Like Roger L. Simon, when I initially saw the story about the Queen of England losing her temper at an American photographer, my sympathies were with the Queen. But as it turns out, the story was falsified by the BBC. Not only had the sequence of events been misrepresented and manipulated, but looking at the video in the link that Roger supplied, it became obvious to me that the Queen not only didn't "storm out" of the photography session, but she wasn't especially bothered by any of it. I think she might have even been slightly amused (although dry British humor can be tricky to read), but either way I agree with Roger's assessment:

I am not surprised the Beeb lied or "misrepresented" or whatever they call it. That's what they do. (They are a self-sustaining propaganda outfit, just as any public broadcasting system must perforce be. As we all know, the BBC is virtually unsupervised with a mammoth budget that taxes television owners in the UK with less representation than the citizens of colonial America.) But I am a little disappointed that the Queen didn't walk out on Annie Liebovitz. I mean who is Liebovitz anyway? A celebrity photographer! (Okay, a good one, but still just someone who goes around taking pictures of famous people.) It was more than a little funny to envision Elizabeth giving her the gate. Like the recent movie, it made me like the Queen.

The thing is, I engage in outright fakery all the time, as I find it entertaining. I also enjoy linking to it, and putting it in my blog.

I even enjoy pretending it's true, and because of the nature of this blog, I don't feel under any obligation to spell out in detail everything I really think. Not long ago, I had some fun with a front page exposé in the Globe maintaining that Queen Elizabeth had scolded President Bush in his "divorce war." I pretended to take the Globe seriously (and I dutifully uploaded pictures of the "fight" between Dubya and the Queen as "proof"), but I'm sure no one was fooled.

However, now I see that the BBC is following the Globe standard. What's the world coming to?

Do I have to start pretending to take the BBC as seriously as I pretended to take the Globe?

It's going to be tough.

However, there is still a distinction between the Globe and the BBC, and I think it has to do with the BBC's status as a "self-sustaining propaganda outfit." No matter how comically dishonest it becomes, the BBC must assiduously maintain the pretense of journalistic integrity at all costs, while the Globe has no such burden. Thus, for appearance's sake the BBC must pretend not to be like the Globe, which means that when it is caught, it must pretend to engage in a ritualized "apology" despite the fact that it was caught engaged in deliberate misrepresentation.

To illustrate how the distinction works, had the Globe had run exactly the same story as the BBC, no reasonable person would have ever expected such an apology (from the Globe or any other tabloid).

But as long as it insists on being taken seriously, the BBC is still expected to play "let's pretend."

The downside of pretending to be serious is that it's hard to pull it off if you think you really mean it.

At the risk of sounding like a bleeding heart, I don't envy the BBC. They're obviously having so much trouble with the moral distinction between fake fakery and real fakery that I should probably be pretending to take them seriously as they're pretending to take themselves.

At this rate, we'll all soon be on the Globe standard.