BBC 'friendly fire'

Here's an amusing bit of BBC 'friendly fire', courtesy of blog favourite Hugh Sykes...

It concerns Newsnight's Gabriel Gatehouse, whose Newsnight reports on the EU this week have been given a thorough fisking by David Keighley over at News-watch for 'promoting EU myths'. 

Anyhow, here's Hugh doing the right thing (and especially so as Gabriel was actually singing his praises!):

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Quite right, Hugh! The European Union isn't Europe. And pro-EU Gabriel shouldn't have put it like that (and revealed his own biases in the process).

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And while I'm praising our Hugh, that Broadcasting House report of his this morning was a superb piece of reporting. It really was. (And Hugh's prose was as superb as ever).

Yes, I could sense that Hugh was trying to nudge us into thinking that Austria's far-right and the Freedom Party's presidential candidate (who, looking at the latest polls, might very well win the second round of the election there) are sinister and dangerous, but he did grant them their say and he restrained his editorialising about them (hung his Twitter coat up at the door this time, so to speak), leaving us, the BH listener, to make up our own minds about them (in whichever direction).

And he also very clearly expressed his fury at the violence of the far-left (and he actually used the term "far-left") - especially their violence towards him at a 'protest' on the Austrian/Italian border. He made a point of calling them "a mob" and equated their badness with the badness of the far-right (though he didn't provide us with equivalent proof of the violence of the (modern) Austrian far-right).

Credit where credit's due. And credit's due to Hugh here.