It’s only words

Andrew Marr, the BBC’s political editor, is always incredulous of accusations that the BBC is anything but fair and balanced in its reporting.

Unfortunately, Andrew is not as yet offering cash prizes to anyone who can give him a good example of BBC bias; his desire for continued solvency presumably outweighing the loyalty he feels towards his employers.

Here’s a small example of BBC bias from its report on the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein.

US officials said the bodies, each with more than 20 bullet wounds, had undergone post-mortem "facial reconstruction" to make them appear more like they did in real life.

The new footage came a day after US forces released graphic photos showing the mutilated bodies of the men - a move defended by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

What’s wrong with that Andrew might ask? Straightforward presentation of the facts isn’t it?

Well for a start, those quotation marks around the phrase “facial reconstruction” look odd to me. What are they doing there? Mark Steyn, writing in today’s Telegraph, thinks it’s a problem with the keyboards the BBC uses, whereas I think the problem is most likely the chair-keyboard interface.

And notice the article doesn’t say that photos of the bodies had been released, it talks of “graphic photos” of “mutilated bodies”. All quite innocent you might think. After all, many nouns have adjectives that seem to follow them around: photos are often described as “graphic”, bodies as being “mutilated”. Fine. Until you ask who mutilated the bodies.

Who mutilated the bodies? The Americans mutilated the bodies.

Now defenders of the BBC and all right thinking people everywhere might say: “Oh come on! The BBC didn’t mean to imply that the Americans had deliberately mutilated the bodies. The reporter was only trying to get across the fact that the bodies of Uday and Qusay had been grotesquely wounded in the fire fight in which they died.”

But mutilation doesn’t mean grotesquely wounded in combat, it refers to the deliberate disfigurement of a body, usually after death or shortly before. The BBC is aware of this and is normally most careful to use the word correctly.

For example: if you look at the thirty-two other references to “mutilated bodies” on the BBC News site, they refer exclusively to deliberate and gruesome acts, horrific crimes carried out mostly on innocent people.

I know it’s only words, but they matter. Because some people might come away from that story thinking that American forces mutilated the bodies, desecrated the remains by “facial reconstruction” before parading them in front of the Iraqi people and are now looking for somewhere to quietly dump the bodies.

Now that would be culturally insensitive.

Thanks to Tim Blair for the link to Steyn's article in the Telegraph.