ah… i ment this: http://blugg.com/stuff/foxs_view_of_the_bbc_player.htm
I am speechless.
If it is real (seriously unlikely) then it is the worst twisting of what’s going on I’ve seen in a while. Nazi propeganda wasn’t as bad as this.
The BBC was anti-british govornment and anti-war, not anti-American. If anything America was virtually irrelevant in the whole affair.
That was so catastrophically twisted that I couldn’t even bear to finish watching it. What hurts me is someone out there is eating this up, hook, line, and sinker. This is about as subtle as some of the anti-Axis propaganda that was aired during World War II. A brief synopsis and review of “The Spirit of '43” can be found here. I suppose the video could be downloaded as well*.
*In no way, shape, or form should this statement be misconstrued to imply that I am in favor of, or suggesting the use of, file-sharing. I simply choose to acknowledge an existing alternative should a party be interested in viewing the footage directly, as opposed to reading a synopsis that does not fully express the propagandist nature of the short.
Thing is: even if it isn’t real, it looks VERY real and will be seen by americans (who know nout about the hutton report), don’t u think?
It’s Fox news, what did you expect?
Pretty much my only contact with Fox News is when it gets pitted on these boards, so I would have thought my expectations of it were pretty low; probably unfairly low, given that only their worst stupidities tend to get pitted.
This, however, has exceeded absolutely every one of my expectations, in a thoroughly downward direction. I’m used to inane commentary, experts who wouldn’t be able to reason their way out of a paper bag and “indepth” reporting so shallow there’s babies peeing in it, but this just looks like some nutter hijacked a studio. Who is this kook?
Oh, and it’s real.
Dead Badger
It’s John Gibson.
[Ignorant American]
Taking away the silly spin (BBC hates America/Americans, etc) what’s the SD on Gilligan and Kelly? Did Gilligan report that the Iraqis were beating back the Coalition? Did Kelly kill himself? I haven’t heard this story before now.
[/IA]
Uh, folks, it’s an editorial. It doesn’t do anything that all the crap by like-minded imbeciles doesn’t do, even in jolly ol’ England.
Isn’t this like the sixth thread we’ve had on this dipshit?
You have to understand tho’ that it does seem odd to the British, as UK TV news (i.e.e BBC News, ITN) is very editorial-lite and mainly consisting of analysis and rarely opinion.
Ah. I’m going to fail at giving you a year’s worth of news in one post, but here’s my patented nutshell version:
Andrew Gilligan, a sort of roving reporter for Today, the BBC’s premier radio news show, met with Dr. David Kelly (a Ministry of Defence scientist), who was not authorised to do so. Kelly said some things, which appear to have been limited to intimations that the government was influencing the intelligence work on “The Dossier”[sup]1[/sup] in an improper way. What Gilligan reported however, was that a high-level intelligence source had said that a key claim[sup]2[/sup] was inserted into The Dossier while known to be false. The government strongly denied this, and eventually Kelly’s name came out. After questioning by a parliamentary committee on the matter, Kelly committed suicide. An inquiry was rapidly launched (and this is the key bit) into the circumstances surrounding Kelly’s death. The whole war, the reasons for it and its reporting by the beeb were only considered wherein they directly contributed to the circumstances leading to Kelly’s death.
To cut a longish story short, Hutton took this to mean that his report should cover:
a) whether Kelly made the claims reported by Gilligan,
b) whether Kelly was unfairly treated by the MOD before and after his name came out, and
c) whether the 45-minute claim was knowingly falsified by the government.
The answers reached by Hutton were no, no and no.
My opinion on the whole thing is this:
[ul][li] Gilligan is a plonker. He buffed up his story and is not, IMO, a great journalist. The editorial chain of the BBC is a bit weird, and probably needs looking at. The governors and all the people who completely backed up the story were stupid to do so without even checking Gilligan’s notes, from which they would have plainly seen the exaggeration.[/li][li] Hutton did not “clear” the government over the war. He exonerated them on the claim that they deliberately lied in this one specific instance.[/li][li] This has absolutely fuck all to do with the US. The Beeb was not forced to “pay up” for its “blatant anti-Americanism”, it was forced to back down over a claim made in a story about the UK government. Only a complete dickhead such as this Gibson would infer from this that the US was in some way involved.[/li][li] We don’t refer to it as “Mother,” Gibson you pillock, it’s “Auntie Beeb.” Sheesh.[/ul][/li]
As for the broader coverage being anti-American, well, I disagree, although I can see how next to Fox News any attempt to report the truth might appear uncommonly like it. I have no idea about the other Gilligan reporting Gibson mentions, and given the factual content of the rest of his piece and follow-up on the website, I’m frankly not going to take his word for it.
[sup]1[/sup] This was the published intelligence work that the government put out shortly before the war when they felt that no-one actually believed them.
[sup]2[/sup] The key claim being that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” ready to be used in 45 minutes. These later turned out to be “battlefield weapons” but were widely reported in the tabloids as though Britain itself were in 45-minute danger, and the government made no effort to correct this. Tony Blair now claims he “didn’t know” that the claim referred to battlefield weapons.
friedo, while I agree that this is an editorial and should be taken as such, I disagree that it’s not anything unusual. I really didn’t think I had the capacity to be surprised by much, but this really is one of the most astoundingly stupid things I’ve seen on a mainstream network. I think it’s probably impossible to explain just how stupid this appears from a UK perspective. MC makes a good point though - editorialising in general isn’t seen on TV all that much over here. It’s just … weird to see someone so blatantly lie on TV.
I’m an American. I was in London for about a week starting three days before the invasion. Between doing the usual tourist stuff, I was glued to the BBC watching what was happening. It wasn’t all that different than CNN other than the graphics not being as good.
Haj
Calm down. Unlike 99.999% of Disney works, The Spirit of '43 is not under copyright. It was produced for the U.S. government, and has always been in the public domain.
Thank you, Dead Badger.