Slashdot Mirror
BBC Buys Google News Keywords In Kelly Case
foreign devil writes "BBC has purchased keywords related to coverage of the Hutton Inquiry in an attempt to direct all traffic to their special news coverage. This would be only moderately interesting, except the BBC is complicit in the death of Dr. Kelly and the 'sexing up' of the Iraq dossier. The article in the Guardian says this is coming out of the GBP 63.5m ad budget. I wonder how much it would cost them if someone, say, automated searching for those links on Google." It doesn't seem fair to pronounce the BBC complicit in Kelly's death (unless that's proven by the facts of the case), but it's certainly an interested party.
This guy is just being a bastard with this line, "I wonder how much it would cost them if someone, say, automated searching for those links on Google."
vampirical
The BBC is a giant entity, they can't magically coordinate all this... I'm sure somewhere in their halls there isn't a dogmatic poster proclaiming:
1. Sex-up Iraq dossier
2. ???
3. Profit!
With #2 circled and 'GOOGLE ADWORDS' scribbled next to it.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
The fair and balanced dept seems to be shrinking these days.
All your Dr. Kelly are belong to us. - BBC
One could argue that the Beeb pushed Dr. Kelly to suicide, but calling them "complicit in ... the 'sexing up' of the Iraq dossier" is somewhat bizarre. Are we missing a relative clause here or what?
Is this a slightly wordier verion of the 'is it wkack' troll? ;)
The BBC claimed the weapons dossier was sexed up, and claimed to have a HIGH RANKING official who told them this. As it turns out, Kelly was the source, and not only was he not nearly as senior as the BBC claimed that he was, but he was not in a position to know what he claimed to know. Then he suddenly winds up dead.
Imagine if SCO bought up key words on their suit against Linux. Now imagine they're a news outlet to boot. Kinda stinks, doesn't it?
Seems their adword budget ran out. The adword links don't appear on "hutton report" or "hutton enquiry" anymore. At least not on google.co.nz, google.com or google.co.uk.
The top non-ad links are the BBC, but that is more than likely due to the fact that the BBC is generally considered a _very_ good source of news, with a great reputation.
As for the whole sexing up discussion, I'll wait until after I've seen the report. :)
I'll go to a new source other than the BBC, since they are obviously trying to skew the news surrounding the case by buying up these Google results.
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
According to the newspaper (the Sun), Lord Hutton criticised the BBC and its reporter Andrew Gilligan over a broadcast suggesting Downing Street inserted a claim that Saddam could launch WMD within 45 minutes.
"I am satisfied Dr Kelly did not say the Government probably knew or suspected the 45-minute claim was wrong before the claim was inserted in the dossier," Lord Hutton is reported as finding.
"The allegation reported by Mr Gilligan that the Government probably knew the claim was wrong or questionable was unfounded."
As a result, the program's listeners were given a misleading impression that the Government "embellished" its dossier.
The British newspaper, The Sun, has gotten its hands on a leaked copy of the report, from which this above information is drawn. Dr. Kelly killed himself after it was claimed he was the one to give the 45 minute quote. Therefore, the BBC is complicit.
BBC should track the referrers. If the person comes from Google, instead of displaying a news page, they should display a giant banner proclaiming
"You are the victim of a shameless advertising experiment.
Footnote: We are not liable for any self-inflicted damage after reading this page"
webpage
...except the BBC is complicit in the death of Dr. Kelly and the 'sexing up' of the Iraq dossier...
Actually, the BBC was citing Dr. Kelly to criticize the 'sexing up' done by the british government. Then the government revealed the name of Dr. Kelly as the source, leading to pressures on him. So I don't think the BBC is really complicit in his death and it's definitely haven't 'sexed up' the Iraq dossier.
Of course, I still find what they're doing with google questionable at best.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I have tried the obvious search strings "kelly suicide", "Hutton report", "Iraq war", suicide, murder, bbc, labour government, in various combinations without seeing any adverts. Perhaps the ads are only being targeted at non-UK residents, or perhaps they only start appearing after the report is published in a few hours time? Has anybody actually seen Kelly/BBC related ads on Google yet?
