Liberals bash BBC Katrina Coverage!

We've trashed the insanely biased BBC on this site for some time, and while Tony Blair has never been a fan, these criticisms of anti-American bias from the left really are something new:

TONY Blair has re-opened the government’s long-standing row about BBC bias by describing the corporation’s coverage of the aftermath of the havoc caused to New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina as being “full of hatred of America”.

The UK Prime Minister’s comments on the BBC’s coverage have been revealed by Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corporation. Murdoch also claims that Blair thought the BBC was “gloating” at the slow response of the federal and local authorities in helping and evacuating the hundreds of thousands of victims made homeless and the dead who were left lying uncollected where they had fallen for days.
Downing Street made no attempt to deny the story...

Bill Clinton, the former US president, and Sir Howard Stringer, chief executive of Sony Corporation,{also at one time the head of CBS! - ed.} also criticised the tone of the BBC’s coverage during a seminar on the media at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York.

Murdoch said Blair first turned on the BBC’s coverage of New Orleans flooding disaster during a recent visit to New Delhi. “He said it was just full of hatred of America and gloating at our troubles,” Murdoch claimed.

But the BBC lives in their own world, as their response demonstrates:

"...the BBC’s coverage of the Katrina devastation was committed solely to relaying the event fully, accurately and impartially, an approach we will continue to take with this and other stories.”

Gentleman, when even your liberal base says you have gone too far, maybe you should get your head out of your arses and take a look around, eh? The Scotsman, also no big fan of America, takes a dim view of the BBC's coverage:

...it is the BBC that deserves to have a red face, because Blair's strictures are quite right. The corporation's coverage of New Orleans was an anti-American hatefest. The tone was gloating: distrust of the Bush administration in particular now colours BBC reports to the point of caricature.
During recent decades the BBC has drifted into political bias to a degree that makes its licence-supported status as a "public-service broadcaster" a mockery. Alongside some excellent programming exists a mind-set almost always slanted leftwards.

Will this torrent of disdain from all sides of the political spectrum prompt the BBC to re-look at themselves? Unlikely; in fact, expect a BBC documentary in the upcoming weeks on how few Jews died in the New Orleans floods - did George Bush secretly airlift his neo-con Zionist buddies to safety with taxpayer money?


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