BBC Apologizes to Tony Blair

[Monte Smith]

BBC apologises as Dyke quits

Director General Greg Dyke has quit as the BBC's crisis deepens in the wake of Lord Hutton's damning verdict.

Shortly afterwards BBC Acting Chairman Lord Ryder apologised "unreservedly" for any errors in its Iraq WMD story.

Mr Dyke's decision to step down follows BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies' resignation on Wednesday, the day the Hutton report was published.

An emotional Mr Dyke told reporters he hoped their departures meant "a line can be drawn under this whole episode".

The pair quit after the most serious claims in Andrew Gilligan's BBC's reports were branded "unfounded" by Lord Hutton.

The apology came after Downing Street said the BBC should say sorry for broadcasting a "false allegation".

Lord Ryder said: "The BBC must now move forward in the wake of Lord Hutton's report, which highlighted serious defects in the Corporation's processes and procedures.

"On behalf of the BBC I have no hesitation in apologising unreservedly for our errors and to the individuals whose reputations were affected by them."

Prime Minister Tony Blair quickly welcomed the statement, saying it meant both the BBC and the government could move on.

He told reporters: "This for me has always been a very simple matter of an accusation that was a very serious one that was made. It has now been withdrawn, that is all I ever wanted."

Mr Blair said he respected the BBC's independence and expected it to continue to question the government "in a proper way".

Lord Hutton's report cleared the government of "sexing up" its Iraq weapons dossier with unreliable intelligence.

He criticised "defective" BBC editorial controls over defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan's broadcasts on the Today programme.

Mr Dyke's decision to go came after BBC governors spent Thursday morning in crisis talks in London.

The resignations follow former Downing Street media chief Alastair Campbell's claim that Mr Davies and Mr Dyke had made things worse by continuing essentially to stand by the story.

Leaving after four years in his post, Mr Dyke said his position had been compromised by Lord Hutton's criticisms of BBC management.

"My sole aim has been to defend the BBC's editorial independence and act in the public interest," he said.

He said the resignations of himself and Mr Davies, as well as his apology for the mistakes in reporter Andrew Gilligan's broadcasts about the weapons dossier, gave the "opportunity for a new start".

The most important thing about the corporation was its audiences, he argued.

"The preservation of the BBC per se is irrelevant unless we have the trust of the public out there," he said.

Clutching e-mails from staff urging him to stay, Mr Dyke said he was proud of his time at the BBC.

Mr Dyke's deputy, Mark Byford, has been appointed as acting director general until a successor is chosen.

The departure of both the BBC chairman and director general comes at a time when calls have been growing for the BBC to come under outside regulation.

Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has said the Hutton report will be taken into account in the 2006 review of the BBC's charter.

In his resignation statement, Mr Davies said that as the man at the top he had to take responsibility.

But he questioned whether Lord Hutton's "bald conclusions" on the dossier's production could be reconciled with the balance of the inquiry's evidence.

And he asked whether enough weight was given to Dr Kelly's taped conversation with Newsnight's Susan Watts.

Following the publication of Lord Hutton's findings, Mr Dyke said the corporation apologised for key things Mr Gilligan got wrong in his broadcasts.

But he added that Dr Kelly was a credible witness whose views the public had a right to know.

In his long-awaited report, Lord Hutton said he believed Dr Kelly had killed himself after being named as the suspected source of the BBC's controversial weapons dossier story.

Dr Kelly's family has urged the government to learn from their tragedy.

In a separate development on Thursday it has emerged Lord Hutton will be grilled by a committee of MPs over the role of inquiries into government.

An NOP poll commissioned by the London Evening Standard suggests that more people believe it was unfair than fair for the BBC to receive most of the blame for the Kelly affair in the Hutton report.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...cs/3441181.stm

Published: 2004/01/29 15:20:33 GMT

© BBC MMIV

The BBC should given an award for telling the TRUTH! When are the little court appointed worm and his lapdog Blair going to apologize for THEIR lies? This war was made up, and now others who expose the truth end up apologizing??!!

Senator Kennedy was right. You still just don't "get" it, Monte













Scott A

Wow. Other than the incredibly predictable diatribe from Scott A, the silence from the liberla's is deafening.

