Mark Mardell was on the BBC News Channel this afternoon, repeating - at times almost word-for-word - his take on the White House Correspondents dinner affair, as conveyed to Jane Garvey on this morning's Broadcasting House.
A transcript of the whole of it would prove overly repetitive, so here are bits where he said something different:
ANNITA McVEIGH: Talking about the motive, is this the Trump administration basically trying to reinforce its fake news agenda, saying to people, look, the President doesn't think it's worth his time to be going along and attending this dinner?MARK MARDELL: I think so. I mean, you could say he's being slightly petulant - I mean, that's, certainly from what we've seen of his personality, relatively likely...that he genuinely doesn't like these people, he genuinely wants nothing to do with them.
*******
ANNITA McVEIGH: What is the media response going to be to this, because this is a new low in relations, isn't it, between the US president and the media? So what's the response going to be?MARK MARDELL: I think there's an air of anxiety generally about how this develops. We saw that with the briefing that excluded some people, including the BBC. Do the others not take part and say 'no, we've got to make a stand here', or is that cutting off their nose to spite their face, and not serving their audience properly? So this will be just seen as another development in what a lot of people are really worried about, that there seemed to be... Remember, the term "fake news" was coined to describe completely false, utterly false, stories peddled by some people with an agenda. There was no truth in them whatsoever. Now Donald Trump is using it to describe stories he simply doesn't like. He's not even disputing certain facts, but just saying 'I don't like it, so it's fake news'. So he's established a moral equivalence between sheer lies and the press that he doesn't like.
Compare and contrast how Obama's petulance was received by Mardell. Wow.
ReplyDeleteMardell has peddled some false stories in his time, just because he didn't like something or someone.
Come on Craig FFS!
ReplyDeleteYou surely heard the magnificent John Grays talk on "A Point of View" this morning.
Well I stuck around liong enough to hear a bit of BH.
Utter crap-but Mardell was rather indiscreet and expansive for Jane(no alpha male crap with Eddie and Paddy I think).
Have a listen at about 9.10-20 when Mark and Jane discuss what`s coming up later.
The WHOLE of the Media/US cartel is exposed by blabbering Mark-and any media commentator like you ought to note it. Can I leave you with THIS nugget from Mardell
"It`s not about having any answers-it`sll about being seen to have asked the correct questions".
FFS Craig-if THAT`S not the whole masomic code of the anti-Trump/Brexit pack of pricks,then what is?
End of media studies maxim-but somehow it summed up the whole conspiratorial class in the liberal media in regard of us...sure glad to hear it though.
I refer the honourable lady to the posts I posted a few hours or days ago:
Deletehttp://isthebbcbiased.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/john-gray-on-spectre-of-populism.htm
http://isthebbcbiased.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/mark-mardell-goes-to-dinner.html
I've been nothing if not obsessively thorough this weekend!
....It`s not about having any answers-it's all about being seen to have asked the correct questions.... This sums up the arrogance of Mark Mardell and his BBC buddies with whom he shares a common brain. Their attitude assumes a superiority over our elected politicians - a very dangerous place to be. Their problem is that Donald Trump will not play the game according to their rules. Good for him, I say.
ReplyDelete"he genuinely doesn't like these people, he genuinely wants nothing to do with them"
ReplyDeleteSays the man working for an organisation that has slipped anti-Trump comments into trailers, 'comedies', weather reports, drama, documentaries, politics, news etc etc.
Never has a US presidential candidate been so ridiculed or a foreign head of state so reviled. They do it because they know they can get away with it. Let's see Mardell take on Kim Jong-un if he is so hot at 'holding to account'!
The BBC only has itself to blame. If they hadn't been so intent on scoring points and making statements about themselves at press conferences they might not have been excluded from briefings. How do they think this is serving the license paying public?
ReplyDeleteA better question might be is all this concentration on Trump by the BBC necessary? Like that Clash song, I'm so bored of the USA. In this country, our media really shouldn't be so fixated on the thoughts and deeds of the latest narcissistic/psychopathic half-wit occupying the Head of State seat over the pond. I'd like to build a wall to prevent us ever hearing the cliche (and falsehood) "special relationship" again.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, are we really suggesting here that the BBC "only has itself to blame" for being excluded from briefings because they're not friendly to the "anti-establishment" billionaire Donald Trump? That seems rather contradictory - we don't want a biased BBC, we do want political leaders who want to bypass critique. Well, not me.
