We used to rely on the BBC as our main source of unbiased news in Africa. But with all the recent revelations of their extreme bias and irresponsibility, I’m questioning a lot of things that were, as it were, received wisdom.<\/p>\n
Den Beste has a smackdown<\/a> of an article whose purpose (as made obvious by internal evidence — I do have a graduate degree in linguistics and textual exegesis, after all) is to provide a convenient emotional image of the US as police state: the US government is prosecuting those human shields (feh!) who violated US law in travelling to the declared enemy of a legally declared war, and there rendering aid and comfort. A little old lady is in danger of losing her pension and her house and facing 12 years in jail and a $1,000,000 fine.<\/p>\n Only it turns out that in the real world, far from facing jail or anything else, she is being fined $10,000 (count those zeros, folks!). Not for exercising her freedom of speech — that she could have done on any street-corner without fear — but for providing aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We used to rely on the BBC as our main source of unbiased news in Africa. But with all the recent revelations of their extreme bias and irresponsibility, I’m questioning a lot of things that were, as it were, received wisdom. Den Beste has a smackdown of an article whose purpose (as made obvious by … Continue reading “BS Broadcasting Corporation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}