Sandy Smith - amazing last words...

Sandy Smith is the editor of BBC's Panorama show. I won't go over the whole story with the BBC Panorama show. I've posted enough about that. But in my last post on the subject entitled BBC Versus Scientology Why? I referred to a statement by Sandy Smith. I thought I would quote the whole thing, it's quite an amazing statement when you think it over.

Just give it a minute of thought... You're making a documentary about something but you knowingly are giving it a unilateral view. It just doesn't make sense - well read my other post and it suddenly does.

from the morning news interview with Sandy Smith
Journalist: And is it a balanced film? I mean it isn't more heat than light is it? Because there is so much passion involved...

Sandy Smith: There is a fair amount of heat as you've seen. It doesn't claim to be the definitive film about Scientology we'll have to do that another time.

The BBC Panorama vs. Scientology - WHY?

John Sweeney - a week of branding has given his photo
and name (and the BBC's) a whole new view in the eyes of the public.

Why would the BBC Panorama show do a documentary on Scientology, knowingly making it mainly or entirely negative when they know Scientology will never let that go down without notice?

Answer: Panorama needs more viewers.

How to get more viewers, get in the media. How to solve getting in the media - get some big controversy going and start being in the news.

How to get controversy - religion is always a great place. Taking on Islam is a little too dangerous, the Danish newspaper did that last year and some of their staff are still hiding. So they take Scientology.

Scientology is doing pretty good in UK with two new centers opened in October 2006 and lots of expansion. They are sure to get a pretty big reaction to that. How to do it? Put the roughest journalist you have on the case and be 90% smear. Result, the Scientologists will do something and media will follow.

You saw the part in between.

The viewers on the show increased. Sandy Smith delivered to his bosses.

The flaw, BBC Panorama didn't know how bad their roughest journalist would mess up and didn't know how far the Scientologists would take it AND forgot to enter in the fact that YouTube and the Internet exists and they no longer have a monopoly on the news.

Result, yes they got more viewers that night but they've also spent a week with a branding iron stuck to them. BBC, Panorama, John Sweeney, Sandy Smith and the rest of the team have become synonymous with: exploding tomatoes, Banorama, yelling, loosing it, lame journalism and plus some.

The idiocy is as Sandy Smith said in his interview on the BBC the only positive on the show that he had included was going to be a few interviews with some celebrities. So he admits that it was going to be a big smear. Things like that are better left unsaid, at least not on TV. It makes me wonder what the qualifications are for working at the BBC - or maybe those are the people Sweeney talked about in his description of the BBC? but then two of them on the same team?

Enough said
(note these are just a bunch of opinions from seeing these stories :0)

Visit the exhibition where John Sweeney lost it!

Here's a press release that was sent around by CCHR. This is the exhibition where John Sweeney the reporter from the BBC lost it.

"Psychiatry: An Industry of Death" Museum Draws Controversy in International Media

Take a video tour of the museum

(Click on the picture to watch the video)

Denouncing the fact that internationally more than 100,000 patients die each year in psychiatric institutions, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) has opened an interactive and visually spectacular museum in Hollywood called Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.

The museum features 14 documentaries with statements from scores of health professionals, academics, legal and human rights experts, and victims of psychiatric brutalities ranging from electroshock and involuntary commitment to political torture, psychosurgery and the devastating effects of psychotropic drugs. Accompanying each documentary are dozens of displays chronicling mental health barbarity spanning hundreds of years right up to present day. Included are sections on the destructive psychiatric influence on our youth, with 6 million children in the U.S. alone taking prescribed cocaine-like stimulants, and psychiatry’s infiltration of Hollywood and the creative industries, resulting in a staggering loss of talent in many artistic fields, including Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland. The state-of-the-art museum documents that psychiatry is an industry driven entirely by profit, and provides practical guidance for lawmakers, doctors, human rights advocates and private citizens to take action in their own sphere to bring psychiatry under the law, and to help protect themselves and others from the abuses rampant in the mental health field.

A sampling of current statistics and facts shown in the new museum include:

• Psychiatrists are using electroshock, drugs and other barbaric means to torture political dissidents.

• 20 million children worldwide are taking psychiatric drugs, which can cause suicide, hostility, violence, mania and drug dependence.

