Tim Blair

Check this out for quality BBC journalism:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,592751,00.html

This is even better than Al Gore inventing the internet.

Simpson may have a generally deserved reputation as a legend in his own mind, but the friendly fire that he & Special Forces & the Kurdish forces came under had to have made for one harrowing experience. His translator killed, the legs blown off. Corpses, bodies burning. I don’t even blame him reacting badly when he mistakenly thought the soldier was about to stop him from broadcasting.

Wouldn't the BBC airing that comedy show be the equivalent of me getting a warning for bad on-the-job conduct (telling clients that they're "useless fuckheads", for example), and then proceeding to plaster posters around the entire city proclaiming that "MY BOSS IS A WANKER!" ?

Oh, I'd also expect to keep my job after all this too.

I listened to Simpson "liberate" Kabul live on BBC World. (Listened, because he was reporting for BBC radio. It was taped, and we got to see the tape sometime the next day.) I'll never forget the way the beauteous Nisha Pillai wriggled with glee as she introduced it. It was fun, even if Simpson was a bit full of it.

That was his high point as far as I'm concerned, though. He's also an admirer of Harper's bizarre publisher Lewis Lapham. Simpson and Lapham strolled the streets of New York on Simpson's World as Lapham explained---and I may misremember slightly---how 9/11 was good for the US, because it would make us more humble. Even Simpson was slightly shocked, or pretended to be.

The point about that friendly-fire incident, ForNow, was that Simpson immediately assumed that the soldier had come up to stop him from broadcasting, and that the Voice of the Mighty Simpson was enough to stay the soldier's hand.

Simpson’s behavior after the friendly fire takes that meaning on with any definiteness only in the collateral light of his behavior in other situations. As a standalone paradigm of his behavior it offers a meaning that tends waver & fade against the background of the horror that he had just witnessed. I don’t know, it’s a horrible incident & we didn’t witness him in detailed actuality of character revelation. Just not an incident that I’d single out to razz him for.

Angie, Nisha Pillai beauteous? You need to get out more. I've seen better heads on boils.

John Simpson may be pompous, but he has a lot to be pompous about. And if he's a laughing-stock, it's because he doesn't mindlessly follow the Leftist Official Line on everything.

I think he's completely wrong in the stand he's taking, but I don't question his intellect, nor his intellectual honesty.

I wonder if any senior Enron employees threatened to walk off the job if their CEO wasnt resinstated immediately...

'resinstated' is of course a misspelling of reinstated, rather than a painful process involving plastic injection machinery.

I agree with Alan Brain. Simpson is the one BBC journalist I trust. If he had come up with the "sexed up" dossier, the BBC's actions would have made sense.

And I think that, as a general rule, it is courteous and reasonable to interpret what someone says in a way that does not make them appear mad or cretinous. How the left crowed when Mrs Thatcher said "I believe in grammar, me". Could she have been joking? Might Simpson have been joking when he claimed to have liberated Kabul? It makes more sense to me than the idea that he really believed it.

" ...planned a comedy mocking the British government ... "

When you can't rely on logic and reasoned arguments to make a case .. resort to mockery.

I always liked listening to the BBC World broadcast in the US. Always regarded the BBC as the best in the world for news.

Too bad the BBC feels it must be ideologically pure at the expense of unbiased reporting.

Simpsons broadcast was astonishing. He'd just watched that bomb drop over him and explode, minutes earlier and not 5 metres distant. Afterwards, bleeding from the ears and face, steel embedded to the hilt in the spine of his flak jacket he records his story. He'd just missed being killed or maimed and he has the balls (without sounding too excited) to berate a marine who he mistakenly thinks is trying to stop him filming. He recovers with grace when he realises his mistake. Say what you like about his politics but the guy is tough.

"I think I've just got a bit of shrapnel in the leg, that's all. OK, I will. Thanks a lot."

"Too bad the BBC feels it must be ideologically pure at the expense of unbiased reporting."

If I read correctly, one instance of bad reporting pertaining to the Iraq Invasion has been (correctly) named & shamed by a formal inquiry.

I am quite confident that the vast, very vast, majority of workers for the BBC will maintain a pretty high degree of quality in their work. It would appear from early reports in England, that a substantial number of English persons feel similarly. Not sure the collective noun that is the BBC is capable of upholding an ideology.

Having given fench politico Pasqua a mauling the BBC is strangely silent in respect of george Galloway named and shamed (and vastly enriched)by the ABC list of Saddam's bagsheeshed buddies.
Is there something really juicy lurking in the BBC corridors ? Having already rubbished the former reports from the politically incorrect Daily Telegraph , how will they re-spin the reports from the ya ya sisterood ?
i, for one am panting with anticipation

"Chico", you've not been paying attention. The BBC did such a bad job covering Iraq in general that the crew of the Ark Royal voted to stop listening to them.

Chico that BBC "collective noun" should be institutionally socialist...

And who can forget the story that the BBCs defence reporter, wrote a memo to BBC about the reports of "setbacks" being crap.

Don't know a whole lot about Simpson, but that story makes me respect the man as at the very least a tougher than usual reporter.
Don't really like the refernce to an 'own goal' though, as I tend to view our guys as more than 'players'.

rexie, Simpson (and his crew) were stomping into Kabul on foot ahead of the military. There were Afghan civilian vehicles travelling along side them. The Taliban had fled. There were people (mostly kids) cheering him from the side of the road, dancing about in the road, and occasionally leaning down from a vehicle to pat Simpson on the head.

He said something along the lines of "It feels strange to be liberating a city like this." So it was sorta kinda a joke. I gather that it was mostly British journalists who had given him flack for it. He was interviewed on American TV and mumbled something about how what he'd said was foolish, really. I was a bit disappointed he'd backed down.

That doesn't mean I'll stop referring to him as John "Liberator of Kabul" Simpson, because it's fun. Still don't care for him much.

Questionable content!

I posted the above comment using "road side" (as one word) instead of "side of the road", and I got a warning that my post was rejected for "questionable content", that content being the letters a-d-s-i-d-e. The hell?