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28th June 2011
EXTRICATING PAXO FROM THE GRAVY
In a pfd file headed “Editorial Standards, Findings, Appeals to the Trust and other editorial issues considered by the Editorial Standards Committee, May 2011 issued June 2011″ -
- the BBC Trust has now delivered its verdict on the Paxman article about the Iraq war that Stan Rosenthal put to them after the BBC Director of News had only partially upheld his complaint that the article contravened the BBC’s impartiality rules.
Rosenthal’s case was that the piece as a whole was biased, not just the part that referred to “the lies that took us to war” and sneered at “Tony Blair striding around with his new best friend in his excruciatingly ball crushing jeans”.
Not surprisingly the Trust cleared Mr Paxman of the wider charge but in doing so they inadvertently revealed how far they are prepared to go to absolve the BBC’s leading political interviewer from any wrongdoing. The whitewash can best be discerned by comparing their responses (based on many pages of irrelevant data compiled by their researchers) with the precise arguments made in the complaint.
Since there are so many ways in which the Trust has bent over backwards to get Mr Paxman off the hook I will be dealing with them in a series of posts rather than in one post.
To start with, let us compare the overall justification of their decision with the main thrust of the complaint, succinctly summarised in a blog post by Peter Hitchens when the response of the BBC’s Director of News became public. “Mr Paxman”, he wrote “expressed the bog standard view of the London Left about the Iraq war”.
Not so, according to the Great and the Good who make up the Editorial Standards Committee of the BBC Trust. The article was “essentially a defence of scepticism in taking anything for granted, however compelling it may appear at first sight. That at times the article may have reflected some of the arguments of those who opposed the war was incidental to the theme on which Jeremy Paxman chose to focus.”
So as long as one-sided, anti-war views can be dressed up in some arty-farty piece about the difference between reality and appearances that’s quite alright as far as the BBC’s impartiality rules are concerned.
Now let us turn to the first of the three sections that the Trust broke the complaint into when they presented their findings. This was Paxman’s use of the term “dodgy dossier”, without inverted commas (the other two sections, whether Paxman was right in referring to the loss of trust in government after the war, and whether the article overall had expressed a wholly one-sided anti-war viewpoint, will be dealt with in later posts).
While the Trust admitted that it was not clear which of the two dossiers Paxman was referring to (the September 2002 one covering the intelligence relating to Saddam’s WMD or the February 2003 one relating to Iraq’s history of deception and concealment ) they chose to concentrate on the one, that had prompted the description of dodgy (the February one) because of its inclusion of the work of a student taken from the internet. In doing so they referred extensively to how the Foreign Affairs Select Committee had repeatedly used this term in their description of this dossier (albeit in inverted commas) and how Jack Straw and Alastair Campbell had subsequently conceded that this dossier was “a complete horlicks” and “a bad own goal”. They then narrowed down a dictionary definition of “dodgy” to mean “unreliable and questionable” and concluded that there was clear evidence that the shortcomings in the presentation of the February dossier could be described as unreliable and questionable so Mr Paxman was right to use the term.
All very convincing until you consider the other side of the argument that Mr Rosenthal had put to the Trust in his comments on the paperwork relating to this appeal (which have been exclusively passed on to this site).
“The paperwork”, he said,” rightly explains that, strictly speaking, the term “dodgy dossier” applied to the February 2003 briefing document on Iraq’s history of concealment and deception which plagiarised internet material and then continues its analysis on the basis that it was this document that Mr Paxman had in mind in his article, However my argument was that in the context of the related paragraph referring to the lies that took us to war the term came across as applying to the more important dossier on WMD intelligence released the previous September. The paper itself admits that the two documents are conflated by the media when the term “dodgy dossier” is used . Indeed Ms Boaden, the BBC’s Director of BBC News, obviously used the term as relating to the intelligence dossier when she referred to the dodgy dossier “being a fair shorthand to describe the document which alleged that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction” when such weapons were not actually found after the invasion..
He therefore thought that “all the material in the paper relating to the February dossier should be ignored and that the Committee should confine its attention to whether Mr Paxman’s use of this term was more likely to have been related to the September intelligence document and to whether using it (without putting inverted commas round it) in conjunction with his earlier reference to the lies that took us to war gave the impression that he was on the side of those who claimed that the document was dodgy in the sense that it was a deliberately deceptive, sexed-up document designed to persuade the public that Saddam had WMD when the authorities knew all along that this was not the case.”
Mr Rosenthal’s comment was of course totally ignored in the Trust’s findings.
Just a couple of examples of how the Trust have outrageously contorted the terms of the complaint put to them to fit their preconceived findings. Others will follow in due course.
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RELATED
John Rentoul has also written on the report here – “Jeremy Paxman? Anti-war? Perish the thought”
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Sign the Ban Blair-Baiting petition here
Recent comments:
I am staggered by all the hate directed towards our former Prime Minister. I believe that Tony Blair made the Iraq decision in good faith and is most certainly NOT a war criminal. If anyone should be tried at the Hague it should be those in the media for totally misrepresenting the information and facts. The media are to blame for fuelling this hatred as it is purely driven by them. (UK)
Tony Blair in Ramallah
Hopi Sen Vs CIF’s Neal Lawson on Lawson’s “part in Blair’s downfall”
June 14, 2011Comment at end
14th June 2011
CROSS POST ON A CROSS COMMENT
Time being short and just to prove I wasn’t making things up in the previous post I’ve put my wheel-inventing toolkit away and throw into the mangle this interesting cross-post.
