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Changing world history, one caption at a time
By Erik Wiesner
wiesnere@mscd.edu

When absorbing news, one should always understand that its providers have certain preconceptions. People are raised and socialized with worldviews that color the journalism they produce, no matter how stringently fairness is strived for. Being fully aware of this did not prepare me, however, for a recent decision by the British Broadcasting Corporation’s editorial staff to change an archived story from 2001.

The story in question is about a man named by the FBI as one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, who is still alive and came forward very confused as to what the FBI was talking about. The change in the BBC’s story was supposedly quite minor: The words “a man called” were added to the caption of the man’s picture ahead of his name. I can’t tell you with any certainty what the actual changes were, because I can’t look up the archived story without getting the new, changed version.

So why is this change in a historical record considered necessary? The BBC says the story has been used as evidence for conspiracy theories that surround the Sept. 11 attacks. The FBI claimed the confusion about so-called hijackers turning up alive was due to multiple people having the same name, and so the picture’s caption was changed from “Waleed al Shehri” to “a man called Waleed al Shehri” to clarify that there is more than one man with the name.

This is ridiculous. There are six billion people on earth. Many of them share the same name, yet the BBC isn’t changing any stories on their account. The only issue here is Sept. 11. The British government, more than any other, has a large investment in the United States’ “war on terror.” Conspiracy theories about Sept. 11 are almost as bad for England as they are for our own government. It got changed only because this archived story was about Sept. 11 and helped fuel conspiracy theories.

My favorite source of news has long been the BBC’s international news website. The BBC is the world’s largest broadcaster, and its website is appropriately well-designed. I find the reporting generally fair and comprehensive, and it’s nice to have a view from outside the United States where reporting isn’t approached with the professionalism that it should be.

However, the BBC, though officially editorially independent, is run by a board of governors appointed by the Queen of England and is funded by a public trust. There is thus some inevitable bias favoring mainstream, Western, capitalist and English views.

Just as the BBC is based in London, so is George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984. In it, protagonist Winston Smith is an employee of the government’s Ministry of Truth, which controls news and culture. Smith’s job is to revise old news reports, economic predictions and politicians’ speeches so they are always accurate. Once he has rewritten the historical records to maintain the government’s illusory omniscience, the original records are sent down the “memory hole” to be incinerated.

I realize 1984 references are a dime a dozen, but the BBC’s action fits too perfectly for me to resist. What the hell were they thinking? Have they no sense of the importance of history? Old BBC articles are archived for a reason: so we can look back years later and see how events were reported. This allows us to better understand how and why people took the opinions and actions that they did. After all, as Orwell points out, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

Shame on the BBC for altering the past, no matter how slight they claim the change to be. An archived story should be kept free from change; otherwise it ceases to be archival. And to make this change just to avoid the article being used by conspiracy theorists is an affront. I will never look at old BBC articles in the same way; I certainly won’t consider them accurate representations of how history was originally reported.

The BBC should provide credible news, not try to control who uses that news to make a political point.