Well then, so what? Sullivan claims that the BBC’s objectivity has deteriorated. So do some other people. Again, so what?
The fact that a few people object to what they perceive as bias does not objectively establish the fact of bias.
You are joking right? So if i dig up something from someone saying the war is all about oil you’ll take that person at their word?
Or should we only take people at their word if they happen to support your irrational and unsupported prejudices?
That person may well be sincere in his incorrect belief. I was addressing the question of whether Sullivan has an ulterior motive.
Sullivan may or may not have an ulterior motive. Sullivan may or may not be sincere in his (correct or incorrect) belief.
But so what?
It’s still some guy (Sullivan) saying that the BBC is biased.
The mere fact that Sullivan said it doesn’t make it true.
And who judges “incorrectness”? (No wait, don’t tell me. I’m sensing the letter D, possibly connected to a month of the year?)
And you weren’t “addressing the question”, you were asserting that he should be taken at his word and not, as usual, addressing any of the counter arguments to your paranoiac OP.
Is there a good reason to take him at face value?
**
Amazing how your critical thinking skills come and go. Sources you agree with get wide-eyed naive acceptance and any criticism of them is met with seemingly innocent defenses of their honor and integrity. Sources you don’t agree with however get raked over the coals, their sources questioned, the integrity of their reporters questioned, and their management accused of bias or “spin”. If you were behaving in good faith you would accept these criticisms of your sources or stop making the exact same types of criticisms of other people’s sources. Can’t have it both ways.
As for the OP? No. Wild speculation about how the Iraqi people may be feeling about news reports is NOT debateworthy. It is borderline slander and is in no way worthy of being the center of a debate.
Unsupported hyperbolic conjecture. The BBC is NOT a military organization, and the claim that they’re “objectively pro-Saddam” has a far higher standard of proof in the real world than “Andrew Sullivan says so”.
Enjoy,
Steven
I don’t think it’s too unkind at all, and one could say the same about Hitchens, while one is at it.
Tom Wolfe, in The Bonfire of the Vanities, had a dissection of the sub-subculture they’re a part of - the obnoxious alcoholic Brit expat reporters who couldn’t hold a job in the mother country, and/or felt unappreciated there, and harbor resentments that may even date from public school (insert speculation about Sully’s discovery of buggery here)(insert reply to december about his possible ulterior motives here). Here, though, a posh RP accent, or a charming north-country one for that matter, adds a cachet of superficial intellectuality that somehow impresses a lot of Americans, and allows them to feel the adulation they never got in London when they were considered simply obnoxious drunks.
When Wolfe wrote the book, that group was relegated to the tabloids in Florida, writing alien-abduction stories. With the Net, they can blog instead, and even get some number of people to take them seriously and keep the praise coming.
But yes, despite whatever background he might have, now Sullivan’s just another opinion blogger - and one with a demonstrated history of severe hypocrisy on moral issues, too. If you like what he says, fine, but don’t take it as fact.
Did you read the OP, Desmostylus? In addition to Sullivan, I cited 5 others who said the BBC was biased. One was a former Press Secretary to the Prime Minister, 1969-70, 1974-76. One was a Labour spokesman on Broadcasting in the House of Lords, 1993-97. Another was the BBC’s own embedded war correspondant.
tagos, you ask who judges “incorrectness”? We do. That’s what the debate is about.
E.g., I endorse a letter-writer’s contention that it was incorrect for a BBC correspondant to describe two missing British soldiers as, “the worst possible news.” Do you disagree? Can you find analagous exaggeration in the other drection?
I’m not sure if that profile fits Hitchens Elvis. Did he go to public school? I’d be surprised if he did since his columns give the impression that his family background was strongly socialist (wasn’t Hitchens father involved in resisting the Spanish civil war?). In any case, Hitchens has always been very idiosyncratic: like his passionate hatred of Bill Clinton which made for some over-the-top columns and one hilarious book that had me wondering how someone so intelligent could sustain so much animus for a figure who, for all his many flaws, did a few good things while he was President.
My impression of Hitchens is that he has buttons that get pushed, and his biggest button of all is the anti-fascist button. He was never a cookie-cutter lefty to begin with, but his break with the left began after 9/11 when he began to see Osama bin Laden and militant Islam more generally as the new fascist threat. When it came to Afghanistan I found some of his writing persuasive (if hyperbolic). But b/c Iraq is not Afghanistan and Saddam is not Osama, Hitchens seems to have lost his judgment entirely. He seems to have bought into the “clash of civilizations” mentality, mobilizing all his anti-fascist passion, and none of the nuanced good sense that he often showed when he was more level-headed.
As to Sullivan, he may well have been more of a “toff” type; I don’t honestly know. Although I dislike his politics, his early career was pretty meteoric and impressive. I do think the scandal over his hypocritical behavior hurt him: and while he richly deserved to be called on his hypocrisy, I suspect he’s had to deal with a certain amount of homophobia. For a guy who seems to value respectability, he seems to have gotten pushed from sphere of elite and respectable journalism to the more fringe kind.
OTOH, there’s a lot to pull journalists in that direction these days. Isn’t Sullivan a frequent TV pundit these days (I would know b/c I watch very little tube)? It’s all fine and good to write for the New York Times, but I suspect that the bigger bucks and the greater celebrity come with joining the TV punditocracy–where sensationalism rather than journalistic standards rule the day. Sullivan may, in other words, be happy with his trajectory. What we see as a fall into the mire, he may see as having climbed to the top of the greasy pole. 
istara, I hope I get a chance to reply to you later on. I must rush.
