:
The BBC’s story on Galloway contains this little gem:
”UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has been criticised over his son’s work with the programme, but he himself, in an interim report by a UN committee issued in March, was cleared of wrongdoing.”
Of course, he was not cleared at all:
“I thought we criticised him rather severely. I would not call that an exoneration,” Volcker told US network Fox News in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.
UPDATE: More on this at USS Neverdock. Marc Landers writes:
Despite Paul Volcker publicly denying that his report cleared Kofi Annan of wrongdoing, the BBC make this false claim on three webpages.
Volcker said: Asked point-blank whether Mr. Annan had been cleared of wrongdoing in the $10 billion scandal, Mr. Volcker replied, “No.”
link to Washington Times article
The three BBC webpages are here:
If Mr. Galloway thinks Democrats – any Democrats – would do *anything* just to please George Bush he obviously hasn’t been paying attention to the international news!
Apparently our lefties feel no solidarity with overseas lefties – either that or the evidence was really, really convincing.
The Fox report is even more direct.
Asked point-blank whether Mr. Annan had been cleared of wrongdoing in the $10 billion scandal, Mr. Volcker replied, “No.”
Doesn’t get any plainer than that.
Here is the Washington Times report on the Fox broadcast.
http://washingtontimes.com/world/20050427-120309-4065r.htm
Well, let’s hope our US friends arrest the w****r Galloway and transfer him to Guantanamo Bay – there he could spend more time with his friends.
Oh come on, never mind what Fox (bastion of unbiased reporting not) said about Annan… what did the report itself say? Go to the primary source, Ms Solent, first rule of journalism.
The Interim Independent Oil for Food Inquiry report said: “There is no evidence that the selection of Cotecna in 1998 was subject to any affirmative or improper influence of the secretary general.”
Tsk, Ms Solent. Go to the bottom of the journalism school class.
Volcker chirs the review – and he has said that Annan was NOT exonerted. And the report itself never said he was exonerated. Further enquiries are ongoing. Meanwhile members of the enquiry have resigned because the panel has not been forthright enough about the shenanigans – and about Annan’s own links. Those people are being summoned to give evidence at Congress – no doubt Basil will make sure he listens to what they say as they have been closer to the action than virtually anyone else. Or is Basil another one who thinks the sun shines out of Kofi’s jacksie ?
Yes, the report is INTERIM, but the Beeb story says that.
Think u are clutching at straws on this one.
OFF TOPIC: Btw, browsing this site, and its paranoiac contributors these last few days, I’m left wondering something – why, in your opinion, is the Beeb so biased? I don’t mean, what is the bias, but rather, WHY do you think they are doing it?
Now, it’s not straight party political stuff, because according to you, they are against Blair on the war, but pro-Blair and anti-Tory on much other stuff.
…so why is it? just to torment you? or something more sinister? or is it aaaaaalllll in the mind?
Basil
I always took the BBC to be the voice of Old Labour.
Even though most of the Beeboids are under 30?
BBC says:
The committee says it has evidence from documents drawn up by the Ministry of Oil under Saddam Hussein and interviews with “high-ranking Hussein regime officials”.
Whyput “high-ranking Hussein regime officials” in quotation marks, when the senate report apparently names the officials ? From Reuter’s:
According to the report, Saddam’s vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, told the Senate subcommittee last month that Galloway had been granted oil allocations “because of his opinions about Iraq” and because he backed lifting sanctions
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050512/325/fip6x.html
Anyhow, so what if Galloway was granted oil? It was legal, and no more than plenty of politicians do every day with their directorships and links to foreign regimes.
“Anyhow, so what if Galloway was granted oil? It was legal, and no more than plenty of politicians do every day with their directorships and links to foreign regimes.”
If Galloway was granted oil, then at the very least he’s been committing perjury by denying that in Court.
That’s a fairly large “so what”.
>why, in your opinion, is the Beeb so biased? I don’t mean, what is the bias, but rather, WHY do you think they are doing it?
I don’t know why you think there’s any puzzle. Anyone who has been to University in the last thirty years will immediately recognize the Guardianista attitudes on display. And these are the people who get hired by the BBC.
Basil, start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramsci
Basil Dear
Residual Socialism exists in some unreconstructed sections of UK society, the BBC is perhaps the best example of a Soviet style institution that is too scared to submit to market forces.
The supporters of Manchester United football club are another…………
I’m not sure if anyone has really answered Basil’s quite legitimate question.
It’s not that we suspect that the BBC checks all job applicants for possession of an up-to-date Labour Party card.
It’s just that the institutional structure of the BBC ensures that only people who tend towards a leftist, internationalist, United-Nations-ish view of the world would *want* to work there.
