Audio: Bolton Unloads on BBC Radio Interviewer

[steevo]

Well it doesn't surprise me. He was the best we had in a long time at the UN before our lefty Dems got rid of him.

digg.com/politics/Audio_Bolton_Unloads_on_BBC_Radio_Interviewer

[Teddy Bear]

I'd love to hear it - is it supposed to be an audio link Steevo?

[steevo]

Yeah sorry about that, its blogging and 1 link to the next. Its at the top of the page from LGF:

littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=25523&only

[Teddy Bear]

Melanie Phillips sums up this interviews in her usual excellent manner:

May 17, 2007
Bolton v the BBC
For afficionados (if that’s the right word — maybe sado-masochists would be more appropriate) of the closed mindset of BBC Radio Four’s Today programme, this morning’s exchange (0840) between its Grand Inquisitor John Humphrys and the former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton was an absolute peach. Bolton was on because of his remarks discussed here about Iran and the alleged disloyalty of British Foreign Office officials in countermanding British government policy over Iraq. The exchange started coolly enough, so much so that for a while I thought Humphrys was for once going to conduct an interview about US foreign policy without betraying his own views.

But then things took a sharp turn for the worse when his incredulity at what Bolton was saying — which, because it was based on truth, rationality, sense of proportion and intellectual honesty clearly struck Humphrys as utterly preposterous – prompted him to claim that America had ‘destroyed everything’ in Iraq. Bolton told him sharply that this was totally untrue, that various Iraqi ministries had remained functioning, and that although undoubtedly America had made grievous mistakes in Iraq, that fact did not invalidate toppling Saddam in the first place. It was that point — that logically unanswerable point —which Humphrys just couldn’t get his head round.

So he then started spluttering — causing Bolton to make a remark about the extreme left-wing bias Humphrys was revealing by his questions. This was the one error Bolton made: he assumed that the visceral anti-war, anti-American bias he was correctly picking up from Humphrys’s ever-more self-revealing questions must be left-wing, whereas it is of course the default position of what passes for the British centre-ground. However, the fury provoked by Bolton’s remark led Humphrys progressively to reveal yet more deeply questionable assumptions — such as the fact that George Soros was attacking Bush and the war furnished the proof that such opposition was not left-wing and, by implication, principled and right. This caused Bolton to laugh out loud in amazement — as well he might — at how a mainstream broadcaster could have fallen for Soros’s anti-Bush, anti-west manipulation. Humphrys then suggested that Paul Wolfowitz had lost his job at the World Bank because he was ‘fatally flawed’ — which led Bolton, who by this time was audibly open-mouthed at the apparently unstoppable stream of false assumptions and prejudices with which every question was being loaded, to point out that a) Wolfowitz was not yet out and b) he was not fatally flawed.

As a demonstration of the astounding prejudices of the BBC mindset, the loaded nature of its questioning and the assumptions it makes about its interviewees, and the circular fact that by definition such a mindset makes it simply impossible for it to acknowledge even the possibility that it might have descended from the summit of Mount Objectivity into the gutter of twisted journalism, the spat could hardly be bettered. The BBC is now a totally closed thought system, and if John Bolton didn’t know that before

[indikit]

Melanie Philips seems to be the only sane person left in Journalism. I can't get enough of her site. I just wish her articles were more prominent across the internet.

[Teddy Bear]

They are sadly few and far between. Most simply follow the 'popular' (left-winge) line and are incapable of independant thought.