Problem is, the OP title isn’t about reporting bias, it’s about causing casualties. You have said nothing at all to support that position, however juvenilely fun it may have been to be so inflammatory.
Now put up or shut up.
mandelstam, I don’t know or even much care about Hitchen’s education, but it doesn’t matter nearly as much as his being a nasty drunk now. Socialism (of the castles-in-the-sky theoretical variety, not necessarily of the solidarity-with-the-working-class variety) is hardly inconsistent with British public school experience, either, since you mention it.
To your other point, there does seem to be a place on TV for anyone with an instinct for self-promotion and some superficial articulateness, combined with a sense for marketing ones’ discussions to a particular demographic. I’d assess Hitchens’ apparent idiosyncratic views with that in mind - I question how deeply he really feels about anything he says.
In fact, the OP cited Andrew Sullivan’s column, which did make the argument. The point is that to the degree that Iraqis believe the coalition may fail, they will be afraid to resist Saddam and the Ba’ath Party. Iraqis certainly know that if Saddam stays in power, retribution will be cruel and ruthless. So, articles that falsely imply that the war is going badly tend to encourage Iraqis to fight for Saddam, out of fear of consequences.
december, as briefly as possible. Obviously there are going to be people in the Labour Party who supported Blair and are worried about potential damage to his reputation–and to the party’s more generally. If I were in their shoes I might well be writing letters to a paper with a sympathetic bias in order to help support my man.
Second, although istara has persuaded me that The Sun’s leaked memo story can’t be dismissed out of hand, I don’t think we’ve got the full perspective on that. Certainly, if we take what we know of the memo seriously, there is one correspondent who feels very strongly that one instance of reporting by the BBC was way offbase. Have you considered that if there is some truth to this memo, and to its account, that it may have exercised a corrective effect that is already in place. As you have been told repeatedly, the BBC’s official policy is to strive for balance.
As to the letter-writer’s contention. The BBC described the new of missing soldiers as “a gloomy event.” That seems very appropriate to me. What’s obvious from the letter is that some kind of narrative was constructed about investigation into the soldiers’ disappearance so that the “worst possible news” refers to their being in actuality missing (rather than just, say, lost, or wounded). In other words, there is some context here to be considered. The BBC doesn’t appear to have opened up with, “And tonight we must report that the worst possible news has happened. Two British soldiers are reported missing in Iraq.”
Finally, as has been pointed out my many posters, none of this suppports Sullivan’s outlandish contention that the BBC’s reportage constitutes a pro-Saddam military action. That is a self-discrediting statement.
december, yet again, you’re assuming the conclusion as fact and have titled your OP as a debate about the consequences of that (alleged) fact. It is not a fact just because you have found someone to tell it to you as something you like hearing.
You haven’t learned a thing about honesty in debate, have you?
Elvis and Mandelstam – As a parody of* what some think* Hitchen’s style has become, that’s one hell of a post, Elvis. I’m not sure, however, I’m happy having my opinions informed by a journalist-conjured genre but, as these things often do, it surely has elements of a telling truth.
What is interesting is that neither of them come from a conventional middle-class, public school (English version) background – not ‘toffs’. Hitchens did go to boarding school (partly) but only because of his fathers (navy) employment.
They both obviously excelled at school and went on to do extremely well at Oxford – only the very best get to do PPE at Balliol (as Hitchens did). That’s impressive of itself.
To be honest, I think Hitchens is original enough to not sit comfortably in any clichéd pigeonhole. For my money and ignoring the ranting, he remains extremely well-informed and writes with rare insight and usually sound judgement on the Very Big Pictures.
Sullivan is too much of a mystery to me but his style seems, initially, suspiciously derivative and unsubstantial … YMMV
A senior BBC executive admitted the BBC had been making mistakes “on a daily basis” during the first week of the Iraq conflict, but denied there was any deliberate bias towards either the pro or anti-war camps.
The amusing aspect is that he made this statement as speaker at a meeting of the Media Workers Against the War. 
“Although it’s unquestionably true that we make mistakes, and on a daily basis, we don’t only make them in [a pro-war] direction,” he added, speaking last night at a meeting of Media Workers Against the War.
The mistakes are being made as they are taking allied claims at face value.
December, even by your standards this is weak. To back up your claim, you actually only provide two examples of what you perceive as anti war spin:
"in a set of headlines today[…] the coalition was suffering ‘significant casualties’. "
and
“it led the Radio 4 7am news with the statement that there had been “another gloomy development” for the British forces, a development which a few minutes later it described as “the worst possible news””
And this you view as anti-war spinmongering? My god man, I could probably pick and choose better examples from Rush Limbaugh if I started quoting him out of context. Do you really view these two comments as so unreasonable that you must accuse people of causing casualties. That is the most ridiculous premise I’ve read in a long time.
For gods sake, please read your own cites. He made this statement in response to “allegations by the anti-war lobby that the BBC had become “shackled” by the government and military were “profoundly ill-judged and unfair””
Hell, the BBC are now being criticised by both sides of bias. If ever I need proof of evendhandness, that’s it.