by Tony Cartalucci
February 14, 2012 - It has been recently reported by the Independent, that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) "will today apologise to an estimated 74 million people around the world for a news fixing scandal, exposed by The Independent, in which it broadcast documentaries made by a London TV company that was earning millions of pounds from PR clients which it featured in its programming."
While The Independent focuses on scandals revolving around the Malaysian government, members of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak's regime, and corporations like Microsoft, the reek of propaganda wafting off from all that BBC involves itself with has been a case study for years.
Three overtly suspect projects BBC recently backed immediately come to mind, including "Thailand: Justice Under Fire" together with "Secret Pakistan," and "The Lady," regarding US and British-funded Myanmar proxy, Aung San Suu Kyi. These three "works" have been exposed as overt propaganda, peddling an agenda rather than anything resembling objective documentaries. BBC's "Secret Pakistan," for example, literally attempted to rewrite 10 years of history where Pakistan, rather than Al Qaeda or "Bin Laden" was retrospectively made responsible for the ongoing violence in Afghanistan and the death of Western troops.
And while The Independent offers up their handful of negligible admissions regarding Malaysia, Egypt, and Microsoft, exposing how special interests compromised BBC's "integrity," the special interests behind other BBC "documentaries" are easily identified, granted you do not watch them in suspended disbelief, accepting everything as truthful, and fully trusting in BBC's obviously non-existent credibility.
BBC is not only guilty of making fraudulent, deceitful propaganda dressed up as "documentaries," but their general "reporting" is also a breathtaking daily assault on truth, objectivity, and journalistic integrity. No where can this be seen better than in BBC's coverage of the events in Egypt and Libya last year, and in particular illustrated in an excerpt from February 2011's "Libya Conquered in the Dark: BBC's Breathtaking Propagandizing:"
Unlike in Egypt, where US International Crisis Group trustee Mohamed ElBaradei was talking daily to international reporters on the ground, and AlJazeera provided 24 hour coverage, Libya is a virtual blackhole. The mainstream media is relaying hearsay from "Libyan" bloggers and protesters on the ground. The tell-tale quotation marks peppering reports coming out of BBC and AlJazeera and a litany of weasel words indicate that the "revolution" will be feed to the public in the most disingenuous and unsubstantiated manner possible.
Unfortunately, when all we have to depend on during a crisis is the honor of the corporate owned media, where BBC itself is a major corporate member of the globalist nexus Chatham House, nothing can be trusted and we are left in confusion and uncertainty. Far too many people, however, will still fall for the thin veneer of legitimacy the mainstream media's slick graphics and well-dressed shills lend it.
BBC's latest article regarding Sayf al-Islam's address to the nation gives us an astounding example of the mainstream media forcing the scant facts coming out of Libya into a predetermined narrative to suit the global-combine's interests. In his address to the Libyan nation, Sayf al-Islam accused opposition groups and outsiders of trying to transform Libya, that the foreign media was grossly exaggerating the government's response to protesters, and compared the unrest to an Egypt-style Facebook revolution.
While BBC concedes that "verifying information from Libya has been difficult," within the text of the article they refer to the speech as a "rambling TV address." In the side bar, we hear from BBC propagandist Jon Leyne, who covered the "bazillion-gagillion man march" in Egypt and told viewers it seemed as if "all of Egypt" had turned out in Tahrir Square. Best estimates of the crowd range from 50,000 to no more than 100,000 (0.1% of Egypt's population.) Leyne says the following regarding Sayf al-Islam's address, in an unprofessional bravado we should only have come to expect from the BBC:
"That was one of the strangest political speeches I think I've ever sat through. He was completely and utterly detached from the reality of what is going on in his country. To put it bluntly, most Libyans will just treat it as gibberish - it was completely meaningless to them. The idea that they're somehow going to sit down and have a national dialogue with a government that's brought in foreign mercenaries to shoot at them is laughable."
What qualifies Leyne to speak on behalf of the Libyan people on a crisis his own network concedes is difficult to report on, thus "utterly detached" themselves, is beyond understanding, unless of course it is pure propaganda aimed at discrediting the address.
What the mainstream media and Sayf al-Islam seem to agree on is that Libya's eastern city of Benghazi has been overrun by mobs who have seized military tanks and weapons. For BBC and AlJazeera to call the government's response to arsonists, looters, vandals, and now dangerously and overtly armed mobs, a "massacre," seems somewhat disingenuous and very similar to their coverage of the US-backed mobs that took to the streets in Bangkok in May, 2010.
While BBC's recent outing as a corporate-paid propaganda operation may seem to many as a simple statement of the obvious, it will hopefully begin to undermine the unquestioned credibility many still seem to believe these large corporate-media outfits possess. It will also hopefully spur many to begin researching, discovering, and attempting to understand the world around them, themselves, without the corporate-paid propagandists guiding them along.
If Thomas Jefferson was correct when he stated, "an informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will," one must wonder where the public will is currently reposited so long as the citizenry is "informed" by corporate-paid propagandists like the BBC.