Media War (best read alongside this post at Belmont Club)

Readers of this blog might realise how for over two weeks now I've been reporting BBC chatter about withdrawal and exit strategies from Iraq (I'm not sure yet if this chatter was reflects actual communications with an unfolding jihadi strategy, but I'm sure they're listening). Of course, idle talk (or 'foregrounding', as I prefer to call it) about 'exit strategies' was being used as far back as November last year, but now, apparently unbidden by events on the ground, the BBC has begun its morbid conversation with world and British opinion in earnest.

This despite the fact that we have (thank God) not seen a British death in Iraq for several months (and long may that continue).

But let's be clear: there is no justifiable reason for the BBC's double-spate of Iraqi-sceptic reporting. We have not yet seen the casualties they need to justify any sort of talk of crisis. That holds true for the US as well as the British, but for us it's even clearer.

It would be reassuring to think that since the BBC is obviously pushing its own 'anti' agenda it could be isolated and identified as a rogue institution, acting against our interests. Unfortunately, the BBC has rather close ties to the Foreign Office (the gang that took us round the UN houses last year, and also happen to fund the BBCWorld service directly), and political allies from the left and the TINO (Tory in name only) right. Furthermore, although it is the central institution of the UK media, it is by no means the only group that conceals its anti-Iraq war colours under a thin veil.

Since the BBC elicited or introduced the terminology of 'exit strategies' and 'withdrawal', many others have seen the sensational possibilities of that line of discussion. ITV have sought as ever to hold on to the respectable coat tails of the BBC while drawing on the tabloid-telly market. Among the newspapers, The Mirror we know about, but what about this piece of digging from The Glasgow Herald? The BBC's agenda quickly becomes the cause most reported by the wider press (and then such reporting is reciprocated -with the inscrutable words 'sources say'- and the big media echo chamber echos ever more tumultuously).

Due to the incestuous nature of media and politics in Britain- fostered by the 'insider' status of the BBC- it is frighteningly possible for a few ideologically motivated groupings to stir up a perfect media storm that will unseat or wound decisively any individual in Government (or outside) if the general conditions are right. There's no media group better positioned to set those conditions and stir up that storm than the BBC.