, your fellow journalist, stop venturing palpably untrue statements dressed up as fact.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd how arrogant you are, how self-important, that you should deign to lecture on the implied assumption that you, and by extension all journalists \u2013 and specifically in this case the BBC World Service \u2013 are above the criticism that you are so busily wagging your finger at me for, and which I (clearly getting above my station) have last weekend meted out to your incompetent mate and his associates at the Beeb. Get it straight, pal \u2013 you are not. Either as individuals or organisations. It’s about time a little humility was allowed into your closed self-regarding little media world. But like the bankers and the MPs these days, you lot just don’t get it, do you?<\/span><\/p>\nAs for Band Aid, well, as a trustee said to me, sickened upon seeing the shameful Times cartoon which accepted the BBC story as gospel (of course) without asking any questions: “We’ve taken it on the chin for 25 years and never said anything. Not this time.” Definitely not this time. The Band Aid Trust is reporting BBC World Service to Ofcom and the BBC board of directors, and we have requested transcripts of all interviews from the show in question from the deputy chairman of the BBC. We will also take a view on what legal action we may take both against the journalist in question and World Service in general. Criticism, no problem, Rageh. Calumny, no.<\/span><\/p>\nBand Aid, too, Mr Omaar, has been a constant target over the years, had you but had the decency to bother checking before uttering your pathetic interpretation of press freedom as allowing any clown carte blanche to interpret reporting as an excuse for half-truth, distortion, and innuendo and unsubstantiated claims. The journalism of “making it up”.<\/span><\/p>\nAs you probably know anyway, but it just doesn’t fit into your pompous guff this time, Band Aid has been under the most intensive scrutiny since and most particularly during the mid-80s. Quite rightly, too. We have an obligation to all those who entrusted us with their money and more particularly to those in whose name it was given. That is what I and my fellow trustees have been doing for the last 26 years. Same guys, same trust. And we ain’t stopping now. Pretty weird, however, that not one, not a single one of the dozens of journalists of record and others who have travelled with me or covered Band Aid “discovered” Martin Plaut’s “story” (and story is indeed what it is). Some feel the press has a right to lie. Rageh, no such right exists.<\/span><\/p>\nThe real story of this sorry saga is the intense systemic failure of the World Service, that cherry on the cake of the BBC’s reputation. It’s a rotten old cherry these days. And I am as bereft as a jilted lover. Of all the taxes I pay, I pay only one gladly \u2013 my licence fee. I <\/span>am<\/span><\/em> Mr World Service. I have done ads promoting the BBC, I have written and spoken in its defence, it is indeed the BBC who started me and others on this African journey; I believe it must, at all costs, be retained very similar to what it is now, albeit cutting away the deadwood and slack. But basically: “I Want My BBC!”<\/span><\/p>\nBut this BBC story was neither about me nor Band Aid. By disingenuously posturing as “serious” reporting, it pretended the total failure and negligence of all the great humanitarian workers and their organisations in the worst famine in modern times, and how miraculously not one of them spotted that no one was getting food despite everyone supplying it!<\/span><\/p>\nIt beggars belief that anyone would take that seriously. Where were all the dead people then? If no one was getting food, why was nobody dying? That would have been one of the first questions I’d have asked. But they weren’t dying because they <\/span>were<\/span><\/em> getting help, and massive amounts of it. But of course no one did ask where the bodies were at the World Service. That and many, many, other unasked questions.<\/span><\/p>\nNo, this story here is of the total collapse of standards and systems at the World Service, which has a special and particular duty of care to the truth. Why? Because in hundreds \u2013 perhaps thousands \u2013 of small rooms in the many dark spots of our planet people huddle secretly and in great danger to hear the reality and the truth behind their situation. Because in deserts and jungles, I have listened to the world tell its story to me through this miraculous brave station. And to tabloid all that away of an instant? Tragic beyond measure.<\/span><\/p>\nWhere were the producers and editors and seniors? Why was Plaut allowed to go mad on his pre- and post- media interview circus around the world with bonkers wild accusations? Just to get an audience? Did he and the World Service for one second comprehend the enormous damage and danger he immediately put every humanitarian worker in? Particularly the huge, brave and brilliant Red Cross? Did he not consider, for one microsecond, the consequences of accusing them, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, that they had handed over 95% of their cash to purchase arms?<\/span><\/p>\nIt literally beggars belief at the enormity of the consequence had his lie not been nailed immediately and with as much vehemence as could be mustered. How appalling the utter and total disregard or incomprehension of the result of his actions. What if the Red Cross, now compromised in their neutrality, were ordered away from war zones, or forbidden access to the deepest dungeons, or concentration camps? What then, Rageh Omaar and Martin Plaut? What then of your smug certitudes and thin pieties? Then you could report on the blood on your own hands rather than falsely smear it over the hands of others. How dare you, Rageh Omaar, attempt to defend the awful indefensible. Just for that alone, Plaut should be fired. You people, you self-important mediators of “news”, should wise up and accept a little humility rather than attack the aid agencies and their workers for being above criticism and ask yourself, as I do, who the hell are you to lecture?<\/span><\/p>\nJust as the Ross-Brand affair exposed the systemic weaknesses of the BBC in the area of entertainment, so this now does in the news sector of the World Service \u2013 albeit with far more drastic consequences. Where were the editors, subs and producers? As the Independent rightly asked, “Did the bells not go off” early on in this sorry tale? Where were the checks, balances, neutrality, even-handedness? They all failed at the World Service. Worse, they inconsistently and continuously contradicted themselves in their ludicrously pompous Rorke’s Drift-type face-saving insistence on “sticking by their story”. Well, they were right in the use of the word “story”.<\/span><\/p>\nDespite the on-the record refutation of everything in Plaut’s report by very senior White House advisers, high-level UN delegates, senior British ex-ambassadors and diplomats, <\/span>all<\/span><\/em> the aid agencies, the leader of <\/span>rest<\/span><\/em> the Tigrayan relief group at the time, the prime minister of Ethiopia and rebel leader at the time, and me, and without a single shred of evidence, not one iota of evidence, they cannot bear to acknowledge the grim reality, the actual <\/span>truth<\/span><\/em> \u2013 that they were wrong. The BBC World Service is so far off the rails it quite literally cannot recognise or acknowledge <\/span>
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