The Beeb Gets a Clue

A few days back, I complained that the excellent BBC war correspondents' collective weblog got a new URI every midnight GMT. It now has a fixed address (and somebody @bbc.co.uk even sent me a note); good on ya! There is also now a scraped RSS feed available from News is Free, if I get around to subscribing I'll report. I should note that I have a special relationship with the BBC.

When I was a kid growing up in the Middle East, there wasn't that much English on the air, basically the BBC and the Voice of America. The VoA very much toed the party line, so if you wanted any kind of real objective information about what was going on in the world in general or the Middle East in particular, the BBC was where you went. Also, they had comedy, drama and music, all pretty good, and by the late sixties, even a whiff, now and then, of rock & roll. Definitely one of my major influences.

By the way, if you follow BBC war coverage you are thereby considered a peon of the Axis of Evil by the American right wing - I hadn't realized this, but they hate the BBC with a visceral passion, accusing it of a single-minded partisan drive to glorify Saddam and attack the US. I don't see it, but then I never managed to get properly convinced that Saddam was all that dangerous to the rest of the world.