The BBC gets spanked

[willy]

This is for all you BBC lovers on the left. I know you've heard about this, but hoped nobody else would.




The Hutton Report

Armstrong Williams


January 31, 2004


Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W Bush exaggerated intelligence information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program in order to justify going to war.

So said the largest news organization in the world, the BBC, which broadcast allegations that Bush and Blair willingly misled the international community. The charges belied the BBC's relentlessly anti-government reporting during the war and set the tone for how other major news organizations covered the events.

Just one thing: The BBC reports were completely baseless. According to a voluminous report recently issued by a retired senior judge, Lord Brian Hutton, the BBC failed to adequately investigate the charges that Blair "sexed up" intelligence data before broadcasting them. The judicial inquiry called the reports "unfounded," and harshly rebuked the BBC for broadcasting them. The findings set off a maelstrom of controversy that so far has resulted in the resignation of the BBC's editor in chief and chairman.

While questions remain about the accuracy of the intelligence reports, and about how intelligence is gathered in general, the Hutton report does assuage the more important concerns about whether Bush and Blair manipulated intelligence information to deliberately deceive the international community. Plainly they did not.

Had the report indicated otherwise, the repercussions would have been severe. Blair would have had to resign his post. Had Blair gone, the knives would have come out for President Bush, who would have had a difficult time explaining why he falsified intelligence and sent hundreds of US soldiers and thousands of Iraqi civilians to their death.

Instead, the report restores credibility to the Blair administration, which had been shaken by the BBC broadcasts. It also reinforces the integrity of the Bush administration, which relied heavily on British intelligence in its assessment of the threat posed by Iraq.

So you would think that a report that vindicates two of the world's most powerful leaders from charges that they deliberately deceived the world would be a big news item. After all, the story has implications for the war on terrorism, the Wilsonian idealism of carrying democracy into the Middle East, and how we intend to confront the basic problems of dictatorship, tyranny, misery and poverty in that area. It also sheds a harsh light on the world's largest news organization. The Hutton report raised serious questions about whether the BBC embraced an overt political agenda in its war coverage. Those nagging questions led to the forced resignation of two senior executives, an open apology to the Blair administration, and open protests by hundreds of staff members. An investigation into how the BBC gathers information will likely follow. It is possible that several western news outlets could be subject to similar scrutiny regarding their war coverage. For all of these reasons the Hudson report needs to be viewed not just in terms of a British political story, but in terns of a global news story that also has direct impact on the Bush administration.

Yet somehow these rousing points were lost on the majority of the American network news organizations who dedicated almost no coverage to the Hutton report when the findings were first released. The lone exception: Fox news, which instantly beamed the story out to the public. Once that happened, the rest were forced to follow.

So why was the broadcast media gun shy on reporting a story that has serious repercussions for the leadership of the western world, as well as the veracity of the world's largest media corporation? Likely it has something to do with the fact that the BBC set the agenda with regard to war coverage. Their consciously anti-US rhetoric had a ripple effect on the rest of the press and public opinion. The Canadian broadcast corporation followed their lead, as did many of the big US broadcasters. It's not in the interest of any of these organizations to highlight their own sloppy reporting.

While the BBC has been forced to admit and scrutinize their own journalistic shortcomings, it is unlikely that the other major US broadcasters will follow suit, raising disturbing questions about the integrity of several major media outlets in their coverage of the war, and President Bush in general.

Willy, you do realize that you are ONLY preaching to the chior here, right?

Amen, baby.........

"While the BBC has been forced to admit and scrutinize their own journalistic shortcomings, it is unlikely that the other major US broadcasters will follow suit, raising disturbing questions about the integrity of several major media outlets in their coverage of the war, and President Bush in general."-- Armstrong Williams

• For once, I agree with Williams.

[Gordon B]

Originally posted by Chris A
"While the BBC has been forced to admit and scrutinize their own journalistic shortcomings, it is unlikely that the other major US broadcasters will follow suit, raising disturbing questions about the integrity of several major media outlets in their coverage of the war, and President Bush in general."-- Armstrong Williams

• For once, I agree with Williams.

Here's the link to Williams column. I give Chris a lot of credit for drawing attention to Williams' comments.
Armstrong Williams

31 January 2004

• Gilligan quits, Dyke hits out and Hutton backlash grows
  Reporter exits claiming a 'grave injustice'. Former BBC chief lambasts Campbell.
  Opinion polls say report was whitewash
  
  By Andrew Grice and Kim Sengupta
  
  Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter who suggested that the Government lied in compiling its Iraq weapons dossier, bowed to the inevitable and resigned from the BBC yesterday.
  
  Mr Gilligan, 35, the third BBC casualty of the affair, apologised for errors in the May broadcast, but said the BBC had been the victim of a "grave injustice".
  
