Speaker 1: From hot air dot com comment on the show to
Speaker 1: talk about his latest column, the column that I mentioned
Speaker 1: at the very beginning of the show about why we
Speaker 1: don't distrust the news media enough. And I have a
Speaker 1: very healthy dose of distrust for most major news media outlets.
Speaker 1: But boy howdy, the BBC has done it to themselves.
Speaker 1: And joining me now to talk about it is David
Speaker 1: Strong from hot air dot com. How you doing, my friend?
Speaker 2: Well? As always when I'm I'm with you, my life
Speaker 2: is perfect.
Speaker 1: See this is just shameless flattery. So I invite him
Speaker 1: back and it works every single time. That and the
Speaker 1: fact that I enjoy his writing so much at hot
Speaker 1: air dot com. So what did BBC do initially? And
Speaker 1: then we'll talk about what they did in their own
Speaker 1: investigation into their own failures from the initial thing that
Speaker 1: I want you to talk about right now.
Speaker 3: Well, the BBC, which has a long and glorious history
Speaker 3: of anti semity, commission a documentary about what it's like
Speaker 3: to survive the war in Gaza and they followed around
Speaker 3: I think a twelve or thirteen year old boy and
Speaker 3: they're showing you how life is so difficult for this
Speaker 3: young man, but how he is gamely following through and
Speaker 3: then and they air this documentary. They push it relentlessly.
Speaker 3: They air the documentary and along comes someone who looked
Speaker 3: into it and they discovered, well, the little boy is
Speaker 3: the son of an official in Hamas. This turned out
Speaker 3: to be just one big propaganda campaign. And of course
Speaker 3: the people who did the documentary knew all about this,
Speaker 3: and they try to argue, well, it doesn't really matter
Speaker 3: that he's the son of a homosophis. Oh he's you know,
Speaker 3: he's a young man and he's in Gaza. And the
Speaker 3: DBC at first was going to push this out worldwide,
Speaker 3: but they got so much pushback that they eventually had
Speaker 3: to pull it and then do an investigation into how
Speaker 3: it happened.
Speaker 1: Well, and this is the thing. First of all, the
Speaker 1: DBC when this was brought to their attention, how do
Speaker 1: you know how it was brought to their attention? Because
Speaker 1: that's I would have loved to see that email.
Speaker 3: I used to know how, But but this the original
Speaker 3: story I wrote maybe two months ago or something like that,
Speaker 3: but it was you know, there there's a lot of
Speaker 3: attention on the propaganda coming.
Speaker 2: Out of Gaza.
Speaker 3: There's this entire infrastructure called Pellywood, which is, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of the Palestinian Hollywood.
Speaker 2: And people have.
Speaker 3: Figured this out, so they start looking at who the
Speaker 3: people are, and they're actors who show up in videos
Speaker 3: on a regular basis. One day they're a dead body,
Speaker 3: the next day they're a doctor, the next day they're
Speaker 3: a journalist. And the problem is is that any actual
Speaker 3: journalist or anyone employed by a media organization has to
Speaker 3: be approved by Hamas. They're often actually Hamas operatives themselves.
Speaker 3: And I mean, you can understand why this is. I mean,
Speaker 3: Hamas is a terrorist organization. You're not going to send
Speaker 3: you're ace reporter in there to get shot if he
Speaker 3: says the wrong thing. But the alternative that they have
Speaker 3: chosen is essentially to report whatever Hamas tells them.
Speaker 1: And without that, the thing that gets me, David is
Speaker 1: that they report it unquestionably right. They just they regurgitate
Speaker 1: the facts that Hamas gives them the Hamas Health Ministry
Speaker 1: without Unfortunately, a lot of people in the West don't
Speaker 1: have a clear understanding that Hamas is entrenched in every
Speaker 1: aspect of the Gaza strip. They are a political system,
Speaker 1: they're a military arm they're an economic wing. They do
Speaker 1: everything So when Hamas they say that the Hamas Ministry
Speaker 1: of Health that is simply another arm of the Hamas
Speaker 1: military wing.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, every doctor, everyone who works in any capacity,
Speaker 3: and whether they're working for the government directly or not.
Speaker 3: And Hamas is the government. So the gods a health
Speaker 3: ministry is Hamas, but everyone who works in the hospitals
Speaker 3: is Hamas. In fact, hostages were kept in the hospitals
Speaker 3: a lot of times. You've got the tunnel entrances for
Speaker 3: the fighters buried in schools, buried in hospitals. Uh, they
Speaker 3: are you know, all the civilian infrastructure, which is by
Speaker 3: the way of war crime.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: That that that is uh one of the definitions of
Speaker 3: a war crime, because you're supposed to avoid uh civilian casualties.
