my name is mwd

Ahh, I try to avoid politics on here, as I’m a bit shallow polical wise. I’m interested, but I just feel I should really pay more attention. Anyway, the Hutton report seems a bit of a whitewash, giving teh government a complete, and somewhat unbelieveable, bill of clean health, whilst slamming the BBC something rotten. I think the beeb where a bit foolish in not really investigating the claims made by Andrew Gilligan, I think the fallout has been a bit over the top, which seems to be the general opinion at the moment. As usual, Sam has some interesting comments. I just hope that the BBC is not neutered as a result of this - questioning journalism of any form is good. There are those <cough>Gerald Kaufman</cough> that say it isn’t appropriate for a tax funded authority not to be answerable to the government. I’d say the inverse is true - unlike commercial media the BBC don’t have any sponsers that they have to worry about offending (with the possible exception the government who raise the tax that pays them, and I think we now know that they’re not worried about them (at least to date)). Thus I think financially independent news media has an important role in our society.

It’s been interesting to watch the BBC output around the Hutton report. Their news output has been completely unbiased, and has stuck to reporting just the facts, which they’ve done very well, where as predicatably a lot of other outlets <cough>Sky News</cough> seem to have taken a good shot at their opponent. More interesting is the actual sorry from BBC commentators that Greg Dyke has left. I don’t really know much about Greg Dyke beyond the Dead Ringers impression done in the style of Michael Caine, but I’m not sure that the CEO had to go. Certainly I think the editors that failed to do much of a review of Gilligan needed to be answerable, and I think the CEO might have done more to try and check up on some of the facts, but for the heads of the BBC to fall for what was a simple claim, which whilst not true in letter I suspect has truth in spirit (that the dossiers were a PR exercise to get us to war rather than a good case for war), made once before most people were up, seems a bit OTT.

Of course, I think the interesting question is still being asked in the house by Charles Kennedy (rather than the ya-boo style of Michael Howard, who seems just as bad now as he was before) as to can we have an indepenant inquiry into why we went to war. I just hope that the current government don’t get away with taking us to war for fictitious reasons.