How do you get this:

“Tony Blair says his belief in God played a part in decid­ing to go to war in Iraq. The Prime Min­is­ter tells ITV1 he prayed over the dif­fi­cult decision. Tonight the start­ling insight into how Mr Blair’s faith influ­enced Britain’s part in oust­ing Sad­dam. So was it holy war?”

ITV News Sat­urday, 4 March 2006

From this:

Tony Blair: The only way you can take a decision like that is to try to do the right thing, accord­ing to your con­science. And for the rest of it, you leave it, as I say, to the judge­ment that …
Michael Par­kin­son: So…
TB: ….his­tory will make.
MP: So you, so you would… you would… you would… pray…to… to God whenever you make a decision like that?
TB: Well I… you know… I don’t want to go into…
MP: No, but I mean, hey, you said that…
TB: …this side of this but it’s… [NB These two lines spoken sim­ul­tan­eously]
MP: …you said that…you’d…
TB: Yeah I … you, you… [NB These lines also spoken sim­ul­tan­eously]
MP: …been informed…
TB: but you… of course…. It’s…. you, you struggle with your own con­science about it because people’s lives are affected…

Michael Par­kin­son show, Sat­urday 4 March 2006

Accord­ing to industry reg­u­lator Ofcom, the inter­pret­a­tion placed by ITV News on Tony Blair’s appear­ance on the Michael Par­kin­son show broke the reg­u­la­tion on due accur­acy.

You can watch the full clip of the inter­view here. See­ing it is more com­pel­ling than read­ing it, and in my view, whilst ITV News repor­ted Mr Blair accur­ately, they didn’t report him impar­tially.

Here’s the ITV intro again:

Tony Blair says his belief in God played a part in decid­ing to go to war in Iraq. The Prime Min­is­ter tells ITV1 he prayed over the dif­fi­cult decision.

And, here’s the BBC News intro (which gives Parky a big­ger plug):

The Prime Min­is­ter has said in an inter­view that he prayed to God when decid­ing whether or not to send UK troops to Iraq. Tony Blair told ITV1’s Par­kin­son chat show that he had struggled with his conscience…

The Beeb launch into a Richard Lister pack­age, but then ITV con­tin­ues with this:

Tonight the start­ling insight into how Mr Blair’s faith influ­enced Britain’s part in oust­ing Sad­dam. So was it holy war?

ITV took a view on Blair’s exchange with Par­kin­son and — without exactly mis-representing it — they ‘over-represented’ it, fail­ing to pro­duce any­one in their report­ing to defend a pos­i­tion they had cre­ated by amplification.

If you’re a Chris­tian, isn’t it right that you pray for guid­ance over dif­fi­cult decisions? After all, we’re not talk­ing about con­sult­ing a Ouija board. As a firm athe­ist I know that prayer won’t be deliv­er­ing any­thing back, but if we take prayer as a socially accept­able euphem­ism for reflec­tion, then is there really any­thing offens­ive, shock­ing or sur­pris­ing about this admis­sion? One doesn’t have to agree with Tony Blair on any­thing, not least his com­mit­ment of troops to Iraq, to tol­er­ate his right to reli­gious freedom.

Still, accur­acy is the offence as far as Ofcom is con­cerned. I guess it’s a less ‘polit­ic­ally sens­it­ive’ crime than impar­ti­al­ity which might make you vul­ner­able — unfairly — to accus­a­tions of stooge-dom. I’d like to see the reg­u­lator have a little back­bone, and tough it out one of these days…

Incid­ent­ally Richard Lister’s report on the BBC didn’t have any­one defend­ing Tony Blair either, but then the BBC piece didn’t shout as loud.