By now I sure most people have seen THIS somewhere. I saw it in the Rocky Mountain News
A judge cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair's administration Wednesday of any direct involvement in the suicide of a government expert on Iraqi weapons, but criticized the BBC for its reporting of the scandal that shook the British leadership.
The government did not act in a "dishonorable, underhand or duplicitous" way in revealing the identity of weapons expert David Kelly, said senior appeals judge Lord Hutton, who was appointed by Blair to investigate the death.
Hutton said he was satisfied that nobody involved in the matter could have foreseen that Kelly would take his own life. He killed himself after being identified as the anonymous source of the British Broadcasting Corp. report accusing the government of exaggerating claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to bolster support for war.
Blair welcomed Hutton's "extraordinary, thorough, detailed and clear" report and demanded the BBC withdraw its allegation he misled the country over Iraqi weapons.
This is a humiliation for a bigtime news agency, much like the Jayson Blair/New York Times scandel, but I don't know if it will make them change. It certainly hasn't at the NYT.
What needs to happen is a fundamental re-think of what a journalists' role is in the world. As a reporter, albeit a small one, I can see the fundamental flaw.
We no longer have reporters who are interested in actually reporting. We have news people who grew up with Woodward and Bernstein. Reporters who saw, not the importance of the story, but the celebrity of the duo. Budding reporters take to the career because of possible fame and stardom. In the minds of these folks, the reporter has become the star. They have forgotten about the story.
I know because fame due to reporting has entered my mind as well.
That is wrong, really wrong.
Reporters of the past gained fame based on the stories. They wanted to be sure the story was right, not that it supported some position held by the reporter. Walter Kronkite and Edward R. Murrow might have been liberal, but it rarely played into their reporting. We have gotten away from that.
It is important to know that when a journalist graduates from university, most get a Bachelor of Science. Yes, we all have told the jokes about reporters getting a B.S. degree, but reporting is more like science than art.
A true journalist would track the story down. Look at the facts and circumstances of the case and report what the result was. Surely a deft touch at writing or speaking helps, but that is secondary. Or should be anyway.
The problem for me is that the true journalist still exists. I see them everyday here in Denver. I know of them in every city, town, or hamlet that has a media outlet. The true journalist is the one that rarely gets complaints. If the story's there than it's reported. If not, well better luck next time. These people rarely win the big prizes for journalism (a stupid practice of hubris in the first place). They know the story is about the story, not the storyteller.
Too many in my profession have forgotten that. Jayson Blair forgot that. The Los Angeles Times has forgotten that. Andrew Gilligan and the B.B.C. have most certainly forgotten it. It's O.K. to be an activist and a journalist. It is NOT O.K. to be an activist whilst being a journalist.
If that is a problem for you, news reporting is not where you ought to be.
UPDATE: The chairman of the British Broadcasting Corporation has resigned following an inquiry into the suicide of a scientist. BBC News 24 says Gavyn Davies stepped down after an inquiry lambasted some of the BBC's reporting on the build-up to the war in Iraq. The inquiry into the suicide of Iraq weapons expert David Kelly had singled out journalist Andrew Gilligan, the BBC's management and its supervisory board of governors for criticism.
