Guido Fawked – Leveson Bashing Dodgy Source

The rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog has wasted no opportunity to put the boot into both the BBC, and the Leveson Inquiry, and today has given the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole, tame gofer to the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines, a chance to get a pot at both in one post. Sadly, Master Cole did not bother to check whether his source was of impartial reputation. He wasn’t.

That c*** Goslett does as he's f***ing told

The Talking Bogbrush (for it was he) has been in conversation with one Miles Goslett, who is nominally freelance but in practice is a name on the by-line of many pieces of BBC bashing offered up in the service of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre. Goslett, by the happiest of coincidences, blames Leveson for the failure of one (unnamed) paper not to go after Jimmy Savile.

Goslett would know full well that Cole would go right ahead and publish, and that would suit his principal paymaster just fine: Dacre and his lieutenants are always happy to see Leveson blamed for anything and everything where the Fourth Estate comes up short, and for one very good reason. The Vagina Monologue is frightened that Leveson is about to end his participation in press regulation.

I don't look like a bogbrush, cos I'm on telly!

So what has Goslett authored about the Beeb? Well, there’s Gary Lineker’s travel expenses, a few occasions where the Corporation has re-hired staff (with “perks”, another of those rather nasty Daily Mail hate dog-whistles), an FoI trawl on hotel bills during Wimbledon fortnight, a similar exercise where staff travel between BBC sites, and payments to a firm of head-hunters.

And, as the man said, there’s more: another FoI trawl on BBC cars with drivers, fees paid to an MP whose views do not concur with those of the Mail, allegations of Question Time bias (yawn), BBC Management Board restructuring recycled as news, and the inevitable Savile piece that suggests he could be stripped of his knighthood if he is convicted of an offence. The bloke’s dead, for Christ’s sake.

So anyone can see that Miles Goslett is not only a regular contributor to a paper that misses no opportunity to put the boot in to the BBC, but also that he participates fully in that process. And, as I’ve observed, blaming Leveson is part of the Mail’s DNA. Any competent person would have found that out before quoting Goslett as their single source for a BBC and Leveson bashing exercise.

This gives Henry Cole two options: either he is so inept that he not only uses a single source (and not for the first time at the Fawkes blog) but also fails to do his homework on its provenance, or he knew and went ahead anyway, because what Goslett told him fitted the Fawkes agenda. Neither cut it as half decent journalism, but then Cole isn’t a real journalist anyway.

Like Eccles, he just got it writted on a piece of paper. Another fine mess, once again.