Speaker 3: As soon as you've got soldiers there, it's a legitimate
Speaker 3: target of war. So there's let's just add one thing here,
Speaker 3: because it's not it's it's not just the BBC as
Speaker 3: bad as the BBC is, uh, but the New York Times,
Speaker 3: one of their key reporters there is an actual Nazi.
Speaker 3: I mean he puts up on his uh social media
Speaker 3: all about how he loved Hitler. And when the New
Speaker 3: York Times was confronted with this, they said, well, we
Speaker 3: had a conversation with him, and he's got to keep
Speaker 3: his politics out of the report it.
Speaker 1: I mean, really, oh my, we we earlier in the show,
Speaker 1: I talked about it, and I don't know if you saw
Speaker 1: this the report from the UN Human Rights Council, which
Speaker 1: is like joke where they did a whole report on
Speaker 1: the quote Israel Gaza conflict that did not mention Hamas
Speaker 1: one time, David.
Speaker 2: Were October seventh.
Speaker 1: That they just talked about October twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: They just glossed over it.
Speaker 1: I just got back from Japan, a long trip in Japan,
Speaker 1: and I went on all these tours in Hiroshima and
Speaker 1: Nagasaki and all of our Japanese tour guides.
Speaker 2: They were very.
Speaker 1: Dedicated to the proposition of showing the horrors of atomic
Speaker 1: war so it never happens again. They are one hundred
Speaker 1: percent piece nicks. It is genuine. I believe them. But
Speaker 1: boy howdy, they glossed over why we dropped those bombs
Speaker 1: in the first place, right, I mean, it's it's their history.
Speaker 1: But it started to annoy me and I was like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, and now we have the un literally
Speaker 1: just glossing over the atrocities that were committed on October
Speaker 1: seventh in order to justify more hatred at Israel. BBC
Speaker 1: is complicit in this. Their coverage is almost some of
Speaker 1: the worst. I think. I look at them every day,
Speaker 1: every day, and every day I'm disgusted by what I see.
Speaker 1: But what did they discover in their own report on
Speaker 1: their own documentary, what did they what did they cop
Speaker 1: to in their report?
Speaker 3: Well, not enough, but even they admitted that this violated
Speaker 3: their journalistic standards, that it was deceptive, although they claimed
Speaker 3: it was not intentionally deceptive, but it did leave the
Speaker 3: wrong impression. And you know, they are tap danswering around
Speaker 3: the fact that they are a propaganda outlet for Hamas
Speaker 3: and they they happen they are among the worst.
Speaker 2: But you can go back and in twenty fourteen, Uh.
Speaker 3: There's a former Associated Press reporter who quit the Associated Press.
Speaker 2: He was there for five years.
Speaker 3: He was based in Gaza for part of it, and
Speaker 3: he wrote an article in the Atlantic about how their
Speaker 3: offices they co office with Hamas.
Speaker 1: Oh one, does you know, I mean office based in
Speaker 1: Gaza is so expensive, David. They probably got a screaming
Speaker 1: good deal on the rent in Hamas's offices, and I
Speaker 1: mean then they have access to the tunnels right there
Speaker 1: and any weapons they might need. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of benefits to partnering up with Hamas for your reporting. So,
Speaker 1: I you know, no big deal, nothing to see here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is something you know, it really is
Speaker 3: the equivalent of you know, having someone based in Berlin
Speaker 3: during World War Two and telling you about, you know,
Speaker 3: the wonders of the Nazi government and how mean the
Speaker 3: Allies are. The New York Times during the Lamador in Ukraine,
Speaker 3: one of their reporters was a Stalinist who reported from.
Speaker 2: The Soviet Union and he just.
Speaker 3: Flat out lied about whether there was starvation going on.
Speaker 3: I mean it was intentional starvation where millions of people died.
Speaker 2: It was a famine caused by the government.
Speaker 3: And he got not a Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer Prize
Speaker 3: for that, and the New York Times refused to give
Speaker 3: it back.
Speaker 2: And you know, so there is a long history.
Speaker 3: You know, journalists not just injecting their own politics and
Speaker 3: the we I mean, let's face it, all, all of us,
Speaker 3: even when we try to be objective, have a hard
Speaker 3: time separating out our opinions from how we spend stories
Speaker 3: consciously or unconsciously. But there's a difference between that and
Speaker 3: pure propaganda. And the New York Times is a long
Speaker 3: history going back nearly one hundred years of being a
Speaker 3: propaganda organization. The BBC is a government mouthpiece, as is PBS,
Speaker 3: and it's always the most left wing parts of the
Speaker 3: government that go into communications.
Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you this. Did you see the
Speaker 1: news that the New York excuse me, the Washington Post
Speaker 1: is sent out an email that said, Hey, we're looking
Speaker 1: to to you know, basically go.
Speaker 2: Right down the middle.
Speaker 1: We're looking to win back the trust of the American people,
Speaker 1: and we're looking to do it in a way that
Speaker 1: focuses on real journalism. And if if you're not comfortable
Speaker 1: with this, you should probably take an employee buyout, is
Speaker 1: their hope. Because obviously Jeff Bezos is looking at the
Speaker 1: Washington Post and saying, we're still shedding, you know, subscribers,
Speaker 1: because I subscribed to the Post for probably, i don't know,
Speaker 1: probably fifteen years until a few years ago where I
Speaker 1: was like, what am I paying for? I'm literally paying
Speaker 1: to be insulted my intelligence, my value system. Every single
Speaker 1: day is their hope? You know, when Jeff Katz took
Speaker 1: over at CNN, I was hopeful. I thought, okay, maybe,
Speaker 1: well we all know how that did not end well
Speaker 1: for him. So what about the Washington Post? Is there
Speaker 1: hope that the ownership of this paper of the La Times,
Speaker 1: which is doing a very similar thing with their editorial page,
Speaker 1: are they going to be able to turn this thing around?
Speaker 1: Or is the profession of journalism hopelessly corrupted by J
Speaker 1: schools that are all left wing, by organizations that are
Speaker 1: all left wing. They all operate in a bubble. Can
Speaker 1: we save this entire thing?
Speaker 3: Well? I mean the personnel is policy, right, you know
Speaker 3: who you hire matters quite a bit. And if you
Speaker 3: go back to the golden age of journalism, journalists were
Speaker 3: essentially the sort of high end, blue collar job.
Speaker 2: You know, nobody went to a j school.
Speaker 3: You know, these are people who many of them never
Speaker 3: went to college. They're just they're just good at writing
Speaker 3: and cynical.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, the.
Speaker 3: Current crop of journalists have all gone through these indoctrination centers.
Speaker 2: And I think it's going to be very hard.
Speaker 3: For the credential obsess elite institutions to reform even when
Speaker 3: their leadership knows it's got to happen. And so I
Speaker 3: think that the center of gravity, certainly of journalism, is
Speaker 3: going to keep moving towards independent journalism. Places like the
Speaker 3: Free Press, Washington Examiner, and you know, the Free Press
Speaker 3: is great because they have, you know, spans from center
Speaker 3: left to center right right, you know, the the you know,
Speaker 3: Washington Examiner, and you know, a few other organizations tend
Speaker 3: to lean a little bit right.
Speaker 1: Right, and I don't want that. I don't want an overcorrection.
Speaker 1: I don't want a bunch of hardcore right leaning. I
Speaker 1: don't want that either. That's one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: I became a subscriber to the Free Press almost immediately
Speaker 1: for exactly what you said. They've got viewpoints from both
Speaker 1: of the aisle, but they don't have the fringe on
Speaker 1: either side, and it is refreshing to read robust discussions
Speaker 1: about things and both sides of the issue. So I
Speaker 1: don't know, you know, I kind of hope they get
Speaker 1: it together.
Speaker 2: I'm with you.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure they can pull it off. But maybe
Speaker 1: the BBC learned a lesson, But somehow I doubt it.
Speaker 1: What I know, oh, go ahead, did no I.
Speaker 2: Doubt it as well.
Speaker 3: I don't think that organizations like the New York Times,
Speaker 3: the BBC, PBS. We saw with CNN, they tried and
Speaker 3: they tried, and it just didn't work. And some of
Speaker 3: it's the economics. People want to be told what they
Speaker 3: believe already, which is why you're seeing this increasing divide
Speaker 3: between the right and left wing media sphere. The market
Speaker 3: for news that's just news is a lot smaller than
Speaker 3: what we would like, and so the reason why CNN
Speaker 3: had the tack back laughed is they kept on losing
Speaker 3: their core audience.
Speaker 1: And they're tired. Yeah, their tiny audience. David Strom writes
Speaker 1: every day at hot air dot com. He is prolific
Speaker 1: and I'd urge you to go check out his work. David,
Speaker 1: it's good to see you again, and thanks for continuing
Speaker 1: to do what you do. I'm there every day on
Speaker 1: the other side of the computer screen reading what you wrote,
Speaker 1: so just know that.
Speaker 3: Hey, that's exciting. I like being in the same room
Speaker 3: with you. Metaphors.
Speaker 1: David will talk again soon, my friend.
Speaker 2: All right bye, all right.
Speaker 1: That is David Strong from hotair dot com.