The BBC made a mistake in broadcasting an inaccurate report, which was unfair to the government and eventually led to the death of Dr David Kelly. Consequently, the two most senior figures have resigned, and the BBC has been heavily criticised by Lord Hutton.

The Government made a mistake in interpreting intelligence material about Iraqi weapons, and huge numbers of Iraqi and British citizens were killed as a result – including Dr David Kelly, who publically spoke out about the infamous dossier. The two most senior figures are still occupying their posts, and the government has not been criticised by Hutton.

Fair?

Oh, and if you think the BBC’s bad, look at how Fox is reporting the story…Talk about hypocrisy, you really HAVE to see this…

The transcript:

My Word. Well, today the British Broadcasting Corporation was forced to pay up for its blatant anti-Americanism before and during the Iraq war – a frothing at the mouth anti-Americanism which was obsessive irrational and dishonest.

The BBC – the Beeb – was one of the worst offenders in the British press because it felt entitled to not only pillory America, Americans and George W Bush but felt entitled to lie and when caught lying felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives.

The incident involved the reporter Andrew Gilligan who made a fool of himself in Baghdad when the American invasion actually arrived in the Iraqi capital. Gilligan, pro-Iraqi and anti-American insisted on the air that the Iraqi military was heroically repulsing an incompetent American military. Video from our own Greg Kelly, of the American army moving through Baghdad at will put the lie to that.

After the war, back in London, Gilligan got a guy called David Kelly to tell him a few things about pre-war assessments about Iraqi weapons programmes and Gilligan exaggerated – lied – about what Kelly had told him.

Kelly committed suicide over the story and the BBC, far from blaming itself, insisted its reporter had the right to lie, exaggerate, because, well, the BBC knew the war was wrong and anything it could say to underscore that point had to be right. A British government investigation slammed the BBC today and a Beeb exec resigned today to show they got it – but they don’t. Next time you hear the BBC brag about how much superior the Brits are about delivering the news rather than Americans who wear flags in their lapels, remember it was the Beeb caught lying. My Word.

Originally posted on The LBSC

From the new series of Fort Boyard on Challenge …

– Jodie Marsh: Arrange these two groups of letters to form a word — CHED and PIT.
– Team: Chedpit.

Marketing spiel at the Design Museum in London:

After the tragedy of the 11 September attacks and the Afghanistan war, Jerszy Seymour decided to design a seat which would give the world a great big hug and bring everybody together. The result was Muffdaddy. Made from machine washable denim covers with removable polyurethane cushions, Muffdaddy is easy to clean and maintain.

And my personal favourite, knowing my thoughts on the Daily Mail, quotes from Lynda Lee-Potter’s column before and after Diana’s death…

“The sight of a paunchy playboy groping a scantily-dressed Diana must appal and humiliate Prince William… As the mother of two young sons she ought to have more decorum and sense. She has for many years criticised Prince Charles for being a distant, undemonstrative father. In the long run he’s been the more responsible parent and certainly inflicted less damage, anguish and hurt.”
— Lynda Lee-Potter, Daily Mail, 27 Aug.

“Throughout their childhood she gave her sons endless loving cuddles… She adored her children.”
— Lynda Lee-Potter, Daily Mail, 1 Sept.

Originally posted on The LBSC

For the past week, I’ve been beta testing the Guardian’s Digital Edition. And I’ve been really pleasantly surprised.

Before going to university, I would happily sit and read the paper with my breakfast. Now I can’t, given that I now have to go and BUY the paper. Since I’m a lazy git, this only happens very occasionally, and I’ve been getting my news from other online sources. But I’ve been missing proper newspaper journalism – even if you look at the Times’s online edition, the copy is all the same but it doesn’t “feel” right.

The Guardian have come up with the answer, an answer to which I may end up subscribing and never buying a newspaper again. I’m a Guardian fan anyway (I love the sense of wit and irony the Guardian has), and this version is a really good idea. You get a little picture of each page of the paper (you browse through them one at a time), and then you click on the article you want to read. This brings it up in a right-hand column in HTML format, and you have the option to download the article or email it in a number of formats. So you get to see where it “fits” in the paper, and you can read it. You can even click on the adverts, and it brings them up in a little pop-up window.

And, of course, it’s ready and waiting when I want to read it – no having to go and buy it at the shops. You can even access about a week’s worth of back-issues, which is handy if you don’t have time to log-on one day.

It’s such a good idea, that I want to give it an award. But I can’t. Because I don’t have one to give.

Originally posted on The LBSC

Those lovely peeps down at Sky News have new music from today. But I have a question – are Sky News actually trying to become a Brass Eye style parody of themselves, or does it just kind of, well, happen?

First they get new jumbo-sized graphics with swishy sound effects every time one pops up. Then they start with the “Sky” thing. Other channels have a video wall…they have the Sky Newswall (Newswall as one word, of course, who needs a space?). Other channels have a telestrator…they have a Skystrator. Other channels have had helicopters for ever…Sky now have the Skycopter. Other channels have a newsroom…they have SkyCentre.

