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jeudi 29 janvier 2004
 

Rewrite: Jan 30 - still sick at heart!

Eric Olsen blundered in where angels and devils alike fear to tread in yesterday's 'Blogcritics' editorial, 'BBC Spanked Soundly'.
Eric's links are good ones, but -- ridiculously swift to use his reading of the Hutton report to grind an old axe -- our American friend calls the Beeb "anti-war, anti-Blair, leaning way to the left"! This is absurd, superficial and smug.
I can only imagine Eric doesn't very often listen to the BBC and certainly knows far fewer of the people who work or have worked for that vast institution than I have.
And I'm rewriting this entry, because though I woke up once again with a sledgehammer headache, it's eased off a little today, leaving me more clear-headed to say that I find Eric's trans-Atlantic punditry irritatingly complacent.
The BC editor has of late included in a 'New Year's Resolution' poll the options to:

  • Pick fights with other Blogcritics.
  • Post, comment, link more, More, MORE DAMMIT!!!
I wouldn't vote for either of those, but since the list reads suspiciously like an editorial rant or a party whip at work, I'd like to suggest that if Eric is going to write more provocative editorials, he'd do better to start by knowing what he's talking about.

Before returning to Hutton, the two other blows I mentioned yesterday were waking up with a really unwanted dose of whatever's going round. So did many people in Paris, going by the state of the Canteen's clients at lunchtime, Sam's plea for paracetemol as he served us all, misery in the Métro and the throbbing skull of one of the doctors I kept an appointment with today.
The second blow, this one below the belt, sent Natalie's 'Secrets of the Worshipped Male' to the top of my reading list. Certain recent events were elucidated when the concierge knocked on my door with a very big packet.
I have no desire to be a "WM", but my first experience of being the man who is sent back gifts he gave a woman, without so much as a note, isn't one I would wish to repeat.
I'm still not quite sure that Nat's book should soon be reviewed rather than burned, as I've already noted, as a manual far too revealing -- and extremely funny -- to be bestowed on the public at large.

Getting back to my relief that blows usually come only in threes, I really have now read through the Hutton report (BBC). And rather more than just skimmed it, though I didn't re-read all the evidence in its hundreds of pages.
It is frightening!
If this outrageously one-sided document is British justice at its best, then may all the gods help that country of my birth, because it's in a very bad way.
My friend Tony told me he hasn't "seen so much TV since 9/11, but then journalism's my trade". He thought, in a note, that the only people really likely to wade through all that stuff are we journalists.
Fortunately, he's wrong. Even if they're not all ploughing through the report itself, it's pretty clear what a lot of Brits think if this 'Have Your Say' page is anything to go by.
If I risk seeing Tony for lunch as planned -- since I really don't think he needs the foul bug I've got on top of his other reasons to trek to this part of town for a medical appointment this afternoon -- I shall be strongly contesting his conclusion that the departure of BBC director general Greg Dyke (BBC story on what I listened to this morning) is a "good thing".
It's true, as Tony contended, that under Dyke the Beeb has been guilty of "dumbing down" on occasion.<
However, in the wake of the Hutton bombshell, the former chief executive at the corporation and a lot of its staff have behaved with an honour and integrity conspicuously lacking on the part of the country's "Teflon prime minister" and many of his mates.
One of the very few bloggers I managed to find in the newsreader last night who have already managed to stop either crowing or vomiting their disgust over Hutton and what it means for the media at large, not just the Beeb, is Hetty Litjens.
'Heli', who goes on this morning to put up a quick interesting link asking 'Who is Hutton?' ('Heaven and Hell'), had already managed yesterday to begin writing some intelligent analysis of what it all means.
I was just too damned disheartened. Yesterday was one of those days when I really couldn't think how I still often succeed, after three decades often at the hot end of journalism, in believing any politicians any of the time.

This whole appalling and "extremely shabby" episode, as Tony just summed it up on the 'phone, saying he is prepared to risk my bug to discuss it all further at the Canteen.
Tony, who as regular visitors will know is now retired after a working lifetime in the press, needs cheering up as much as I was this morning by happier developments in life.
I have very rarely known him confess to depression, since he's a very gutsy man, but he tells me that this Hutton business and its implications for "the old country" put him in the blackest of moods he's known in a very long time.
It's not a "spanking" the BBC has had, Eric!
The whole institution has been rocked to the core by a shameful collision with squeaky clean politicians that should be scaring the shit out of any of us who lay claim to being professional journalists and, above all, editors.
Throughout the months of the inquiry, I retained some faith that Lord Hutton might use his admittedly restricted brief to come up with something other than what does, indeed, read very dangerously like the "whitewash" some are calling it.
I was wrong.
10:18:37 PM  link   your views? []



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