Craig: The BBC is being praised to the skies for its war coverage, and not only by itself and the usual suspects. Not that I've seen any BBC coverage, so I can't say if it's deserved or not, but lots of surprising people are singing its praises. It seems to be having a good war.
Sue: Well, I was half thinking that the BBC is ‘having a good war’, too. But with all its resources and long-standing infrastructure it would be surprising if it wasn’t.
I haven’t watched it very much though, but sometimes the ad breaks on other channels drive one BBC-wards. I haven’t seen any of the Beeb’s opinion stuff, only the Myrie/Doucet reporting. I must say Lyse is getting more emotional than usual (and Clive is okay. A bit drained obvs.)
I saw Konstantin Kisin's performance on Question Time (excerpts on YouTube.) It’s weird to see him on the dreaded BBC, especially when he’d only just said he’d stopped appearing on GB News because he felt he was being expected/required to opine on things he didn’t particularly know enough about.
This unexpected invitation from the QT team must be partly to do with the new ‘impartiality’ pledges.
Speaking of which I dread to think why they’ve let Jeremy Bowen loose on Ukraine. He will inevitably make comparisons with the M.E., (how he sees it - The bully against the oppressed, the brave Ukrainian-Pally resistance, the almighty Russian-Israeli aggressive warmongering.)
I think I actually heard him make a reference to the M.E. in an aside on the Today prog, though I couldn’t find it when I searched. Can you imagine how the BBC’s new impartiality regulators let someone like Jez go to Ukraine with all that baggage?
The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu talked about building your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across. In the Cuban Missile Crisis - the closest the world has come to nuclear disaster in 1961 - the deal there after the Soviets put missiles into Cuba was that the US move missiles out of Turkey. Now, of course, the things are not...you know, you can't directly transfer the idea, but the point is, there needs to be in all these crises, to finish them, a face saving deal. Otherwise, the two sides tend to fight until one side wins or both are exhausted, which is a catastrophe for the countries affected by that, as we've seen in the Middle East extensively.
BBC reporters like Lyse being more emotional than usual was one of the topic on Samira Ahmed's Newswatchthis week, asking: How new is it? Does it help or hinder the viewer's understanding?
The fact that it featured a particularly toe-curling example of heart-tugging purple prose from Fergal Keane [‘On platform 6, a father's farewell to his infant son. What cannot be held must be let go. Until another day’] shows where that kind of thing probably began at the BBC, with the likes of him and Orla Guerin - and Jezza Bowen, with his endlessly-repeated, embittered, personalised memories of a particular moment involving Israel and his unfortunate friend.
Even John Simpson cried recently - though he told Samira Ahmed that he's not proud of doing so and it won't happen again.
So, as you can see, I've actually watched a BBC programme now.
Talking of Orla Guerin (salary £160,000 to £164,999), her name often used to get linked with Fergal Keane (salary £195,000 to £199,999) as one of the (then) new breed of emotive and emoting BBC journalists who emerged at the BBC in the 1990s.
Both were seen as an acquired taste.
Fergal has considerably grown on me as the years have gone by - unlike Orla.
Sadly, he's now had to step down as the BBC's Africa Editor due to those very emotions. Decades of covering wars and genocides have left him suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
It's good to see that the BBC is placing more emphasis on Africa and that Fergal Keane, their new Africa editor, is making good on his pledge to report goings-on there more fully.
He's just been to the Democratic Republic of the Congo - site of the worst war (or wars) since World War Two. The BBC (though far from alone in this) never gave that conflict the coverage it deserved, preferring to focus on much less deadly conflicts instead like that between Israel and the Palestinians.
Hopefully then, the BBC is now trying to get its priorities right (though it still came lower down the running order than the Jerusalem story).
Last night's BBC News at Ten saw Fergal Keane in the BBC studio explaining the situation their to Fiona Bruce.
