Monday, September 05, 2005

The Other Side

I've been having a discussion about an issue in a Blithering Bunny post. I've left one or two comments on the post because I noticed that one of BB's suspicions was incorrect. BB suspects that the levees in N.O. were a state and not a federal responsibility.
However, the BBC did air criticism of the levee situation - these were apparently inadequate. Yet somehow the BBC failed to inform us of the body that is responsible for the levees. Now, I’m no expert on the situation, but I suspect it’s the state government rather than the federal government who is responsible. But there’s little milage for the BBC in airing criticism of an obscure female Democrat governor rather than W.
In fact, it is the US Army Corp of Engineers, a federal agency, which is responsible. As such, thought it worth pointing out that this part of the post was incorrect.

I don't want to start a slagging match or anything, I'm a friendly guy, but it seems to me that BB isn't really playing the game. The whole point of the post is to question the impartiality of the BBC. If you're going to accuse someone of impartiality, it seems to me that you'd better be sure you're own position is absolutely fair and accurate. In this paragraph BB accuses the BBC of bias based on nothing more than a suspicion, and when I pointed out that this suspicion was unfounded, no effort was made to clarify the error. That doesn't seem, to me anyway, to be a firm foundation on which to base accusations of impartiality.

No comments: