Author Archives: Jackie

Specialist pharmacist Anthony Cox has a disturbing article on his site about how the BBC has fed the public hysteria and confusion over MMR, and what the consequences may be for Britain’s population. It’s one thing to be miffed about the BBC wasting licence fee money on extravagant trips for executives and reporting a stridently left-wing agenda, and it’s yet another to realise that — as a licence payer — your money is financing such dangerous misinformation. I have also written elsewhere on what this case, and the Today programme debacle with Andrew Gilligan’s inaccurate reporting on the Iraq dossier, tells us about what really motivates the BBC — and the deadly outcome it all may have.

Comparing and contrasting the BBC’s rotten behaviour on this issue with their rotten behaviour on the issue of WMDs — and the consequence of death in the latter, with the possible consequence of death in the former– brings to mind specks and planks. In both cases, the BBC’s employees have acted recklessly and purely out of self-interest. In both cases, they claim to have the public interest at heart, but in the case of MMR they have actually misled the public and caused greater confusion. I would say that also applies to the BBC’s behaviour in the case of WMDs and Dr David Kelly, and we will hear from Lord Hutton on that soon enough, but at the very least the BBC has itself admitted to getting things very wrong (while assuring those in its employ who got it wrong that their jobs are safe), and a good man died in the course of their follies.

None of this would be forgivable even if the British public wasn’t forced to finance it, but it’s made that bit more distasteful by the fact that we are.

This just in:

Caroline Thomson, the BBC’s director of policy and legal affairs, said the Today programme report that led to Lord Hutton’s judicial investigation fell short of the “truth and accuracy” that are the “gold standard of the BBC”. She said the concessions made by the BBC during the inquiry had been “spectacular”…

Ms Thomson conceded that the BBC’s regulatory structure, in which the organisation’s editorial impartiality is upheld by its board of governors, was “out of kilter with modern fashions of regulation”.

…Ms Thomson, speaking on Radio 4’s PM programme, said Andrew Gilligan’s original Today story, in which he reported concerns about the September 2002 dossier that made the case for war on Iraq, was not up to scratch. “Truth and accuracy are the gold standard … but you don’t always achieve it and we rather spectacularly had to admit that we hadn’t got the entire details of the Hutton story, the Gilligan story right.”

It only took an expensive, sweeping government enquiry — which saw the testimony of even the Prime Minister — and the suicide of a good man to get them to admit it.

And people wonder why this website exists…

BBC News Online journalists have been banned from referring to Saddam Hussein as a former dictator. Instead, they must call him “the deposed former President of Iraq”.

With 501 instances of Chile’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, being referred to as exactly that on the BBC’s website, one cannot help but wonder why such a double standard has come to pass at the BBC. What makes one former dictator more deserving of respect than another?

As the song says, the trouble with the truth is that it always begs for more truth. Exactly why a news organisation should wish to prevent the truth from being spoken by its journalists is, in this case, a total mystery.

If you’re outside of Britain, just be thankful that you’re not forced under penalty of law to finance this deeply troubled organisation’s efforts to dodge reality.

Anthony Cox — who will forever be remembered as the author of that WMD 404 page — notes an interesting exchange with the BBC on his blog.

After BBC News published a call for President Bush’s assassination, Cox wrote to them to ask for it to be removed. In a very curt, two sentence reply, BBC News claimed they never published the call for Bush’s death — because, as it happened, the comment had been deleted. The BBC eventually admitted that they had indeed published the call for President Bush’s murder, and apologised to Cox for having done so, and for getting it wrong when they claimed they hadn’t.

How did such a statement make it onto the BBC’s pages in the first place, though? That’s anyone’s guess.

It’s puzzling why the BBC’s coverage of the Iraqi foreign minister slamming the UN has omitted the harshest words he had for the supranational organisation. In case you missed it, the New York Times — unlike the BBC — did find it fit to print:

“Settling scores with the United States-led coalition should not be at the cost of helping to bring stability to the Iraqi people,” Mr. Zebari said in language unusually scolding for an occupant of the guest seat at the end of the curving Security Council table.

“Squabbling over political differences takes a back seat to the daily struggle for security, jobs, basic freedoms and all the rights the U.N. is chartered to uphold,” he said.

Taking a harsh view of the inability of quarreling members of the Security Council to endorse military action in Iraq, Mr. Zebari said, “One year ago, the Security Council was divided between those who wanted to appease Saddam Hussein and those who wanted to hold him accountable.

“The United Nations as an organization failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years, and today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure.”

Now, exactly why would the BBC find these quotes irrelevant and not worth reporting?