Last night's BBC News at Ten returned to the migrant crisis.
It featured Richard Bilton reporting from the Italian aircraft carrier Cavour on the EU's latest response to the growing tide of migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Libya and featured a short interview with Federica Mogherini, the EU's foreign policy chief.
The report described how the EU is getting so accomplished at detecting and intercepting migrant vessels that the journey across the sea has become a lot safer. Rescue is now virtually guaranteed and interceptions are now happening much quicker. Perhaps not coincidentally, there's been a 60% rise in the number making the crossing in the last six months.
Richard Bilton quite properly raised the fear that the EU's "military might" is making it too easy and that, knowing it has become much safer to attempt a crossing, more and more people will try and make the journey. He even put that to Federica Mogherini, who merely replied that life is becoming harder for the people smugglers.
His report did, however, continue some typical BBC reporting:
This is one of the 26 rescues since Monday - young children in a flimsy dinghy, the desparate who set off hoping help will come.
The dinghy certainly looked flimsy, but there didn't look to be many young children. It was nearly all adult males - as you can see from these screengrabs (click to enlarge):
What? - the BBC, after giving wall to wall (positive) coverage to migration in 2015, are finally, in the run up to the Referendum allowing us a tiny, teeny-weeny glimpse of what's going on this year? How kind of them. I am not surprised that this year, with the Referendum result in the balance, the BBC are being slightly less partial, for fear of frightening the masses who might actually want to hold on to their country and not give it over lock, stock and barrel to people from other continents with very difference values. So, no sign of Jenny Hill waving them on shore with a big beaming smile and a huge Welcome sign.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways it presented the EU as being efficient, tough against people smugglers and caring towards the desperate, so the questions about whether the EU's mission was being counter-productive were probably intended to be seen in that light.
ReplyDeleteFederica Mogherini's arrival on the Cavour was like something out of one of those BBC One dramas where am impossibly glamorous young female head of a British security service or police unit takes charge, surrounded by saluting men.
Were those children's lives in immediate danger like European Jewish children were? This is such nonsense, blaming the wrong people.
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