Tony Blair has an undiminished appetite for continuing his work. To continue his work he has to be in power/office (surely the same thing in this context??) So, his appetite for power is undimished.
And how on Earth does reporting that Tony Blair wants to continue in office/in power/doing his work constitute a continued
“assault” on Tony Blair by the BBC (see how I changed the words around there but retained the essential meaning).
Do words really mean such different things in America? And, if so maybe Americans should desist from semantic commentary on British media. December, as you believe this has been such a scandalous affair, please provide a cite of Tony Blair attacking this report. Or of any Labour party minister/MP/ex-MP/supporter attacking this report. Or any British media source/commentator attacking this report.
Did you read this thread? december did point this out, but he also neglected to say that this same spin was repeated by the conservative British press, too.
Cite please. The BBC is an organisation employing over 23000 people in Britain alone. Any evidence of this “liberal” allegation (whatever that means anyway).
How do you know? You have seen a small part of the transcript of the press conferance. You have no idea how the press were briefed by Tony Blair’s spin doctors. The fact that a very similar wording appears in several unrelated media sources suggests that the wording was used by someone.
To be “in power” is pretty much a synonym for being in office in political parlance. Blair’s reply was in the context of his staying in office for another term. So I don’t see any distortion in the statement by the BBC. Since various newspapers from a wide political spectrum chose the same phrase it is difficult to see what the fuss is about.
The BBC must be doing a pretty good job if its critics have to scrape the bottom of the barrel in this fashion to attack it.
That’s an absolutely outrageous request. december may not be the model of unbiased posting, but this particular thread has much to recommend it. I agree with the OP that the BBC (and other sources) rendered a deceptive quote.
Your request might have garnered some sympathy had it been addressed to december in a thread that was truly unfounded and without basis. But to place it in this thread, which makes a very clear and cogent point, is useless.
And by the way – if you’re asking posters that use the boards “…as [their] own personal stomping ground[s] for unfounded and biased attacks and spin…” I assume you’ll be hitting Reeder up for an apology as well?
I agree, but that’s not quite what the BBC’s paraphrase said. They used the phrase “appetite for power,” which has a different connotation than an appetite for getting work done. The BBC’s usage implies that Blair wants power. What Blair actually said was that he wanted to accomplish a “big job of work.”
Bricker and Chicago Faucet - I don’t know why you are not able to follow along with the thread, but here’s the story so far. Tell me if you think this is a fair assessment.
december (yet again) attacked the BBC. Not all the newspapers that used the identical quote, just the BBC. He referred to the “scummy trick” and “malicious interpretation” as further proof of the BBC’s “continued assault on Blair”.
The debate here was supposedly about “Whether that use of quotation marks is improper journalism” and “Whether the BBC is conducting a continuing assault on Tony Blair”. Granted, the former does provide grounds for an interesting debate, but clearly that is not the main purpose of this thread. The thread title makes that clear.
Then jjimm did some excellent research which basically destroyed the argument that the BBC was specifically (and maliciously) attacking Tony Blair.
To which december could only reply
When jjimm pointed out that
december did not respond. Did not admit that he was wrong. Anyone know why?
I think jjimm has made it clear that this was not a case of the BBC “continuing their assault” on Blair. How could it be when three other major papers (including a conservative one) used exactly the same quote?
Again, december does not acknowledge this fact. No apology for wrongly accusing the BBC; no admitting that this thread was simply (yet another) excuse to attack the BBC.
I believe that enough is enough. Why this sort of nonsense is allowed (especially in Great Debates, which ought to be about debating ideas, not furthering one’s agenda), I do not know. Perhaps because he’s so polite about it…
This is not about conservative or liberal. It’s about the way one “debates”; the starting of misleading, biased, agenda-driven threads; the spin and the lack of mea culpa; the failure to admit the truth; the continued lies and distortion for the sake of furthering one’s own personal ideology; and the crapping of it all over these boards.
(On preview I see that december is continuing his assault on the BBC. No mention of the fact that the other papers did this as well. It’s “the BBC’s usage”, not the FT’s et al.)
There are two points raised by the preceding discussion:
An attack on the BBC; and
An attack on the quotation.
I agree that the former is misplaced. It’s unclear to me if the Financial Times, Telegraph, and Independent derived their quote from the BBC coverage or independently; in eaither case, it’s clear that the BBC is not deserving of sole blame.
