I am the truth

"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest/editor?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6464629.stm

John Simpson is the Grand BBC World Affairs Editor. His progress up the broadcast journalism tree is perplexing and inexplicable.

"And the most common feeling you come across [in Baghdad] is a kind of slow-burning, gloomy anger"

Scientists are taught during their training about a number of common mistakes easily made when doing research. One is the mistake of only seeing what you set out to find. If I were to characterise John Simpsons output concerning Iraq over the last four years "a kind of slow-burning, gloomy anger" would be a perfect description. John Simpson hates America, and he believes that the invasion of Iraq was illegal and bad. At every point since the invasion, he has wished for a coalition defeat, and has sought the precursive signs of it everywhere. When there is good news, he is silent. When there is bad news, and admittedly there has been a lot of that, he is all over it like flies on poopy. That is not journalism.

It is easy to forget how high the expectations once were.
"I don't like the feeling that my country has been invaded," a shopkeeper in Haifa street told me, a day or so after the fall of Baghdad.
"But thanks to God that it is the Americans who have done this. They are the richest country on earth. They will help us."
But they did not. They did not even protect the ministries and public buildings and museums from being looted.
We filmed as people shouted "Do something!" at an American soldier, while thieves were running out with valuable medical equipment from the hospital behind us. He just shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
Iraqis were infuriated by the gross mismanagement and open theft that American contractors and Iraqi politicians carried out in the first year after the invasion.
They had little but contempt for the feeble administration of Paul Bremer, the American proconsul whose only previous senior job had been as US ambassador to the Netherlands.

What a petulant, non-sensical, mendacious mangled wreck of a narrative.

If you want journalism, read Michael J Tottens reportage of the situation in Lebanon. Clear, factual, un-biased, brave, comprehensive and detailed, Mr Totten makes me wish we could clone him and send him all round the world. John Simpson has no interest in the facts. What interests him is the next cudgel to batter the evil Americans over the head with. Like a mopey sullen schoolboy who hates the schoolmaster, he can't bear to scrutinise things with the objectivity which might provide evidence contradictory to his prejudice. The number one rule in my media world would be, don't promote journalists whose personal psychology precludes them from being able to report the truth. Hence my quotation of Henry II's words. John Simpson believes that he is part of a monolithic truth-telling machine which is more important than politicians and voters. He believes that it is his job to enforce the views of this truth-telling machine on us simpletons. It is arrogance and hubris on a grand scale.

But as Thomas Becket discovered, pretending to power one does not actually have occasionally costs you a great deal.