Craig’s tour de force below is a hard act to follow, but since he’s currently off the radar he might have missed the Vice News documentary that I hear has gawn viral on t’interweb.
He’s probably the only one on the planet who hasn’t seen it, so on the off-chance that he logs in to see if there’s life in the old blog yet, I’m posting it once again.
Actually, that might not be the only reason I’m posting it. A certain amount of malice may be involved.
Anyway if that doesn’t dislodge the last remnants of Labour loyalists who were stubbornly clinging to the sinking ship, nothing will.
Who, in particular, has disaffiliated? David Aaronovitch has, voluntarily, Rod Liddle has, compulsorily, and perhaps even the BBC has, ideologically.
Corbyn said (of the BBC)
“There is not one story on any election anywhere in the UK that the BBC will not spin into a problem for me. It’s obsessive beyond belief - they are obsessed with trying to damage the leadership of the Labour Party and unfortunately there are people int the Labour Party that play into that.
The BBC said (Of Corbyn)
Jeremy Corbyn's communications chief claims the Labour leader's preparations for Prime Minister's Questions are being leaked by his own staff.
In a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Seumas Milne said the "annoying" leaks from his top team were handing an advantage to the Conservatives.
Mr Corbyn also criticises the media coverage of his party.
Mr Corbyn also hit out at the BBC over the local elections, claiming "the whole narrative" had been that "Corbyn's going to lose" and saying an unnamed group of political commentators were "shallow, facile and ill-informed".In other footage, the leader's aides discuss their attempts to ensure he dresses smartly and watch him pose for a succession of photographs with supporters.Mr Corbyn is also shown reacting to the suspension of Ken Livingstone from the party after the former London mayor invoked Hitler in a defence of an MP's comments about Israel.
Of course in the film, there’s something for everyone. The bit about Jonathan Freedland is the one that exercises me most, obvs.
Here’s some excerpts from David Aaronovitch’s piece. (£) “Yikes! I might have to vote for the Tories”
Any responsible voter should find a way of keeping Jeremy Corbyn’s obnoxious views well away from Downing Street
On the night of the local elections the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, went to make a speech in a pub that appeared to have a Cuban communist theme. He was filmed there, beneath the pictures of Che and Fidel, holding forth to the kind of people who still go to Cuban-themed pubs.
The next day the film-makers interviewed him. “I am not a traditional party leader,” he told them. “I do things in a rather different way.” And then added: “Some people are slower at learning things than others.”
Are they not? I cannot find a phrase for the telling of an inadvertent truth that everyone else but the teller can see while trying to say the opposite, but perhaps a “Jeremyad” will cover it. Indeed, the half-hour film on Corbyn, released yesterday, begins with a Jeremyad. In a car on the phone to his communications chief, Seumas Milne, Corbyn discusses a Guardian article worrying about Labour’s antisemitism problem. “Utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness” are the words Corbyn uses. About the article, not about the problem.
“That stuff about calling Hamas and Hezbollah “friends” was not some cheap shot or shallow debating point. It is Corbyn’s “just talking” rebuttal that was unconvincing.
I’ll say. Times of Israel:
“Before his election as UK Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn pressed for a boycott of Israel and called on the British foreign secretary at the time to ban Israeli politicians from entering the country, newly released letters from 2010-2015 show.The letters, sent to then-foreign secretary William Hague, were published following a Freedom of Information request to the government.
Writing to Hague in February 2012 about East Jerusalem, in particular house demolitions in the Silwan neighborhood, Corbyn, who was a backbench MP for Islington North at the time, urged trade sanctions against Israel.
“Israel’s current actions and victimisation of the people of East Jerusalem is an abomination that is totally illegal,” he wrote. “Surely the only logical way forward here is to take concrete action to penalise Israel via the most obvious method.”
“There is clearly no time to lose to take actions via the EU-Israel Association Trade Agreement. Let the suffering of the Palestinian people no longer be so familiar to us that all we do is ‘make representations’ when there are tools at our disposal that our government and other governments are choosing to ignore,” he wrote.
In another missive to Hague from February 2013, Corbyn wrote that he had just returned from a visit to the Gaza Strip, during which he was asked if Britain “would stop allowing Israel’s criminal politicians to come to our country,” ensure that the BBC “portray Palestine fairly,” and work “to end the siege of Gaza.”
“Had I not been working on three of these goals I’d have hung my head in shame,” Corbyn wrote. “There was no possible explanation I could give as to why our governments had made no progress in support of such crucial aims.”
Just talking to Hamas and Hezbollah and inviting them to the HoC for tea whilst aggressively lobbying for “Israel’s criminal politicians” to be banned from visiting the UK. Actively working for peace? I think not.
