. True, everybody’s done it in this case, so what the heck, but you might have thought the BBC would have had enough of misreporting sources. Nicholas Vance has an excellent account of how the BBC has managed to distil the the interviews given by Dr Kelly,… sorry, Dr Kay, into a pithy little sound-byte, ‘it turns out we were all wrong’. True, the ‘sound-byte’ itself as an irritating noun could as well as have been invented by Blair and Campbell, but the BBC reminds me of a person who thinks they know the rules of a game, and then proves by performance (by performance I mean, well, a number of them have had to resign) that they don’t- and can’t stand the fact. What’s irritating in particular is that there’s a perfectly good sceptical approach to be taken, but the BBC can’t resist the controversial name-calling that, again, they’ve learned from the politicians.
As Nicholas points out, referring to a Guardian profile (I’ve ruthlessly borrowed Nicholas’ links), they’ve also learned from their recent mentor, Greg Dyke. Dyke’s obviously an excellent media man (who triumphed at the BBC in the ratings over his old ITV employers) and an ideological warrior- but Hutton showed he knew nothing about Government, either with a big or a small ‘g’. It seems to me that the politicians can only get away with their spin and their name-calling while the press lacks the moral authority to criticise them for it- which is where the BBC’s political stance interferes with their primary job of being impartial observers. They can’t have their cake and eat it; they can’t accuse the UK Government or the US President on their chosen ideological grounds (here I’d call them ‘post-colonial relativism’)- and report Dr Kay’s remarks faithfully. Melanie Phillips explains why the two don’t tally in the case of Dr Kay.