Biased BBC

David Vance #

A RADICAL VOCABULARY. What is the problem that the BBC has with using the term "terrorist"? Take this report headed "1970's radical freed from jail". It concerns a woman who spent 24 years on the run before pleading guilty to a 1975 attempted police car bombing, and who has been released after a seven-year jail term. Sara Jane Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, was a member of the terrorist group the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army. The group became famous for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in 1974. Olson also pleaded guilty to the second degree murder of a woman during a 1975 bank raid. This woman is NOT radical, she is a terrorist. Would the BBC please explain WHY the euphemism "radical" is employed rather than than the correct term "terrorist"? Moral relativism got their tongues?

Labels: euphemisms, terrorism

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Last year the BBC collected £3.2 billion from licence-payers (pg. 82). The latest licence fee settlement will give the BBC at least £20 billion from licence payers over six years.

"We get from time to time people saying you're biased in favour of the Labour Party. Every time I ask people - show me a case of that bias, explain to me where we got it wrong and why what we said was so unfair - they seem to be unable to do so", Andrew Marr, May 11th, 2001.

"The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias", Andrew Marr, the Daily Mail, Oct 21st, 2006.

"It's not a conspiracy. It's visceral. They think they are on the middle ground", Jeff Randall, former BBC Business Editor, in The Observer, Jan 15th, 2006.

"The idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. Why not tax people for owning a washing machine to fund the manufacture of Persil?", Jeremy Paxman, James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, Aug 24th, 2007.

"People who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that [global warming] is the consequence of our own behaviour. I assume that this is why the BBC's coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago", Jeremy Paxman, Media Guardian, Jan 31st, 2007.

"I do remember... the corridors of Broadcasting House were strewn with empty champagne bottles. I'll always remember that",
Jane Garvey, BBC Five Live, May 10th, 2007, recalling May 2nd, 1997.

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