• More than 100,000 patients die each year in psychiatric institutions.

• Annually, psychiatrists kill up to 10,000 people with their use of electroshock—460 volts of electricity sent searing through the brain. Three-quarters of all electroshock victims are women.

• Psychiatrists and psychologists have raped 250,000 women. Studies show that 10 to 25 percent of psychiatrists sexually assault their patients; of every 20 of these victims one is likely to be a minor.

Visitors to the museum, which have included celebrities, doctors, educators and legislators, have described it as, “inspirational,” and that the museum should be viewed by “everyone who breathes.”

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.

You can also watch the Introduction to our new Documentary, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.

For more information, contact the Citizens Commission on Human Rights at 800-869-2247 or email humanrights@cchr.org

BBC Reporter gets a taste of his own medicine and doesn’t like it

BBC Reporter John Sweeney, one of the main journalists behind the BBC Panorama show Scientology and Me should be quite experienced with journalism and the routines of the job.

We all know the techniques of journalists to elicit an unexpected emotional response from the subject. Nobody likes being in the camera spotlight like that with a fast paced and prying journalist in your face trying to make you err at every step.

They stalk the subject and film it at every possible moment, hopefully trying to capture something that nobody else has so they can have some sensational materiel for their show.

This is John Sweeney’s profession – he’s a journalist for a living on one of the worlds largest TV channels.

Now what does a journalist like John Sweeney say when the tables turn and he is the one being documented? When a journalist starts to investigate him, his actions and his life?

We’ve all seen the video on youtube.com, but before you look at it again, let’s rapidly look over the journalistic philosophy of John Sweeney per the BBC’s Panorama site. He says "First, find a crocodile. Two, poke it in the eye with a stick. Three, stand back and report what happens next. If it's a sodden log you'll be quite safe. If it's a crocodile you've got a story."

And let’s see the video now

Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxqR5NPhtLI

Have we got a story here? Per John himself I think we do.

We will all agree that one of the most fundamental journalistic skills is the mastery of language. Let’s see how John excused himself after this outburst; we would all expect a quick twist of words that would make it all seem rational and intelligent.

Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVAeL8AyYeI&NR=1

For someone whose job it is to investigate and write stories one would expect a little more creativity than “I wanted to show you that my voice was louder than yours”. (I’ll have to try that next time I start yelling at someone I am investigating).

Now in response to this he claims he was feeling brainwashed because he was “being stalked” for several days. Actually the stalking in question here is a Scientology Documentary team that did a documentary on John Sweeney’s making of the Panorama show. But how can this be an excuse? Here is a Documentary journalist complaining of being stalked by a documentary team? Does he not realize what he is saying?

In other words, is documentary journalism brainwashing people?

I don't know about that last statement but I do know that John Sweeney is getting a taste of his own medecine and it's not tasing good.

A fellow blogger wrote an article and has some great videos on this. (the one who put the youtube video on)

Don Grey

RFID chips, BBC reporters and Human Rights ...

I was looking through some earlier Engadget blogs on RFID lately and remembered one of them about a company that had invented an RFID tattoo to track cows - and then someone mentions that this could also be used for the armed services. The tattoo is readable up to 4 feet away. Only for cattle now but the company wants to get this to military personel second.

It's sort of scary how we're moving into a control society where every move is being tracked. And how many people watch it happen and think that it's inevitable. I know as I've wondered sometimes myself what could be done about it.

Something can always be done about it. That's my motto - I'm a Scientologist and I believe in that. As I'm in the subject of human rights I thought I would write a little blurb.

I was looking at the news recently and it's amazing how human rights like Freedom of Press get perverted into "Freedom to lie and twist the truth". I've lived Scientology for some 12-15 years now and I look at the stuff the media reports, it's just weird - I mean it's just not what is happening, I wonder what planet these reporters like John Sweeney from the BBC are on.

I've always kept a good opinion of the BBC for it's pretty accurate reporting, but either the Management has changed and someone from The Sun became an editor or John Sweeney has been acting like a rogue journalist.

The film Mad City was a great eye opener on how easy it is to twist the truth. It's sad that BBC entered that game.