I maintain that the attack on the quote itself is quite justified, and ample reason for this thread’s existence.
I hold the BBC in a higher regard than I do other sources of information. Unless there is more that Blair said that the headline is referring to, I think that it was not the BBC at its best – even if other newspapers did the same thing. Very uncharacteristic of the BBC and worthy of comment by december. I’m a liberal, myself, and don’t like it when free speech is squelched from either side.
What puzzles me is why did all of the newspapers misstate his comment in identical terms?
If I were a journalist, I would think twice before narrowing someone’s actual words to one quoted word. That technique can certainly be used to mislead.
I can remember one time when the local newspaper said that during inservice, teachers were “working” at school. That very much implied that it was not real work.
But my favorite is this: Mr. Smithson was seen leaving the hotel with his “wife.”
Blair's answer about "work" was in the context of a question about his staying in office for a full third term ie. about his staying in power. So **in this particular context** "power" and "work" are pretty much the same. At worst this is a minor and inconsequential inaccuracy.
Here is the question btw:
“At the weekend your friend and Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, said quite categorically that you would stand at the next election and serve a full third term. Was he speaking with your full authority?”
Thank you december, we’ve successfully established that “power” and “hard work” are not direct synonyms. Although I can’t find the point where myself or anyone else argued that they were.
Now, do you have anything to say to my actual point about the context that the words were used in which is what I was actually talking about:
And take into account CyberPundit’s point, which I had not picked up on about the question that Tony Blair was answering:
While you’re there, do you have any response to the other parts of my previous post that you ignored:
To be honest, this thread is a complete non-event, it puts concerns about the future of the BBC into context if this is really what it’s opponents are reduced to. I won’t go as far as some others and demand an apology for the thread, but december should certainly apologise for the title of the thread which, on any reading, is a total mangling of the truth.
I wonder if it’s possible that this is deliberate. I may be giving december too much credit here, but perhaps the thread title is a deliberate distortion of the truth. I mean, the “power/hard work” thing is a bit of a misrepresentation, but an “assault”? That’s a bit much, even for a BBC-hater like him. I should think even he sees that as quite a stretch. An “assault” would be more along the lines of “Blair’s a jerk” or “Tony Blair’s mother wears combat boots.”
So, what say you december? Have you whooooshed us all with your thread title? Or, as I suspect is more likely, are you guilty of pretty much the same sort of distortion you accuse the BBC of?
Is it simply possible that “power” has a slightly different connotation in Britian vs. in the United States? E.g, december works himself into a lather because he’s interpreting “power” as “mastery of the heaven and earth,” whereas British Dopers (and the BBC) simply consider it as “an urge to stay in office”? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time there’s a linguistic difference between American English and British English, after all.
I emailed the Oxblog blogger with the info I’d derived for this thread, asking “Just wondering why in this instance you singled the Beeb out and not the others?”
…but then goes on to cite Hitchens bitching about BBC announcers pronouncing ‘Wolfowitz’ with a Germanic, rather than Americanized, pronunciation. :rolleyes:
The BBC and some other UK newspapers implied that they were synonyms. They quoted something Blair had said about work as if he had said it about power.
I agree with Avalonian and others that this misquote was a minor flaw. However, I also believe that the BBC has been conducting an assault on the Blair administration.
I’ve said it. The BBC (and others) got the quote a bit wrong, in a way that had a more negative connotation than what he actually said. I agree that this particular quotation error is not a big deal. I find it a interesting from a POV of proper rheoric. Various posters have raised good points as to whether or not there’s anything wrong with this type of quoting.
The other half of the topic – the BBC’s alleged partisanship – is an important debate.
jjimm – Good work in getting your info to Oxblog. For the record, here’s the full quote that you disparaged:
I don’t agree with your rolleyes at the consistent mispronounciation of Wolfowitz’s name. Neither the Germanic pronounciation nor the American pronounciation are relevant. The relevant one is Wolfowitz’s pronounciation. It’s disrespectful to consistently mispronounce someone’s name. It shows that one hasn’t bothered to get the name right.
This was my take on it, looking afresh this morning. Here (unless I’m the only one, of course) power is not seen as anything monstrous, but just a way of saying that one is in office, in charge if you will, of the country.
I know it’s been said above but I’m convinced that’s really all there is to the ridiculous assertion that the BBC is out to get ‘Our Tone’!!
