Nigel and Naga

Following on from his Question Time appearance on Thursday Professor Anand Menon was back on the BBC as the paper reviewer for BBC Breakfast this morning.

I was intrigued by the heavy-handed way he was introduced each time:

8.18 - Charlie Stayt: Time now for a look at the newspapers. Our guest this morning is Anand Menon, who's from UK in a Changing Europe. Particularly at the moment, and in Brexit times, people are very keen to make sure they know where everyone's coming from who we broadcast with. So just explain - I know you've told us before: Your organisation does what?  

Anand Menon: Well, we're a network of academics and, basically, what we're funded to do is to let people know what the research says. We're not allied to any side. We have to be impartial. We simply say, I've carried out a couple of years research on, for instance, what the economics of Brexit might look like, and this is what I've found.

9.18 - Charlie Stayt: Anand Menon is with us this morning, director of UK in a Changing Europe. Do the explainer for us so that everyone knows who you are and what you do.  Tell us who you are in what you do? 

Anand Menon: We're an impartial network of academics that simply lets people know what the research says. 

Impartial like the BBC perhaps? 

Well, that second introduction was immediately followed by one of the BBC's 'most impartial', Naga Munchetty, letting slip a predictable opinion of her own:

Naga Munchetty: OK, one of the stories that you've picked out....and I will put this to you. I don't understand, or lots of people don't understand, why we spend so much time talking about Nigel Farage.
Anand Menon: For several reasons really. Well, one is he's box office. I mean, he's good, he's entertaining, so the cameras like him...
Naga Munchetty: (interrupting) OK, what's his place when it comes to Brexit negotiations?
Anand Menon: His place when it comes to Brexit...
Naga Munchetty: (interrupting) Now. Not from the start, but now. 

That's all very 'Samira Ahmed' from Naga there, thinking that Nigel Farage shouldn't be paid attention to. 

Here's how it went on. As you'll see, Naga followed through on her first point:

Anand Menon: Now, I think he is positioning himself so that if he can credibly argue that there has either been a watering-down or a delay or a cancellation of Brexit, he's planning to relaunch his political career. And you can see there the danger for Theresa May from her right flank, which is, if she does what a lot of people are saying, which is to softens Brexit, join a customs union, join the Single Market, the Brexiters in her party will be very annoyed and people like Farage will make capital out of it.
Naga Munchetty: Isn't this though, if that's the case, if Theresa May pays the attention to Nigel Farage that David Cameron did, isn't there the danger of falling into the trap that some say David Cameron fell into did, because of the noise, the noise, around Nigel Farage being picked up and being given too much prominence?

Impartial like the BBC, Anand? 

"Language matters"

Nick Robinson isn't happy. (I imagine the tweet being sent with a loud tut):

As several people are reminding him on Twitter though, Jeremy Corbyn only make the 'fake news' point after a BBC interviewer posed a question to him framed in terms of 'fake news'. So perhaps he should be also be addressing his BBC colleague?

Charlie Stayt: Your own personal circumstances...I'm aware of the issue of fake news at the moment.

Jeremy Corbyn: There is a lot of it about!

Charlie Stayt: Well, there's a story going about that you have set a date for when you are going to quit as Labour leader.

Jeremy Corbyn: That's in the 'Imadeitupyesterday.com'.

Charlie Stayt: So absolutely no truth in that?

Jeremy Corbyn: Absolute nonsense.

Charlie Stayt: So your future as Labour leader is absolutely intact? You've not considered for a moment whether you as leader are damaging the party's chances...

Jeremy Corbyn: Look, I'm really surprised the BBC is reporting fake news. There is no news!

Charlie Stayt: Well, I'm...what I'd like...(indecipherable)...to give you the opportunity to say...(indecipherable)...

Jeremy Corbyn: I was elected leader of the party, I am proud to lead the party...

"It is impossible to keep track"

The Papers

Regardless of what you think about Donald Trump and his fitness to be President of the United States of America, it's surely beyond reasonable doubt that "a full-scale Corporation attack on him is now in full spate" - as News-watch's David Keighley put it the other day.

Yes, that may also be said of most other mainstream media outlets, but the BBC is the only one that people are forced (by law) to pay a compulsory licence fee to watch.

I've not seen much of the BBC News Channel overnight or today, but I did watch three short segments (about half an hour's viewing in total).

There was last night's edition of The Papers with its very cosy consensus between the BBC presenter and her two journalist guests from the Times and the FT on Trump and Brexit-related matters (biased in all the expected ways), with Martine Croxall adopting a special, slightly derisive tone when talking about Nigel Farage.

Then there was BBC Breakfast's paper review where the BBC's Rachel Burden shared a sneer, at Donald Trump's expense, with David Davies (formerly of the FA and the BBC).

Then I switched on (at around 10:10) and witnessed Gavin Esler interviewing an anti-Trump author and cosily reinforcing everything that anti-Trump author was saying in criticism of Mr Trump, with very little (if any) attempt at playing devil's advocate on Gavin's part.

As I say, those are just snapshots, yet all three contained varying degrees of bias - and all in the same direction.

Goodness knows what listening to hours of it would have yielded (other than a blogpost half a mile long)

As David said, "It is impossible to keep track", so why even try? The bias is all across the BBC. It's there for all to see and hear. I shall just resign myself from now on to just dipping in at random every so often and sampling (as above). That's all anyone can do.

Besides....

Though there's always the 'echo chamber' danger of seeing more and more people sharing your view and thinking that amounts to something significant, it really does seem to be the case that many, many more people are becoming seriously angry at BBC bias these days - and especially over the course of this year.

It seems to have gone way beyond 'the usual suspects'. Is it an explosion yet?

