Two out, one back in

Another of our old BBC favourites, retired BBC veteran Hugh Sykes, took to Twitter the other day in light of the BBC's Ukraine coverage to take a potshot at Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis:

Hugh Sykes: I bet the recent Big Name defections from the BBC are regretting their decision to go dosh-and-podcast - they are nowhere near the front line now: out of sight, out of mind.

David M. Beneš: Oh they’ll soon be back, like KK.

Hugh Sykes: No one is indispensable.

I was also thinking about Maits and Soapless today in light of all the chat hereabouts about how The New York Times has just conceded that The New York Post got it right in 2020 when reporting the Hunter 'Son of Joe' Biden laptop story - a possible major scandal with strong implications for the ethical standing of the present US president, especially in light of the Ukraine crisis. 

This was, notoriously, something that landed The New York Post - a famous US newspaper - with a two-week Twitter ban for its now-shown-to-be-accurate journalism in the run-up to the 2020 US election. 

It's the sort of thing the BBC's disinformation unit and Ros's Radio 4 Media Show should look into and John Simpson should object to. 

Where Jon and Emily come into this is that they did an Americast podcast for the BBC at the time [which Arthur T got me to listen to] where they 'covered' the story. 

'Covered', in inverted commas, is the word. They 'covered' it, but Emily Maitlis in particular - then in her pomp at the BBC - was openly derisive about the story, sarcastically mocking the fact that they were covering it at all. Her and Sopes and The Zurch used every trick of language in the book to show how little they thought of the story. It was all a distraction by The Donald apparently.

On listening back today the word 'covered' took on other connotations: Unconsciously or consciously, they were 'covering' for Joe Biden as he fought for office with President Trump, blowing the same bubbles that their US counterparts were blowing from their echo chamber to help make this story blow away.

Anyhow, they're now LBC's business. Rob Burley, bless him, will probably end up having to defend them on Twitter. For his sake only, I hope they're not a walking disaster for LBC's ratings.

Meanwhile, as David M. Beneš tweeted above, KK - Katty Kay - is back at the BBC. 

She was formerly the face of the BBC in America but left last year to join a left-wing US media outlet that closed shortly afterwards following fraud allegations. 

The BBC has kindly taken her back on as a 'US special correspondent'. 

Kindly for her, though not necessarily for BBC licence fee payers.  

She's now back on the Beeb defending the Biden administration as if she'd never left and back doing the BBC's claim of impartiality harm again.

Despite Hugh, Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel's departure was a blessing for the BBC in impartiality terms. Rescuing Katty Kay - the kind of partisan BBC journalist who also moans about the influence of 'the Jewish lobby' - isn't a good idea for the publicly-paid corporation in that respect.

Coda to Sue's post...

So Mates and Soapless are off to join James O'Brien, presumably leaving The Zurch in the lurch. 

It's worked out nicely for the Beeb because the Defund the BBC campaign has lost its poster girl, but - looking on the bright side - it's worked out nicely for us too because we'll hopefully never have to think of either of them ever again. 🙏

Groupthink

Sopes, Maitlis and The Zurch gathered again for Americast this week to review the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, absolute oozing disapproval of Kyle Rittenhouse and his defence team and his supporters. The Zurch complained about two-tier justice for the rich because of all the funding for Kyle R; while Maitlis asserted that his gun was illegal despite the judge saying it wasn't; and Sopes sneered at him for meeting Tucker Carson and for becoming ''a celebrity'' after killing two ''protestors''; and both Sopes and Maitlis were aghast at him being offered internships, and played clips of some of his ''far-out'' high-profile Republican supporters, mocking and sneering at them; then The Zurch talked of the ''tragedy'' of the men's killing and how the Right was turning Kyle R into Captain America. And then came their guest, and she ruled Kyle R ''morally culpable'' and thinks the case should have been made against him over his handling of the gun. The bias was in plain slight, and this might have been MSNBC.

Anyhow, have you read Stephen Daisley's latest Spectator piece, Kyle Rittenhouse and the collapse of media neutrality? Oddly, he doesn't mention the BBC. 

Update: Meanwhile, here's a little Twitter exchange that also, oddly, doesn't mention the BBC:

Spiked: The silence on the Waukesha massacre is shameful. Six people were slaughtered by a man in an SUV and there’s just silence from Hollywood, from influencers, from the woke set. Identity politics has corroded these people’s humanity, says Brendan O’Neill. 

