"I'M AN IDIOT", says UK Lib Dem aide...

The Guardian ^ | February 13, 2003 | Kevin Maguire

[new cruelty]

A Liberal Democrat press officer took the unusual step last night of describing himself as "a complete idiot" in an attempt to defuse a potential row over BBC political bias.

Andy McGuffie, a senior press and broadcasting officer, was forced to issue an embarrassing public apology after he sent an email to a long list of media organisations instead of party activists.

The message suggested he had been asked by Daisy Sampson, a former aide to Charles Kennedy who helps present The Daily Politics, a new BBC2 programme, to supply details of Conservative gaffes.

"Daisy S called from The Daily Politics to say that they are running a feature on the show called The Dukes of Hansard, a short thing on MPs making fools of themselves - tripping over words, etc etc," wrote Mr McGuffie.

"If we have any suggestions, she would like to know ... she didn't exactly say 'especially Tories', but it was all but ...!"

The Liberal Democrat spin doctor, realising his mistake, sent out a second and then third message within minutes to withdraw the first and insist he had misinterpreted the views of Ms Sampson - required to be politically neutral in her new role.

"It was entirely my error, my fault, my idiocy. It had nothing to do with Daisy. I was a complete idiot," said Mr McGuffie. "I sent it to the wrong distribution list. It was an email to colleagues and not for release."

Ms Sampson was said by a colleague to be too angry to speak, although a Tory spokesman commented: "McGuffie will be forever more known as McGaffie. He was right, he is an idiot."

[KC_Conspirator]

Comments?

[Drango]

BBC has a political bias? I'm shocked. SHOCKED!

Next someone will claim NPR has a bias.

[GOP_Proud]

NPR is biased? Who knew?

[ClearCase_guy]

Here we have a Liberal Democrat "tripping over words" and such.

Is the BBC still going to focus on the Tories? Seems like there's good hunting in the other part of the forest.

[McGavin999]

Sounds like TWO people should get familiar with the location of their unemployment department.

[F.J. Mitchell]

"I was a complete idiot",said MR Mc Guffie.

Sounds like he's pretending to be reformed complete idiot.

[Dont Mention the War]

Why not drop an email to Ms. Sampson and ask her why she's so interested in Conservative gaffes only? Since she's "too angry to speak" after being outed, perhaps she can type back to us!

Daisy.Sampson@bbc.co.uk

[DeuceTraveler]

I was in Amsterdam a few weeks ago and put on the BBC to catch the news in my hotel room. They had an hour special on Bush. From what I watched I realized that:

1. Bush is a puppet of the oil companies.

2. Bush was installed as President by the Supreme Court, not honestly elected.

3. Texas is a toxic wasteland covered by smoke stacks spewing horrible materials into the air. Every now and then you will find a lone guy working in a shop that looks like he's on a prarie. Oh....Texans aren't well educated, either.

No wonder the world is scared of us. I bet Clinton and Gore were presented in a much better light.

[Dont Mention the War]

Our hero:

And here's a full page of pictures of Daisy looking far more bimboish (and thus far more like her real self). Sadly, it's a freebie Geocities site with a low per-hour bandwidth threshold, and it's been throttled for this hour. You'll have to try later.

She's only 31, and from her bio looks like she's had all the benefits of being a member of the British upper class since the day she was born. Which means she's probably not particularly good at what she does; she's just there because of who she is.

[Dont Mention the War]

Sounds like the Beeb likes them young, pretty and stupid these days. From a month-old Guardian piece on the launch of a "hip new politics show" starring our own little Daisy:

In many ways, the programme conforms to the two current commandments of BBC news and current affairs - the viewer requires clear and uncomplicated explanations of big stories and knotty issues, and politics must be made to connect with "ordinary" peoples' lives.

"Dyuhhh ... we're the British public and we're too stupid to understand anything unless you hold our hand the entire way. Oh, and can we have some boobies?"

[Congressman Billybob]

Your brief sarcastic comment about NPR bias, "Who knew?" made me laugh long and hard. The only time I listen to NPR is during my 11-hour drives to and from D.C. It always makes me mad as a wet hen.

I then plan my next assault on NPR bias, on my various written columns and radio appearances. Then I chill out with a Bela Fleck CD.

Congressman Billybob

Latest column, "Buncombe Rides Again, and Again," not yet up on UPI or FR.

"To Restore Trust in America."

[Congressman Billybob]

Your brief sarcastic comment about NPR bias, "Who knew?" made me laugh long and hard. The only time I listen to NPR is during my 11-hour drives to and from D.C. It always makes me mad as a wet hen.

I then plan my next assault on NPR bias, on my various written columns and radio appearances. Then I chill out with a Bela Fleck CD.

Congressman Billybob

Latest column, "Buncombe Rides Again, and Again," not yet up on UPI or FR.

"To Restore Trust in America."

[Allan]

Bump

[new cruelty]

hubba hubba hubba

[Tacis]

Sent it to the wrong list, huh? What he doesn't tell us about is the dozens of times he sent biased material to the right list. Each of those times, he had fewer whiskies before hitting the "send" button.

