Covering the States

It might sound as though I'm inviting obsessiveness, but I really believe there would be a place out there for a blog devoted purely to covering the coverage the BBC extends to the US. Many good Americans are already concerned about this, and express their concerns, amongst others, at blogs like Last Night's BBC News and USS Neverdock, but really there should be no shame in a blog dedicated to tracking US coverage by the BBC, for several good reasons.

First of all there's the fact that the BBC coverage of US matters is large and growing. They are, I am quite sure, more fascinated by America than by any other country or any other region of the world. The BBC, as any voracious grazing mammoth might be, is constantly attracted to the nutrious plains of the USA newsscape. If its bad, and happens in the USA, the BBC is almost guaranteed to label it so and proclaim it.

There is a deeper reason though, which I find more disturbing. That is that the BBC is one of those remaining British institutions most intertwined with our history as a colonial power. Not only, therefore, does the notion of a neo-colonial US stimulate the sensitively attuned nostrils of the former British Empire Service, it also reawakens their appetite to influence history as it used to do in times of yore.

Even worse is that the BBC has for many years considered itself the conscience of the British nation, and consequently charged with expiating the sins of the past. So we have a post-colonial broadcaster, laden with a weight of the intellectual fashion to consider the British Empire a dirty compound noun, which nonetheless cannot deny its appetite for power and influence. A dangerous British brew, I continue to believe- that can be observed quite well from this post at LNBBCN.

So, when I see a vast array of anti-American articles expressed at BBC online (sometimes just a crucial word or two, determining the flow of the reader's thought), including utterly indefensible ones such as this, highlighted by Natalie at BBBC, and sentiments to match that across the BBC's networks, I think I know what is happening: the BBC is taking up the task of policing the policeman which it believes its forebear failed to do when it was the British Empire Service. For an example of that, the BBC's obsession with Guantanamo and abu Graib is a notable, continuing theme- as this LNBBCN post illustrates. What's bad about this general trend in particular is that it's a reflexive reaction to the criticisms of the British Empire that were mainly coaxed along by socialist and communists, and later splinters from those movements such as feminists, ecofreaks and race-warriors.

Thus we get ad infinitum negativity about the US', at best a faintness of praise when praise is truly deserved, and regular chances to bash the US in the solar plexus on the BBC's airwaves.