Annals of the BBC. (Notes & comments: May 2003).(Editorial)

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 ...