News of fresh disasters

 Is the BBC trying to commit suicide?

Oh, now they have editorial standards.

First it was the creepy pedophile Jimmy Savile, who used his TV stardom to achieve the celebrity (and knighthood) he needed to frighten people away from reporting what was long suspected by many, until two courageous reporters risked their careers to pull back the curtain.

Then we learned what Martin Bashir did to secure his 1995 interview with Princess Diana, a ratings bonanza for him and the Beeb, a divorce-precipitating disaster for her.  It seems that forged bank statements implicating her brother Earl Spencer are not considered good journalistic practice.

Then there was the Newsnight debacle when Lord McAlpine, a former Conservative Party treasurer, was falsely accused of being a pedophile.  The director general George Entwistle had to resign over that one.

A chastened Newsnight then scheduled an interview with Prince Andrew from which viewers learned that he was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein ("not close"), that he broke it off in person "to show leadership" and that he once ate pizza in Woking.  Also he stopped perspiring because of the Falklands War, which is a unique symptom of PTSD.  After that the prince was relieved of his royal duties, whatever they were.

Yesterday Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted on five of six counts of sex trafficking and who do you suppose the Beeb sought out for comment?  Alan Dershowitz, onetime lawyer for Jeffrey Epstein; alleged recipient of the services he provided to men like the prince; defendant in a defamation suit by Virginia Giuffre (who says Andrew and others raped her when she was a child); and currently suing Netflix, et al., over the documentary Filthy Rich, which portrays him in an unflattering way.  The BBC interview mentioned none of this, identifying Dershowitz as a "Constitutional lawyer."  Well, we have a lot of those.  According to the American Bar Association there are 1.3 million lawyers in the US, and this is the only one whose name is known in London?

And because, like another of his former clients Donald J. Trump, Dershowitz has a Twitter account and no idea when to shut up, he took this as an opportunity to defame Giuffre all over again.

It's no secret that the Tories and their buffoonish leader, eager for any distraction from the slow-rolling disaster of Brexit and their kak-handed management of the pandemic, would love to end the BBC.  They can crow (possibly on the sides of buses) about how much money it will save; denounce it as a nest of loony leftists; celebrate yet another triumph of privatization like mail delivery and the railroads.  And these charlies just keep making it easier.