Max Klinger: Brendan O'Neill on the horrendous attack in Waukesha and the predictable response to it in @spikedonline. He's correct. It's possible to predict when we will and won't witness massive displays of selective outrage with almost perfect accuracy.

So...Americast moved on from one episode to another in this past couple of weeks, covering Kyle Rittehouse and the killing of a black jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, in Georgia by three white men. 

Have a guess which murderous US event they didn't cover, as if to prove Brendan right?

Lets go Brendon!

On Jon Sopel [the Full Sopes treatment]

I

A few days ago, one Tony Spencer tweeted a link to a BBC News website piece, Three ways this Afghanistan crisis really hurts Biden The US president promised more competence and empathy - his reputation and America's have taken a hit. 

Tony wrote,

Hope @BBCJonSopel is not reading this. Biden's number one fan will be so disappointed.

Jon Sopel, adding a 'rolling eyes' emoji, replied,

Tony - I wrote it.

“Burn!” cried Jon's delighted Twitter fans.

Tony then replied,

Wow. I'm impressed and should have read the credits!! Fair play to you Jon on this article, which is well balanced. Changed your tune a bit, though.

To which Jon - channeling his famous “impartial, free and fair” response to President Trump's 'Another beauty!' crack - replied,

Nope. Have not changed a bit. Hold people in power to account - fairly and firmly whatever their political stripes.

II 

Jon Sopel's belief in his own impartiality is undoubtedly sincere. He evidently thinks he's getting it right.

He's proclaimed it many times, from his appearances on Feedback and Newswatch, to his newspaper/gazette interviews. 

He's even favourably contrasted his own 'fair' reporting of Donald Trump to that of 'unfair' partisan, liberal US outlets, despite himself reporting on the previous US president in pretty much the same hostile, sneering spirit as they do - albeit with added British dryness.

There's none so blind, perhaps...

Or to quote the ripe-for-cancelling Rabbie Burns on behalf of Jon: O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!

I, personally, don't think that Jon Sopel has been even remotely impartial as the BBC's North America editor - whatever he thinks. He objected to Donald Trump and fixated on Donald Trump's tweets [despite criticising others for fixating on them], and sneered and sneered and sneered about Mr Trump, whilst evidently getting a real kick out of playing to the gallery, reinforced by the enthusiastic responses he got from the usual, unrepresentative suspects on Twitter. 

III

Yes, many more people than just Tony - including me - found themselves taken aback by the sheer unexpectedness of Jon Sopel's strong criticisms of President Biden over the incompetent-at-best Afghan pullout. 

From Twitter to the BBC's News at Ten he's actually been pretty brutal.

Here's a small sample of his reporting, broadcast over the month on BBC One's main news bulletins:

• Those optics are terrible. This looks like being the most consequential decision that Joe Biden is going to take. It could also be the most calamitous.
• Over many years and at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, the US trained and equipped Afghan forces to be ready to take back control of their country. But they collapsed like a house of cards - one of many miscalculations made by the Biden administration over these dizzying few weeks.
• This may have been Donald Trump's policy, but it is Joe Biden's implementation, and I think he will play quite a price for the shambles that has unfolded over the past few days. 
• America is the world's pre-eminent superpower, but after the past few days, it doesn't look very super and it actually doesn't look that powerful.

So is this a sign of impartiality? He spent four years 'holding Donald Trump to account' and then some, after all,

Or does it show the opposite? 

Because this could very well be Jon marching in lockstep with like-minded US journalists, let down by and angrily disagreeing with 'their' President.

Many of them - just like the BBC's John Simpson - seem to be deeply wedded to the liberal interventionalist model, and aghast at the pullout.

[They also like war reporting.]

And, indeed, it does strike me as being highly suggestive that huge swathes of the US liberal media - even some of the most partisan outlets - have just-as-suddenly turned on Joe Biden over Afghanistan too, at exactly the same time, over exactly the same issues, and just as fiercely, and that they are all making much the same criticisms of the incumbent President as Jon Sopel's been making. 

Liberal interventionist birds of a feather flock together, even on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean?

IV

And it also strikes me that Jon Sopel, like his BBC colleagues, has been just as guilty as those partisan, liberal US outlets of not holding President Biden to account...up till the point when the Afghan debacle began unfolding.

