Fair and balanced



I found this article on Guardian unlimited via a spot on Neil Gaiman's blog. With Murdoch's Sky cable-satellite service now also carrying the odious Fox News UK viewers are being treated to the endless spewing or right-wing bile completely devoid of a basis in fact our journalistic integrity. Now they are broadcasting to the UK they decided to have a go at the BBC:



"The Fox presenter, John Gibson, said in a segment entitled My Word that the BBC had "a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest"; that the BBC "felt entitled to lie and, when caught lying, felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives"; that the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, in Baghdad during the US invasion, had "insisted on air that the Iraqi army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American military"; and that "the BBC, far from blaming itself, insisted its reporter had a right to lie - exaggerate - because, well, the BBC knew that the war was wrong, and anything they could say to underscore that point had to be right". "



After the article I posted last autumn on Al Franken's excellent book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them dealing with Fox and the other right-wing Nazi shock-jock hate-mongers (and Fox's own goal when they tried to sue him but inly pushed the book to the top of the NY Times bestsellers) I found this particularly interesting. Glad to see that at least in the UK the regulators will not just sit back and let these wankers dress up what are almost neo-Nazi rants as 'news'. Guess this means Anne Coulter won't be getting a daytime show on UK services then, eh? For shame.