Later in this issue, James Bowman reports on the mainstream
media’s coverage of the war with Iraq. It is an inglorious tale:
a compendium of anti-American broadsides, half snide, half
furious, almost comically wrongheaded and inaccurate. A few days
into the conflict, major media institutions from The New York
Times to CNN and the BBC could barely contain their glee.
What, not yet in Baghdad? What happened to the “cakewalk” that
Dick Cheney predicted? OK, OK, it turns out the
vice-president did not predict a cakewalk, he was merely
reported to have done so, and what is reported can be repeated.
Still, disaster clearly loomed. The war, we were told, was
proceeding much more slowly than the
administration expected;
casualties were mounting; civilians were being bombed; the
coalition didn’t have enough troops; supply lines were
over-stretched; we had forgotten about sandstorms and the fierce
desert heat; natives greeted coalition forces with bullets, not
flowers; Baghdad promised to be a latter-day Stalingrad,
house-to-house fighting, bloodbath, quagmire, US arrogance,
cowboy, Europe told us so, Bush, Bush, Bush …

Well, that was day four or five. Three weeks after the war began,
one of the most brilliant military campaigns in history ended
with Iraq liberated from Saddam and his henchmen, its
infrastructure intact, and astonishingly few civilian or
coalition casualties. It was an amazing, an extraordinary
performance—unprecedented in its speed and precision—but
you didn’t catch the mainstream media frankly acknowledging
that fact. On the contrary, no sooner did the coalition forces win the
war than the media began wringing its collective hands about
whether we were on the brink of “losing the peace,” “widespread
looting,” etc., etc.

Of course, there were a few bright spots in the media’s reporting,
particularly from some “embedded” reporters and some so-called
internet “bloggers.” As Mr. Bowman suggests, however, the
dominant note was ignominious. The low point? Well, competition
is stiff for the title to that achievement. CNN is at least a
runner-up, not only because of its consistently anti-American
bias, but also for its policy of deliberately hushing up the grim
realities of Hussein’s regime in exchange for “access”—a fact
that, as Mr. Bowman notes, its chief news executive managed to
admit and evade in the space of a single op-ed contribution.
Still, after all the contestants have been scrutinized, we
believe that the BBC deserves to come out on top (or do we mean
at the bottom?) in this diabolical contest for awfulness. Mr.
Bowman recounts several outrages perpetrated by the
once illustrious news organization that, when the war got
underway, was widely referred to as the “Baghdad Broadcasting
Corporation.”

We’d like to share with readers two additional items
that came to light after Mr. Bowman’s piece went to press. They
offer graphic corroboration of the BBC’s reflexive ideological
posturing. The swift fall of Baghdad was a grievous blow to those
parts of the Western media that backed the quagmire-thesis of buffoons
like The New York Times’s R. W. Apple. How to deal with such an
unscripted event? Easy: turn success into failure. The coalition
had come to liberate Iraq, but according to Andrew Gilligan, the
BBC’s defense correspondent, residents of Baghdad experienced
their “first days of freedom in more fear than they have ever
known before.” “More fear”? Really? Was a bit of looting worse
that Saddam’s secret police? As a spokesman for the British
government tartly advised, “Try telling that to people put in
shredders or getting their tongues cut out.”

It would be a mistake to think that the BBC’s reporting on Iraq
was an anomaly. The ideological bias of the institution is evident
in virtually all its reporting. Consider the recent
capture of Abu Abbas, the Palestinian terrorist who masterminded
the hijacking of the US cruise ship
Achille Lauro in 1985. It was simply business as usual for the
BBC to describe Abu Abbas blandly a “fugitive”—after all,
“terrorist” is such a judgmental word. But it takes a special
sort of blindness to proceed, as the BBC’s initial report did
(thanks to www.andrewsullivan.com for bringing this to our
attention), that “During the hijack, an elderly American
passenger died.” Died? What happened to the poor fellow? Did he
suffer a shuffleboard-induced heart attack, aspirate an olive,
expire from sunstroke?

The “elderly American passenger” who died when Abu Abbas hijacked
the Achille Lauro was Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound
American Jew who was on holiday with his wife. He died because
Abu Abbas’s Palestinian thugs shot him twice in the head and then
pushed him overboard. The BBC later emended “died” to “was
killed,” which is still considerably less candid than “murdered,”

the blunt but accurate term employed by Fox News.

We heard a lot
about “collateral damage” when the war against Iraq started. The
extraordinary precision of America’s weapons and the
unprecedented care with which coalition forces targeted the enemy
reduced collateral damage to an historic low. But we may still
hope that this conflict has brought in its wake some collateral
benefits—the delegitimation of the United Nations, for example,
whose preposterous sermonizing in the months leading up to the
war with Iraq put paid once and for all to its pretensions to be
a serious player on the stage of international relations. We may
also hope that media outlets like the BBC have finally provoked
sufficient public outrage that their status as state-funded
propaganda machines for the enemy will finally be called into
question. The fact that sailors from a Royal Navy aircraft
carrier turned off their direct feed from the BBC in protest of
its pro-Iraqi coverage is a good sign, as is the disgust and
anger of some members of the British government. We are sometimes
accused of being pessimists, but we admit that the privatization
of the BBC would be a brilliant silver lining to the very dark
cloud represented by its distorted, politically tendentious
reporting. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.