This is centred around a comment at a Guardian post. Blogger Hopi Sen (his name, not ambition) commented at the Guardian’s (sometimes free) ‘Comment is Free’. Neal Lawson had tried a “not me Guv – clean hands, me – see!” on the downfall of Tony Blair. Hopi Sen incisively dissects and rejects his pleas of innocence.
It was you Guv. Sadly, half the Labour party went along with your crime of careless, biased, non-evidence-based misjudgement when you removed the most electorally successful leader your 100 year-old party had ever, EVER found (see inarguable PROOF here)
This is Neal Lawson’s post – Tony Blair: my part in his downfall (hint: I didn’t have one) – and more importantly, pasted below, Hopi Sen’s comment, copied in its entirety.
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hopisen
10 June 2011 4:43PM
Neal,
You’re doing some really quite remarkable rewriting of history here. I’m just not sure why, because not all of the real story reflects badly on you. But I don’t see why you are painting yourself as a passive observer when in fact you were a champion of a particular vision of what Brown might be as PM.
So for example, in an article entitled “Gordon the brave could do what Tony never managed” from May 2005, immediately after the last election, you argued :
“The election forced Tony Blair to say that he will listen and change. But if he was listening, he would know that the electorate and the Labour party want Gordon Brown to have his job. Gordon is a Labour giant. He has enormous energy, commitment and intellectual ability. “
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/may/09/labour.election20052
Now, lets be clear- you also argued that to fulfill his potential Brown needed to take the approach you advised then, and still advise now. I happen to think that apporach is a mish mash of cobbled together left tokenism, hand waving and soporific sloganising, but heck, that’s what political debate is for, and you’re consistent in your view.
Then in May 2006 you wrote an article for the independent called “Why we think the Prime Minister should go now”. (the we, in the title is Compass) (your description in this article was”Neal Lawson is chair of Compass, a left-of-centre pressure group, and was an adviser to Gordon Brown “. Bit late to deny it now!)
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/neal-lawson-why-we-think-the-prime-minister-should-go-now-477385.html
A year later, after Compass had endorsed Gordon Brown for leader against the advice of some on the left you wrote:
“Brown is the only candidate to lead us against the Tories. Like it or not our job is to make him as electable and radical as possible. I had illusions in Blair. More fool me. I won’t (make? sic) that mistake again. But neither will I write Brown off. “
http://www.compassonline.org.uk/news/item.asp?n=610&offset=30
You say in your comment that “honestly I never tried (to unseat Blair). My enemies enemy is not necessarily my friend. Brownism was about control freakery and the liberation of capital – even though some of it was for good ends. It was bound to fail. I and others underestimated how quickly and badly. But there were no illusions ” It seems hard to square that with repeatedly calling for Blair to resign, getting Compass to endorse Gordon, and calling Brown brave, a giant, and the only person to lead Labour.
If Brown was about control freakery, the liberation of capital and therfore bound to fail, why did you support him in August 2007 when you said ” Brown could be the first Labour leader since Clement Attlee to recast British society – not by taking small steps but giant leaps.” and “Brown becomes potentially the premier to oversee the transformation of British society.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/aug/08/comment.politics
I suspect you’re right that you weren’t “plotting” – you were doing what you did, out of ideological consistency and the belief Brown would deliver some of your agenda, but the fact remains you were trying to get rid of Tony Blair and replace him with an idealised version of Gordon Brown, and it seems odd to pretend otherwise now.
In fact,position appeared to be pretty consistent from May 2005 to Autumn2007. You wanted Blair to go. You thought Brown wasn’t perfect but was a political giant and the right person to lead Labour, and you wanted to help him develop the new politics you have often spoken of. To that end you rallied support in the soft left of the Labour party.
Then of course, it went wrong, the illusions you had in Blair turned out to be repeated in Brown, and it looked like you had made the the same mistake again, so again, perfectly consistently you said that Brown should also resign. So why are you pretending that you barely felt a flicker of sympathy for the man, and never sought to help him achieve his ambition of becoming Prime Minister?
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RELATED
TWO TWEETS ON THIS
Just to show that Lawson is not the only Brownite Labourite who gets it all wrong on Blair, this Conservative blog – Platform10 – has another example. But then the Tories differ from Labour in that the former understand “winning”.
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Sign the Ban Blair-Baiting petition here
Recent comments:
I am staggered by all the hate directed towards our former Prime Minister. I believe that Tony Blair made the Iraq decision in good faith and is most certainly NOT a war criminal. If anyone should be tried at the Hague it should be those in the media for totally misrepresenting the information and facts. The media are to blame for fuelling this hatred as it is purely driven by them. (UK)
Tags:Brownism, Cif, Clement Attlee, comment is free, Compass, Gordon Brown, Guardian, Guardian.co.uk, Hopi Sen, John Rentoul, labour, my part in tony Blair's downfall, Neal Lawson, Tony Blair, twitter
Posted in 1. Tony Blair, BBC, Broadcast Outlets & Press, British Politics, British Prime Minister, Brown (Gordon Brown & his Labour Government, from June 2007), Labour party leadership, Press - Truth & Lies | Leave a Comment »