Jeremiah at the Beeb. If you flick through the book of the prophet Jeremiah (which surely you do regularly) you will find an almost unbroken series of warnings and predictions of calamity. As a prophet, Jeremiah was pretty good at that sort of thing (hence someone bothered to write down and preserve a big wodge of his writings). Not so the BBC.

The BBC can take a snippet of warning from a US source, sew it together with an arguable instance of coalition violence, button on a spot of jihadic activity and attach it with velcro to a garment called 'crisis in Falluja', and then present that as part of the 'ongoing Iraq crisis' top news item (disclaimer- all ridiculous BBC news-gerrymanderings may be subject to changes without acknowledgement). Oh- and it even manages to recycle the arguable instance of coalition violence (involving children!) within the same article. This would not be so bad as a summary of news, treated discretely (and not recycled), but to present it as a seamless crisis, to lump Fallujah with Najaf and throw in a couple of other incidents, is just what the disparate anti-US forces in Iraq want to hear. It gives them hope (as ever, springing eternal) of frightening away the international community, applying political pressure to Bush, and intimidating to their profit commanders and troops on the ground.

It's also typical of BBC coverage of Iraq. From the beginning they have overridden typical journalistic distinctions such as geographical or religious differences in their enthusiastic coverage of the 'insurgency'. Paying attention to these distinctions would have given rise to some helpful deconstructive analyses of a series of lethal disruptive activities that aspire to become an insurgency. The BBC have also apparently failed to register the significance of the fact that as a British broadcaster they are giving more publicity to deaths of US servicemen than US networks, while the British losses since May 1st 2003 have been negligible and freakish where they have occurred. It's a pathetic loss of perspective for the British funded Broadcasting Corporation to spend all its time pointing out US casualties.