A climate of mistrust

I think we're at the stage where judicious mistrust should be a reasonable precautionary default setting for any BBC News website readers when encountering BBC news online reports.

For example, I'm no expert on French politics but I know enough to half-trust my instincts, and my first instinct on reading the BBC News website report today headlined EU flag removed from Arc de Triomphe after right-wing outrage was to mistrust it. 

Alarm bells rang with the BBC report's heavy political labelling of the opponents of President Macron's flying of the EU flag at the Parisian landmark  - in chronological order as: 'right-wing', 'right-wing', 'far-right', 'far-right', 'conservative', 'far right [minus hyphen]'.

That led me to Google around on behalf of the blog, in French if necessary, to see if the opposition was wider than that, as I assumed it would be. 

My instinctive guess was that the anti-globalist Left's leader and prominent perennial presidential contender Jean-Luc Mélenchon would have vocally opposed it too and that the BBC would be ignoring that to keep their narrative pure and simple. 

And, yes, it didn't take long to find M. Mélenchon denouncing the flying of the "Marian" EU flag at the Arc de Triomphe as a "bad decision" and a "Macronist whim" - something the BBC report didn't mention. 

And one of M. Mélenchon's leading leftist allies, Bastien Lachaud MP [of the far-left La France insoumise], said "A European flag replacing the French flag under the Arc de Triomphe is a mistake. The unknown soldier did not die for Brussels" - something the BBC also report didn't mention.

How significant my correct hunch is here is open to question, but I'd say it's significant enough that I guessed that the BBC would omit something to keep their narrative pure and simple - and helpful to the EU - and then found that they'd duly omitted it, just as I'd guessed.