The other day on GB News Simon McCoy [ex-BBC] commented, just as the crisis began:

If you watch some channels you would be forgiven for thinking everything's fine because President Trump's gone. And yet America, Joe Biden, with the decision to remove troops from Afghanistan, there are issues, there's sleaze bubbling under around President Biden.

I think he had the BBC in mind, doubtless among others. 

The Real Simon was, I think, rather understating it though. From the border crisis and growing economic woes to VP Kamala Harris's unpopularity and the divisiveness of Democrat identity politics radicalism, there's so much to say about the present US government.

Indeed, the 'Nothing to see here' attitude to the Biden administration's many failings even saw the BBC park their Americast podcast - the one with Sopes, Maitlis, and Zurch. 

No Trump to sneer at, no fun perhaps.

And then came Afghanistan.  

Americast was brought back this week, and Jon Sopel rose from his post-Trump slumbers, describing Joe's handling of the Afghanistan fiasco as ''totally incompetent''. 

V

Despite all this, I'm sensing - especially from his latest BBC One reports - that Jon's now starting to restrain himself, slipping back into more circumlocutory turns of phrase in describing the latest Biden misspeaks than he was last week. 

I think that might be because of that very Americast. 

He started expanding on his earlier criticisms of Mr Biden's ''totally incompetent'' handling of the Afghan crisis [as he put it], but found himself alongside a far-more-charitable-to-Biden Emily Maitlis and - their special guest - a kind-to-Biden ambassador. 

BBC and US media liberal groupthinks colliding and scattering, maybe.

VI

It's a tricky thing, thinking you're impartial when you're not. 

VII

CODA

And to end, a little light relief, plus an opportunity to post a map...

The good old 'crossing the DMZ from Tajikistan' defence for getting your facts wrong is one we've surely all used, especially in pub quizzes. 

I once got a Lady Gaga question wrong in a pub quiz, saying that Her Ladyship really was the sister of Queen's Radio Gaga, but excused myself by saying ''Sorry, but Jon Sopel crossed the DMZ from Tajikistan once'', and was awarded the point. 

Rightly so. Maybe Joe Biden should try it?

Indeed, as geography fans will know, Russia now has a minimum of two countries between it and Afghanistan [almost always three countries], depending on your land journey - unless you take the narrow but long land route via China. 

Clicking the link in the tweet Jon replied to, you find that Jon has [without admitting so on Twitter] edited the piece. 

Instead of ''three countries that neighbour Afghanistan - Russian, Iran and China'', the piece now says ''Why, three countries near Afghanistan - Russia, Iran and China''. 

Hm, Russia's still not that near. Kazakhstan, especially, is huge. Gawd know what they eat in Kazakhstan to make their country so big. Yaks? Lost yetis? Or former Kazakh regime advisor Tony Blair's legendary all-you-can-eat Brown burger specials?

The Beauties - BBC Bias à propos US Politics

 

A Guest Post by Arthur T 

I have made the point recently that the BBC’s news gathering and broadcast is more biased in the US than in the UK. From top to bottom, the BBC have allowed their dislike of President Trump to pervade every pore of news reporting as they seek to ridicule him. Jon Sopel just couldn’t wait to label his nemesis ‘loser’ as the BBC declared Biden victorious in the November 3rd Presidential Election. 

The above screenshot from the other day has replaced the US Election feature on the BBC News website US and Canada pages. What caught my eye was the Sopel and Maitlis Americast: Review of 2020. I thought ITBBCB? might review Sopel and Maitlis’s podcasts, one in particular: 'Hunter Biden’s Laptop, Why the media isn’t covering a story Trump wants them to’, a podcast from 21st October - just two weeks before polling day. Craig has very kindly made a transcript:

Jon Sopel: Let's go onto the topic of conversation that Donald Trump would love to be talking about. It's a complicated story, but it seems that someone got hold of a laptop allegedly containing emails written by Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden's laptop, which apparently he had taken in for service. He had forgotten about it. Owner of the shop looks at it, thinks 'Oh, those are interesting emails', sees if the FBI are interested, they're not, and it ends up in the hands of Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and in the hands of Steve Bannon, former campaign director at the last election. And they have touted it around. They have tried to give it to Fox News. Fox weren't interested. Then it ends up being published by The New York Post, a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper. And the suggestion, I think, at the most is there may have been a meeting organised between Hunter Biden, who was then a director of this Ukrainian energy company Burisma and his father Joe Biden, then the vice-president, to meet a couple of the executives. But it is a screenshot that has been taken. And the reason a lot of people are very suspicious about this is that no one's actually examined the hard drive to see whether the screenshot has been doctored in any way. And so that it why a lot of news organisations have been treating this story with suspicion. It ain't Hillary Clinton's email investigation of four years ago when the FBI announced two weeks before polling that they are investigating her. This is a laptop that has kind of washed up and, you know, it looks like...it may all be genuine but it looks like it's dirty tricks as well. 

