Blair 'attacked BBC over Katrina'

Interesting that Rupert Murdoch is apparently now Tony Blair's mouthpiece on media matters. In a recent speech at Bill Clinton's Global Initiatives forum the News Corporation tycoon told the audience that the Prime Minister is of the opinion that the BBC's coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was "full of hatred of America and gloating at our troubles". ("Our"?) How nice of him to tell us what the Prime Minister was thinking. (Clinton apparently noted that there was "nothing factually inaccurate" in the BBC's reporting, and I think most viewers would agree with that observation.)

Of course it is quite reasonable that Mr Murdoch is good friends with Tony Blair: New Labour has needed Murdoch's newspapers' support to take, and retain, power; and Murdoch has been rewarded with a tasty Broadcasting Act written specially for him a few years ago. And of course we would expect the owner of Sky to be anti-BBC.

But Murdoch also called the BBC a "government-owned thing", which is rather strange: he obviously wants to have his cake and eat it too. Surely if the BBC really was government-owned, which of course it isn't thank goodness, then it wouldn't say things that the PM didn't like that Murdoch could then exclusively pass on to the rest of us.

Mr Murdoch knows all about news broadcasters who are "government-owned things": he owns one in the US, called Fox News, which is firmly - nay rabidly - pro-Bush come hell or, if you'll pardon the expression, high water, and whose head regularly sends memos round the company to make sure that everyone is taking the correct rightward-facing view - but even Fox News has criticised the Bush administration over its handling of Katrina relief, if only for a moment.

Downing Street has yet to comment on Murdoch's understanding of Blair's views at the time of writing, and it'll be interesting to see what, if anything, will be heard to confirm or deny.

Needless to say, one can easily imagine Tony Blair disliking BBC coverage of his master (woof) across the water: he has been there before. It would be a pretty difficult allegation to hold up in this case, however. These days, we have come to expect the US media to be pro-Bush and largely supine, but on this occasion they woke up, including AP, the New York Times and the New Yorker to name but three. MSNBC news anchor Keith Olbermann was heard to lambast the administration's response at length, in an example of editorialising which remains entirely alien to the BBC (and see also this MSNBC blog entry). But even so, the political centre in the US is far to the right (apart from the usual suspects), as far as everyone else in the world is concerned, so the fact that there is such damning criticism of Bush over Katrina in the US mainstream media is actually interesting, and makes the BBC's coverage hardly look controversial.

Study other people's coverage, however, and you find that the BBC, always striving to be 'fair and balanced' (a slogan that simply doesn't apply to Fox News who abuse it) and succeeding 99% of the time, has been remarkably restrained. How about the German media - a newspaper, I seem to recall - that told the truth about Bush's visit to New Orleans, where construction workers were seen in the background busily rebuilding a levee and a food distribution centre was displayed - both of which were apparently props, removed immediately the cameras had left? Or the host of helicopters that were kept out of the rescue effort so that Bush could be shown in front of them? Or the people who didn't even come from the area who were shown being talked at by Bush and evidently didn't understand what on Earth he was on about - they just wanted to find some food for their starving friends? Such stuff is still going on, as Brian Williams of MSNBC noted recently, when the electricity in one part of the city was turned on for Bush's motorcade on the 15th, and off smartly afterwards.

The BBC gave Bush a relatively smooth ride compared to some people in the US and abroad. And even if it hadn't, the important thing is that the BBC strives to remain as accurate and objective as it is possible to be - and by and large succeeds. Yes, I can recall one example where Matt Frei coloured his report with justifiable anger - but this could hardly have been avoided under the circumstances, and indeed simply giving 'just the facts' and not what they mean would often be meaningless. And in this case, it was obvious which were personal comments and which were 'facts' - something that, to say the least, is a great deal harder to tell on Fox News.