  Gavyn Davies, chairman of the BBC governors, and Greg Dyke, the director general, had already quit after Lord Hutton's report into the death of the government scientist David Kelly. The report criticised Mr Gilligan and management at the BBC and exonerated the Government.
  
  Mr Gilligan had said in his initial broadcast on 29 May that the Government "probably knew" its claims about Saddam Hussein being able to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes were wrong before they appeared in the September 2002 dossier, an important plank in its case for war.
  
  Mr Gilligan said last night: "I again apologise for it. My departure is at my own initiative. But the BBC collectively has been the victim of a grave injustice."
  
  His decision to quit came as Mr Blair faced a growing backlash over Lord Hutton's inquiry. There were fears inside the Government that it was in danger of losing the propaganda battle over the report. Mr Dyke challenged Lord Hutton's findings and accused Alastair Campbell, No 10's former communications director, of being "ungracious" in his comments about the Government's victory over the BBC.
  
  Government unease was also fuelled yesterday on another front - the case for war. President George Bush was forced to say that he wanted to know the facts behind the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. His intervention came after a week in which experts had rubbished intelligence reports suggesting that Saddam represented a threat to American and British interests, as Washington and London claimed before the war. Mr Blair was challenged by Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, to admit that the intelligence was "wildly wrong".
  
  The Government's hopes of "moving on" were scuppered when Mr Dyke showed that he had no intention of going quietly. He said that Lord Hutton was "quite clearly wrong" in some parts of his report, which was read with "disbelief" at the BBC. "We were quite shocked it was so black and white," he said. Questioning Lord Hutton's conclusion that the Ministry of Defence had properly cared for David Kelly, he said: "If that's showing a duty of care I'm glad I don't work there."
  
  He said there were "remarkable contradictions" between evidence given by Mr Campbell to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and the Hutton inquiry.
  
  BBC staff were raising cash yesterday to pay for a national newspaper advert expressing their dismay at Mr Dyke's departure. Organisers were hoping to collect at least 4,000 signatures, including those of high-profile television figures.
  
  Mr Dyke said he did not want to stand down, and had offered his resignation because he decided he would only carry on if he had the full backing of the BBC board of governors.
  
  Mr Blair's official spokesman declined to reply to Mr Dyke's attack, saying: "A dispassionate judge has looked at the facts and has made his judgment on the facts. That's where the matter should rest. We accept there was a lot of emotion and anger [at the BBC] but the judge has reached his conclusions ... and what people should recognise is that this is the judge's verdict."

[Captain Hate]

This is like asking for Jayson Blair's reaction to being canned. Except nobody killed themselves as a result of his made-up stories.

[Bill Ashline]

The Hutton Saga is a Sideshow

by Seumas Milne
UK Guardian
January 31, 2004

We have been here before. In April 1972, the former brigadier Lord Widgery published his now notorious report into the killing of 14 unarmed civil rights demonstrators by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland three months earlier on Bloody Sunday. Widgery cleared the soldiers of blame, insisting, in defiance of a mass of evidence, that they had only opened fire after coming under attack. The Widgery report was so widely seen as a flagrant establishment whitewash, and continued to be such a focus of nationalist anger, that a quarter of a century later Tony Blair felt compelled to set up another Bloody Sunday inquiry under Lord Saville, still sitting today.

Lord Hutton - a scion of the Northern Irish protestant ascendancy who himself represented British soldiers at the Widgery inquiry - has, if anything, outdone Widgery in his service to the powers that be. Hutton's embrace of any construction of the evidence surrounding David Kelly's death that might be helpful to the government is breathtaking in its sweep. Instead of a prime minister who took the country to war on the basis of discredited dossiers about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, it is the BBC that now finds itself in the dock - and its chairman who was last night forced to resign. Hutton's report could scarcely have been more favourable if it had been drafted, or even sexed up, by Tony Blair's former spinmeister Alastair Campbell himself. The prime minister certainly knew his man when he appointed the one-time Diplock court judge to head the inquiry into Dr Kelly's death.

Fortunately, we have the inquiry transcripts to test against Lord Hutton's almost comically tendentious conclusions. We know, for example, that Blair's chief of staff Jonathan Powell asked the joint intelligence committee's John Scarlett to redraft that part of the September dossier which suggested Saddam Hussein might use chemical and biological weapons "if he believes his regime is under threat" - and Scarlett did so, by taking out the qualifications. We know that Campbell asked Scarlett to change a claim that the Iraqi military "may be able" to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes to "are able". But Lord Hutton is of the view that this is not at all the "sexing up" that the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan quoted Kelly as complaining about. We also know that Blair chaired the meeting at which the strategy for outing Kelly was adopted, even though the prime minister later denied having anything to do with it. But, in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of Lord Hutton, that was entirely consistent and honourable.