And don’t dismiss that as paranoia. When the Police were accused of institutional racism, leftists were delighted and claimed to see quite clearly how institutional structures can bias people towards a certain view of the world. Well, what works for the police works for any large institution.
Any large institution, that is, that is not subject to market forces.
” Oh come on, never mind what Fox (bastion of unbiased reporting not) said about Annan… ”
This is plain silly. No-one is quoting Fox. They’re quoting what Paul Volcker said in an inteview on Fox.
There is a difference.
Jon is right, it is Volcker that is being quoted here.
Basil, the report says many things and spin is applied to all of them. What you can’t spin is when asked point blank did his report clear Annan of wrongdoing, Volcker, in the plainest terms you can get, said “No”.
Why did two of the three lead investigators quit in protest over the report?
Put the two together and one can deduce that there is evidence of Annan’s wrongdoing and Volcker didn’t want to publish it. Knowing that there are several outside investigations going on and that one of his lead investigators has turned his evidence over to Congress, when asked point blank had he cleared Annan of wrongdoing, Volcker had no choice but to come clean and say “No”.
I have sent 3 emails to the BBC in an effort to get them to correct the pages in question. We should all email them.
The email complaint form is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ukfs/hi/newsid_3950000/newsid_3955200/3955259.stm
The BBC’s watchword:
We don’t report the news; we make it up!
Basil –
The reasons why the BBC are biased are cultural. Probably dates back to the days when radio and television were new. As a new area of employment and opportunity it would not have attracted middle class establishment types who went into the army, law, empire service, the City and so on. It would have attracted the outsiders – particularly talented people from lower income homes. These people themselves were, for obvious reasons, attracted to left-liberal ideology.
This all then became self-reinforcing. Once you have a situation where all the vacant posts are advertsied in the Guardian and where the in-house ideological range is well established, then it just perpetuates itself.
The solutions are:
1. Elections to the Board of Governors – all licence fee payers to be able to take part.
2. Jobs to be advertised on a rotational basis in all the “broadsheet” newspapers.
3. Interviews for key personnel to be undertaken by an outside board including senior journalists from the main serious newspapers.
4. A proper independent complaints system. No more in house exonerations. Also – real penalties for passing off inaccurate information.
Advertising in different newspapers is not likely to make that much difference (a bit, yes, but not much).
People who want to work in the media read the Guardian job ads whether or not they normally read the Guardian. And it’s not like some pin-suited type is going to stumble over a BBC job ad just because it’s in the Telegraph and say to himself “Hang the investment banking, let’s go work at the BBC”.
Anyway, the people who do the hiring will still be the same. And they’ll still hire people like them, ie. left-leaning humanities graduates.
I’m not against requiring the BBC to advertise in different papers. I’m just worried that if they do, it will be seen as answering their critics, when in fact it won’t make much difference.
“The reasons why the BBC are biased are cultural. Probably dates back to the days when radio and television were new. As a new area of employment and opportunity it would not have attracted middle class establishment types who went into the army, law, empire service, the City and so on”
I’m sure it doesn’t. Any cultural influences on the BBC aren’t related to where the middle class looked for jobs when the BBC started. For starters, the point is meaningless directly after the Second World War, when a huge number of ex-servicemen entered the workforce once again, including the BBC.
Why can’t the BBC quit funding the Guardian, and simply post its job ads on its own much-vaunted website.
Oh no – that would save money. What a dumb idea.
JiL
I agree with Scott that advertising posts in various newspapers won’t make much of a difference to the employee profile. I’d welcome the move anyway because it’s our tax money which pays for all of these advertisements and, from what I have read, keeps the Grauniad in business. Have you seen how thick the ‘Society’ section is each Wednesday? There must be thousands of public sector jobs advertised in there. So, although it would be welcome to see the jobs spread around (in fact it would be welcome if the public sector could just STOP recruiting people to non-jobs for 5 minutes) it won’t happen. The Grauniad is their Bible and mustn’t be allowed to go under.
JiL
That would certianly be a most sensible start in the right direction. In these days of interent access and a surplus of media students lookign for jobs, I;m sure that talent would go to the BBC rather than the BBC having to do the leg work.
Anonymous –
When I referred to the Army I meant the Army as a full time career option. It’s true that many BBC employees did war service but if anything in war time the army was a radicalising institution that encoruaged dreams of social equality and progressive thought. All sort so people who wouldn’t normally have mixed together did and the various nonsenses of the class system (e.g. that some Battle of Britain pilots were officers because of their class and others were kept as sergeant) exposed.
Back on the subject of Galloway, I am glad to see that he is already squirming on this one. He has already had to conceded that contrary to the impressino given by
his statements he did NOT beg the Congress Committee to allow him to appear before them.
