One voice

Caroline Hawley on Lesbos

This evening's BBC One Weekend News led with Pope Francis on Lesbos and his 'shaming' pleas for more 'humanity' (from people like us) and for much more to be done (by countries like ours) in order to help the 'refugees'.

Watch it for yourselves (while you can) and you'll see that this BBC bulletin gave the Pope's view, supporters of the Pope's view (including someone from Save the Children and Cardinal Nichols), and 'desperate' refugees' views which were wholly in line with the Pope's views (for obvious reasons) a completely free run.

There were no opposing views. It was one message, one plea, throughout. 

And the newsreader (Kate Silverton) and the reporter (Caroline Hawley) adopted facial expressions and tones of voice that merely reinforced the Pope's message too. (Watch and see for yourselves if you doubt that).

And the BBC's language? Well, here's a representative sample:

Thousands of migrants are stuck on Lesbos. 

He came to what's being called 'the frontline' of the migrant crisis to meet the people who've risked their lives to get here to plead for a more humane international response to them. 

The Pope is used to provoking emotions. They're usually drawn from religious fervour not desperation. 

...a growing chorus of concern.... 

He'll hope at least to have managed to stir Europe's conscience. 

The Pope flew back to Rome taking with him three Syrian families whose homes have been destroyed - the chosen few, while thousand of others have been left in limbo here. 

...that has come at the cost of Europe having its humanity questioned, 

Impartial language? I don't think so.

Though the BBC has (perhaps because of the EU referendum) let this story slip somewhat out of focus recently, I'd say from this that the BBC is clearly as committed as ever to cajoling us (one way or the other) into thinking we ought to take these people in. 

If the BBC was being genuinely impartial about reporting this wouldn't they have featured at least some contrasting or contradictory points of view?

The ghost of Noel Edmonds

The BBC's coverage of that UN panel's verdict on Julian Assange's 'arbitrary detention' in the Ecuadorian embassy hasn't been straightforward.

Given the BBC's extraordinary behaviour when Wikileaks first 'broke' (via the Guardian), when the BBC seemed to be hanging on the Guardian's every word and was very uncritical of Mr Assange, I kind-of expected the BBC to betray a strong pro-Assange bias.

Maybe others did too. When the story first 'broke' (the day before the UN panel officially released their 'ruling') the BBC were up to their neck in it, having received a leaked copy of the ruling (from some interested party no doubt!). 

It was 'the BBC has learned' territory yet again - and, as ever, they made as much of it as they could. 

I read some comments over at Biased BBC on Thursday saying that the BBC was being heavily pro-Assange in its reporting that day - singling out Caroline Hawley on that evening's BBC One News at Six for particular opprobrium. 

Checking it out for myself I found myself in total agreement with the folk at B-BBC. Caroline Hawley's report appeared very pro-Assange to me too. 

She called the UN panel "experts", stuck to their narrative for nearly all of her report, gave the pro-Assange people featured in her report significantly longer than the anti-Assange people (curiously a Lib Dem) and, most strikingly of all, didn't even mention the rape charge.  

I was all ready to post about that yesterday when I watched the BBC One News at Six again and saw another Caroline Hawley report, following the official release of that absurd UN ruling. Would it be as bad? 

Well, no. This time she did mention the rape charge and was far more even-handed throughout. She didn't call the UN panel "experts" either. 

That stopped me in my tracks.

My only other encounters with the BBC and this story concern last night's Newsnight and this week's The News Quiz. 

Newsnight completely confounded my expectations. 

My expectations were that by (a) inviting one of the UN "experts" to be its sole interviewee and (b) by getting that notorious lefty James O'Brien to interview him, we'd be given a full Guardianesque homage to Julian Assange's 'triumph'. 

Not so. In fact, we saw JO'B give the man from the UN a thorough duffing up, with JO'B aggressively putting the anti-Assange case and the Beninese UN man crashing and burning. 

It was grimly compelling - that grimness being compounded by the fact that however happy I was to see the UN idiot brought low it was James O'Brien doing it.

The UN man's less-than-perfect English and the time delay on the long-distance feed meant that JO'B's loud interruptions left the UN man at a severe disadvantage and a very long silence resulted at one stage, broken by the UN man asking if he could still be heard. 

That was rude, incompetent, look-at-me interviewing on James O'Brien's part but - thanks to the UN man's complete and utter ineptness - it gave the impression of being a knock-out fisking by the LBC/BBC man.

And as for The News Quiz (which this week was minus the usual far-left suspects), they were 100% unsympathetic towards/mocking of Julian Assange. There was a complete consensus that the man had 'arbitrarily detained' himself and considerable mockery of him to boot. (The audience didn't sound as if it expected this - doubtless being a typical BBC Radio 4 comedy audience). Someone called him "the Twitter Generation's David Icke" and Miles Jupp called him the "ghost of Noel Edmonds". 

So I can't rule that the BBC has been non-arbitrarily biased here. 

(That said, I didn't see or hear that much of the coverage, so I might be missing a lot of other bias - one way or the other).