25 February, 2010 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
Spinning For Edelman
Reports that former BBC director of news and Media Lens sparring partner Richard Sambrook had found new employment were delivered with perfect timing. The Times commented, February 16:
“He was 30 years at the BBC, but in May Richard Sambrook will start a new life spinning for Edelman, the world’s biggest independent public relations company.” (business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/movers_and_shakers/article7028335.ece)
It seems a natural career move. In 2002 and 2003 Sambrook’s BBC news team spun heaven and earth to lend an air of respectability to one of history’s most brazen campaigns of state-orchestrated lying. The performance was encapsulated perfectly by BBC “rotweiller” Jeremy Paxman when he said last year:
“… when Colin Powell sat down at the UN General Assembly and unveiled what he said was cast-iron evidence of things like mobile, biological weapon facilities and the like [in Iraq]… When I saw all of that, I thought, well, ‘We know that Colin Powell is an intelligent, thoughtful man, and a sceptical man. If he believes all this to be the case, then, you know, he’s seen the evidence; I haven’t.’”
(coventryuniversity.podbean.com/2009/10/29/is-there-a-crisis-in-world-journalism-jeremy-paxman/)
Idiocy is one thing, but the BBC’s idiocy all went one way – no journalist swooned with comparable helplessness at the feet of experts excoriating US-UK propaganda. As news of Sambrook’s move arrived, his former colleagues at the BBC were once again deferring to the “intelligent”, “thoughtful”, “sceptical” American and British politicians hawking the public relations event known as Operation Moshtarak in Afghanistan.
The New Dark Age 