I hardly ever read the colored boxes on the right. They're more ads than anything. Getting results like 'Read the gravitational fields Ebook on Amazon.com' doesnt entice me to look to the right side of my screen. I'll read the normal results over the right-hand side results any day of the week, thank you.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
Buying Google keywords doesn't redirect searches. It just determines what sponsered links show up.
Doesn't this qualify as an abuse of the Google search service?
I (and I'm sure millions of others) browse through Google results to get the articles and opinions from over the world. Allowing this would mean no fair-an-balanced news via Google anymore.
Google would be wise to come up with way to prevent such abuse IMHO.
I once tried watching the news on BBC America and Fox News in the same evening but it made my head implode.
If they get any further apart they're going to meet.
Independant Counsel does a report for Congress on who knew what and when and who ordered what and why.
NPR buys keywords so they can ??
You get the picture. Fortunately nothing like this could ever happen in the US so go back to sleep citizens, theres nothing to worry about.
Only the names have been changed to protect the writer from defamation action.
"BBC thinks palestinians who blow themselves (and innocent babies) are "freedom fighters""
history is written by the victors man. At one time a bunch of people hiding in the woods and sniping at officers was beyond reproach, and were the "terrorists" of their time. We here in the USA call them revolutionaries now, and revere them. During the civil war, the north took a radical step by attacking civilian and logistical targets instead of purely military ones. A move that would have been reviled had the north ended up losing, instead it's hailed as tactical genius.
Conventions of warfare go OUT THE WINDOW when you are faced with a militarial superior enemy. Calling palestinians freedom fighters is no more or less accurate than calling our american forefathers heroes.
Why would anyone assume that the "sponsored links" are somehow independently managed by an editor? So what if the BBC comes out on top--it just means that they paid the most.
In my mind a news organization has the right to actively defend itself when it itself is being accused of a crime--just as any other entity would...
Before we all don our tin-foil hats, its worth pointing out that the episode of Panorama (a highly-respected current affairs programme) which aired last Wednesday was highly critical of the BBC involvement in the Kelly business. Which channel did it air on? That would be BBC One. Don't beleive me? Check out this story on the BBC website.
In light of this, it's pretty peverse to suggest that the BBC has gone to any lengths to hide or downplay their involvement in the whole affair. I myself think the Google ad buying is simply part of the BBCs shift towards positioning itself as more of a 'regular' media player (albeit with public funding), as opposed to the state-run service which it originated as.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Yes...sniping at officers who are in uniform by other solider is acceptable.
Sniping at civilians isn't. Now if you are an irregular not in uniform and snipe and are caught, you can be summarily executed.
That's an accepted fact for the last...3-400 years.
Now during the American Revolution...very limited warcrimes were carried out by both sides as did irregular operations against other irregulars and against uniformed soldiers. Fellas like Nathan Hale were hung by the British for being soldiers out of uniform...thus a spy.
The North did carry out military operations against logistical targets in the war, however they did not attack civilian targets for the sake of attacking civilian targets, and the North isn't hailed for it's operations in the war...it's considered an agressor and in large parts of the country...they are considered war criminals...no matter how clean a campaign might have been.
Reading this article I'm surprised that The Guardian (very respected UK daily newspaper) have missed one of the more important aspects of the BBC (must highly respected news broadcaster in the world) buying Google search keywords related to the Hutton inquiry. This action will cause the BBC to appear as a link on any website mentioning the Hutton inquiry that uses Google advertising banners on its pages, not just on Google search results pages.
... Google is automatically directed to a paid-for link to BBC Online's own news coverage of the inquiry."
In taking this action, the BBC will be inexorably linked with the Hutton inquiry as a source of information, rather than having an major role in the events that have led to it.
I would also question the use of the phrases "buying up all internet search terms relating to the inquiry" and "anyone searching for "Hutton inquiry" or "Hutton report" on
The first of these phrases implies the BBC is attempting to prevent others from using these keywords by buying Google's entire stock. This is obviously false, as anybody can buy Google's keywords and there is an unlimited supply.
