Irish Targets of Opportunity

We've spent a relatively high number of posts recently commenting on dubious material in the Daily Telegraph. But they just keep on delivering. Today, editor Charles Moore uses a signed editorial to launch a feature called Beebwatch, in which the paper will have a team of analysts, supplemented by reader input, monitoring BBC content for signs of bias. It's all motivated by the BBC's skeptical coverage of the Iraq war, and so will sound great to pro-Bush ears here, but the Telegraph being the Telegraph, they have to get in a few digs at Irish nationalism and a few winks to Unionists along the way. So in the midst of the rant is the following:

[the BBC believes that] Gerry Adams is better than Ian Paisley, that government should spend more on social programmes, that the Pope is out of touch except when he criticises the West, that gun control is the answer to gun crime, that... well, you can add hundreds more articles to the creed without my help.

Now, none of the above beliefs is indefensible. The problem is that all of them are open to challenge and that that challenge never comes from the BBC...If the BBC puts on a play about GM foods, you just know that it will be against them (the recent offering in question was by Ronan Bennett, a supporter of Sinn Fein/IRA, and Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian).

So in the midst of what's supposed to be their response to BBC bias on the Iraq war, they find time to tar Ronan Bennett with the terrorism brush. And to occasional Telegraph readers, the most likely reaction is "Who?" But there's a long running agenda here. Ronan Bennett is an Irish novelist now living in England. He briefly served jail time in the 1970s, when it was a relatively easy matter for disenchanted Catholic youths to come to the attention of the police. As Bennett recounts in this article from the Guardian, he's had to handle these slurs and smears for years.

Then there is the other supposed example of egregious BBC bias, that Gerry Adams is better than Ian Paisley. We're not sure where to go that one, although we suspect that merely being mentioned in the same sentence as Adams would be enough to unfuriate Paisley. And there would have been less scope for the likes of Gerry Adams to emerge if Paisley and his supporters hadn't been so busy beating up civil rights protestors in the 1960s.

Finally, let us speculate on how the poor old BBC could placate the irate Telegraph without having to change its politics one bit. As satirical magazine Private Eye points out, the paper has perhaps just one true obsession: Liz Hurley. A few more stories about her on the BBC and beebwatch would be dead in no time.