Happy 2014!

Well, here were are in 2014. Whoo-hoo! 

Plus no hangover. Double whoo-hoo!!

Now back to business.

Biased BBC's Alan highlighted the reporting of Phil Mackie on Radio 5 Live, noting the BBC man's determined effort to rubbish the Sun's reporting on the Bulgarian-Romanian immigration story. Alan accuses Phil Mackie and the BBC in general of playing the race too, in seeking out and then leading on the accusations of racism against the UK media make by a Romanian official.

Alan then tracks Phil's tweets and observes that they are all pushing the same angle. Indeed they are:

The Romanian Foreign Ministry has told me some of the language being used in the UK about its citizens is "close to being racist"

The editor of a daily newspaper in #Bucharest asked me why the British press says #Romanians are "beggars and thieves", and Phil's most recent tweets take that even further. 

And his most recent tweets and re-tweets have continued in the same vein. He retweeted a BBC colleague who's making a point against Migration Watch, for example:

 Frankie McCamley ‏@Frankie_Mack 2h

On a personal note. My father @McCamley01 went in the other direction. He moved to Bulgaria to live and work there. #migrationwatch

 Retweeted by Phil Mackie

If you fancy defending Phil along the lines that he's merely reporting the criticisms of others as a reporter ought to do, well, during a subsequent Twitter exchange he took part in with the Huffington Post's Oana Romocea and ex-Fabian Society head Sunder Katwala of British Future, this impartial BBC reporter made his own view crystal clear:

 Oana Romocea ‏@OanaRomocea 28m

@philmackie @sundersays Read your interview with @alinamatis in @gandul. Still can't get why UK media use the same approach to reporting.

 Phil Mackie ‏@philmackie 27m

@OanaRomocea @sundersays @alinamatis @gandul some has been shameful

 Sunder Katwala ‏@sundersays 18m

@philmackie certainly

And that was precisely the message Phil was hammering away at yesterday on Radio 5 Live and on both Radio 4's World at One and PM. He was relentless. 

As indeed were The World at One, PM and The World Tonight.

It's when you listen to a day's worth of reporting across all the main Radio 4 current affairs programmes that you so often see the way a single angle is being banged away at, obviously in a concerted fashion. And in no way can it be called an uncontroversial angle either.

Shaun Ley on WATO tried to get migration expert Prof. John Salt to join in the denunciation of the UK media and had re-try when the professor misunderstood his question. It was quite blatant. Then Eddie Mair began PM's coverage with a litany of UK press reports before letting the denunciations begin. Carolyn Quinn on The World Tonight pursued the same angle with another BBC reporter in Romania, Mark Lowen. Absolutely relentless.

Now, even if the BBC has a point and is right that the British "mass media" (as Mark Lowen put it) has been "shameful" (as Phil Mackie put it) in its reporting of this story, does that make it right for an allegedly impartial news organisation to act as if it's a campaigning newspaper (like the Guardian) and for it to ram this controversial point of view so aggressively down its listeners' throats at every opportunity?

Well, this is one of those occasions where the answer to the question 'Is the BBC biased?' is clearly 'Yes, of course it is. What a stupid question to ask!'