I was listening to the Today programme this morning, as I usually do and was feeling morally outraged, as I usually do, by some of the backlash coming from the Hutton report.
One of the “suggestions” seems to be that journalists cannot report news based on the word of one person. They couldn’t just ring David Kelly get his (obviously biased, but then who isn’t) views and report on that.
Now a couple of things occur to me. Firstly, wasn’t that the justification for going to war. The whole 45 minute claim was unproven and came from one dissatisfied member of Sadam Hussein’s military, who was paid for the information. Now if the Intelligence Services were swayed by the government’s desire to justify themselves, who’s to say that some guy in Iraq ain’t swayed by a huge bundle of fivers.
On another point, all news is based on subjective reporting, rumors and hearsay. In fact the biggest and most interesting news and the stuff which sells lots of product is the stuff that is purely based on that: the plethora of Royal Family allegations, the leaked report 2 days ago, the Clinton scandal, any trouble that Blair has been in over the last decade… the list goes on. All some tidbit of information from a single source, maybe the truth comes out eventually by trawling through the evidence, but at the end of the day it usually comes down to nice, biased, subjective, personally interested individuals.
Anyway, here’s an interesting picture to put it all in perspective.