Thursday January 29, 2004

• This one-sided judgment will not win voters round
  Hutton takes Campbell's view, but only on the narrowest of issues
  Jackie Ashley
  
  It is indeed, as Margaret Thatcher famously remarked at the time of her decapitation, a funny old world. The country is taken to war on the basis of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that almost everyone now acknowledges never existed. There, thousands are killed. Here, a scientist kills himself after raising legitimate doubts about the government's intelligence. And a six-month inquiry by an eminent judge concludes that the only people who have done anything wrong at all work for the BBC.
  
  Lord Hutton's report could not have been more favourable to No 10. Whitewash? Great barrels of the gloopy stuff are sloshing around Whitehall. This was not the even-handed sprinkling of blame that many at Westminster had been expecting. It provided scant pickings for Michael Howard, hoping to demonstrate his legal-eagle skills in parliament. It was a devastating indictment of the BBC at almost every level.
  
  Certainly, to this commentator, Lord Hutton's report lacks any sense of proportion. Yes, errors were made at the BBC, as the corporation has itself acknowledged. But in the megaphone battle between the BBC and No 10, exaggerated claims were made on both sides. While Andrew Gilligan wrongly impugned Tony Blair's integrity, Alastair Campbell, remember, impugned that of many BBC journalists, describing them as having "an anti-war agenda".
  
  This is not to say the Hutton report can be dismissed. Tony Blair's integrity, I fully concede, has been proved, in the sense that he clearly believed the intelligence he was putting before the British people. But the report is, as Hutton himself said when introducing it, limited by its terms of reference to the specific events leading up to the death of David Kelly. Important and tragic though that death is, there is a much wider agenda here.
  
  On the face of it, this "make or break" week now looks like a fantastic triumph for Tony Blair. Not only have Hutton's conclusions been far more favourable to the government than he could ever have dreamed, but Blair also managed to pull off that vote on university tuition fees as well. He has won everywhere ... except perhaps among the only group not extensively interviewed, profiled or discussed lately, the electorate. It has been a narrow Westminster story, not a broad British one.
  
  In that Westminster sense, Alastair Campbell's strategy of trying to narrow down everything dodgy about the Iraq war to the single question of what Andrew Gilligan said in a few seconds one early morning was brilliantly successful. It left the Hutton inquiry, which is supposed to bring "closure" to the row over the Iraqi war, with nothing to say on the broader questions. (Nevertheless it's curious that Hutton didn't feel quite so constrained about straying beyond his remit when it came to the BBC.) The narrowing of the issue produced what it was always intended to - a blizzard of headlines and verdicts in which the words "cleared" and "exonerated" appear beside the names Blair and Campbell. Bingo! What more could you ask for?
  
  But this is the fundamental problem with the political ecosystem whose workings have been so closely observed this week. What seems clever at Westminster, and even heroic in the narrative of insiders, does not work with the public at large. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the very one-sided nature of Lord Hutton's criticisms, voters will be left perplexed. The truth is that people in the intelligence world were dubious about the Iraqi weapons dossier; that no WMD have turned up; that much of what Gilligan reported was both accurate and new. These things mysteriously dwindled as the laser-like focus encouraged by Campbell on Gilligan's weak spot took effect. So, when it comes to the public generally, the narrowly-focused Hutton inquiry does not help the government a jot. It does not touch the bigger questions, so it cannot exonerate or clear anyone on the bigger questions.
  
  And what of the BBC? Senior managers there were aghast as it became clear that the apparently heavily-spun Hutton conclusions leaked to the Sun newspaper were not spun at all: the actual report was even more pro-government and anti-BBC than the Sun had suggested. One head, that of the chairman, Gavyn Davies, has already rolled. And it's unlikely to be the only one. But if the government uses Lord Hutton's report to try to neuter the corporation it will find no sympathy among the voters. Warts and all, the BBC remains a much loved and trusted British institution.
  
  The gloating "we stuffed you" tone of some of the government's supporters in the immediate aftermath of Hutton risks backfiring badly. For while the BBC must improve procedures for editorial control and investigating complaints, no one would seriously argue that a cowed BBC should stop asking awkward questions of ministers.
  
  And let's not forget the main beneficiary of any diminution of the BBC's role in British life: Tony Blair's old pal Rupert Murdoch, who not only runs Sky Televison, but also the Sun newspaper, which mysteriously secured a leak of Lord Hutton's report. Surely something fishy there.
  
