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Just an accident? When the news is concocted by a socialist institution is it any wonder that the news comes out deeply biased against America? Well, it's no accident if you're talking about the increasingly dubious BBC. David Frum reports. Quotable:

Before the three of us got to business, “Newsnight” broadcast an introductory video clip. It was that clip that was my perfect moment of news slanting. A reporter at the gates of Buckingham Palace told us that a small crowd was waiting for President Bush, and that its mood was mixed. Cut to clips from three members of that crowd: all negative. (One of the negative voices was American – that was apparently all the balance the broadcaster required.) Now here’s the punchline: I recognized one of the three – I’d seen him earlier that day at an anti-Bush rally in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In the interim, he’d changed into casual tourist clothes – and the BBC was now presenting him as a representative of ordinary British opinion.

I pointed out this distorting selection bias in my first answer to one of moderator Jeremy Paxman’s questions. He was very impatient with me. But I persisted. How can you do a program that purports to study why British people are so hostile to President Bush – without taking note of the state broadcaster’s role in creating and magnifying that hostility? The BBC is not just reporting this story; it is in many ways the story’s most important actor.