something of the night - a little bit of politics

THE QUALITY OF REPORTING: Since The Sun seems to be trying to bury it, we thought it might be helpful to give some extra coverage to it's "apology" to show just how shabby its reporting of stories involving Muslims tends to be:

IN March last year and again after the London bombings in July, The Sun wrongly accused Mohamed El Guerbouzi of being a fanatical, terrorist warlord who was on the run in England and named him as a major al-Qaeda suspect.

In fact, Mr El Guerbouzi is a devout Muslim who has lived peacefully in London with his family for the past 30 years.

He has no involvement with the bombings in London or Madrid and we apologise to him and his family for the upset caused by these allegations.

But then it's a simple mistake to make, isn't it? A quiet, devout family man really can look like a terrorist warlord - it's a mistake we make all the time. We thought we were watching one of them Al Qaeda terrorist training videos the Sun was going on about the other day; after we'd phoned the terrorist hotline we realised it was actually Countdown and what we thought were coded messages calling for the destruction of Western society was, in fact, the countdown conundrum.

REBEL YELL We went back to dig this out of the Today archive, as we couldn't quite believe what we'd heard. Talking about the Labour rebellion against 90 Day Police Detention without trial, Blair loyalist Anne Clwyd made an astonishing claim. "I have rebelled myself, but when we had a large majority." In other words: of course you may have principles, but only when acting on them is meaningless.

Listen to her say it with her own mouth [mp3]
From Today, BBC Radio 4, Monday 14th November