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From MediaChannel
Newsletters
The "News Dissector Weblog": Danny Schechter's dissections of the day's
news.
http://www.newsdissector.org/weblog
JANUARY 30, 2004
Decapitating the BBC
No Apologies on the Potomac
Viva Greg Dyke
The war on Iraq continues by other means. The
distortions and deceptions in the run-up to the war -- and during its
first bang-bang phase -- remain alive and well on both sides of the Atlantic.
In London, two leaders of the BBC resign and apologize -- sort of -- for
relatively minor errors in one radio report. A Prime Minister claims to
be vindicated. And in Washington a President vows to fight on and defends
the war that spawned this whole mess that threatens journalism everywhere.
This issue is about more than the BBC or the details of one report that,
depending on your view, was or was not properly sourced. Was the late
Dr. Kelly an "intelligence source" or a "weapons expert"? Should the BBC
have clarified earlier and satisfied their politically motivated nitpickers.
Was there too much arrogance on both sides? Does it matter anymore?
THE BBC BURNING
In London, the Guardian is using a war word, calling the Hutton Report
and its aftermath a "decapitation" of the BBC. Many journalists, as you
will read, decry the blows struck against the world's leading broadcaster.
In Washington, the man behind the war smirks on, saying he looks "forward
to debating the issue on the campaign trail." "Oh, no, you won't," said
Bush-booster Imus dismissively on MSNBC this morning. "No one could look
forward to that." More bluster is all it is.
When you learn the underreported background of M'lord Hutton, you will
be saying "Lord" with me and asking why anyone in their right mind is
surprised that his verdict was the whitewash it was. He has been in the
whitewash business for years.
DYKE ON FIRE
Here's the latest at 7:30 this AM:
The Director General of the BBC Greg Dyke resigned after in effect being
fired by his board. He was not a happy man. The Corporation (as it's called)
has officially apologized "unreservedly," but Dyke has not and is challenging
the one-sideness of the report. The Guardian reports,
Former BBC director general Greg Dyke today hit out at Alastair Campbell,
calling him "remarkably ungracious," and said Lord Hutton's conclusions
were "quite clearly wrong" on some points of law.
In an extraordinarily outspoken interview, Mr Dyke, whose resignation
yesterday in the wake of Lord Hutton's condemnation of the BBC caused
shock waves at the corporation, said he believed the broadcaster was not
the only one that made mistakes.
"We have an opinion... there are points of law in there where he is quite
clearly wrong.
"We were shocked that it was so black and white. We knew mistakes had
been made by us but we didn't believe they were only by us," he said in
an interview with GMTV this morning
http://media.guardian.co.uk/huttoninquiry/story/0,13812,1135108,00.html
"Cut the crap" seems to be their slogan, but so far no one can flush all
this away.
BBC STAFF ON FIRE
BBC reported yesterday that "In the wake of the resignation there were
spontaneous walkouts at BBC offices in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle,
Glasgow, Cardiff and Londonderry."
Paula Dear writes on BBC Online of staff members shouting "Bring back
Greg Dyke, Hutton Take a Hike"
(news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3442825.stm)
Not long ago Dyke was criticized by some at the BBC for expanding too
rapidly, especially into 24 Hour News and other digital channels, and
commercializing the place. He was criticized for diluting the BBC's public
service mission. Those complaints have been forgotten and seem minor now.
He has emerged as the outspoken symbol of the fight for the BBC's independence
from government manipulation.
Alastair Campbell, Blair's Minister of Propaganda, said, "it was right
that Greg Dyke resigned." He then criticized Dyke for refusing to accept
-- and continuing to blast -- Hutton's findings.
IMPRESSED BY DYKE
I have met Dyke on a few occasions and was pleasantly surprised by the
stands he took. I wrote about a speech he gave at the UN some years back
that challenged commercial broadcasters and affirmed the need for public
service broadcasting.
I wrote about his criticisms of US media coverage of the war, which he
said shocked him by its totally uncritical tone. He repeated those comments
in December at the World Electronic Media Forum where I spoke. He noted
that of 800 experts interviewed on US TV during the war and its prelude,
only THREE had been explicitly against the war.
WHO IS LORD HUTTON?
And now on to Lord Hutton, the Lord High Executioner who buoyed Blair
and blasted the Beeb.
Someone named "Re-Sista!" writes about him for Indymedia.
Upon his resignation as BBC chairman Gavyn Davies commented on the irreconcilable
contradictions between Hutton's "bald conclusions" and the balance of
evidence presented to the actual Inquiry.
Even BBC political editor Andrew Marr comments on Hutton's underlying
assumptions and background, making him more likely to believe and trust
certain social groups: "again and again, he comes down on the side of
politicians and officials."
So who is Hutton? And what is in his background to come to these extraordinary
conclusions? What has led to the report's extraordinary absolution of
Blair's war lies and attack on journalistic freedom?
