This must have happened before, but it’s the first big example of it that I’ve heard about at all recently. Tomorrow’s British press is apparently full of reports of what Mr Blair “said” to a bunch of trade unionists. In other words, the press printed the stuff that they had been given by Downing Street beforehand. They printed a whole load of stuff that he was going to say. The trouble is, BBC2 TV’s Newsnight has just reported, several trade union leaders who were present at the meeting at which all this was going to be said are adamant that Blair didn’t actually say it.
There must have been occasions where the print media have written reports in the past tense about events that had yet to occur, only for them not to happen as scripted, but it is somewhat unusual for our Prime Minister to be directly involved in such a mess-up. Why didn’t Blair follow his own script? Did he chicken out? Did he set the papers up on purpose? Did he think the whole thing would remain permanently in two separate compartments, with the trade unionists getting one message, and the rest of us getting another, without anyone comparing notes?
Maybe this sort of nonsense happens every day, and the government has (had) a gentleman’s agreement with the BBC that what it says it is going to say is what it said, regardless of what it really said. And if the newspapers print a load of bollocks they are too embarrassed to admit it, and it all dies the death without any embarrassment to anyone. Except, that – maybe, could be, I don’t know, I’m guessing – the government forgot that the BBC now hates it. What the Prime Minister was apparently going to say was that the trade unions are going to have to jolly well behave themselves and not protest or demand lots of money or behave like lefty idiots.
Here’s what it said just a moment ago at timesonline.co.uk, which we copy and paste from here but don’t link to (because the links don’t last), in the “BREAKING NEWS” box:
Blunt warning to unions from Blair
The Prime Minister tackled union militancy head on, warning senior trade unionists that the idea of a left wing Labour Government as an alternative to a moderate one was an “abiding delusion”. Tony Blair told leaders of the country’s top unions that he would not be deflected from controversial reforms of public services, despite rising anger over the increased involvement of private firms. He told a dinner in Brighton, attended by the TUC general council as well as other members of the Cabinet and a string of Government ministers, that there was no alternative to the Government’s agenda.
And that is what Newsnight just said he didn’t say after all.
The Prime Minister gets tough. Or not as the case may be. And the BBC has either plunged another poisoned dagger into Blair, or the real story here is that it is trying to, but has made its own story up. Either way, it’s a great little contretemps.
Now I’ve had a look at the BBC website, and here’s what the BBC is now saying (in a report timed at 11.16 pm our time, i.e. at the same time as the Newsnight report about half an hour ago as I write this:
Tony Blair has told union leaders not to delude themselves about having a more left-wing government as his policies face a day of criticism at the TUC annual congress.
One union leader has cast doubt on whether Mr Blair actually made some of tough remarks attributed to him by Labour officials when he dined privately with the TUC governing council.
… which is downright schizophrenic. Paragraph one says what that the PM said what he said, and paragraph two says maybe he didn’t say it after all, but that his people merely pretended he did. In other words, the BBC is as confused as I am!
What a delightful mess.
Delightful? Disgusting. Filthy, vain, corrupt, astoundingly dimwitted left-wing media liberals showing their shitty ass to the world day after day after day.
Most likely a clerical error. Whatever secretary makes photocopies for the speechwriters just mixed up the speeches.
I have seen articles come out before an event describing the event in the past tense before. Of course nothing as important as what the PM said or didn’t say. It was a sports article saying who “had” started in a game that hadn’t started yet.
Ho hum. Speeches embargoed until a certain time are standard fare for politicians everywhere. It makes for clarity and serves everyone’s interests because the newsies don’t have to write their stories in a hurry and make more errors than already is the case. But the BBC is still a swamp of leftists who in their heart would rather rule than report.
“Truman LOSES!” screamed the headline…
But it ain’t necessarily so.
The BBC’s shameful, discrediting debacle earlier this year with Andrew Gilligan reporting “No, no Americans in Baghdad…” at the SAME TIME that al-Jazeera and Fox and CNN were broadcasting LIVE IMAGES of troops helping ecstatic Iraqis tear down the statue of Saddam has set them up for a period of intense scrutiny re reporting factual reality.
