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I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Monday, July 21, 2003
Blair and the Beeb
I've struggled hard to find a positive angle on the whole sordid row between Tony Blair and the BBC, and the tragic suicide of former weapons inspector David Kelly that seems to have happened as a result. The only thing I can think of is this: that it puts to rest the misconception, surprisingly common in the US, that the BBC is either a state-run network (Downing Street can only wish) or as sleep-inducingly dull as PBS (could you imagine Jim Lehrer having this kind of stand-off with W.?)
The BBC is neither of these things. It is also not the New York Times, to address the devil's advocacy from my friend Mac down there in the previous post's comments section. Mac, a former Times employee himself, pointed out that the Gray Lady conducted somber internal reportage which the editors themselves were not allowed to edit; why isn't the Beeb holding itself to the same standard of self-examination? Easy: because the two situations bear absolutely no resemblance to each other.
In Jayson Blair, the Times was faced with a serial fabulist, a reporter who made stories up out of whole cloth. What the Beeb is faced with -- at worst -- is a reporter who may have sexed up the quotes of his major source in order to show that the government sexed up its intelligence dossier. In fact, there is no real evidence that the reporter in question did anything of the sort. And now, with the untimely death of the source, there may never be. In his testimony before Parliament, Kelly never actually denied the accuracy of the BBC report or that his quotes were used -- saying only that he couldn't remember saying such things or that they didn't sound exactly like the sort of thing he'd say. What else would a shy scientist with a fear of being scapegoated tell a Parliamentary committee? Kelly was aware of maneuverings around his testimony; as he ominously put it to an NYT reporter before his death, there are "dark actors playing games."
Were individual quotes sexed up? Probably; that is a long-running tradition in British journalism. Was the substance of the report wrong? To my mind, the fact that the BBC is being attacked so vehemently shows they got unnervingly close to the truth. Think of the way the Washington Post was relentlessly pounded by the White House in 1972 for its dogged investigation of a "third-rate burglary." Some of their evidence, Woodward and Bernstein knew, was pretty shaky. Some of it was plain wrong. But their instinct was correct. As unlikely as it seemed at the time, there were dark actors playing games in the corridors of power. And now? Now we know just how hard it was to prove a weapons of mass destruction case against Iraq. Now we know what a flimsy house of cards other intelligence sources were. As for sexing up statistics before you present them to the House of Commons -- that, too, is a long-running British tradition.
The BBC has no anti-Blair agenda; if anything, Broadcasting House should fear the Conservative alternative. It is belligerently neutral in its wartime reporting -- a paradox which, to the combatants, can look like bias. Winston Churchill once famously complained that the network took neutrality to the point of "being neutral between the firefighter and the fire." But sometimes being neutral, and rational, and curious, means lighting a few fires yourself. I say fair play to the Beeb for continuing to do exactly what most of the media in the US is not: raising the tough questions, listening to whistle-blowers, playing the agent provocateur.
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