For some reason best known to the local cable company, our local BBC station is BBC London and it was on their local news bulletin that I saw the worst smear attempt I’ve seen in a long time. Apparantly, with Jean Charles de Menezes now entirely blameless in his own killing, the Metropolitan Police and/or its allies have shifted their focus on his family and the Justice 4 Jean campaign. Dimly realising that smearing the family themselves may backfire, the police or its allies have chosen to smear their advisors, which resulted in this “news” item: “is the Menezes family’s campaign for justice hijacked by the far-left?”
The common sense answer is of course “no”, but that’s not what the BBC wanted to show so we got treated to several minutes of ominous, slo-mo shots of two of the family’s advicers, one Asad Rehman, who turned out to be connected to George Galloway and Respect (no!), the other, Yasmin Khan who, so the BBC revealed after some intensive googlin^wresearch revealed to be behind the Corporate Pirates website, which is devoted to the plundering of Iraq by big business. At no point was explained why this was so sinister; any appeal was emotional not reasoned.
Two talking heads were asked to comment, one some wet behind the ears police spokesman, who adviced the Menezes family to change advisors — as if they’d take the advice of their son’s killers— the second Brian Coleman, who was indentified as being on the Greater London Assembly, but not as a Tory, strangely enough, who saw it all as a “far-left plot” to damage the police and “sir” Ian Blair. Neither had any political agenda themselves, I’m sure.
The interesting thing was how this was presented. I’m sure the BBC London news team meant this all to be outrageous, but it just fell flat. Course, I might not be the best person to judge this by, but I don’t think this would convince anybody who didn’t already think Menezes had it coming and “those lefties” should stop hassling the police. It was all too American, too Republican and while the British public can be just as ignorant, pigheaded and stupid as the American, it’s not this stupid. Anti-war is not a scary word in the UK, not like it is in the US: the gulf between cant and reality in this programme was just too great for anybody to swallow…
Which does not mean this wasn’t a slimy piece of biased crap for which everybody responsible at the BBC should be sacked, of course. But that’s no more then we’ve come to expect from the post-election, post-spine BBC.