The Beeb USED TO report what happened, but over the years it became full of itself, and THIS year it decided that America was the ‘root cause’ of the world’s suffering, therefore the military effort in Iraq was wrong, therefore all BBC reporters must actively seek evidence of that wrongness and report that wrongness…
And now, BBC is eating crow pie of its own making, and striving daily to distance itself even further from the murderously unprincipled Gilligan and his leftist leanings…
George Bush is doing the same over here. Official transcripts of his speaches and comments are routinley edited to reflect the scripted or intended content, while his numerous (read:constant) stammering and mistakes are deleted. The official transcripts are what is reported by news outlets.
Where’s Alastair Campbell when Blair needs him?
The Times has a similar lead on its front web page.
I rather wonder if this isn’t a case of the real lefties setting up Blair for defeat within the Labour party. The idea that Blair would use stark, harsh language against a traditional Labour support base is unlikely … but that headline DOES represent how the Shorts et al are thinking about Blair these days.
Certainly, it is now considered routine for the government (and most other entities) to send embargoed news releases. But a proper news organization still has to actually attend the event and report what really happened.
Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the BBC essentially admits it did not attend the meeting or do any interviews at all? This is reporting? Aren’t they the least bit embarrassed?
According to The Scotsman it was Gordon Brown who said all that stuff.
Or, it did at 0730 this morning. Perhaps they’ve changed it now.
Marvellous.
For reasons I entirely understand lots of commenters want the BBC to be the villains here.
First, it WAS a Blair meets trade unionists meeting. The Brown thing was earlier. The Blair/TU-ists meeting was private and the BBC got their story from trade unionists who were there. If the BBC themselves could have been in they would have been. Downing Street issued a screed of what Blair was going to say. The newspapers printed this as what he had said. The BBC reported the claims of some who were present that Blair did not follow the script, at all. The BBC is only at fault if in fact no trade unionist present at the meeting made any such claim, and because its reporting of the matter at its website is a contradictory muddle, as I explained in my posting.
Personally I’ve been annoyed for as long as I can remember by the constant mismatching of official records and reports and versions with what actually got said or done, perpetrated by newspapers, but by lots of other organisations also. If this is “spin” it’s been going on ever since the invention of the printing press, and more probably since the invention of language, body or verbal.
The only unusual thing about this story is how big the mismatch apparently was here, and the fact that it was a Prime Minister and his minions doing the mismatching.
Maybe under the influence of the likes of us, the big newspapers will stop misreporting events as what the people staging them wanted them to be, or to seem to be, and report them instead more accurately.
The comment that Blair is already missing Campbell strikes me as dead on the money.
Correction – not a “meeting” quite, it was a dinner.
There’s a good piece at telegraph.co.uk explaining it all.
Good piece in today’s paper Telegraph, apparently, headed: “PM shies away from attacking ‘deluded’ unions”.
It’s now at the telegraph.co.uk website, top UK news story.
And correction, it wasn’t a “meeting” exactly, it was a DINNER, to which the BBC weren’t invited (I got that right).
Something similar happened with Bush’s recent address, I think it was the Guardian that ran a story shortly beforehand, saying that Bush was going to announce he was asking the UN to take over, and that the majority of the US public didn’t support him, and that the Iraq campaign has been a total failure.
Needless to say, that is not what Bush ended up saying, and the other bits are pulled straight from the same bass-ackwards dimension that the BBC gets their news from.
I see that my comment about the telegraph report arrived in two versions. Sorry about that.
Tim in PA
TO REPEAT
The BBC got this story dead right. They spotted the very mismatch that you are accusing them of ignoring. It was the Times that took the hand-out at face value and Newsnight, and then the BBC website (albeit rather confusedly) that pointed out the difference.
Just because the BBC are involved in this story, this doesn’t mean that the story is evidence that the BBC is biased and inaccurate. THEY GOT THIS STORY RIGHT. Less Pavlovian instant-response and more reading please.
Less Pavlovian instant-response and more reading please.
Amen!