The 72 year old Baron Hutton of Bresagh, County of Down, North Ireland,
is a classic representative of the British ruling establishment….Whilst
British Judges are overwhelmingly conservative, upper class, white, male
and biased, Hutton's background is even more compromised.
His name will be familiar to residents of the Six counties of Ulster.
During the bloody thirty years war Hutton was an instrument of British
state repression, starting in the late 1960's as junior counsel to the
Northern Ireland attorney general, and by 1988 rising to the top job of
Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland.
Hutton spent his career as Judge and Jury in the notorious northern Ireland
kangaroo "Diplock Courts." These were special non-Jury courts, condemned
by human rights advocates for their miscarriages of justice. He was hated
for this role by the families of the many innocent Catholics wrongly convicted
here.
Hutton distinguished himself after the Bloody Sunday massacre of civil
rights protesters in 1972. He played a key role in the ensuing judicial
cover-up called the Widgery Inquiry which absolved British troops of murder.
This miscarriage of justice is only now being investigated by the current
Saville inquiry.
However, he will be remembered in the rest of the UK for his role in the
1999 Pinochet affair. Another senior Judge, Lord Hoffman had contributed
to the decision to arrest and extradite the notorious former dictator
of Chile and mass murderer General Pinochet during his visit to Britain.
As a law lord, Hutton led the rightwing attack on Lord Hoffman, on the
excuse that Hoffman's links to the human rights group Amnesty International
invalidated Pinochet's arrest! Lord Hutton said, "[P]ublic confidence
in the integrity of the administration of justice would be shaken" if
Lord Hoffman's ruling was not overturned.
More recently, Hutton was also involved in the ruling that David Shayler,
the former MI5 agent, could not argue he was acting in the public interest
by revealing secrets.
This history of intimate links with, and knowledge of Britain's secret
military intelligence operations meant he could be a trusted pair of hands
when it came to the Kelly affair.
www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/01/284545.html
Thanks to Scoop Media for bringing this to my attention. Why wasn't this
known more widely before so many -- including many in the BBC -- put their
trust in a judge with this background? Hello?
MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE EMPIRE
More reaction to the Hutton report in a minute, but first let's head to
Washington for related developments on this side of the Big Pond. We leave
one former empire for an emerging one.
President Bush is at it again, defending the war again. Richard W. Stevenson
of the New York Times tells us this morning,
The Bush administration, justifying its decision to go to war against
Iraq despite its failure since then to find any banned weapons there,
said Thursday that even if Saddam Hussein had not amassed stockpiles of
nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, the United States could not have
afforded to leave him in power because he had a history of trying to acquire
them.
On the defensive since its former chief weapons inspector said he now
believed that Iraq did not have any substantial stockpiles of banned weapons
at the start of the war, the White House sent Condoleezza Rice, the national
security adviser, to appear on the three network morning news programs
to carry the message that the war was justified even if Mr. Hussein's
weapons stockpiles are ultimately found to have been nonexistent.
"With Saddam Hussein, we were dealing with somebody who had used weapons
of mass destruction, who had attacked his neighbors twice, who was allowing
terrorists to run in his country and was funding terrorists outside of
his country," Ms. Rice said on the "Early Show" on CBS.
www.nytimes.com/2004/01/30/politics/30WEAP.html
Paul Krugman of the New York Times could not take it any more and lashes
back with a comparison between what happened at the BBC and at the White
House. (For some reason, Richard's Nixon's refrain that "there will be
no whitewash at the White House" echoes in my ear as if we have all been
here before.)
So where are the apologies? Where are the resignations? Where is the investigation
of this intelligence debacle? All we have is bluster from Dick Cheney,
evasive W.M.D.-related-program-activity language from Mr. Bush -- and a determined effort to prevent an independent inquiry.
True, Mr. Kay still claims that this was a pure intelligence failure.
I don't buy it: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has issued
a damning report on how the threat from Iraq was hyped, and former officials
warned of politicized intelligence during the war buildup. (Yes, the Hutton
report gave Tony Blair a clean bill of health, but many people --
including a majority of the British public, according to polls -- regard that report as a whitewash.)
In any case, the point is that a grave mistake was made, and America's
credibility has been badly damaged -- and nobody is being
held accountable. But that's standard operating procedure. As far as I
can tell, nobody in the Bush administration has ever paid a price for
being wrong. Instead, people are severely punished for telling inconvenient
truths. And administration officials have consistently sought to freeze
out, undermine or intimidate anyone who might try to check up on their
performance.
www.nytimes.com/2004/01/30/opinion/30KRUG.html
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter is speaking out as well, writing
in the Guardian,
Tony Blair's government is heralding the Hutton report as a victory, since
it absolves it of any wrongdoing regarding the "sexing up" of intelligence
about the threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The Hutton report was released at the same time as the former head of
the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, testified before the US Congress that
there appear to be no WMD in Iraq, and that the intelligence was "all
wrong." Given this, the Hutton findings have taken on an almost Alice
in Wonderland aura. By focusing on a single news story broadcast by the
BBC, Hutton has created a political smokescreen behind which Blair is
seeking to distract the British public from the harsh reality that his
government went to war based on unsustained allegations that have yet
to be backed up with a single piece of substantive fact. Lord Hutton was
in a position to expose this; he chose not to. It is left to the public,
therefore, to carefully examine his report, looking not for what it contains
but for what is missing.
www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1134768,00.html
SOME REACTIONS TO THE BBC CRISIS:
Russell Brown writes in his blog "Hard News,"
Apparently, you need a higher standard of proof to make a radio broadcast
than to take a nation to war. I'm not being flippant. That is the clear
implication of the findings of the Hutton Inquiry.