I notice he is quite careful in his denials. He says it would be ludicrous to suppose that, as he was under secret service surveillance, that any oil money could have passed into his bank account. Indeed. Did anyone suggest it did?
The sad thing is that even if Galloway were guilty as charged, he would still have won in the Bethnal Green – with the block vote of the closed-ears/closed-eyes/closed-minds of the Bangladeshi community there. The Respect Party is effectively the Muslim Party of Great Britain – with support from the Socialist Workers Party. Nowhere does the BBC focus on this, and the dangers it poses to community relations in British cities.
Thye BBC is very happy to do an extended demolition job on someone like Kilroy-Silk, or on the BNP. Where is the demolition job on Respect ?
This blog has the measure of Galloway. Very dry humour indeed:
http://world-socialism.blogspot.com/2005/05/tipping-point-has-arrived.html
Demolition job on Respect? So you haven’t been listening to Today or Paxman’s interview with Galloway then?
King was given a 5 minute free reign to lambast George Galloway, Respect, the Bangladeshi press and just about anyone she didn’t like. She even broadly hinted at the end of the intverview that Galloway will get his comeuppance sooner or later, and she’ll return as Bethnal Green MP, quite interesting in light of the news from the US Senate Committee. What does she know?
No-one, Galloway or a Respect member, was given any time to rebutt any of her outlandish claims, and as a piece of journalism it would make Fox News blush.
As far as I can see, Galloway has become the latest media hate figure. (Why does everyone on this site hate him so much?)
Copy and paste this text to read an interesting Michael Rosen article on this subject. It’s from the Guardian I’m afraid. Not every copy has been burned yet by raging biased-beeboids.
Sorry don’t know how to do blue links.
Sorry, this is link to story by Roy Greenslade.
‘NO NEED FOR BALANCE’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1483047,00.html
and this is Michael Rosen, in Socialist Worker (gasp)
‘THE MEDIA’S TWO-MINUTE HATE’
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=6491
Basil,
One doesn’t have to be a raving right wing nutcase to see that Galloway is an a*sehole of the highest order. Having said that the best way to deal with these idiots, as with the BNP, Scottish Socialists, Veritas, UKIP, Communists etc etc is to ask them about their policies and watch them drown.
It all turned into a bit too much of a p*ss take at times.
Poor Galloway. The right loves a witch hunt like nothing else don’t they? Anyone here miss the days of McCarthy? You could have had Beeboids hauled out of their beds to answer committees on “anti-American behaviour”.
Good for Galloway for getting money out of his detractors by successfully winning libel actions against them.
Now there’s an idea….
Cockney
It’s clear now that Basil is. indeed, taking the piss. It’s best to ignore him.
The BNP, Scottish Socialists and various other communist loons should, indeed, be derided and hopefully, one day, consigned to history. Vanitas is a one man band not worth talking about. But UKIP can be brought up on their policies? In the main we’re talking about just the one main policy of withdrawal from the EU. Have you not grown up yet? Call them a bunch of useless amateurs and I’ll agree with you. You won’t win on trying to make a case for staying in the EU though.
Hey Cockney, I take it all back! The EU is doling out our money to large, English, shooting estates in order to rear game.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4546079.stm
They are obviously blessed with the wisdom of the Gods.
I don’t know why people are so exercised about George Galloway winning BG&B. The alternative as Oona King, an equally repulsive person, but not as quick witted with a quip. Oona King’s a very nasty piece of work.
Kofi Annan was cleared off personal wrongdoing in the hiring of the Swiss firm Conetca. The interim report of the Independent Inquiry Committee concluded: “There is no evidence that the selection of Cotecna in 1998 was subject to any affirmative or improper influence of the secretary general,” but it also ruled that the inquiry he initiated was “inadequate [with] no referral to the UN departments carrying the responsibility for thorough and independent investigation of such matters”. So he came in for considerable criticism, but still felt able to claim that he had been personally exonerated. Mr Volcker (no fan) is clearly not of the same opinion.
Thank you for raising this point. We will attempt to be more precise in our wording in future.
With best wishes
BBC News Website
Those weasel words suggest that Volcker had been a critic of Annan. Ridiculous – he had been selected by Annan to head the enquiry.
Once again – either the BBC is ignorant – or it is adding its pro-UN spin.
Basil – I don’t hate Galloway. Hate would only become an issue if he had done me some personal wrong. No – I haev contempt for him from an ethical point of view. Yes, he is an eloquent, witty and intelligent man. BUt he is also a moral imbecile who went to Baghdad and personally praised a tyrant who had murdered hundreds of thousands of his people and who had started two wars which cost millions of lives.