Newsreader: At least 14 United Nations peacekeepers have been killed and more than 50 injured in an attack on their base in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The UN said the peacekeepers were from Tanzania. Five Congolese soldiers were also killed. The attack took place in North Kivu province in the east of the country, where several rival militia groups are fighting for control. Our Africa Editor, Fergal Keane, is here with me. You've just come back from Congo. What's the background to this?
Fergal Keane: Well, the UN has for some time been a target in eastern Congo because it acts in support of the Congolese government. The real context behind this, even though the group who carried out the attack, the ADF, are Islamist, well it's not like Al-Shabab in Somalia. The real context is a deeply unpopular central government that's clinging to power, whose President, Joseph Kabila, has gone beyond his two term limit. And you have a sense now among warlords, militia groups, among wider civil society, that an endgame is beginning. You have jockeying for power. Congo itself is a mess at the moment. You've more than 4 million people displaced. And at the same time as this, you have a UN peacekeeping force of 20,000 and they are now cutting it down by 3,000, under pressure from the Trump Administration, which wants to reduce peacekeeping costs. This at a time, as I say, when violence is on the rise. I've just come back and I've seen in many parts of the country how those UN peacekeepers, the very people who were attacked last night, are the only people who stand between the ordinary citizens who are being relentlessly attacked, and the exactions of militia groups, warlords and the security forces of their own government. So this couldn't come at a worse time.
I saw that after reading the Guardian's account of the atrocity and noted some striking differences:
Firstly, the Guardian's account doesn't downplay the Islamist element of the atrocity, unlike Fergal Keane's.
And secondly, the Guardian doesn't criticise the Trump administration for forcing the UN to cut the number of peacekeepers in the DRC, unlike Fergal's report which emphasises the vital nature of the UN peacekeepers there and ends with his opinion that the Trump administration-enforced cuts "couldn't come at a worse time".
I do find with Fergal Keane that you rarely come away from his reporting without feeling that you're being not-too-subtly preached to.
Fergal, failing to notice the camera in front of him and looking dreamily into the middle distance
Seeking to lift the profile of their Africa coverage the BBC have recently made the famous Fergal Keane their Africa Editor.
He's already had the stroke of luck to be doing a to-camera BBC piece at the very moment when Zimbabwe's parliament received Mugabe's resignation letter and erupted with joy (or relief), with MPs quickly running up to talk to him.
Right historic place, right historic time, but still lucky.
Fergal's From Our Own Correspondentpiece this morning was very 'Fergal', sweeping in its scope, ringing with memorable phrases (though Ican't quite recall any of them specifically at this moment), and absolutely crystal clear in its sense of who the good guys and bad guys of recent history in that neck of the woods were (Western colonialism and apartheid bad; African liberation heroes good) - except for the USA and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, both of whom were as bad as each other.
His starting point was this fascinating photo from the early 1980s of some of the strikingly-dressed leaders of 'the Frontline states' (plus the SWAPO leader):
From left to right, there's Sam Nujoma (later president of Namibia), Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda, Samora Machel of Mozambique, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola - heroes to some, a rogues' gallery to others, a mixed bag to me.
Fergal was clearly closest to the first camp there. I smiled at him merely calling the sharp-suited Mr Machel's early '80s Mozambique "socialist" and his leaving-out-an-awful-lot statement that Mr Dos Santos has just resigned the presidency of Angola. (He'd been there for 42 years and very successfully raised corruption to a masterly art form). He did say that old Julius had ruined Tanzania's economy but not why. Bob Mugabe, however, got it in the neck for being far more egotistical than the others - that being his downfall. He'd outlived his welcome (despite being in power five years less than Angola's Dos Santos, who only left office a few months ago).
'Sweep' rather than 'detail' has, fairly or unfairly, always struck me as being Fergal's thing.
There are a lot of very interesting things happening in Africa at the moment from what I can see - varied, complex things. If Fergal Keane can restrain himself from emoting, hunting out sob stories, trying to be 'award-winning', and, above all, forcing his predictable outlook onto everything he reports he could be in for a fascinating time. And so could his audience.
