Correspondents Look Ahead - a look back

Having lived alongside BBC Radio ever since I was a (geeky) teenager, I seem to have been tuning into Radio 4's annual Correspondents Look Ahead for what seems like forever and a day - so long, in fact, that I can't even remember if it actually was  broadcast during my teenage years or not. Is my (middle-aged) memory playing tricks on me?

It's certainly been going on for a long time though.

The sharpest memory I have of the programme comes from the early 2000s and concerns the BBC's then Washington correspondent Matt Frei. 

For a few years, his sneering take on the Bush administration was a regular feature of the programme, and one year (I can't remember which) he confidently predicted that George W Bush would be a one-term president. 

Given that Matt barely ever bothered to disguise his utter contempt for President Bush, that incorrect prediction almost certainly sprang from his personal bias (i.e. wishful thinking on his part) and I listened for that sort of bias thereafter - and for more wrong predictions. 

Finally, as 2012 drew to a close, I thought it might be interesting to try and track this and see, as 2013 dawned, just how many of the predictions made on the previous year's edition had panned out correctly. 

You can read the results here. They show that most of the predictions made for 2012 had been wrong, often very wrong. 

Paul Mason, in particular, made some spectacularly off-target predictions, mostly based on his biased assumption (i.e. wishful thinking) that "people power" would cause uprisings across the world (including Iran, Israel and the U.S.).

Having published the piece before the pre-2013 edition of Correspondents Look Ahead, it appeared to have caught the attention of the programme's makers and my mockery of the section called 'Wild predictions' was duly paraphrased thus by Owen Bennett-Jones:

A rather unkind blogger put up a comment the other day saying we don't need any wild predictions on this programme because all the predictions are badly off-the-mark so it's not a necessary category.

And he ended by saying, 

I hope you enjoyed listening to that and agreed with some of it and kept notes or digital records so that everyone can be held to account.

Well, oddly enough, it was surprisingly hard to take Owen B-J up on that because, perhaps (just perhaps) because of  the filleting the previous edition had just received, the reporters on that pre-2013 edition were vastly more cautious than in preceding editions of Correspondents Look Ahead. 

Trying to find specific, concrete predictions to hold them to account to was much, much harder because they all seemed to be trying so hard not to say anything that could come back to embarrass them the way they'd been embarrassed over the previous edition of the programme. They'd started playing safe.

So, if the pre-2012 edition had been like shooting fish in a barrel, the pre-2013 edition was like trying to capture several dozen eels single-handed. 

And it's been pretty much the same ever since. The BBC clearly hates being embarrassed. (Who doesn't?)

That pre-2013 edition was so slippery and safe that only one cast-iron prediction stands out from it - the prediction of Lyse Doucet (and others) that Bashar al-Assad would fall from power before the end of 2013. 

The BBC was, at the time (as I see it) still in the throws of its naive enthusiasm for the Arab Spring and saw "people power" in Syria too and, as the BBC so often does in such situations, sided somewhat with "the people" against "the regime". If this bias existed (as I think it did, though not universally at the BBC), then it was hardly surprising that BBC reporters like Lyse Doucet might 'wishfully' think the Assad regime out of power and 'the people' into power.

Perhaps another bias (speculating aloud, on a laptop) - the bias against 'overstating' the danger posed by Islamists - led none of the BBC's ace reporters (or most of the mainstream media for that matter) to predict that the vast, competing swirl of variously unpleasant Islamists in Syria (and the region as a whole) might just possibly spawn a monster to out-monster all the other monsters (so far), namely Islamic State. 

This year's edition of Correspondents Look Ahead 'fessed up to having failed to foresee Islamic State (and Russia-Ukraine and Ebola) but last year's edition reflected on that wrong prediction regarding Assad, especially Lyse Doucet who, while generalising the matter beyond the BBC to the West as a whole, seems to sum up some of the biased thinking that pervaded the BBC's reporting of the story:

I think we look at them with the wrong lenses. I think in the West we look at it through the lenses of what we want to see. So for a long time we saw President Assad as a westernised leader with a British-born wife. Then we saw him in the mould of Colonel Gadaffi and Hosni Mubarak, i.e. about to be toppled. It is a police state, so it's very difficult to get to the heart of what's happening in Syria, and my view, in covering this closely, is that many western capitals have seen it through ideological lenses as well, coming out with statements like "Assad must go", "His days are counted". They're not counted, and he's not going anywhere any time soon. 

Well, I would say that I saw a lot of comments at blogs like Biased BBC (and made a few myself) criticising the BBC's sometimes rose-tinted take on "young" Bashar before the 'revolution' began, and Israel and the U.S. never looked at President Assad Jnr so sympathetically, so you can speak for yourself there, Lyse!

And I recall reading plenty of posts and comments (including plenty from Sue) cautioning against what might come in the wake of the fall of Mubarak, Gadaffi and Assad. (Some of the comments from RGH at Biased BBC at the time outpredicted everyone over what would happen in Libya were Gadaffi overthrown before Gadaffi was overthrown) as we denounced the BBC for enthusing over the uprisings. (Ah, alas, they didn't listen to us bloggers!)

And as for "many western capitals" having "seen it through ideological lenses", well, Lyse, is that a beam I see in your own eye?

Most of the successful predictions on last year's programme were so vague (the economy will get a bit better) or so widely expected to happen (like Mr Modi winning the Indian election or Mr Erdogan becoming president of Turkey) that they don't really stand out as prize-winning predictions.

Among the bigger unsuccessful predictions, however, were (1) that John Kerry would help bring about a major breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (2) that talks with Iran would also result in a successful deal. Neither happened, and I'm putting forward both of those wrong predictions as candidates for bias-suggesting wishful thinking. Neither of them were 'fessed up to on this year's edition.

And, returning almost to where the post began, it was on the (then) upcoming U.S. mid-term elections that the BBC reporters got it most obviously wrong last year.

Both Mark Mardell and James Robbins predicted that it would be a bad year for the Republicans with the Republicans failing to take the Senate and the Democrats making gains in the House (though not enough to take it). They reasoned that the public had taken against the Republicans over the budget crisis of late 2013 and that they would punish them for that in November 2014...

Didn't happen. Bias. Wishful thinking. And, again, Mark Mardell didn't 'fess up to it.

As for this edition's predictions, well, we'll review those in a year's time. If we're still here. Which we probably will be.