Inflammatory lies from the BBC
: BBC Foreign Editor John Simpson has gone over the edge of credibility and decency as he essentially accuses the U.S. military of targeting and murdering non-embedded journalists.
BBC world affairs editor John Simpson has called on the US government to investigate why more journalists were killed by American soldiers than by any other means during the Iraq war.
Simpson blamed the deaths of many of the journalists – what he called “the ultimate act of censorship” – on the system of embedding, which meant that journalists operating independently of US and British troops became “potential targets”.
I was about to start screaming about taking away Simpson’s journalism stripes and drumming him out of the corps.
But then I came to a buried paragraph in the Guardian report:
American soldiers did not kill journalists on purpose, said Simpson, but out of “a mixture of blind panic, inadequate street training, and complete and utter ignorance”.
I’d say the Guardian is just as at fault for this bit of inflammatory accusation as Simpson, for that last bit should have been at least alluded to in the first three paragraphs. Altogether, it’s a festival of anti-Americanism and it’s shoddy journalism. [via IWantMedia]
