So let’s get this straight…..
The Labour Party concoct a story that Tory advisor Lynton Crosby advised ‘profiteering’ private health companies on how to exploit failures in the NHS.
The Guardian splash the story on its front page.
The BBC picks up the Guardian story and runs with it claiming that Cameron faces questions after ‘it emerges’ his election strategist advised private health companies how to profit from NHS reforms.
Guido Fawkes then fact checks and finds that it was in fact a Labour leaning group that made the presentation, Crosby merely provided research to that group.
The Guardian back tracks and changes its story.
The BBC, having run a story that conveniently attacks and undermines a person that represents a danger to its fellow travellers in the Labour Party, is still running the same story at 18:00.
Suddenly the BBC too changes its reporting…but it doesn’t put up a fresh story it edits the old one…changing it entirely….keeping the same web link and an old time stamp…14:59…therefore preventing anyone from seeing the previous, and very erroneous version….unless you had seen it before and were able to link to it via any other website which had picked up the original version.
Sooooo…the BBC runs a smear story, one that it clearly didn’t factcheck, one that it took complete from the Guardian without asking is this true? The fact that the presentation was in 2010 when Crosby was not working for the Tories should immediately have cast doubt on this story…but the BBC ran it full on all day.
Why did they run it? Because the story was too good to not be true….building on the narrative that Labour and the BBC have been creating for a week or so now to distract from Miliband’s Unite problems.
When the facts became publicly known, thanks to Guido, the BBC did a stealth edit and covered its tracks making it difficult to locate the original version of the report…even the ‘Way Back When Machine’ and ‘News Sniffer’ cannot link to it.
The BBC did a hatchet job on an important figure in the Tories’ election strategy…..the BBC made a deliberate attempt to undermine and discredit someone who is a key player in the Tories’ political battle against Labour….potentially derailing the Tories’ election plans and possibly even the outcome of the election…they hope.
The BBC has been caught red handed interfering in the political process with a clear attempt to rig the election in Labour’s favour.
The paragraph where the old time stamp 14:59 is noted made me think of the fate of Syme in Orwell’s “1984”.
Syme worked on the Newspeak dictionary and was a true believer but he must have lapsed in crimethink and then became an unperson. At the chess club he had frequented, his name no longer appeared on the list of members … but it had NOT been crossed out, nor had an updated list been issued. The old list with the old date had simply been reproduced but minus Syme.
Winston Smith commented that Syme no longer existed and that, in a sense, he never had existed.
The BBC – bringing Orwell’s vision into real life!
There is no doubt Orwell used the al-beeb as model.
George Orwell? Do you mean BBC staff member 9889? Yes he was well aware of the BBC and it’s mind-set and, by the look of things, based Big Brother’s all pervading propaganda machine and it’s ability to pervert facts and history to suit it’s purpose on that knowledge.
Well spotted. Worth making a complaint to the BBC. Copy to RT if you get ignored.
You might be able to track the edits using http://www.newssniffer.co.uk
Unfortunately, as Alan says, the BBC has prevented News Sniffer from capturing it.
News Sniffer only shows the original article at 02:50 and the final version at 16:10. The revised 14:59 article in between has been well and truly disappeared down the memory hole.
http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/667595/diff/0/1
News Sniffer does prove that there was a stealth edit though. There’s not even a mention of the time stamp 14:59 on News Sniffer, even though that’s the BBC’s official time stamp for the final article. Plus New Sniffer records that “The article has changed 2 times”, but only succeeded in capturing one revision.
O’Brien would have been proud of the BBC here.
This is a very serious issue and has happened many times before; I strongly suggest (not for the first time) that contributors here take screenshots of the stories they notice/comment on. With luck somebody somewher has this BBC story in the original forms.
“Sooooo…the BBC runs a smear story, one that it clearly didn’t factcheck, one that it took complete from the Guardian without asking is this true?
Why did they run it? Because the story was too good to not be true….’
Didn’t take too long for the post McAlpine lessons to get unlearned, or any staff promoted sideways to get up to their old tricks, did it?
The ability… and evident strategic decision, to circumvent accurate tracking of archive is a worry.
Maybe that’s the job of the Newsnight chap who was reassigned to ‘tidy up’?
In the 70s, I used to work behind the Iron Curtain with our Defence and Military Attaches and this Guardian and BBC ‘Lynton Crosby’ misinformation story is very reminiscent of examples of what we regularly used to find in the Socialist national dailies.
In those days I naively used to think that this could never happen in my country. How wrong was I?
I assumed in Socialist countries it must be a hangover from Stalin or the Third Reich’s Propaganda Offices. The dangerous thing is, when talking to the locals in Warsaw and other places, mud did stick and such misinformation indoctrinated a vast swathe of the population.
The BBC, albeit on a much less damaging scale, is practising misinformation right under out noses and I really think they believe there are no consequences. You just have to look at the following site to see the vast scale of this within the BBC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_controversies
I really feel the time for real reform has now arrived.
The BBC has become so blatantly out of control in so many areas:
Be it the left wing bias like this Lynton or McAlpine, or Dr kelly and so many other stories.
Magement and stars scandal after scandal coming up, like Saville, Stuart Hall etc.
Unbelievably for a State organ the BBC has even had a go at tax avoidance with so many of its employees paid as self employed, when clearly they are not earning the majority of their earnings away from the broadcaster.
I do hope we are all writing to our MPs and requesting we correct this unbalance with the Licence fee review coming up.
This is all very reminiscent of a previous smear where Labour cut out the middleman (the Guardian) and went direct to the BBC.The victim is quite funny in hindsight.
..another BBC chump who became a Labour operative.
Not part of any pattern, of course.
…in reply to Beeboidal above.
So Albaman will be along in a minute to show us where Alan got the facts all wrong, for as Albaman so succinctly puts it in the Open Thread ‘This site contains countless examples of sweeping generalisations made by “preferred contributors”.
When invited to evidence these assertions they are either nowhere to be seen or they (and other “preferred contributors”) resort to personal attacks and abuse. ‘
So here’s your chance, Albaman (yes, yes, yet another one). The floor, as ever, is yours……