Complaints about BBC bias are certainly spreading like wildfire onto the BBC website, as anyone who regularly clicks on BBC Have Your Say threads will know.

Is this gentleman Catholic?

I just clicked on a few minutes ago - on another of their 'Fake News' pieces - and where I might have seen the odd anti-BBC comment at most a few years ago it can now almost be guaranteed now that there will be legions of such comments.

(Of course, it could be that 'the usual suspects' have colonised there too, but I don't think that's the explanation).

On this typical piece all of the top-rated comments are critical of the BBC. Here are the Top 5:

13. IWANTTOBREAKFREE: Dancer you are spot on. BBC has been ranting about this "fake news" issue all week with the inference that it affected the vote in the USA. This is despite it publishing its own "fake news" in the form of a supposed leaked Govt document saying there was no strategy for Brexit which turned out to be nothing to do with the Govt. Sadly BBC news can no longer be considered reliable. Look elsewhere.

11. Raskilnikov: The BBC and their ilk like to imagine that Brexit and Trump won because the people listened to the wrong advice, Murdoch etc as opposed to our moral guardians the BBC, the truth is people aren't stupid, they voted for Trump/Brexit because it was what's best for them, whats best for the BBC isn't what's best for the working class

3. BBCLeftWingBias: Facebook is cobblers, the BBC News publishes biased articles, the sun rises in the morning and water is wet. Move along, nothing to see here.

2. Dancer: So Zuckerberg is now political, BBC when are you going to admit you are politically motivated?

39. NigeM: The BBC is smarting because it failed to stop Brexit and Trump. As a result it is now slinging mud at everybody else because it knows its influence is on the slide. The population is slowly waking up to the antics of the BBC.

The top-rated comment there ought to be particularly painful for the BBC. It is well put.

It's a funny thing (that I originally posted this without giving it a title, and took hours to realise the fact)

It's a funny thing because, especially having watched this morning's BBC Breakfast, this comment at Biased BBC made me laugh out loud (genuinely, rather than in the sarky Twitter sense of 'lol'):

AsISeeIt

April 16, 2016 at 9:04 am

The BBC forced-marriage miscegenation between Charlie Statist and No-go Munch-my-spaghetti are here again to entertain us this morning.

So pleased to see a castrato in a happy pairing with a feminatrix – showing the nation this is a viable life choice. BBC social agendas may well be under attack worldwide from news of hypocritical celebrity shenanigans – but here in little England (and Wales) our quaint laws protect our massive stars from criticism – how’s their tax affairs we wonder, anyone shining a light there? And this on the day I find to my dismay Jackie Chan was named in the Panama Papers – I wish the BBC could furnish us with more names and details. But we digress.

Our dynamic BBC duo reckon the Brexit debate is getting a bit ‘heated’. Strange, I thought the Leave campaign were doing rather well and scoring some good hits. Poor old Obama, it’s diplomacy 101 that when the POTUS visits England he don’t mention the Declaration of Independence. Boris made a barnstorming speech yesterday with many fine soundbites eg. ‘I say British-made French knickers to the Bremainers’ meanwhile the BBC crawling headlines pick out some very staid and bland statements – odd.

And so to the newspaper review. oh dear. As they read a few selected headlines it’s like Charlie and Naga live in a different BBC-approved world of news – scarcely parallel, more like divergent – a BBC universe of news but not as we know it, Jim.

Raise the red flag comrades, ‘Poet’ Ian McMillan is here to review the Tory Rags – “This is an Age of Inequality” is the text for today, you children of the ‘Blair rich project’. Our Ian reckons when the kids pick up the FT (assuming after somewhere north of two dozen years of state comp and uni they can read a newspaper and they actually choose the pink ‘un – a stretch, I know, but go with Ian for a moment) then the FT really ought to use more inventive graphics in their rich list. So we can visualise these rich bastards. You know kids- like the evil gits who brought you your i-phone and cheap air travel. 23 million hedgehogs piled up in a heap would do the job – I’m not kidding, it was Ian.

Then some riff about potatoes on the moon. Was it Attila the Stockbroker who sang about how he kept tropical fish – in his underpants. Now that was poetry. and there’s one for the teenagers!

And we close with our ‘poet’ Ian. Who wandered lonely as a climate skeptic on the BBC. Yes a big shout out for Climate Change and some stuff and nonsense about early daffodils. Come back from Mars to planet earth, Ian. Pop over to the post-Easter weather forecast and some news of late snow on them tha hills.

My main point of dissent here is that I absolutely loved Ian McMillan's contributions this morning. 

His half-deadpan/half-broad-and-Northern humour had me laughing out loud several times - and he wore his worthy left-wingery (though unquestionably on display throughout) very lightly. 

In fact I'd go so far as to say that this was the best BBC Breakfast paper review I've seen in a long while, at least since...well, since the Bard of Barnsley was last on...

...and I've been trying even since this morning to see if some kindly YouTube user has captured the moment and posted Ian's lovely, hilarious tribute to Phil Sayer, the voice of London Underground's 'Mind..the Gap' (who died this week), as I thought you'd love it too. Alas, no one has done so yet.

Ian McMillan was funnier in just  two minutes here than the entirely of the last series of The Now Show...

...and here am I going on about it and you probably didn't see it, and (unless YouTube comes to the rescue) might never see it.. So I should probably shut up about it then.

Though it might get lost in translation (and as you probably had to be there, as it was the delivery that made it so funny), the Bard of Barnsley was commenting on To boldly grow: Nasa puts potatoes on menu for Mars. His suggestion was that Mars Pipers will be the obvious spud of choice and that "these will be anti-gravity potatoes, because there's less gravity on Mars, that will lift themselves from the chip pan up to your mouth." 

Well, it amused me.