So to begin with, the BBC admitted (scroll to bottom) that it was "caught out" by a picture of a pig alleged to be one of the cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, and "for a time showed film of this in Gaza ..."
In Gaza?!?
Now here's Wretchard:
This is going to rank right up there with the fake Koran-flushing story which got people killed in Afghanistan. No one has a right to expect perfection from the media. Like intelligence agencies, which they resemble in some respects, the media sometimes gets things wrong. But I'd argue that some publications have a dangerous tendency to believe stories like "right-wing Danish publication portrays Mohammed as pig" because they want to believe it. This phenomenon is called bias and bias is dangerous not because it predisposes one to a wrong set of opinions but to the wrong set of facts.
Ironically, if the BBC had published the cartoons it would inevitably have discovered that the pig picture was not part of the Jyllands-Posten cartoon set. But instead of presenting the dry facts it substituted hearsay and for days the world was inflamed over a set of images described only at second-hand; wrongly described at that and imagining the worst about what were actually a very mild set of drawings. This violent debate occurred precisely because organizations like the BBC, whose job it was to present the facts, failed signally in their duty.
Emphasis in original. Go read the rest at the link.