Emily Maitlis: But the interesting thing is, you said that Fox News wouldn't cover the story but Fox & Friends, the chat show, did talk to the President about this because this is fertile ground, as Sopes said, for him and they said, "What are you going to do?", and he said, "I think we ought to get the Attorney-General William Barr and ask him to investigate". Now that is an extraordinary step, you know. Just think about that in sort of political overreach terms. You're actually going to get the Attorney-General to investigate Hunter Biden,...

Jon Sopel: For corruption.

Emily Maitlis: ...your opponent's son, for corruption. Let's not forget, the last time Donald Trump asked somebody to investigate Hunter Biden for corruption it was the Ukrainian government, and it got him into the impeachment scenario. So this is something that you kind of, you know...it does sort of make you think it's a whole different league of playing politics. And really the cards are on Bill Barr, who has not shown himself to have an enormous spine in standing up to this president, and to see how far he will go in playing this game.

Jon Sopel: Well, I thought there was a fascinating moment where Donald Trump is on the tarmac, he's about to go off to one of his rallies, he's about to board the plane, and Jeff Mason, who's a very well respected agency reporter who covers the White House beat, asks the President about the allegations and calling for a corruption investigation and this is what Donald Trump said: 

Jeff Mason: Your campaign strategy seems to be to call Biden a criminal. Why is that?

Donald Trump: He is a criminal. He's a criminal. He got caught. Read his laptop. And you know who is a criminal here? You're a criminal for not reporting it. You are a criminal for not reporting it. Let me tell you something, Joe Biden is a criminal and he's been a criminal for a long time, and you're a criminal and the media for not reporting it.

So, you guess, a real sense of the President's mood that he thought that they had gold dust. Interestingly, this occurred last week. That's when the story broke in The New York Post. And it was the night of the duelling townhalls, where we did the podcast afterwards, and Donald Trump didn't mention it once, as if to suggest that Donald Trump didn't really believe quite what was being reported. But here you have the White House correspondent for Reuters being accused of being a criminal because he obviously has doubts about the veracity of the story of this laptop and how it came to be in the hands of Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.

Emily Maitlis: The Zurch, do you think that if it was flipped more papers would be picking this up? If it was a story about Trump would more papers be more inclined to be latching onto this? I mean, that's obviously his allegation in that clip, so maybe we should, you know, air it and we should analyse it?

Anthony Zurcher: Giuliani definitely shopped it around before he ended up with  The New York Post. And I think there were some legitimate concerns, as you mentioned, from even outlets like Fox News about where this laptop came from and the story behind it. Obviously, back in 2016 The New York Times had no problems and media outlets had no problems poring over the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign team and reporting on them. So in that case it was flipped and we saw what happened. I think maybe this time around there's a little more reluctance on the part of mainstream outlets to run with things that are of questionable sourcing. And there are a couple of things, as you pointed out, in these emails - if they are legitimate - that raise some questions. The one about the Ukrainian businessman thanking Hunter Biden for the opportunity to meet Hunter Biden's father. Of course, that could just have been a handshake at a public event. The Biden campaign has denied that there is anything on the official schedule for it. And then there was another one, a 2017 email where a Chinese associate was paying money to Hunter Biden's company and a business associate of Hunter Biden's said that $10m was going to be set aside, given to Hunter Biden for The Big Guy. And Fox News said that The Big Guy was Joe Biden. So the question is: Did Joe Biden get any money from that business deal? But then again, you know, Donald Trump has clear business dealings with China, we've learned from the The New York Times a bank account in China, so I don't know if the attacks that we see from the Trump side are going to be able to strike home here. It will come up in the debate though, I'm sure of it. 

Jon Sopel: Oh, I'm sure. The debate is going to dominated. I would think that Donald Trump is going to go on and on about this, because that way it will have to be picked up by network news bulletins in a way that the allegations haven't been hitherto. Donald Trump's calculation will be, look, if I talk about the border wall or I talk about whatever it happens to be it's not going to get much purchase. If I want the subject to be Hunter Biden, Burisma, corruption, his father, the best way to do that is, you know, saturate bombing the debate with these allegations. And I think the Biden campaign will be thinking long and hard about what the response should be in the debate to all of that. Does he get drawn into this debate or does he try and make a brief statement and move on? It's tricky. Tricky for Biden.

