The BBC announced Friday that it will not acquiesce to requests to ban the song "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead!" from its airwaves. The song, sung by Munchkins celebrating the death of the Wicked Witch of the West in the movie, shot up the charts after former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's death. A BBC spokesman explained the decision by saying the company could not justify not playing a song at the top of the singles charts.
Via:
While acknowledging that the broadcast could offend Mrs. Thatcher’s family and supporters, Mr. Cooper added, “To ban the record from our airwaves completely would risk giving the campaign the oxygen of further publicity and might inflame an already delicate situation.”
Mrs. Thatcher herself made famous use of the same metaphor in 1985, shortly after the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by Islamist militants, when she argued:
"We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend. In our societies we do not believe in constraining the media, still less in censorship. But ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, a code under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists’ morale or their cause while the hijack lasted?"
As Mitt Romney would say: "what's sauce for the goose is now sauce for the gander."
