CBS News isn’t the only establishment media organization in the business of manufacturing news that fits its political agenda:

The BBC was last night plunged into a damaging general election row after it admitted equipping three hecklers with microphones and sending them into a campaign meeting addressed by Michael Howard, the Conservative leader.

The Tories have made an official protest after the hecklers, who were given the microphones by producers, were caught at a party event in the North West last week. Guy Black, the party’s head of communications, wrote in a letter to Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news, that the hecklers began shouting slogans that were “distracting and clearly hostile to the Conservative Party”.

These included “Michael Howard is a liar”, “You can’t trust the Tories” and “You can only trust Tony Blair”.

[...]

Last night, the BBC claimed that the exercise was part of a “completely legitimate programme about the history and art of political heckling” and said that other parties’ meetings were being “observed”. However, The Telegraph has established that none of Tony Blair’s meetings was infiltrated or disrupted in similar fashion.

[...]

Last night a BBC spokesman said: “This is a completely legitimate programme about the history and art of political heckling. The programme observes hecklers at other parties’ campaign meetings and not just the Conservatives. The hecklers were not under the direction of the BBC and their activities did not disrupt the meeting in any way. The incident at the Michael Howard meeting only plays a small part in the overall programme. However, we will be investigating the complaint very fully and will be replying in due course.”

Some people will undoubtedly argue that this is perfectly legitimate. If the program discusses political heckling, then why not do this? Let’s grant the BBC the benefit of the doubt and assume that, in the future, the network would have done something similar at a Tony Blair rally. Like an insurgent attack where cameras just happen to be in place to get the perfect shot, we have to ask whether the presence of the cameras create a different outcome merely by encouraging certain behavior. If that’s the case, then the BBC was complicit in generating news.

But the BBC went far beyond merely having cameras present. They apparently had cameras focused on the hecklers, and had the hecklers pre-wired with mics.

In some crowds, hecklers might lose their nerve. Maybe they shout a little less, or not at all, or clean up their language because they feel intimidated by those around them. Maybe potential hecklers sometimes recognize they have better things to do than engage in an infantile display of disapproval and decide not to show up in the first place. The BBC’s actions precluded all of those possibilities and virtually guaranteed that the hecklers would heckle, and would try to create the biggest spectacle possible while doing so. After all, the type of folks who make a hobby out of stifling the speech of others are probably starved for attention. The BBC came along gave each of them a chance to be a star.

Chalk it up as one more example of the establishment press creating news rather than reporting it. Like NBC’s bottle rockets under GM cars and CBS’s forged memos, I’m sure the BBC was convinced it was just reporting the truth. The trouble is, in each of those cases, the reporters thought the truth needed a little goose to get going. And that’s precisely when they stopped being reporters and started acting like Ashton Kutcher in some political version of Punk’d.