G20 Protests: The Smear Campaign Is In Full Flight.

Tommorrow a House of Commons Select Committee will begin to investigate the policing of the G20 protest following the death and subsequent cover up of Ian Tomlinson and 90 individual complaints of the police using excessive force. This investigation has largely been attributed to the release of hundreds of videos showing the police using all sorts of tactics forbidden by the police's own public order handbook. Channel 4 news declared this to be the moment that citizen journalism came of age.

If that's true then Sunday must have been the moment when the old hands at the BBC gave the citizen journalists an abject lesson in media manipulation. It started when the Sunday Times released this video http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6122553.ece (for some reason I can't embed videos). It shows the events at the G20 Climate Camp and includes footage of a police officer punching a protester in the face, a silver commander using his shield to strike another protester in the face and another police officer using his shield in a chopping action which is technically speaking the most alarming of the incidents.

As the video had already been widely circulated on the Internet and picked up by a national newspaper the BBC had no choice but to include the story in the news bulletins although they went to great pains to emphasises that the video had been edited and the person who released it had been paid by the newspaper. It was what they did next that was really sneaky. They cut from the Climate Camp video and showed that now famous video to the RBS's windows getting smashed and footage that appeared to show a group of police officers being forced to retreat from a surging crowd. That was an attempt to portray the protesters as extremely violent people who the police needed protecting from. It was deliberately misleading for three main reasons;

• The footage does not show the police being forced into retreat. If it was shown in context it would reveal that the police had been keeping two sections of the crowd separate by cordoning them into a small space. The police then decided to withdraw the cordons as part of the kettling process so all the video really shows is the crowd spreading out into the vacated space.

• Neither that footage nor the video of the RBS were shot at the Climate Camp, they were shot at the G20 Meltdown protest. Admittedly the two protests were close to each other but the atmosphere at the two was very different. The Climate Camp went on for around 12 hours amongst many unprotected buildings none of which were damaged.

• Aside from being from the wrong location the BBC footage was also from the wrong time. The kettling process happened at around 12:00 and the RBS windows got put through at around 13:00. The footage from the Climate Camp was shot between 19:00 and 00:00. This is important because the main accusation against the police is that they kettled a large crowd and brought it to a violent boil before the whole situation calmed down. Then when the situation had become so calm that the media got bored and went home senior police commanders (Gold) sent officers in to give people extra-judicial punishment beatings. A serious charge to level at the supposed upholders of the law.

The BBC also put in a similar performance with the Nicola Fisher interviews which bordered on the libellous but I'm getting too bored of my own post to go into details. Let's just say that it's a good job she's got a publicist because no-one's yet accused her of urinating on the officer as he lay dying before stealing his wallet.