Joined Up Journalism II

FBI Head Predicts Al-Qaeda Defeat (7 April 2008, BBC)

A week is a long time in the 'war on terror'. The head of the FBI Robert Mueller (speaking in London to an audience which included Johnathon Evans, head of MI5, and Ian Blair, the metropolitan police commissioner) said that the West can achieve victory over Al-Qaeda within three-and-a-half years.

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(One may wonder what this victory might look like on the streets of Britain. Could it be that in three-and-a-half years all the attacks will stop? Could it be that in three-and-a-half years we can do away with all the surveillance measures that our government has brought in in the name of 'terror'; measures which have turned liberty into little more than a thing of memory?)

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Ignoring certain truths about Al-Qaeda and the 'war on terror' for a moment, consider the following story, also from the BBC, and coming less than a week after they reported that an end was in sight in the fight against Al Qaeda.

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Terror Threat To UK 'Is Growing' (13 April 2008, BBC)

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It makes no sense. We are just three-and-a-half years from defeating Al-Qaeda. Then a week later, Al-Qaeda is a growing threat. We're winning the 'war on terror'. And then a week later losing it.

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The BBC doesn't flinch.

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You could perhaps defend the BBC by saying that they were just reporting what they were told. In the first instance by Mueller, and in the second by home secretary Jacqui Smith. But then the BBC is of no use to any of us unless it validates what it is told by making sure it is the truth. If the words don't correspond to the world, they're meaningless.

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This it seems to me is the problem with the BBC. Quite simply: they don't validate what they are told. When a member of government or any kind of official speaks, they all too often report it without question. Even when this unquestionning faith leads to the innate and confusing kind of contradictions that you see in the above stories.

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Around a year-and-a-half ago I wrote to the BBC to ask them why they continued to report that Osama Bin Laden was behind 9/11 when the FBI had said that in the four-and-a-half years since the attacks they had found no "hard evidence" that he was. They said Bin Laden remained the chief suspect because the US government said he was. I asked if they had seen or come across any evidence linking Bin Laden to the attacks. They had not. I found ths astonishing. It really seemed that things like evidence and the truth did not matter, even though Bin Laden's guilt was given as justification to launch military strikes against Afghanistan.

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In the real world, when people continually lie you lose faith in them. You start to treat their assertions with scepticism. This is a very understandable state of affairs.

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So when General David Patraeus told the BBC in March that Iran was "behind Green Zone attack" in Iraq, you might expect a degree of caution on the BBC's part. Is there evidence? According to Patraeus, there is. Did the BBC ask what this evidence was? No. Instead we learn that Patraeus "thought Tehran had trained, equipped and funded insurgents who fired the barrage of mortars and rockets."

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The BBC continues to report and relay what these people say without question or investigation, no matter how contradictory, dubious or downright false what they say is. And they are carrying the Iran war propoganda with the same regard for truth as when they carried the Iraq propoganda. That is, with no regard at all.