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Day 17 April, 2009

Entries 2 Total

What next now that Damian Green has been cleared?

Apr 17, ’09 8:40 AM

New Zealand’s No Right Turn has some thoughts:

Now that Green has been cleared, atten­tion must focus on those respons­ible: the Speaker of the House, who allowed police to search a Par­lia­ment­ary office without a war­rant, the Home Sec­ret­ary, whose com­plaints led to the raid, and the Cab­inet Office, which inflated the import­ance and sens­it­iv­ity of the inform­a­tion in order to force a police response. These people have all either delib­er­ately attemp­ted to under­mine the UK’s demo­cracy, or (in the Speaker’s case) failed to do their duty to defend it. And they should be held accountable.

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You can’t trust the BBC on the Middle East

Apr 17, ’09 8:37 AM

Robert Fisk, writ­ing for The Independent:

… why is it that Haaretz’s1 top cor­res­pond­ents — Amira Hass and Gideon Levy — write so much more cour­ageously about the human rights abuses of Israeli troops (and war crimes) than the BBC has ever dared to do? Whenever I’m asked by lec­ture audi­ences around the world if they should trust the BBC, I tell them to trust Amira and Gideon more than they should ever believe in the wretched broad­cast­ing station.

I can cer­tainly advise view­ers to turn to Sky TV’s infin­itely tougher cov­er­age of the Middle East and … I can recom­mend the cour­age with which Al-Jazeera Eng­lish cov­ers Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian-Israeli war.

My exper­i­ence is that you can’t trust the BBC on the Middle East either. While I was in Iraq on the human shield action, the BBC — some­what to my sur­prise — turned out to be one of the most fac­tu­ally incor­rect and least object­ive news source report­ing on the action. In fact I remem­ber at one point read­ing more object­ive stor­ies on the Fox News web­site, a pro­pa­ganda chan­nel for the Repub­lican Party of the U.S.

I doubt any­thing will change there until the place is cleansed of people like the mor­ally cor­rupt Mark Thompson, the BBC’s dir­ector general.

Notes:
  1. Haaretz is Israel’s old­est daily news­pa­per. [↩]
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