UK

To Lawrence, UK : You are asking for the BBC to focus on the positives rather than the negatives. I would rather the BBC focused on the truth, something that I believe they have been doing. I’m sure most Americans would describe their media as ‘positive’ but i’d describe it as biased and misleading.

Jack Thomas, Bangkok, Thailand

The moor has done his duty, the moor may go

: Natalie Solent has already posted below about the BBC’s characterisation of one of its old-time greats, the late Alistair Cooke, as having ‘particular dislike of the shallow flag-waving of the Reagan presidency’. Let me add my testimony.

For several years, from the very end of the seventies though the early eighties, my Sunday schedule let me hear Cooke’s ‘Letter from America’ week after week. Unlike the obituarist, so cocksure that Cooke thought and felt what left-thinking BBC people should, I enjoyed learning from what he actually thought.

The Cooke I heard in those years had insights of the kind that come to someone who prefers to take a genial approach to his subject, thinking first and judging after. If he was, as Natalie sensibly speculates, more naturally a Democrat than a Republican, he was never blind to the faults of the left. Often in those years, I recall him offering not the damning indictment of Reagan that the news online obit would have you think, but penetrating critiques of the kind that that both the American Left and the BBC elite desperately need. I have no book of Cooke’s broadcasts to hand but I don’t need it; thoughts of the quality he sometimes reached stay in the mind.

One ‘Letter from America’ described the U.S. reviews of a new edition of Vera Britain’s ‘Testament of Youth’, which all talked of it in feminist categories. Alistair contrasted them with the British reviews written when it was first published (which he quoted); they talked rather of the author’s attitude to the first world war. More gently and persuasively than this bald summary can suggest, he asked whether the modern reviewers’ fashionable attitudes gave them more insight than the contemporary reviewers or, on the contrary, less. He invited listeners to think about the way in which a reviewer’s mindset can get in the way of their hearing what a book is saying.

Another ‘Letter’ examined a supreme court ruling that laws limiting how one could display the U.S. flag were unconstitutional. In the U.S., such laws were common before the ruling; in Britain, we’ve never had them – you can use the Union Jack as an advertising logo if you want to. Cooke made me smile describing how some world war two British merchants, more eager to promote anglo-american relations (and their sales) than to uphold good taste, found american G.I.s were more often shocked than amused to find the stars and stripes displayed in some unusual product locations.

By the time, he reached the meat of this letter, the listener was in no doubt that Cooke saw no actual need for such laws (and as a fellow Briton, neither do I). Yet he was disturbed by the Supreme Court’s ruling. What does it mean that such laws can be voted by legislators and supported by constitution-proud Americans for 200 years, and yet can be declared already unconstitutional; not able to be made so by some future constitutional amendment but always so? Does it mean that the judges simply described their prejudices as the constitution? Perhaps more alarmingly, does it mean they see nothing alarming in the idea that the constitution is beyond the comprehension of U.S. voters and their elected representatives? What becomes of the constitution as ‘the act of a people constituting a government’ if the court thinks the people cannot understand their act? My bald summary does not do justice to Cooke’s gentler and subtler raising of his concern. Even so, it does not seem a concern that a ‘particular dislike’ of Reagan then or of Bush now would prompt. Now, as then, such radical reinterpretations seem rather the hallmark of those who do particularly dislike them.

As the eighties wore on, I was less and less able to listen to weekly letters from America; my loss. No doubt,Cooke said plenty about Reagan and the Bushes. But the recent letter that Natalie links to reminds me vividly of many I heard; a critique gently offered not to the right but to the left – a thought he thinks they need to ponder. It is a kind of left-leaning regard to be sure, a kind Orwell might have recognised, but far from the dismissive BBC obituarist’s description. And that is what makes such remarks so sad. To ignore hostile criticism is human nature, if human nature not at its best. But I can’t imagine a kinder, gentler, more sympathetic analysis of the failings of political correctness than that sometimes offered by Alistair Cooke, a BBC insider and very much of the breed that gave the BBC such reputation as it has. If his thoughts are beyond the current elite’s grasp, what hope is there for reform at the beeb?

You know

how the Radio 4 news starts with a summary and then goes on to cover the same stories in more detail? Well, in today’s 1 o’clock news the summary said that a fax had been sent to a newspaper by the Abu Nayaf al-Afghani group saying that Spain would suffer more terrorism if it did not withdraw its troops from Iraq.

Just Iraq.

I thought it sounded odd, given the name of the group. And so it proved: when it came to the detailed story later (from a female correspondent whose name I did not catch) we heard that the actual threat was that Spain would suffer if it did not remove its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just over-hasty editing? Could be, could be – but just for fun, why not amuse yourself working out a political motive for playing up Iraq and playing down Afghanistan as a motive for terrorism.

Alistair Cooke

died the other day, aged 95 and just weeks after broadcasting his final Letter from America. This page contains well-merited tributes to him and excerpts and transcripts from the longest-running speech radio programme in history.

I remember listening to his distinctive, gravelly voice literally as a child at my father’s knee. I liked his voice. After a while it dawned on me that I liked and was learning from what he was saying too.

From all the vast range of topics he covered, this obituary couldn’t resist the opportunity to cherry-pick.

The lyricism of his broadcasting and the urbanity of his voice did not disguise his fears for America which he saw becoming a more violent society.

A liberal by nature, he reserved particular dislike for what he saw as the shallow flag-waving of the Reagan presidency.

True, he was a liberal. I would guess he voted Democrat for most of the many, many US elections he covered. But he was a liberal of a different era, or more accurately of a more timeless sort. He started writing for the Guardian when it was the Manchester Guardian and started speaking for the BBC when it was what I once meant by the BBC.

His character changed a great deal less than that of the institutions he worked for. Despite that – correction, because of it – he was an acute observer until the very end. Here’s a letter he wrote last Christmas about the urgency of fighting the Iraq war.

Wonder why News Online didn’t pick that one for the obituary?

Brian Micklethwait

Brian Micklethwait, desperate for hits over at little-known blog venue Samizdata, pleads for a link to an outrageous piece of mischief-making by the Radio Times, the BBC’s literary mouthpiece. Happy to oblige, guys.

Pondblog

is one of several blogs who have mentioned that Israeli minister Natan Sharansky sent a furious letter to the BBC over Orla Guerin’s coverage of the child suicide bomber who changed his mind.