There is something fishy going on at the BBC:

Exhibiting a thoroughness worthy of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, the BBC has been busy erasing all traces of the corporation’s blatantly dishonest reporting of President Bush’s speech on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion…

…On Wednesday the BBC reported the speech under the headline ‘Bush speech hails Iraq “victory”‘. The headline was supported by the following sentence in the story:

He said recent troop reinforcements had brought about “a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror”.

However, this isn’t what Bush said. What he said was:

The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around – it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror.

Mike, over at The Monkey Tennis Centre, first blogged the incident on Thursday and emailed it around, namely to Little Green Footballs. After showing up on LGF, and getting a little press covereage, the BBC apparently realized that the public weren’t as stupid as they thought, and began quickly changing the quote anywhere they had referenced it (which, apparently, was in a lot of places.)

Mike documents, with screen captures, all of the sly (or not-so-sly, depending on how you look at it) changes the BBC made to their website. It’s really quite an interesting read.

(via Little Green Footballs)