There are different ways of reading the spectacular one-sidedness of Hutton's conclusions. One is that the Ulster law lord might be a touch naive about the seamier side of 21st century political life; another, that the legalistic defence offered by Blair, Hoon and senior civil servants naturally appealed to a conservative judge far more than the BBC journalists' case that the main thrust of their story was in fact right; a third that, as a lifelong servant of the British crown, he knew where his duty lay when the credibility of the state was at risk.

But whatever the mixture of motives, Hutton's unqualified endorsement of the government's behaviour is bound, in the current climate, to be widely regarded in the country as a cover-up. It will have no credibility for millions who opposed the war on Iraq; it will merely add to the sense that the political system is unable to deal with the crisis triggered by Britain's participation in the illegal invasion and occupation.

The Hutton saga has in reality been a very British sideshow to that central issue - and the now barely-contested consensus that the reasons given for joining the war were false. Next to the national and global implications of what has been done - and the more than 15,000 people estimated to have died as a result - a loosely worded 6.07am BBC radio broadcast, and even the grim death of Dr Kelly, pale into insignificance. By setting up an inquiry into the Kelly affair, Blair created a partially successful diversion from the far more serious - and more threatening to him personally - questions raised by the war itself.

Those are the questions - rather than the BBC's systems of editorial control - that need urgently to be addressed. Armed with Lord Hutton's report, Tony Blair will now try to "draw a line" under the war and "move on", as he likes to say. That will be impossible. The failure to turn up any of the weapons used as the pretext for Britain's unprovoked attack on Iraq last March has been cruelly highlighted by the queue of US officials and politicians now prepared to concede publicly that they didn't actually exist.

Last summer, Blair was telling us to wait for the Iraq Survey Group to produce his smoking guns. Now David Kay, who has been in charge of the group, says of the phantasmic Iraqi weapons: "I don't think they existed". His replacement, Charles Duelfer, thinks "they're probably not there".

Meanwhile, the misery of the occupation of Iraq grows, as US and British claims to have liberated the country are exposed as a fraud. While the resistance continues to inflict daily casualties on the occupation forces in the centre and north of Iraq - regardless of the capture of Saddam Hussein - the Shia religious leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani has put himself at the head of a mass popular movement for democracy, opposed by the very US occupiers who insisted they were invading to trigger a democratic revolution across the Middle East.

There are now around 13,000 Iraqis imprisoned without trial; evidence of torture and brutality by US and British occupation forces is growing; and the CIA has warned that Iraq is at risk of slipping into a three-way civil war. For most Iraqis, life has got worse under the occupation and even on the crudest calculus, many more have been killed since Saddam Hussein was overthrown than in his last period in power: as the US-based Human Rights Watch pointed out this week, Saddam's worst atrocities date from the days when he was backed by the west.

This is the legacy of the decision by Tony Blair and George Bush to invade a country that posed no threat either to Britain or to the US. There is no way in which the Iraq war can somehow be put behind us. That is not only because of what is now happening on the ground in Iraq, but because of the increased threat of terror attacks it has brought about, the precedent of pre-emptive war it has created, and the poison released in the British political system by a war launched on a false prospectus. Nor is it enough for the prime minister to say he believed there was a threat at the time. If that is the case, he is guilty of reckless incompetence.

The priority must now be to bring the Iraqi occupation to an end and for those who launched the war to be held to account. That process could begin in Britain with the independent inquiry into the war demanded by the opposition parties and anti-war movement. But it needs to go further. The Hutton report is no more likely to lift Iraq's shadow from British public life than Widgery did Bloody Sunday's. Until the prime minister who took the decision to go to war has been brought to account, that shadow will remain.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

[Monte Smith]

Originally posted by willy
This is for all you BBC lovers on the left.

I'm a BBC lover on the right. So I take satisfaction that this fine institution has been chastened. May it go forth and do no wrong.

Originally posted by Captain Hate
This is like asking for Jayson Blair's reaction to being canned. Except nobody killed themselves as a result of his made-up stories.

An idiotic analogy, IMO. Read Bill Ashline's post from The Guardian. Blair lied and people died--the blood is not off his hands.

[Captain Hate]

Originally posted by Chris A
An idiotic analogy, IMO. Read Bill Ashline's post from The Guardian. Blair lied and people died--the blood is not off his hands.

Having read some of your analogies before I don't think you're arguing from a position of strength. I'd rather read the article you posted; it has a nice quote from Mr. Dyke: Questioning Lord Hutton's conclusion that the Ministry of Defence had properly cared for David Kelly, he said: "If that's showing a duty of care I'm glad I don't work there."

Since he doesn't work anywhere now I guess everybody's happy.

[willy]

From smh.com.au


Stench of a great immorality in BBC's defence of its righteousness
By Padraic P. McGuinness
February 3, 2004

Who killed David Kelly? Not I, said the BBC. Not I, said the British Prime Minister. Not I, said reporter Andrew Gilligan. Not I, said the British Ministry of Defence and its minister.

