Who is BBC's John Sweeney?

The "Pilger-Baathist Line"

One of the more spectacular examples of this kind of propaganda was provided in a recent article by John Sweeney in the Spectator. In it, Sweeney uses both of the strategies outlined above to smear John Pilger:

"For years John Pilger - 'one of the world's most renowned investigative journalists', it says on the back of his latest book - has been insisting that the West, not Saddam, is to blame for the crisis in Iraq's public health; that 5,200 Iraqi children were dying every month; that Western depleted-uranium weapons were to blame for an epidemic of cancers; that sanctions crippled Iraq's doctors. Funnily enough, Pilger's journalism echoed what the Baathist regime wanted people to hear." ('The first casualty of Pilger... John Sweeney says that John Pilger blames the Americans alone for birth defects in Iraq, and overlooks evidence that implicates Saddam Hussein', The Spectator, June 28, 2003, http://www.spectator.co.uk/...icle.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2003-06-28&id=3252)