But of course the most revealing aspect of this internet hit is that it allows the sheer incompetence of the Corbyn regime to speak for itself.
Corbyn’s charmless personality, his reptilian countenance, his slow-wittedness, the amateurishness of his entourage and most of all his mean-spirited response to an innocuous article in the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland about antisemitism in the Labour Party.
“Utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness, you know. He’s not a good guy at all. He seems kind of obsessed with me, you know?”
We saw a shambolic committee of incompetent sycophants struggling to orchestrate a strategy for PMQs. We saw Corbyn ineptly failing to score despite the open goal he’d been handed. On a plate with a cherry on top.
As someone already said somewhere, this was The Thick of It, minus the laughs. Not just a car crash, but a full blown pile-up.
I apologise for the far-fetched analogy, but one is reminded of descriptions of Lenin - mild mannered and polite in private, but utterly despotic as a leader. Of course the analogy falls apart in terms of their respective intellects, but he is clearly more than normally sensitive towards any criticism. What does he expect? If he sincerely believes the press have given him a hard time, in the words of my late mother, he doesn’t know he is born.
ReplyDeleteAnother one for the Complaints From Both Sides. Pointing out his actual problems is bias, apparently.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Corbyn is right that there is an element at the BBC that is out to get him.
You seem to be saying that you don't think the BBC is biased because you don't like Jeremy Corbyn. Whether you like him or not he is the leader of our second biggest political party and therefore should not be targetted by the BBC for political assassination. But that is what people like Laura Kuennsberg and Nick Robinson have done - targetted him. There is no doubt the local elections were supposed to be the moment of the assassination. But it didn't happen because the voters didn't allow it to happen. Today Laura Kuennsberg was booed at a Labour Party press conference. I say good, because if the BBC want to become PART of the political process, as people like Mark Easton, Mark Mardell and Evan Davis clearly think it should be (rather than just observing and reporting on it), then I am afraid they are going to have to get used to that.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, I am a supporter of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East and completely disagree with Corbyn pro-Hamas insanity.
The ridiculous part is that some at the BBC are biased against him, but Corbyn is simply wrong in what he sees as the bias.
DeleteThe establishment Beeboids (upper management, flagship programme producers and editors, most high-profile on-air talent) see Corbyn as unelectable. They want beloved Labour back in power and see him as the biggest obstacle to that goal. So they poke and prod, try to find weaknesses. Occasionally one will see a presenter trying to gently guide their Labour guest towards understanding what needs to be said.
Nick Robinson spent more time as the BBC political editor protecting politicians than he did being an honest broker of news about them, so he may very well be in on the game as well. Not by directive or conspiracy, you understand. It just comes naturally to them, and they're all at it.
Politics junkie journalists want a strong opposition so they don't keep having to work hard figuring out what to say every day against the party in power. Corbyn isn't that. Notice how so much effort is spent whining about his week PMQ performances, or how he isn't handling the latest crisis as perfectly as they'd like.
But Corbyn is mainly complaining that they're pointing out his real flaws and the real problems that have become inflamed under his leadership. Most of that isn't biased reporting. Actually, Labour's Jew-hater problem must be even worse than we know if the BBC is spending time on it. Lord knows they've spent years trying hide from their audience the growing problem of anti-Semitism in Europe, never mind in Britain. Sometimes, reality forces the BBC to report something, and it's pretty bad if they're really doing it this much. Worst of all for the Beeboids, it goes right to the heart of the problem: anti-Zionism has become an excuse for anti-Semitism, just as so many of us have been warning for years. Plenty of Beeboids are anti-Israel and worry about the power of the Jewish Lobby, so imagine the internal strife over reporting this at all.
That's not bias. Plenty of other things are, but not what Corbyn is actually complaining about.
I agree entirely that a portion of the BBC saw Corbyn as unelectable, particularly during and just after the leadership contest. The General election was obviously a major trauma at the BBC and many beboids did and still do see Corbyn’s leadership as a double blow. Yet at the same time I suspect another portion of the BBC are rather sympathetic to his far-left position. This is apparent not just in current affairs programs, but across the whole range of BBC broadcasting.
DeleteCorbyn and his supporters are protesting too much. I’m no particular fan of Laura Kuennsberg, but if Corbyn appears slow-witted in PMQ it is because he is slow witted, not because of biased reporting. The same applies to Corbyn’s “friends” and so many other issues which many people find deeply disturbing in a potential Prime Minister. Yet Labour appear to believe that anything negative to their cause should be brushed under the table. Coybyn was obviously much more exasperated by the scandal of anti-Semitism than by the anti-Semitism itself.
