Katrina and the BBC

The Observer also reports on the supposed anti-US bias of the BBC‘s Katrina reporting, citing a second-hand report from the always fair and balanced tycoon Rupert Murdoch on a conversation with Tony Blair. The PM supposedly referred to the BBC’s coverage as “gloating” and “full of hatred of America”. Even Bill Clinton seemed to echo these criticisms.

I’m not so sure: I was in the US for the entire week of Katrina, and the reporting there was no less angry: angry not at the people of New Orleans, of course, but angry at the government for its slack response, its representatives’ willingness to tell bald-faced lies about the state of the poor (in several senses of the term) people in the Superdome, for example. That veneer of supposed objectivity (and of course we must emphasize the “supposed”) is rarely cracked in US reporting, but Katrina was one event which actually brought the reporters straight into the story, a stark contrast to the sorry, spoon-fed “embedding” they and we have had to endure of late.