The second of these phrases states that uses will atuomatically be directed to the BBC Online site when searching for 'Hutton enquiry'. This is blatantly false. Instead, a link to the BBC Online coverage will be displayed amongst a separate list of clearly demarcated sponsored links.
Buying advertising to negate the effect of negative crticism is a well-established business practice for which The Guardian (and indeed all other media which provide advertising facilities) have long served as a platform for.
What's far worse than the implied misdirection by the BBC in The Guardian's article is the blantant misreporting of opinion as fact in the Slashdot headline. Stating that the BBC is 'complicit' in the death of Dr Kelly is factually incorrect, not to mention libellous in the extreme.
it takes a lot of money to buy keywords in such magnificent cases
Anyone who is interested in what they might cost can see for themselves at Adwords for free. Just click on the 'Click to begin' button. You can set up an ad, plug in keywords, max cost per click per keyword and see what your daily cost would be. They don't ask for a credit card until the very end so you get a feel without the slightest commitment (not even a name or email address is required until the end.) It's really pretty interesting.
It puts every fact - when issued by the Blair govt - in quotes, to make it look suspicious
Yea, that really bothers me too. Things like Saddams WMDs. I wish they had just reported as fact that Saddam had WMDs, like we did here in the US. It is totally rediculous that a news agency would question the government.
The BBC misrepresented Kellys statements and views (largely by ommision) and created the furor that led to him losing his grip. If you are going to claim the Iraq dossier controversy pushed him over the edge, then you have to put a lot of the blame on the BBC for turning what was a difference of interpretation into worldwide controversy. REF
The BBC puts everything in quotes.
At the time of writing the following headlines on the BBC news page contain quotes:
Mydoom virus 'biggest in months'
Martha Stewart 'lied about tip'
'Several dead' in Baghdad blast
'Bribery' halts Kenya graft probe
Obviously the put those headlines in "scare quotes" to make them seem more suspicious!
>> palestinians who blow themselves (and innocent babies) are "freedom fighters
:)
well, anyone that blows themselves is pretty flexible to say the least... and not likely to ever leave their own home. So, I doubt they'd be very effective freedom fighters.
As for blowing innocent babies... that'll get you 25 to life here in America.
MadCow
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Nah, he was being fucked with, by both. One minute his name wasnt going to be released to the press, the next minute he it was. The press actually played 20 questions with the govt (absolutely true!) to guess his name.
Did anyone else notice that when you google "Kelly", this story (as in, this /. story) comes up under 'News'?
I guess I knew that googleheads read slashdot, but now google does too!
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
I'm sorry, but someone has to draw a line in the sand here. The American revolutionaries wanted freedom from the British, and they fought the superior enemy's military and won. That is a HUGE fucking difference than sneaking men and women onto busses with explosives and killing dozens of innocent people, or blowing up religious dinners (but no, they don't hate jews, just "zionists"), or hiding with sniper rifles behind kids throwing rocks hoping one of the IDF accidently hits a 12 year-old.
The Palestinians don't want freedom from Israel, if they did they would have taken the offer of a state they got 3 years ago instead of launching this latest jihad. The palestinians want to destroy Israel because they hate Jews. Do some research and find out about how many of the founding members of the PLO helped recruit soldiers for the Waffen SS. The Mufti of Jerusalem even lived in Berlin during the war, helping Hitler organize military units. Oh yeah, he was related (uncle I believe, it's been awhile) to Arafat. Oddly enough Arafat doesn't use his real name anymore because it ties him directly to the Nazis.
If the revolutionaries in america had said "No thanks, we'll just destroy your country instead" when the British gave up, THEN they'd be no different than the palistinians.
It doesn't seem fair to pronounce the BBC complicit in Kelly's death (unless that's proven by the facts of the case)
Yeah, I'd hate for slashdot to become known as a place where people make false claims and jump to unjustified conclusions.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
It's especially sad when someone reads one piece of propaganda and goes psycho without considering the motives behind it. The Guardian hates the BBC, and they along with Rupert Murdoch have been trying to get the British government to shut down the BBCs great website, so that more people go to their services.