I also agree that people like Mark Mardell et al believe, rather worryingly, that the BBC should become part of the political process. But what is even more worrying is that Labour also appear to believe this, with the proviso that they can control the output.
If your comment (Anonymous 2 June 2016 at 23:03 ) was aimed at me, here’s my response.
DeleteI have said this before. I don’t think scrupulous impartiality is either achievable or desirable for humans. It’s strictly for inanimate objects.
When necessary, the BBC must be allowed to make a distinction between right and wrong, moral and immoral, based on the Judeo/Christian principles that define this country.
There is a distinction between straightforward news reporting and opinion, and all too often the BBC blurs the line between the two, particularly as news reports these days are almost always followed by ‘analyses’; or a BBC-appointed expert is asked to reinterpret it for us (lesser mortals). I think I can remember a time, pre 1980s maybe, when this was not the case.
This blog is not intended to be a categorical index of all the BBC’s transgressions. We don’t hate everything the BBC puts out, and we don’t concentrate exclusively on examples of bias. If you read the “World This Weekend’ section in Craig’s thoughtful “Au Revoir” post, you’ll see what we think about “dangers for bloggers” and understand why we’re wary of the confirmation bias trap.
You said:
“You seem to be saying that you don't think the BBC is biased because you don't like Jeremy Corbyn.”
Yes, I do think there are times where the BBC is not biased, but I can’t see how you reached that particular conclusion.
I will admit that I don’t “like” Jeremy Corbyn. In fact it’s not really a matter of “like”. It’s more a matter of me making a “value judgement”, something the BBC has decided, for them, is against the rules.
So if you like, I see that the BBC is breaking its own rules by applying a value judgement in their partial ‘targeting’ of Jeremy Corbyn. But I dislike this rule, specially when it leads to their precious impartiality being applied to Jeremy Corbyn’s good friends Hamas and Hezbollah.
I would certainly prefer it if the BBC braved the wrath of potential Hamas supporters and used the derogatory term ‘terrorist’, alongside Israel, America, Canada, the EU, Egypt, Japan, Australia, Jordan and the United Kingdom.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas who have designated Hamas terrorists.
Incidentally, I can be a bit of a pedant, but since Laura Kuenssberg’s name crops up so often in your comments, I’ll give you a handy mnemonic. “One nose, two shoes.”
It’s like ‘necessary’. “One coat and two shoes.”
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/03/tom-watson-criticises-labour-activists-booed-laura-kuenssberg-jeremy-corbyn
@Terry,
DeleteIt's not just Labour who want the BBC to be part of the political process. Cameron hasn't stopped trying, either.
As for Mardell and his kind, I have long viewed them as political activists posing as journalists. Paul Mason recently gave up the pose entirely and went full-on activist. Unfortunately, it's in BBC job descriptions that they believe they shape the national agenda, educate the public, inform thoughts, etc. Only a near-complete purge of staff can remedy this.
Corbyn is a nasty, shallow and basically thick camp follower of Tony Benn who "got lucky" and-despite himself-is now "Leader" of the Labour Party.
ReplyDeleteThankfully, it`s a zombie corpse now-so he`s shackled to it, until one of other of them dies...who knows which?...who cares?
The Left is dead-funeral rites bit drawn out, but only the BBC and liberal broadsheet oafs care about Corbyn. He is a dull apparatchik, and as representative a symptom of the brain-stem death of any intellectual basis for having a Labour Party anymore.
Corbyn was never a Bennite. Benn was a quixotic left parliamentarian with only a tenuous connection to Marxism. Corbyn is a Marxist, pure and simple.
DeleteHe only "got lucky" because idiots paid three quid each to get him elected...
ReplyDeleteCorbyn is an accident of history, the pall bearer of whatever plans the Left had to get elected-only with a suggestion box, because a coffin would involve some thought and planning.
ReplyDeleteNo reason whatsoever to listen to the Lefts death rattles...Corbyn is an unpleasant, shallow and simple cipher and medium for Tony Benn-and without an original thought in his head,so a picador for Parliamentarian obsessives.
A colourless dead parrot-can only be seen through Red Lenses, only available as a Lefty monocle.
This is the reality of BBC Bias:
ReplyDelete"Reality Check verdict: Net migration is still at near-record levels. Just over half of it comes from outside the EU. The government has not managed to bring migration from outside the EU down to tens of thousands as the 2010 and 2015 manifestos promised, so it is not clear it would be able to do so with EU migrants post-Brexit."
This is the only bias that is really important at this point in June 2016. Forget the rest and vote to Leave.