The BBC takes a stand

The BBC knows a dangerous religious organization when it sees it, and it isn’t afraid to challenge that religion. If one of its reporters tangles with a religious leader, the BBC will back that reporter to the hilt, knowing its obligation in a free society to ensure that no single religion threatens the underpinings of that society. To that end, this report:

The editor of the BBC’s Panorama programme has defended a documentary on the Church of Scientology in which a reporter shouts at one of its members.

Reporter John Sweeney lost his temper during the filming and shouted at Scientology representative Tommy Davis.

Panorama editor Sandy Smith said he was “disappointed” by Mr Sweeney’s actions.

But he also said Scientology was an “extraordinary organisation” and had “no way of dealing with any kind of criticism at all”.

Mr Smith said that: “As you go in as a journalist to try and deal with that, it’s explosive.”

Footage of the argument between Mr Sweeney and Mr Davis was posted on internet site YouTube in advance of the television broadcast of the documentary on Monday.

Mr Smith told BBC Breakfast: “Very quickly, two stag beetles were locked.”

He added that it was “not a question of calling it a cult” and that the programme had not alleged that people were “brainwashed”.

See! Isn’t the BBC brave? Well, if you’re like me, you’re shaking your head right now in answer to that rhetorical question. The fact is that you, like me, probably hold no brief for Scientology but, like me, you’re not currently worried about Scientologists demanding that we impose their laws nationwide, envisioning a takeover of the world, or simply trying to outdo the Red Queen when it comes to beheading people. The worst we have to fear about them right now is really bad movies.

Things are a little bit different, of course, when it comes to the BBC and the Muslims, a tight relationship that crosses the line from respecting all religious moderates in a pluralistic society, and falls right into pandering to the radicals. In a funny way, the BBC made this slip and fall from objective grace patently clear when it started writing “pbuh,” shorthand for “Peace be upon Him” after writing Mohammed’s name in any article about religion. Here’s how the BBC explains it:

Throughout the BBC’s section on Islam you will see peace be upon him or (pbuh) after the name Muhammad.

Muslims say peace be upon him after every mention of Muhammad’s name, as a mark of respect. Muslims do the same when they write the Prophet’s name, adding pbuh.

The Arabic translation of peace be upon him is sallallahu alayhi wa sallam which is usually abbreviated as saw.

The BBC uses pbuh in the Islam section out of courtesy, and we would do the same for any other religion if they had a similar phrase that was universally used as a sign of respect.

When the site refers to the Prophet on pages that are not in the Islam section, we do not use the phrase. The phrase is only used on the first occurrence of the Prophet’s name, and not throughout each article.

We chose this position after much debate over what would be a truly impartial way to write about different faiths. The problem we faced was that religions can be so different in their underlying philosophy and world view that it could be impossible to understand them properly if we approached them from a single consistent point of view.

We decided that a less biased and more consistently fair approach would be to write about each faith from the point of view of that faith – so that our explanatory pages were in essence, a particular religion explaining itself to the reader. From that position it made sense to use pbuh on pages explaining Islam.

Hmmm. So if you right an objective piece about religion in a section of your publishing company devoted to describing the world’s religions, you have to follow the practitioners’ procedures to do so? That’s a new one. I might agree to it as just another piece of feel good multi-culti behavior, which takes journalistic objectivity and dresses it up a bit, were it not for a couple of things. First, the silly, petty thing: If you check out the BBC’s sections on Christianity and Judaism you’ll see that, when using pronouns to refer to God, the BBC uses lower case “h’s,” rather than writing “He” or “His.” As for me, I’ve hung around churches and temples enough to know that genuinely religious people accord God the special respect of a capital letter, even in pronoun form.

There are also a few more substantive problems with the BBC’s behavior vis a vis the more radical aspects of Islam. Take the bit about the BBC’s desperate (and successful) legal battle to keep secret the contents of a report allegedly slamming it for having an anti-Israel bias in its Middle Eastern reporting:

The BBC has won its legal battle to block the publication of a report into alleged bias in its reporting of Middle East affairs.

A ruling obtained under freedom of information legislation had obliged the corporation to make the internal audit public.

But that decision was overturned by the High Court.

The BBC’s decision to spend an estimated £200,000 of licence feepayers’ money to keep the Balen Report secret has been widely condemned.

The corporation was accused of hypocrisy because it has regularly used freedom of information legislation to break news stories.

The attempt to force the BBC to publish the report – compiled in 2004 by its editorial adviser Malcolm Balen – was led by lawyer Steven Sugar, who represented himself in court.

The ruling will disappoint the Jewish community which would have wanted to know whether the 20,000-word document had found any evidence of anti-Israeli bias in news programming.

Mr Justice Davis, sitting at the High Court in London, said last August’s decision by the Information Tribunal for the report to be published was flawed.

He said: “I conclude that the BBC’s submissions are well founded. The tribunal had no jurisdiction to entertain any appeal.”

The judge said the document was exempt from inspection under freedom of information laws because it was held by the BBC “for the purposes of journalism, art or literature”.

After the verdict, Mr Sugar said: “It is a technical win by the BBC which has the result desired by the BBC of weighting the Freedom of Information Act in its favour.

And let’s not forget the BBC reporter who wept openly when mass murderer and embezzler Yasser Arafat died — although it’s a bit unfair to impute one dingbat’s emotions to an entire institution.

Anyway, enough about me. What do the more vocal Islamists think of the BBC? They love it! And why shouldn’t they when the unmistakable tenor of BBC reporting is to be not only an apologist for extremists, but another weapon in their arsenal against the only liberal Democracy in the Middle East (that would be Israel)?  (As an aside, one of the reasons the New York Times claims objectivity about its Israel reporting is its claim that, after every story, both sides attack.  The assumption is you can’t be a biased reporter if every side to the story feels you’re against it.  The flip side is that, if one side feels strongly supported by a news organization — perhaps it is.)

So you see, I’m less impressed than I otherwise would have been at news that the BBC is strongly supporting one of its own who had the temerity to attack a religion it perceives as dangerous.