The Hutton inquiry, established to look into Kelly's death, establishes that it was suicide, and that whatever drove him to this end it was not the fault of either Tony Blair, nor of the Ministry of Defence.

Moreover, the report which claimed on the basis of a conversation between Kelly and Gilligan that Blair had "sexed up" the British dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and thus misled Parliament and people was wrong.

This misreport had become the mainstay of those who wanted to claim that Blair's decision to go to war against Iraq was based on deliberate lies rather than on, it now appears, erroneous intelligence information about Iraq's possession of WMDs. This misinformation needs to be explored further - but so far the case that Blair (and Bush and Howard) lied is in tatters.

So the supporters of the original misreport can only justify themselves by denouncing Hutton as an establishment figure (hitherto they had been sure he would support them and so had praised him), and his report as avoiding the real issue - why did Blair and the others get it wrong? A big issue, but not what Hutton was asked to deal with.

It has emerged that Gilligan's claim was made in an unscripted interview with another journalist live to air early one morning, and that he did not thereafter repeat it. Not what one would call a mortal sin of journalism, and an error which could have easily been corrected when challenged.

The real mystery is why the BBC rejected complaints without even checking anything, and then made such a production of insisting there was nothing to correct - a variation of the standard editorial reply, "we stand by our report". A good principle - provided you have checked with your reporter and asked how sure of his facts he is.

But Hutton's criticisms of the reporter and the BBC's editorial process were wide of the mark. Like most lawyers, especially judges, he applies a standard of care which not only is impossible in realtime reporting but which few lawyers of any kind could ever meet in their professional lives.

There are plenty of mistakes, and worse, made by judges during the hearing of a case and in ex tempore judgements. If these were punishable there would be fewer judges on the bench.

Rank and file lawyers, like reporters, under pressure are prone to make mistakes. Judges and editors are there partly to apply their own experience to correcting these. So Gilligan certainly did not kill Kelly.

The real mystery is why the BBC so vehemently defended his report. It appears to have taken the attitude that any government complaint about its coverage of the Iraq war must be unjustified, and therefore was not worth following up, but should be rejected out of hand. That is, the responsible people right up to the director-general and the board of governors were so sure that anything they said was right that they treated the Prime Minister (and his press office) as dishonest and insincere.

They were convinced like so many others in the British political class (and elsewhere) that there was no case for war on Iraq, or an insufficient case, and that anything emanating from Blair's office was pure political spin.

To them Blair was a liar, pure and simple. Moreover, there was no case for the war that could be made by Blair that they would accept.

This stance enjoyed great popularity among the rest of the media, and among the vociferous anti-war propagandists which constituted much of the audience for the BBC and like-thinking organs of journalism. It was followed with dog-like devotion by the ABC and its admirers.

The protests by Blair were treated contemptuously as if any suggestion that the BBC might not be fair, objective, truthful and wholly accurate in its reporting and treatment of stories had to be rejected since it represented attempted political interference by government in the fiercely defended independence of the BBC.

There is a clear answer to the opening question. The BBC, in its overweening institutional arrogance, killed David Kelly.

• BBC to go ahead with comedy mocking Hutton report
  
  AFP[ TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 03, 2004 09:11:17 PM ]
  
  LONDON: The BBC pledged Tuesday to broadcast as planned a comedy mocking the British government over last week's Hutton report, despite worries the programme might inflame a dispute between the two institutions.
  
  The new series of popular radio comedy "Absolute Power", based around the cynical antics of a pair of fictional government spin doctors, or experts in media presentation, would go out as planned this week, a BBC spokesman said. "I do not think there was any talk of it being scrapped," the spokesman said, while conceding: "It was possibly slightly inappropriate to show it at this time."
  
  A report by judge Lord Brian Hutton into the suicide of government weapons scientist David Kelly, published last week, exonerated the government of any blame in the death.In contrast, Hutton slammed as "unfounded" a BBC report from last year which anonymously quoting Kelly as saying government spin doctors had exaggerated the case for war against Iraq .
  
  The BBC's chairman and director general both resigned in the wake of the report, leaving the state-funded but independent broadcaster facing the biggest crisis in its history. The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported earlier Tuesday that the BBC had decided to drop an episode based around the aftermath of Hutton for fear of further antagonising Prime Minister Tony Blair.
  
  In this episode, a spin doctor played by actor Stephen Fry reportedly says there is nothing he could "teach this prime minister about deception, manipulation and lying. Except how to do it properly."
  
  The head of radio light entertainment at the BBC said later that there had been a "very small number of edits" made to the programme. "I think the suggestion that anything would be dropped from one or our programmes in deference to a politician ... is daft," John Pidgeon said.