The Observer reports (yes, I will read other papers today, I promise) that the Scientologists are using Youtube in their continuing campaign against the nosy, critical media, this time against a BBC Panorama reporter, John Sweeney:
John Sweeney has apologised for the outburst against a scientologist which was filmed and then put on the video-sharing website YouTube, prompting criticism of the corporation. The BBC held an internal inquiry but said Sweeney had not breached any guidelines.
The incident is one of the first examples of ‘video ambushing’, where organisations being investigated turn the camera on the film makers. The Church of Scientology, whose members include the Hollywood stars Tom Cruise and John Travolta, shadowed the Panorama team in America with its own camera crew. It has made a ‘counter documentary’, attacking Sweeney’s methods, and distributed 100,000 DVDs to MPs, civil servants, religious groups, media organisations and business leaders.
Sweeney’s a complete dumbass for losing his temper, that’s clear – but the carefully edited clip’s a Scientology hit-piece pure and simple, a preemptive smear. This is the video they put out:
That looks really bad doesn’t it?
Panorama has responded by posting a YouTube clip of its own in which leading scientologist Tom Davis, a friend of Cruise and son of the film actress Anne Archer, also a scientologist, is seen losing his temper at Sweeney’s use of the words ‘sinister cult’ and storming away mid-interview with the reporter in hot pursuit. In a separate clash Archer, an Oscar nominee for her role as Michael Douglas’s wife in Fatal Attraction, is understood to have snapped when Sweeney asked if she could have been brainwashed. The Church has withdrawn consent for the BBC to use the footage and Panorama is being hastily re-edited for broadcast tomorrow, but will still include the Sweeney outburst.
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Here’s the corresponding BBC YouTube clip. Personally I think Sweeney was quite restrained with that asshole and I doubt I’m alone in thinking it.
Here’s what John Sweeney himself has to say:
While making our BBC Panorama film “Scientology and Me” I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a “bigot” by star Scientologists, brain-washed – that is how it felt to me – in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers.
Back in Britain strangers have called on my neighbours, my mother-in-law’s house and someone spied on my wedding and fled the moment he was challenged.
[…]
As often in life, I snapped over something completely different and quite trivial.
Top Scientologist Tommy “Don’t mention the word cult” Davis had been goading me all week, and on the seventh day I fell into his elephant trap. He shouted at me and I shouted back, louder.
If you are interested in becoming a TV journalist, it is a fine example of how not to do it. I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it makes me cringe.
I apologised almost immediately, Tommy carried on as if nothing had happened but meanwhile Scientology had rushed off copies of me losing it to my boss, my boss’s boss and my boss’s boss’s boss, the Director-General of the BBC.
[…]
Although this appears on the surface to be about journalistic professionalism, or the lack of it, it’s really about whether one of the richest, most influential and reputedly most controlling untaxed pyramid schemes in the world, which has a special position and privileges because of its legal status as a church, can control what a public broadcaster in another country says about it.
The ‘church’ can call on oodles of Hollywood advice from its members. To counteract the documentary in advance they’ve written their own imaginary screenplay, in which the big, bad, communist, no atheist, bully BBC beats up poor the ikkle ‘freedom of religion’ enthusiasts. Oh the poor, persecuted loves, how they suffer for their faith, with no way to defend themselves! Well not quite, if you believe their former members:
[…]
Three days later, Bowers says, a Scientology official named Philip Jepsen paid her a visit. “He comes with two people in uniforms–very intimidating–and he asks me about Tom Cruise,” Bowers recalls. “It became obvious he knew everything I had told ‘Goldman.’ He grilled me for two hours. At the end, he handed me a Declare.”
The charges listed in Bowers’s “Suppressive Person Declare”–essentially an order of excommunication–included “writing anti-Scientology letters to the press or giving anti-Scientology or anti-Scientologist data to the press” and “engaging in malicious rumour-mongering to destroy the authority or repute of higher officers or the leading names of Scientology.” The Declare meant that, in general, no one in Scientology should speak to her again, including members of her family. It was followed by “Disconnect” letters from her sons and ex-husband.
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Sounds like they have the self-defence part pretty well sewn up internally, now if only they could exert the same control over non-members…
Scientology’s use of what’s percieved as a ‘samizdat’ medium like YouTube to give their narrative credibility is a new and interesting twist in the development of online discourse and public media. But I’m definitely going to watch the BBC Panorama documentary tonight, where I might not have before, and I suspect many others will too now – so have the attempted Scientology media psyops actually backfired on them?
