Saturday, May 19, 2007

Panorama and The Church of Scientology

Well, it seems the Church of Scientology is at it again. I ain't no big fan of them, in fact quite despise them but still in order of religious tolerance then I tolerate them. But I do like their antics from time to time, like the ruckus about John Sweeney's momentary laps of reason.

The whole shabang started by The Church of Scientology posting a clip of the incident on youtube where you can see that the two men are in a sort of a shouting contest and Sweeney taking it way to far but still gathering his composure in between to ask if Tom Davis understood him. It is not clear from the clip what interview Sweeney is talking about but reading the transcript from the Panoroma show (viewable here) shows that Sweeney did an interview with a man named Shawn Lonsdale and Tom Davis came in while Sweeney was doing the interview and discredited Lonsdale and not allowing the interview to continue by interrupting it the whole time, Davis accuses Sweeney of being partial against The Church of Scientology but Sweeney insist on that Davis does not know what he is talking about since he did not see the beginning of the interview and the shouting contest begins.

There are other griefs Davis has with Sweeney, the first youtube post is only 1 of 2 they have on him, the other is when John Travolta comes to some cinema to do a promotion for his newest film and we see Sweeney in the crowd shouting out "questions" to him, watch here. Now this does not give a good view of Sweeney who I think is a good reporter in general and so does the BBC by the look of it, see the take on it from the BBC themselves here.

But judge for yourselves, watch the Panorama flick, read up on The Church of Scientology, have a look at what people are saying who are not stars and have wandered away from the congregation.

I for one think that a reporter looses composure and is followed through the taking of his documentary is not a good start for a documentary, but there are other things in there that are worth while. The following and all the interaction between Sweeney and Davis goes to show a pattern surely but is it really fair to judge the whole of Scientology from how Davis is? Its the same as judging the whole of BBC by the way Sweeney is.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Read this about another reporter in the UK. Paul Bracch suffered from an intimidation and smear campaign after investigating scientology.

Dail Mail, UK, 29-5-2007
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=455886&in_page_id=1879

Anonymous said...

Here is a tinyurl link
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2mygyz

to www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/
article.html?
in_article_id=455886&in_page_id=1879