When they were covering the hot air balloon record attempt, they had full scale sandbox animations used in front of the newswall – I mean, they had an animated concorde flying about and an animated balloon above the presenter’s head in an attempt to demonstrate relative heights. In fact, it ended up looking like a scene from Mary Poppins.

And now, to complete the package, they have totally over-the-top, over-dramatic music, even moving away from that memorable musical “do, do do do, daaaah” hook that they used to use at the TOTH . Oh well.

In other news, I have become addicted to watching people via the power of interactive webcams . I don’t know why, but I can’t stop spying on people waiting for buses or eating their lunch in a park. Help me!

Just 12 days left until I move into my new Stockton-based university-flavoured accommodation.

I saw Fight Club for the first time last night, after JRC said I must watch it or die (admittedly, he said that about 12 months ago, but never mind). Maybe I’m special – I’ll admit that this is a possibility – but I thought that the “big twist” was HUGELY predictable. Having never seen the film before, I had correctly predicted it before we were even half way through. So whilst it was a good film, I was disappointed that I had it figured out so early on. I’m not even convinced that it was designed to be a twist, but more that you were supposed to work it out and then watch the lead character as he took the whole film to work it out.

It’s my brother-in-law’s birthday tomorrow. I really don’t know why you’d want to know that, but hey. That’s it from me for now…Bye!

Originally posted on The LBSC

The Prince is said to have crept up behind the 14-inch animal during a hunting trip last week after taking lessons from a Masai warrior….He said: ‘We took him out hunting and he crept up like we do on the first prey he saw, a fully-grown dik-dik.’

I can’t be the only one to think that the reporters at Sky are having a bit of a laugh…can I?

No Homebase yesterday , so no comment to give.

Instead of a long post, I’ll finish around about here. With one last word.

Thursday.

Originally posted on The LBSC

I moved my website, as I’ve already told you (weren’t you listening?) It’s completely incompatible with most browsers’ security settings, and has one of the slowest loading times and worst page designs of any site I regularly visit. Imagine my surprise, then, when I log into my stats area and find that in the ten days since I put it up, my site has received 1464 hits.

This scares me – Who wants to see the same content as me? Surely there aren’t that many people out there who want to reference Fame Academy news, The LBSC and American TV News amongst other stuff? It scares me, because I thought my interests were a fairly unique combination – but the stats clearly show not only a scary number of hits, but also that the majority of visitors return. But I have made a special logo to celebrate, and even in my current, slightly inebriated, state I know it looks crap. But then, at least it makes a change.

Another thing that surprised me – Lloyds TSB online banking is ‘closed’ between midnight and 4am every day. Surely that defeats the object – No-one wants 20hr internet banking, what’s wrong with 24hr? What do they do for those four hours? If it wasn’t a regular thing, I’d think it was a system update, but obviously not…

The summer holidays are here, which means that annoying numbers of small individuals are flooding the streets. This annoys me. I’m beginning to seriously consider painting large boils all over my body before going out of the house, since I would assume that people would not then walk right into you – Christmas and Summer are the only times of year when being a leper might have strong advantages. I’m beginning to truly understand why people would actually want to go to Tesco at 3am.

Am I the only person in the country who thinks it’s wrong to says that it’s “good” that Saddam Hussein’s sons are dead? Surely it can never be a good thing that someone has been killed. Their father may have had some, well, warped ideas, but why is it right to celebrate the death of two fellow human beings? Surely that just lowers our moral standards to the same level as those we are apparently trying to destroy.

And another thing – if anyone has contacts at the ITV News, please tell the script writers to actually write in full sentences. It annoys me immensely the way they talk like newspaper headlines when doing the headlines package at the beginning of their programmes – would it really take much longer to speak in full sentences? They manage on every other news programme. I don’t actually watch the ITV News, so perhaps I have no real right to comment, but when it’s on in the background it annoys me.

This amused me greatly, as does pretty much anything about Norway. This seemed funny too, just because the thought of an elephant down a well makes me laugh. This may be something to do with it being 3.19am right now, which suggests that I may not be of completely sound mind.

Anyway, I think I should probably stop typing now before I give some deeply psychological revelation about my inner psyche, or basically make more of an idiot of myself as I probably have already – I’ll leave it till the morning, which is technically later today, to decide, so this post might disappear then.

Big Sloppy Kisses,

tillyoshea

Originally posted on The LBSC

Someone explain to me how a phone vote can be void? I mean, COME ON! Isn’t the real story here that over 100,000 people who read the Daily Mail are so damn stupid that they can’t even manage to vote in a simple poll without messing it up?!? Or is this a case of reducing the number of “No” votes through a bit of figure fiddling? No, the DM has too much honesty and integrity to do that. Yeah right.

Originally posted on The LBSC