Anthony Zurcher; And I want to drive home the point, right now there's no evidence that Joe Biden did anything untoward, either in his dealings with Ukraine or in his dealings with China. Although I think it's clear that - it's something we knew before but we know again if we take this laptop at face value - it's clear that Hunter Biden was capitalising on his connections to power and his last name in order to sign business deals, which, unfortunately, in Washington is kind of an age-old tradition, and it is certainly not limited just to Hunter Biden.   

Emily Maitlis: I think you could probably say it's really inclusive of the Administration itself, could you?

Anthony Zurcher: Yeah. I think that's safe to say. Yes. 

The tone throughout is to make light of the laptop story - passing it off as unimportant. Zurcher in particular asserts that ‘there's no evidence that Joe Biden did anything untoward, either in his dealings with Ukraine or in his dealings with China.’ He offers no supporting evidence for this point of view, and neither does he offer any evidence for his claim ‘in Washington is kind of an age-old tradition, and it is certainly not limited just to Hunter Biden.’

Emily Maitlis: I think you could probably say it's really inclusive of the Administration itself, could you?

Anthony Zurcher: Yeah. I think that's safe to say. Yes.

In two short sentences he absolves Biden of blame and accuses POTUS of corruption. That’s BBC bias pure and simple, coupled with a loathing for President Trump. As we know, Zurcher, Sopel and Bryant get nowhere near the White House. Most broadcasts are from the pavements of DC far enough away to know only what they are fed through US MSM channels. 

James Delingpole in TCW and now Josh Glancy The Times’ Washington Reporter have finally broken ranks and admit to believing that the laptop story was by no means trivial, but in fact crucially important.

BBC humour

 
More comedic stylings (bullying?) from Emily, Jon and The Zurch:

Contains some strong language

The BBC's Americast has landed. 

It's hosted by Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis. Or 'Sopes and Maitlis' as they call themselves - though Jon does occasionally slip into calling his old friend and co-host 'Em'. 

And there's a third regular it seems, MB's favourite Anthony Zurcher. 

Their 'theme tune' ends with a clip of the 'Another beauty!' exchange between Sopes and Donald Trump. 

'Contains some strong language' said Podcast One. I presume that was because of Em calling the Iowa Democratic caucus "a shit-show". (She wasn't wrong though). 

There have been two podcasts so far. Between the first and the second, Em had flown back to the UK. 

The second one covered the State of the Union speech (starring Nancy the Ripper) and Donald Trump's Impeachment acquittal. 

But it also featured a Newsnight-style Emily Maitlis interview with Kurt Volker where, after a gentle start, Em held a second Impeachment trial and placed Mr Volker in the dock for failing to be damning about his former boss, Mr Trump. 

As for the Senate finding the President not guilty, 'Sopes and Maitlis, and Anthony too' focused mainly on how Mitt Romney had ruined it all for Donald Trump. A bad day for Donald apparently.

To be fair, however, Sopes countered Em over Nancy Pelosi's ripping up of the speech. Em seemed impressed but Sopes said that the overall reaction has been negative with many finding Ms Pelosi's actions petty and discourteous. 

They've already got into the habit of reading out tweets praising their podcast. 

Americast

Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis are starting their Americast podcast this week and Jon Sopel has been talking about it to The Radio Times. He says it will allow him to be even more sceptical and opinionated than he is on the News at Ten!: 

Because it’s a half-hour conversation it will allow us to arch an eyebrow half an inch higher than maybe you would do on the 10pm news [Ed - Surely, if his eyebrow arches even higher it will disappear over the top of his head, down the back of his spine and end up in the seat of his trousers], or point out some absurdity or historical context…We don’t want to be bland and boring; there’s got to be a reason to listen, so hopefully it will have a sharp edge to it.

Will Jon and Emily be impartial?, asks the Radio Times. His reply?

I bet there will be times when we cause upset; give someone indigestion and heartburn in the higher ranks of the BBC. We’re right to be aware and careful, but if we are going to be so self-censoring that we’re not doing our jobs then we’ve gone the wrong side of the line. 

In other words, it less be even less impartial than his and Emily's 'normal' reporting. What beauties!