  Also in narrow Westminster terms, the tuition fees vote was a close and thrilling victory for a prime minister who bet his instincts and will power against a great swathe of the Labour party. The No 10 line is that Blair didn't blink and, confronted by his heroic determination, everyone else, including the Brownites, was forced back into line. And so, in the last sentence of the last paragraph of the thriller, our hero escapes again, with a nonchalant shrug and a grin for the cameras. We can hardly wait for the next in the series: Tony and the Hospital Fees Vote.
  
  But again, what about the voters? The tuition fee rebels' best argument was always that they were honestly trying to save the government from itself. These fees are going to be hugely unpopular, especially among modestly-salaried middle-class voters who miss the special help for people at the bottom.
  
  This was the week when Tony Blair might have had to go. That was so very close. Had a handful of relatively obscure MPs not changed their minds on Tuesday, he would have been politically finished, despite Lord Hutton's warm endorsement. Now the prime minister hopes to start afresh. Having won through his traumatic week, he's plunging right into a big speech on public service reform.
  
  So, after the thrills and spills of the last 72 hours. British politics returns to a familiar-seeming equilibrium. There will be storms ahead, not least in the committee stages of the tuition fees bill, and when the Iraq Survey Group eventually issues its final report. There will be increasingly bitter battles over the future of the BBC. But overall it will be calm-down time, a period of healing and preparation.
  
  Yet things have changed. They haven't changed in a coup at Westminster. They haven't changed after a damning indictment from a judicial inquiry. But across the country, millions have been watching the events of this past week. And I cannot believe that they have much liked what they saw.

• Brownies guide PM to safety but no Scouts' honour in the camp
  By Peter Fray in London
  January 29, 2004
  
  Tony Blair has pulled off yet another escape, but it has come at a high cost to his authority and is likely to further diminish his standing in the electorate.
  
  Blair loyalists were more relieved than jubilant after the Prime Minister's win on introducing HECS-style fees. There is little to celebrate when a 161 majority is reduced to five.
  
  The mood is likely to be lifted by reports that Blair has escaped censure by the Hutton inquiry into the death of weapons scientist David Kelly, though Downing Street's scheming about how to get his name out will not be forgotten or forgiven by many voters.
  
  The depth of the schism within Labour's parliamentary party is now clear. In the aftermath of the vote, Blair camp members were insisting that now was the time for loyalty and the party could not afford to have an alternative government within the government.
  
  They are probably correct.
  
  But the closeness of the vote will only fuel talk of a leadership change from Blair to his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, or a deal for Blair to bail out as gracefully as possible.
  
  Brownites and anti-Blairites were playing up the role played by the Chancellor in helping bring over a prominent "rebel", Nick Brown (no relation), at the last minute. This may have bought Blair a few votes and, according to one MP, showed that Gordon Brown "holds Blair's future in his hands".
  
  But the closeness of the vote also showed that Gordon Brown's fabled power base - and appeal to true Labour - may not be as strong as his supporters make out.
  
  Blair's survival may have come down to his prowess in the darker arts of political persuasion and a bit of luck.
  
  Despite the misgivings many Labour MPs have about Blair and his policies, they were not ready to throw him to the resurgent Tory opposition with the Hutton report just a few hours away.
  
  The timing of the tuition fees vote and the Hutton report worked in Blair's favour. By concentrating all the gripes and complaints collected from his near seven years in power into one action-packed 24 hours, it forced Labour MPs to decide whether they still want him.
  
  The answer is clearly yes, but only just.
  
  The trouble for Blair is that if a bunch of fully paid-up Labour believers only just want him, what does that mean for the voters, whom he needs for a historic third term? Are they growing even more tired of him than the party he leads?

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...088091761.html

[Douglas]

I don’t know how resident in Britain will view it, but to a semi-interested semi-outsider it almost seemed that the BBC thought they were the party in opposition. If they had wanted they had the opportunity to beat up the government slowly but badly over the case for war. There’s certainly sufficient popular disgruntlement to support such a strategy. Instead they decided to go after Campbell and the knockout. They fucked up. Very, very stupid in trying to personalise it. The management deserve to go.

Blair's trans-Atlantic ass licking never sat well with the British people--he is finished, but old Auntie BBC just keeps on going.

[Douglas]

I'm not so sure Chris, I think they got seriously out of shape in going after Campbell. They really have to pull something out the bag now, or it will cost them their Charter.