Is Trump being given a fair hearing by the BBC? No, it's at times embarrasingly juvenile. The funny thing is I wonder how else he could possibly be reported. It's almost as if the quality of reportage has stooped to an inverse echo of the quality of the President. The BBC's reporting of Trump is needlessly belligerent and childishly focused on the ongoing absurdity of his daily foot-in-mouth moments, but let's not bypass the fact only he is responsible for his words and deeds. He does not and should not have a free pass.
An enquiring broadcast journalist might ask does Trump have a point about fake news. That the BBC ain't going there is telling.
ReplyDeleteBut they are going there, at full tilt. They've set themselves up as the ultimate impartial arbiter of what's real and what isn't:
Deletehttps://isthebbcbiased.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-bbc-cant-edit-internet-but-we-wont.html
Yes he has a point about "fake news", but as you know he's not averse to "fake news" in his favour and demonstrably not averse to presenting falsehoods personally to further his own desires. You can not unreasonably draw your own conclusions that when Trump refers to "fake news" he's referring to any and every source which doesn't venerate his every word. That strikes me as more worrying than the BBC's lack of objectivity.
ReplyDeleteBut Mardell has a history of declaring things untrue simply because he doesn't like them, or declaring falsehoods to be true because he agrees with them.
Deletehttp://biasedbbc.org/blog/2014/01/07/mark-mardell-lies-about-health-care/
http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/02/28/mardell-tells-a-white-house-lie/
http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2012/11/14/mardells-mandate-muddle/
http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2012/09/21/mardell-redistributes-his-political/
Or even just because he doesn't like who is reporting it:
http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/05/18/mardell-admits-benghazi-was-ignored-too-complicated-only-obama-is-a-muslim-websites-interested/
The point isn’t that the BBC should be afraid to criticise or raise controversial points, obviously it should. Heaven forbid that Trump or any politician should be given a free pass. But how helpful is to the public if it is as Mark Mardell has stated, ”…about being seen to have asked the correct questions" - in other words playing to the crowd rather that being journalists. People like Sopel and Mardell are supposed to be at the top of their profession, yet they are behaving like undergraduates.
ReplyDeleteIt's a pity that, like their US MSM fellow travelers, they gave Obama a lifetime free pass and acted more as a White House press bureau than as any kind of objective journalists.
DeleteSuddenly they are back to the 'core mission' of holding power to account.
Throughout I've made the point that the way the BBC is conducting itself is absurd. I made the mistake alas of pointing out the subject matter of said conduct is even more absurd. How do you report on the absurd?
DeleteI agree re: Obama incidentally. He operated with charisma and, like many other media outlets, the BBC took that at face value.
Your last sentence is in the running for understatement of the year.
DeleteWhat I dont understand is that new stuff isn't exactly hard to find with google, if you can think of some crack pot story chances are somewhere there'll be a blog for it. Some of it is also probably true.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that non of the true non PC stuff seems to get a look in is what troubles me - it means there's probably at best "group think" going on in all the media rooms of the MSM - something's gone wrong, investigative journalists don't seem to actually investigate anything anymore.
Massive cuts in the MSM all round haven't helped. The irony is the digital age and all its promise of information via a deluge of sites,blogs,vlogs, social media and 24 hour news channels is the very reason IMO that standards in the MSM have dropped so alarmingly. News has become magazine-format (which I'd blame Sky for), hot-topic, personality-driven and opinion-driven. So, a story like Trump has it all and it gets bled to death because it's all over social media like a zombie virus.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just the BBC, none of the MSM are making news programmes worth bothering with, sites or papers worth reading. Switch off, it isn't going to change any time soon.
Good points.
ReplyDeleteHowever with the unique way the BBC is funded I'm not sure they should get to use the lack of funding or dumbing down excuse.....it's obvious that the the BBC journalists themselves believe they are upholding this standard though which is laughable.