The above video, in which BBC reporter Jane Standley is seen and heard reporting on the collapse of Word Trade Centre building 7 (WTC7) whilst it is apparently still standing behind her, is leading to a wave of derisory comment and reaction amongst the 9/11 truth movement.
The BBC editors blog has so far failed to receive any favorable comment after posting a general rebuttal. Equally, the Digg article - where users comment upon the original story, has failed to elicit much in the way of pro-BBC debunking.
What is the BBC doing to explain this bizarre inconsistency - in which one of its reporters appears on screen confirming the collapse of building 7 before the actual event occurs? So far, the answer appears to be very little. Apart from producing Richard Porter, Head of News for BBC World, to claim that the organisation has lost all of its original footage of the days events!
We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy). So if someone has got a recording of our output, I'd love to get hold of it. We do have the tapes for our sister channel News 24, but they don't help clear up the issue one way or another.
This is simply not a plausible response from the (supposedly) premiere news organisation on the planet. So far the best response Mr Porter and the BBC have produced is contained in the following quote taken from the same article.
If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that. As one of the comments on You Tube says today "so the guy in the studio didn't quite know what was going on? Woah, that totally proves conspiracy...
It seems unbelievable that an organisation of the calibre of the BBC should be resorting to quoting a You-Tube comment in order to support its version of events - because the actual story, is far more significant than this trite and silly response suggests.
If that is WTC7 in the background, it suggests that the source of the inaccurate information provided to the BBC had foreknowledge that the building was about to be demolished. Which begs the question, who was that source and how could they have known that this random and unpredictable building collapse was about to occur? If as the BBC claim the early report of the buildings collapse was simply "an error" why was it not subsequently corrected?
This "error" and the subsequent explanations issued by the BBC, do little to increase faith in the accuracy and quality of its journalism. An organisation that reports the collapse of a building before it actually topples; fails to correct the mistake; then claims to have lost the original recordings of the event, is barely believable, let alone reliable. The story also raises questions about what other errors may have found their way into the BBC's 9/11 coverage and its recent documentary. It raises far more questions than it answers not the least of which is wether the BBC can really be relied upon to provide accurate and reliable coverage of news events.