What exactly is wrong with advertising your side of the story. Most advertisers are interested parties, and the article made it sound like they were preventing other voices from being heard, which is ridiculous.
Finaly
"I wonder how much it would cost them if someone, say, automated searching for those links on Google."
Absolutely nothing.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
history is written by the victors man.
I've ceased to believe this. After looking at the current state of the world I find that the victors write thier history and think that no one else knows any different while the victims (and much of the rest of the world) remember. It's not hard to find grudges in europe that go back thousands of years where the victors thought they wrote history and it turns out that 300 generations later thier decendandts still remeber the old hatred.
At one time a bunch of people hiding in the woods and sniping at officers was beyond reproach, and were the "terrorists" of their time.
Not really, I've heard this one said many times. While it wasn't normal it was by no means so extraordinary that one would call it "terrorism". That statement needs a little more backing up than "I said so". The British at the time used it as propaganda but pretty much every known army has *always* done so, it so foolish not to that any and all commanders know to do it.
During the civil war, the north took a radical step by attacking civilian and logistical targets instead of purely military ones. A move that would have been reviled had the north ended up losing, instead it's hailed as tactical genius.
Have you ever been to the south? Having grown up there and currently living there I can tell you that is a *very* reviled thing that Sherman did. It went well beyond "unconventional warefare" even for it's time. Grant tried to reign Sherman in and was pretty much unable to. It is probably the number one reason for resentment between the north and the south today. Seeing a northerner on TV dreamily talking of poisoning, raping, and torturing my great great grandparents doesn't make me feel too happy.
Conventions of warfare go OUT THE WINDOW when you are faced with a militarial superior enemy. Calling palestinians freedom fighters is no more or less accurate than calling our american forefathers heroes.
The reality is that for one side they do, that doesn't make it legitamate. Our American forefathers fought pretty much within the rules of war, many other revolutionaries have also.
A large part of terrorism is attacking civilian targets (not as collateral targets, but as the main targets), as far as I know they didn't attack innocent civilian targets over in england. Neither did the British for the most part. Most of the civil war was fought in the same way, in the places civilians were specifically targeted the victims hate the agressors (no need to look further than native americans for another example). There are few recent wars where people did and in most of those cases it was normal rules of wars (WWII for instance, though even then the fire bombing of dresdin was seen as over the line back then and that was probably the most "no rules" modern war ever).
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Erm, no. They call people who blow themselves up, "suicide bombers". They call the militants, "militants". In Iraq, they call the insurgents, "insurgents". Compare to the completely unbiased and independent American media, who refer to all of those under the collective term, "terrorists".
Has it occured to you, that they might be using quotes because they are quoting someone?
The coverage of the Dr. Kelly affair was incredibly poor. That's a large part of the Hutton Inquiry, right?
However, I get the impression, sir, that you are simply part of the angry right complaining that the BBC is not biased to the right enough.
Oddly, the first paid link that came up when I searched for Hutton at google.ca was version of this very story, about the beeb buying up adwords.
Wacky wacky world.
-- http://vectorvector.tumblr.com/
SCO has bought the google keywords "litigous bastards" and linked them to the Free Software Foundation.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
The Palestinians don't want freedom from Israel, if they did they would have taken the offer of a state they got 3 years ago instead of launching this latest jihad.
No, I suspect you have that correct - They don't want "freedom from Israel"... They want their damn land back! Why should they accept a tiny strip of land, rather than insisting on what they had before?
If I came to your house, kicked you out into the dog-house, and then offered you a "peace treaty" to let you keep the dog-house, would you walk away smiling at your great success at the negotiating table?
I suspect you'd see that situation as a tad bit different.
We hear a very one-sided view of this particular situation, because news outlets (other than the GP's claim about the views of the BBC) greatly fear the "anti-Jewish" label. I used to fear similarly as well, suffering a tad bit of cognitive dissonance as a result, until I realized something VERY important... "Israel" does not equal "Jews" (although it has done its best to blur that point, hoping our memory of WWII will keep us from protesting their actions that, performed by any other country, we would consider as bad as Saddam treated the Kurds). "Israel", though made up of a large number of Jews, exists as a political entity, with its own goals and means, entirely separate from either the race or the religion.
You can observe that "Israel" commits atrocities that make people wonder if they've copied a few pages from Hitler's playbook, without it meaning that you want to put Jews back in camps. You can say "Sharon should stand trial for his actions against the Palestinians", and it doesn't mean you have close-cropped hair and discuss the Final Solution while goose-stepping around your bunker.
See the difference? Try it a bit, and you might feel a lot better. Israel can err. It can commit crimes against humanity. You can admit that, and it doesn't make you a Jew-hater, because Israel has as much to do with Judaism as a philosophy, as Stalin's regime did with actual communism - Just a name.
Whoa buddy, God has NOTHING to do with these United States of America. And you know what, these terrorists don't give a rat's ass about you or I, or especially our freedom. You have been soaking in too much propaganda. America is a victim of terrorist attacks because of our government's greedy capitalist tactics that trash poorer developing countries and humiliate proud people. I am not defending terrorist tactics by any means, but you should know that from every other country's perspective, the US is the largest terrorist threat in the world (and has killed more foreign people and destroyed more foreign property during "peace" time than any one else).
every time a republican dies a queer angel gets his wings
Quoting the Sun second-hand by way of the Sydney Morning Herald doesn't really count as a news source. The Sun, as a flagship of Rupert Murdoch's News International has its own axe to grind with the BBC. You can't trust the Sun's "reporting" on anything, least of all about subjects where Murdoch has a vested interest. Your link is about as convincing as if the Sydney Morning Herald had quoted Slashdot.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
It's a massive, disparate, semi-controlled corporation where one arm can frequently operate without the others being aware. There is the occasional shitstorm which flies up because of this (when, accidentally, the BBC 6 and 9 o'clock News programs almost entirely neglected the ruling Conservative Party's campaign in one election they went nuts and refused further interviews, threatened funding changes etc.) but on the whole the system balances out, given time.
Hutton is a big story in the UK. I don't work in News (thankfully) but I am willing to bet that what we have is an entirely regular attempt to drive traffic to the BBC for coverage of a major story. The BBC is an interested party, but news.bbc.co.uk couldn't give a damn about protecting Andrew Gilligan, broadcast news or any other part of the corporation.
In another situation, maybe you would have Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch flaying the different section chiefs about contradictory coverage, or maybe not. But in the beeb, it simply doesn't happen. Nobody knows about anyone else's activities, and if they want to find out they've got to investigate, like journalists should. It's not efficient, but in terms of a free press, it's effecive.
Nothing I could possibly say could compete with Yes Prime Minister's rather brilliant and oft-quoted commentary.
PM {Responding to Sir Humphry}: "Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers.
The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country.
The Guardian is run by people who think they ought to run the country.
The Times is read by people who actually do run the country.
The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country.
The Financial Times is read by people who own the country.
The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country.
The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is run by another country."
Sir Humphry: "Prime Minister, what about the Sun?"
Bernard: "The Sun readers don't care who runs the country as long as she's got big tits."
The Sun has a page online called Page3.com, which is an online version of the 'topless lady' page 3 in the newspaper. No, this is not a troll, check the link :-)
It's a free market: advertising space is available to anyone, whether they have vested interests or are for/against an issue. Equally, anyone can buy television or newspaper space to do the same thing.
I don't see that there are any "rights" problems here ? If you had an opposing view, you too could have purchase keywords for the hutton case.
Irrespective of who purchased those keywords, Google is always going to serve up pageranked results for "objective" results, or return collective links to press coverage from google news.
If you have a problem, purchase keywords at other search engines. You can argue that Google has a dominant position and therefore subject to anti-trust concerns, but as it returns pageranked results, it's hard to see how this argument is sustainable.