[aculeus]

Andrew Sullivan (http://www.andrewsullivan.com/) has them nailed on his site:

BAGHDAD BROADCASTING CORPORATION I: Thanks for the tidal wave of BBC snippets. I'm even more struck by the anti-anti-Saddam slant. Here's a recent one, to give you a flavor: a piece posing as journalism focussing on a handful of liberal churches in the U.S. supporting a non-violent removal of Saddam. How would such a removal be accomplished? By encouraging civil disobedience among Iraqis. Here's the piece. Try not to laugh or cry. Not a skeptical note in it. As a reader noted, the last time the West urged a similar mass protest against Saddam - with leaflet drops in March 1991 - the dictator's response was to massacre 20,000 Kurds in the North and between 30,000 and 60,000 Shi'ah in the South within a month. For balance, the outside "expert" who gives his take on the idea is a leading former member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (which, of course, doesn't want to disarm Saddam). It's a classic Beeb piece - not really news, utterly slanted, with a patina of easily-debunked objectivity.

BAGHDAD BROADCASTING CORPORATION II: Check out this piece of "vox populi" boilerplate from the BBC, going around the world asking people what they think about the Iraqi situation. Barely a single voice in favor of using force to disarm or depose Saddam. No surprise there. But more objectionable are the voices of people in Iraq, presented with no context in exactly the same format as interviews in Paris and London and Washington. As if there weren't a gun pointed at the back of their head. Yesterday, Paul Krugman blamed the Fox News Network, with an audience in the hundreds of thousands, for slanting America's views in favor of war. It was the only way he could understand the difference in public opinion between the U.S. and Europe. Meanwhile, the BBC, with a quarter of a billion worldwide listeners and viewers, and a semi-monopoly of television and radio in Britain, churns out anti-American propaganda by the truckload. Hmmm. - 2:45:04 AM

BAGHDAD BROADCASTING CORPORATION III: Check out this BBC interview with Tony Blair on Newsnight, hosted by Jeremy Paxman. Now, Paxman is a notoriously rude and offensive interviewer in what is a ruder and more offensive political-media culture in Britain. But this grilling of Blair took things to a new level. Look at this exchange:

TONY BLAIR: Well I can assure you I've said every time I'm asked about this, the [sanctions] have contained [Saddam] up to a point and the fact is the sanctions regime was beginning to crumble, it's why ... we had a whole series of negotiations about tightening the sanctions regime but the truth is the inspectors were put out of Iraq so -

JEREMY PAXMAN: They were not put out of Iraq, Prime Minister, that is just not true. The weapons inspectors left Iraq after being told by the American government that bombs will be dropped on the country.

TONY BLAIR: I'm sorry, that is simply not right. What happened is that the inspectors told us that they were unable to carry out their work, they couldn't do their work because they weren't being allowed access to the sites. They detailed that in the reports to the Security Council. On that basis, we said they should come out because they couldn't do their job properly.

JEREMY PAXMAN: That wasn't what you said, you said they were thrown out of Iraq -

TONY BLAIR: Well they were effectively because they couldn't do the work they were supposed to do JEREMY PAXMAN: No, effectively they were not thrown out of Iraq, they withdrew.

TONY BLAIR: No I'm sorry Jeremy, I'm not allowing you to get away with that, that is completely wrong. Let me just explain to you what happened.

JEREMY PAXMAN: You've just said the decision was taken by the inspectors to leave the country. They were therefore not thrown out.

TONY BLAIR: They were effectively thrown out for the reason that I will give you.

Note the complete contempt for Blair. Note the silly semantics treated as if it were a real point. Not the insufferable pomposity of Paxman. And the audience was drawn entirely from people opposed to the Blair policy. Not a single affirmative question or sympathetic comment was allowed. Fair and balanced. That's our Beeb.

BAGHDAD BROADCASTING CORPORATION IV: Some more recent quotes from the BBC's reporters and correspondents. From Fayad Abu Shamala, the BBC's Gaza correspondent, at a Hamas rally - yes, a Hamas rally - in 2001: "Journalists and media organizations [are] waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people." The BBC still won't characterize Hamas as a terrorist group. From John Simpson, World Affairs editor, the man who claimed to have liberated Kabul: George W. Bush is a "glovepuppet of his vice-president, Dick Cheney, and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld." Simpson also said of Americans he met in New York after 9/11: "Thank God I don't have to broadcast to them." There is, of course, one extraordinary exception to the BBC's slide toward leftist agitprop. And that's Alistair Cooke's Letter from America, a broadcast I grew up on and from which I learned my first lessons about America. Decades later, Cooke is still invaluable.

Sullivan blames BBC for much of the British public's anti-Americanism.

BTW, BBC "sanitizes" its cable channel BBC America, not showing any of these anti-American pro-Saddam programs.

[ez]

Sounds like between BBC and CNN International, the brainwashing of Europeans is complete.

What completely frosts me is the way in which the less than one percent fringe left is represented as if it is an uprising of mainstream citizens. (What is 5 million, a generous estimte, out of 6.2 billion anyway? Why it.s .8 percent)

This is becoming a propaganda war Goebbels would be proud of.

[weegee]

The American Press pulled the same technique on George W. Bush. He was governor for years without a peep about him making blunders or "creating words". Then he became a candidate, gave the same speech several times a day to different audiences (with the same press pool in tow) and they looked forward to any gaffes (there is this admission from the press).

They successfully defeated George W. Bush in terms of spin. Rather than counter his arguments and ideas, they attacked him on the surface.

[geedee]

This is becoming a propaganda war Goebbels would be proud of.

Sad . . . well said . . . and, alas, true.