WHILE FRANCE SURRENDERS freedom of speech, in Britain freedom of the press is eroding. Let’s give a big "harrumph" to Britain’s "Office of Communication," a government bureaucracy whose mission it is to "balance the promotion of choice and competition with the duty to foster plurality, informed citizenship, protect viewers, listeners and customers and promote cultural diversity." Last week "Ofcom" scolded Fox News Channel’s John Gibson for accusing the BBC of lying and "frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism." Gibson’s broadcast had struck a nerve with twenty Brit whiners who complained to Ofcom when he attacked the Beeb’s Andrew Gilligan for his wildly false reporting during the 2003 Iraq campaign. Gilligan -- most famous for making up the charge that the Blair government had "sexed up" the intel on Iraqi WMD (and thus lied the UK into war) -- had been proven false by a formal investigation. When David Kelley -- Gilligan’s supposed source -- killed himself after denying saying that to Gilligan, the whole mess was investigated. The report by Lord Hutton found that the Beeb, not Blair, had made things up. I remember Gilligan’s reports from Baghdad and its outskirts. They could have been (and possibly were) written by Baghdad Bob. None of those outrages was enough to wake Ofcom up. Now, Ofcom has puffed itself up to chastise Gibson who, predictably, reacted by using one of his opinion segments to tell Ofcom to stuff it. He was much too polite. The Beeb is relentlessly anti-American, anti-war, anti-Bush, and anti-everything else that doesn’t fit neatly into its own far-left view of the world. Just ask the sailors of HMS Ark Royal, who voted to ban it from the ship during the ’03 fighting because of its bias. But forget the Beeb. Its biases are too blatant to even worry about. The real problem is the overreach of Ofcom.
Bulldog, you have a tough row to hoe. Care to borrow a bulldozer?
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