Yeah, well, your great-great-grandparents were fighting to preserve slavery, if not actual slave owners themselves, and therefore deserved no better than what Sherman dished out.
In fact, had I been in Sherman's shoes, I would have summarily shot or hanged every slave owner I captured.
People forget, or lie about, what the Old South stood for and what it was fighting for. Talk of states' rights is crap. The Confederacy existed purely to preserve human chattel slavery. It was destroyed and will never rise again. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
The cretin who submitted this doesnt even live in the UK - he is an American who lives in San Francisco.
Quote : "the BBC is complicit in the death of Dr. Kelly and the 'sexing up' of the Iraq dossier."
Where does this idiot get his information from ? Yes, looking at this sentence, the BBC IS involved in the death of Dr. Kelly and the 'dossier' accusations, but only as a part of a whole, including the BBC senior management, the Government, MOD, some MP's and Dr. Kelly itself. And NO-ONE is directly accused of directly causing Dr. Kellys death - he committed suicide, end of story. The BBC's alleged involvement was to stand by an accusation against a government adviser of 'sexing up' an intelligence dossier, despite grave misgivings about the accuracy of the story.
I know news coverage in the US is poor, but I would suggest the original submitter tries to get some decent news coverage - BBC TV news (if you can get it in the US) still beats the pants off anything else you are likely to get for objectivity and editorial quality. I was also under the impression that the Guardian is a bit of a cheerleader for the BBC in general - public service broadcasting is something I would think the vast majority of it's readership support.
"BBC is complicit in the death of Dr. Kelly and the 'sexing up' of the Iraq dossier." Complicit: to ssociated with or participating in a questionable act or a crime.
The BBC have been biting at the heels of the goverment, ever since they caught a wiff of the fact the goverment did sex it up, theve been hounding them like a rabbid dog, if it wasn't for the BBC, I doubt we'd even have an inquiry, they were in no way complicit with it, they didn't even allow it to go by without being noticed.
Yes perhaps this did lead to the death of poor Dr. Kelly, but that was because the goverment wanted a fall guy, not the BBC's doing and depending on the outcome of the report the goverment could be in some deep doo-doos.
At this time I still don't notice a difference, so I have to wonder if Google didn't pay the BBC for all this publicity.
Noone seems to be looking too hard at what happened. So lets have a quick walk through the scandal:
The BBC reported that the goverment had decided to "sex up" the dossier which contained evidence of weapons of mass destruction. This is the dossier known as the "dodgy dossier" (because there was little or no actual evidence of these WMDs and a lot of fuzzy language that didn't say a lot but sounded threatening).
At the heart of the dodgy dossier was a claim that WMDs could be ready within 45 minutes. This was a major pinnacle of Blair's justification of war. David Kelly (an important intelligence expert) expressed to Gilligan (BBC journo) that this claim was dubious.
Now lets not get this wrong, after the war weapons inspections teams have been crawling all over Iraq and they have found ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE of WMDS, let alone WMDS that could be released in 45 minutes. So this 45 minute claim is without a shadow of doubt ABSOLUTELY BOGUS.
Now before this report was released, Tony Blair was talking up the dossier and the contents of it and saying how this dossier justified war for about 9 months. SO when the dossier was released he had built up a massive expectation of the contents of the dossier (which eventually turned out to be pretty underwhelming).
After Kelly's death, it was widely reported that the dossier had been passed backwards and forwards between Blair's press office, intelligence departments, and other cabinet members. They were altering the report, improving the wording etc.
One alteration that Alastair Campbell made (Tony Blairs Head of (press) Communications) was that the 45 minute claim should have much stronger wording. So it is clear that this dossier has been messed with to improve its impact and pursuasiveness. Instead of being an impartial intelligence report, it has turned into a PR document.
So what now?
Kelly expresses scepticism about the report to Gilligan. Gilligan reports that the government has "sexed up" the dossier. The government who perceive this as a major PR loss if this goes unchallenged, and which has a lot riding on this report anyway challenges the BBC on this.
