Saturday, March 13, 2010

Britain’s Got HAD Talent

Bob Geldof sounds out on what has grown rather obvious to any BBC World Service listener: their standards of journalism stink. In spite of that, they take it out on Bob Geldof’s good works while trying to make some silly argument about journalistic exceptionalism (or supremacy, if you boil it down to what’s implied):

Despite the on-the record refutation of everything in Plaut's report by very senior White House advisers, high-level UN delegates, senior British ex-ambassadors and diplomats, all the aid agencies, the leader of rest the Tigrayan relief group at the time, the prime minister of Ethiopia and rebel leader at the time, and me, and without a single shred of evidence, not one iota of evidence, they cannot bear to acknowledge the grim reality, the actual truth – that they were wrong. The BBC World Service is so far off the rails it quite literally cannot recognise or acknowledge truth when it encounters it.
What do they mean by ‘exceptionalism’? Every time the notion of ‘special rights’ for one sort of fashionable public feature comes up, such as it has been with journalism for a while, it seems rather obvious that what they want is a sort of status above the limitations a law-abiding person would live by. The only way to call these folks an ‘unimpeachable super citizen’ would be to insure that the general population has fewer rights (of free speech, of freedom from criticism, etc.,) than they do.

No comments: