BuzzMachine

Sweeney Tod
: The German canibal who killed and ate a man got a sentence of eight years. Dr. Jack Kervorkian, who helped dying people commit suicide, got 10 to 25.

(And, yes, I meant Tod; it’s a bilingual joke.)

A blog, sort of
: The NY Times has been threatening to start a campaign blog and now it has… sort of. It’s basically just short (for The Times) bylined (!) pieces with token links. But the sidebar actually links to the competition. It’s a start.

He takes the ball and goes home
: Michael Wolff didn’t manage to buy New York Magazine and so he quit to go to Vanity Fair.

I’ll apply for his old job.

The scream redux
: The Scream Spin of late has been that it wasn’t loud in the hall and so we got it all wrong; ABC is buying that. I don’t buy it. The candidate was not playing to the hall. The candidate was playing to TV and knew exactly how it would play on TV. It was a calculated move that turned out to be a miscalculation. Put that in your history books and smoke it.

The real liar quits
: Andrew Gilligan — the Jayson Blair of Britain, the man who brought the BBC down to shame — has, at last, quit.

But he goes out shameless. He’s the one who sexed up the story. But even after an amazingly extensive investigation that found that he was the sexer upper, Gilligan still accuses the Blair government of sexing up its report and he has the audacity to use that phrase again:

If Lord Hutton had fairly considered the evidence he heard, he would have concluded that most of my story was right. The Government did sex up the dossier, transforming possibilities and probabilities into certainties, removing vital caveats; the 45-minute claim was the ‘classic example’ of this; and many in the intelligence services, including the leading expert in WMD, were unhappy about it….

This report casts a chill over all journalism, not just the BBC’s. It seeks to hold reporters, with all the difficulties they face, to a standard that it does not appear to demand of, for instance, Government dossiers….

No, you haughty, clueless, disastrously destructive, unrepentent, and incompetent lunkead, you cast a chill over all journalism. For you singlehandedly diluted the credibility of our craft. You brought the BBC to shame.

Good riddance!

I’ll take a Coke with my fish ‘n’ chips, please…

: A commenter bets he’ll have a book deal by Wednesday.

I’m betting a juicy job on The Independent.

: Now this is funny: Russia’s minister of media criticizes the BBC for apologizing. Why, in our day at Pravda….

: Thanks to the comments, I’m watching BBC’s Newsnight show now and the acting head of the BBC, Mark Byford, is being pushed hard by the interviewer to accept the Hutton report. What he keeps saying is that “the BBC accepts that Lord Hutton has published his report.” How Orwellian. The BBC acknowledges that the sun came up. The BBC acknowledges that Hutton published. The BBC acknowledges, he says, that Hutton criticized the BBC. He says he apologizes “for our errors.” He won’t admit and apologize for sexing up the report. Round and round it goes. Until the BBC accepts responsibility for what it has done — and it has not — repair cannot begin and damage will continue.