So the Alistair Campbell challenges the BBC head on, makes a massive confrontation in the press (trying to bluster the governments way out of the mess). He demands that the BBC reveal their source of who said that the "dodgy dossier" had been "sexed up". Gilligan refused, and the BBC stood by him because he had tapes from the interview with Kelly so they could prove their point.
The goverment doesn't like the BBC anyway at the moment, and had openly criticised the BBC's coverage during the war for not presenting the government's side enough - I think the government wished that the BBC's coverage of Iraq was more like Foxes! (It is a joke criticising the BBC for not presenting the government's side enough - the reason the BBC is such an amazing institution and people listen to/watch it around the world is that they always present both sides of a story and allow the viewer to make their own mind up).
In addition before the war, the government had been floating ideas for what to do with the BBC when its charter comes up for renewal including such ridiculous ideas a *privatising* the BBC!(BBC's charter is renewed every 10 years, and it is this charter that allows it to operate/collect the license fee. There is always an anti-BBC lobby that is against everyone having to pay a poll tax on the BBC. )
So this standoff between Alastair Campbell and the BBC has be looked at in the context of the government's ongoing feud with the BBC.
The government get wind of who the source is (probably through intelligence channels) and they put about the word to the press that although they will not release Kelly's name, they will confirm to any press member if they suggest the right name. So the press are phoning up with lists of candidates, and miraculously some of them guess David Kelly.
So the government has leaked his name to the press, eve
SURELY NOT!!!!!
I had a quick look at their server today (28th, when the report is due out) and response time was good - checking them with Netcraft it looks like they are running Apache (probably on Linux underneath - though Netcraft is not always reliable on this point in my experience), and recently changed over to Akamai presumably for edge caching - which would explain the good response time.
Any Slashdotters involved with the technical side of the inquiry? I was really impressed by the evidence management system where everything submitted got scanned in and was available on screen to the witnesses and (mostly) on the website as well.
-- Nothing unusual happened today
Listening to the BBC coverage on Radio 4, it is very good and impartial. The BBC is the only media service I know of which will openly criticize itself. They are concerned with reporting the facts, not their own agenda (unlike most newspapers, many of whom have an agenda against the BBC as their owners want to control all the media in the country)
They're now interviewing the director of news for the BBC, and he's admitting that the Hutton Report is very bad for the BBC and a lot needs to be done to ensure this doesn't happen again.
I'm just shocked at how much the MoD and Government has got away with... (the way they named Kelly was horrendous, openly inviting journalists to guess and telling them if they're right)
Do you have any cites that support your accusations of the BBC?
What information can you point to that the BBC is known to be utterly biased? socialist?
Where is your direct proof that the BBC thinks that Palestinian suicide bombers are "freedom fighters"?
Where is your proof that the BBC is an overfunded club of liars?
You do not have any, that is why...you are only regurgitating other conservative pundits that also have no supporting proof of their rhetoric. Just like the one about NPR being some left wing biased news program.
That's the pre-Murdoch Times, of course.
Still true. The Sun-With-No-Tits is now read by those who run the country because they need toknow what Rupert wants them to do.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
"How ironic that your sig contains a quote by Sherman, who did exactly that in his famous "march to the sea"."
Ah, but he didn't. The popular understanding of Sherman's March to the Sea is that he raped and pillaged Georgia. He didn't. The Army attacked Confederate infrastructure while on the march, freed slaves and burned cotton and other goods the state depended on while knocking out communication (railroads and telegraph) while living off the land as they marched.
The living off the land by foraging was a time-honored tradition for an army it's just been made controversal during the March to the Sea.
No longer.
He manages to find that the Covernment did no wrong, despite commenting on the insufficiency of the records of the meetings upon which he based this judgement.
He finds all the government claims justified, and all the counterclaims without foundation.
Here's a hint - don't let him near the SCO trial - you'll end up with SCO (no evidence) winning against the rest of the world (tons of evidence).
As you can tell, I'm disappointed - the independence of the judiciary is once again called into question, and we still have the liars in charge.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!