This entry was posted on
Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at
12:58 pm and is filed
under Rupert ‘The Evil One’ Murdoch.

Independent – BBC criticised after it rebukes Humphrys for slating Cabinet: Rod Liddle, a former editor of the daily news programme, said: “The BBC after Hutton seems to have lost its spine. It has no intellectual grip on what constitutes impartiality, objectivity and subjectivity. It doesn’t understand that we know that presenters and journalists within the BBC have views and that if they have given a speech about them, it’s a form of transparency. “If what John said demonstrates anything, it demonstrates utter impartiality. He’s the most impartial journalist I’ve ever come across … He’s sceptical of all politicians.” Mr Liddle added: “It should be noted that the newspaper which published this biased and incorrect report of what John Humphrys said is part of a New Labour cabal which has always hated John Humphrys. That very newspaper, The Times, has since said the comments are of no consequence whatsoever.”

It’s enough to make you weep. Had the BBC stood by their man – as they bloody well should have done – this mud would have failed to stick. But here they are smearing it on themselves in a bizarre appeasement ritual. All the uneducated eye will see is the mud – and ‘uneducated’ is the primary keyword here.

I find it both amusing and disturbing that Humprhys opened the ‘offending’ speech with an anecdote involving Blair’s election-eve “I’ve got a big cock and use it 5 times a night” interview (published in the other major ‘news’ paper that is part of that same New Labour cabal; the same ‘news’ paper that feeds us on-message editorials from Downing St via Page 3) – and it didn’t even rate a bloody mention beyond the ‘transcript’ published by the Times!

Think about that… in his ‘offending’ speech Humphrys leads with an anecdote where he stands next to the Prime Minister at a urinal and comments on the size of his penis.

And it doesn’t rate a mention.

Can you imagine the reaction to this kind of thing 10 years ago? Even 5 years ago? Sadly, now we allow such base and infantile propaganda to pass unchallenged because the ‘war’ on terror is so fucking serious – while a good man gets pilloried for suggesting that a bunch of liars may have the occasional problem with telling the truth (about anything from their cock size to presence of WMD in Iraq).

Blair has to work to compromise the BBC out of sheer necessity. Murdoch does it out of sheer lust for power. Together they’re whittling away at the institution’s credibility (when they don’t have a scrap of credibility to share between them). It doesn’t help that this new spine-free set of executives at the BBC is so willing to carve off pounds of flesh and hand them over without question or complaint.

Often, all the BBC has to do is say nothing in order to hurt itself. And all too frequently, nothing is exactly what we hear.

All of the lies about The Power of Nightmares that followed the London bombings – the greatest and boldest of them being that the programme claimed there were no terrorists at all – should have been met by a bold repeat of the programme with tops and tails putting forth the necessary context… that the only thing that has changed is that this wrongheaded and manipulative approach to Muslim extremists has finally had dire consequences on our shores.

Almost everything we are being fed regarding the ‘war’ on terror is a lie and/or a bluff designed to shield the One Big Lie behind it all. And lately, the BBC seems to be afraid of speaking the truth. They look set to go out with a whimper for fear of someone at Downing St yelling “Bang!”… and more genuine explosions will result from an ongoing failure to call this government to account, you mark my words.

UPDATE – You can say Tony’s a liar if you’re from Sky: Take these quotes from a broadcast news political editor, in a session at the Edinburgh Festival: “Tony Blair lied to me… John Reid lied over the NHS… They [politicians] all lie absolutely consistently.” So was the author of these remarks, Sky’s Adam Boulton, treated to hysterical calls for high-level inquiries and covered with heaps of ordure? Er, no. His remarks weren’t reported anywhere, even though they were made in front of an audience of journalists.