We now know that the controversial "45 minutes" claim at the centre of
the affair was plucked from a stack of single-sourced raw intelligence
provided to MI6 by an Iraqi exile group which has since disowned it: "We
were passing it on in good faith. It was for the intelligence services
to verify it."
The claim arrived towards the end of the preparation of the Blair government's
first Iraqi weapons dossier and was swiftly added to the dossier's final
draft. It wasn't verified. It couldn't be verified. It wasn't intelligence,
it was a soundbite, from a source whose credibility could not be assessed.
It ran counter to more robust intelligence. It proved to be farcically
inaccurate. A journalist who had written a story based on that claim as
a tip would have been the laughing stock of his colleagues. And yet it
was considered fit to print in the most serious context imaginable.
Lord Hutton would presumably argue that an examination of the British
government's presentation of the case for war was beyond his remit. This
might be more sustainable if the law lord had not mused in his decision,
as BBC chairman Gavyn Davies noted, about restricting the ability of British
journalists to use unverifiable sources.
Investigative journalism, especially where it involves scrutiny of official
actions, is frequently about the use of sources, about making decisions
on their reliability and about occasionally getting it wrong.
www.publicaddress.net/default,990.sm#post990
A TASTE OF THE DEBATE: FROM LETTERS TO THE GUARDIAN
The following three letters are from www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1134854,00.html
Tim Dawson and Chris Frost, members of the National Union of Journalists,
write,
The consequences of Lord Hutton's report for the BBC and quality journalism
in general are far more worrying than whether an individual stays in his
job.… There is now a real risk to the independence of the BBC and a threat
to the ability of its journalists to hold government and others to account.
A step forward would be an independent ethical watchdog for the BBC, staffed
by journalists and others who enjoy public trust, that could deal with
inaccuracies quickly and transparently. A model - and source of help -
could be the National Union of Journalists' ethics council, elected from
the union's membership. It can and does discipline members found to have
breached our code of conduct.
Former BBC producer Stephen Phelps is more critical.
Two things are clear to me as a former producer of the BBC's Rough Justice
and deputy editor of Watchdog: the sloppy standards exposed are a consequence
of the BBC's slavish expansion into 24-hour news (where more output means
less journalism); and that the BBC must be led by a journalist, not an
entertainer, accountant, manager or business graduate.
When the principles of sound journalism are not fully understood and placed
at its very heart by those who run it, the BBC is setting itself up for
the kind of attack we have seen in the past two days, which strikes at
the foundations of this bastion of our democratic freedoms.
Alan Taylor writes,
Andrew Gilligan said: "Particular words and phrases should not be picked
out from a transcript for detailed forensic examination that distorts
the effect of the words at the time." Surely that is exactly what journalists
do? Why should they be excused the sort of scrutiny they subject others
to?
So you can see where my head is this morning. The reason: If the BBC can
be brought down this way, what's next?
There are many other stories of interest this morning. The Pixar people
have rebuked Michael Eisner. They don't want Disney distributing their
movies no more. Boo Hoo. Watch for Michael's resignation.
A LETTER TO US:
Ethel Steadman of Virginia Beach, VA, who calls herself a "frustrated
former working journo," writes, "Thanks...and keep up the good fight for
truth and accuracy in media! God bless you."
Thank you one and all. Sorry for all the letters I haven't received. I
hope this email mess can be sorted. Not only is the BBC under attack,
the Internet is too. The spam, the worms, the viruses are multiplying.
A terrorist attack? You tell me.
I am off to San Francisco this weekend for a Digital Independence conference.
I am so frustrated right now that I would prefer independence from the
digital world. I want to urge you to check out and sign up with MediaChannel's
Media for Democracy 2004 campaign. Also, special thanks to Andy Hughes,
our volunteer editor, who has done so well by all of us. A new editor,
I hope, joins us Monday.
Until then, enjoy the weekend and the big game. Oh... and before I go,
I have to pass this on: I was in a cab earlier in the week. The driver
had the radio on and a caller was gushing about how handsome our President
is. "He works out," she said. "He's in great shape," she said. "HE'S A
STUD MUFFIN."
Praise some Lords, save the BBC and enjoy the weekend. Write to me at
dissector@mediachannel.org or care of --
Globalvision
575 8th Avenue, 22nd Floor
New York, NY 10018
I am not getting email still. Maybe D Mail will work.
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