Last year, Fergal Keane found a living symbol for the migrant crisis [even though she was in no way representative of the overwhelmingly male-dominated mass flow of people at that time] - a charming, English-speaking wheelchair-bound girl from Syria called Noujain Mustaffa (or, as Fergal called her, "a disabled 16-year-old with big dreams").
She has cerebral palsy, yet, Fergal reported, brings with her "gifts, the great gift of inspiration". "A nation that loses a child like Noujain is losing its best", said Fergal.
On Thursday night's BBC One News at Ten brought us an update. Fergal tracked her down in Germany and told us of her "new life" in Cologne...going to school, speaking fluent German, "embracing the normal". She has found, as Fergal put it, "freedom". She is now full of smiles.
"But this is not a story with an uncomplicated happy ending", continued Fergal to the noise of men chanting. "Resentment of migration is growing in Germany", especially following Cologne. "The far-right has gained politically. It would refuse entry to people like Noujain".
Cue a clip of Christer Cremer of Alternative für Deutschland [presumably representing that "far-right"] saying that Syrian refugees should have been helped nearer to home.
"But", immediately continued Fergal, "like many Syrians, Noujain longs for home. Here she is in Aleppo before the war [wearing pink sunglasses]. And this is her city now [a scene of utter devastation]."
Fergal's latest report then ended with the following - a message to Syria from Noujain:
Hello, my home. I really miss you. But don't worry. You're just really, really, really sick. But I'm sure you're going to get better. And when you do I'll be right back.
In just a moment we'll hear from a spokesman from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, which has done well in state elections recently on a platform of opposing Chancellor Merkel's open door policy towards migrants. There are more than a million in Germany. And, of course, every individual refugee has there own story of hardship. But occasionally, for whatever reason,...
[...and that reason was that the BBC and Fergal Keane had decided to push it over several days and Fergal had poured all his considerable emotive reporting skills into it...]
...one in particular captures the public's imagination. Amid the huge numbers of people who were on the move across Europe last summer, Fergal Keane met a 15-year-old Syrian girl trying to make it to Europe, unaccompanied...
[...though Fergal's subsequent report soon makes it clear that she was accompanied by her older sister and Fergal says she was 16-years-old at the time, so that's two factual errors in Razia Iqbal's introduction...]
...and in a wheelchair. Her story seemed to sum up the crisis facing the world. She did eventually make it to Germany. What's her life like now?
After Fergal's report, Razia said:
That was Noujain Mustaffa, speaking to Fergal Keane, underlining what appears to be a common attitude that people who fled conflict are doing just that to be safe. The majority want to return to their countries of origin. The fear that they may not can often be the source of tension in the way they're greeted in the countries they end up in. Germany has taken in more migrants than any other European country, but not everyone is happy about it. Police say there have been around 700 attacks on asylum accommodation this year, including 57 arson attacks.......etc
She then said:
I've been speaking to Christer Cremer who represented the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland in Cologne.....
[Mr Cremer is having a busy week with the BBC].
Question 1 was 'very BBC':
You represent a party that has an anti-migrant agenda. Do you accept that the agenda that you are putting forward is potentially linked to creating these kinds of attitudes on the street?
Mr Cremer replied they always oppose and condemn violence and that they simply give a democratic, legal voice to people's anger at Mrs Merkel's policy. Razia, in response, simply restated her first question:
Isn't it possible to see the sorts of messages that you're putting forward as a political party is legitimising the anti-migrant sentiment among people who may not even be your supporters but are actually absorbing that as a prevailing narrative inside Germany?
He could have said something along the lines of "I refer the honourable lady to the answer I can some moments ago" but didn't. He just restated his first answer as well.
She went on:
In what do you think that she is breaking the law. As the Chancellor of Germany, as the most powerful country inside the European Union, she is presenting a case for being compassionate towards people who need help, and this is part of the core value of being a member state of the European Union.
Well, you've certainly done very well through the ballot box recently. Do you think that that's partly because you have an anti-migrant, anti-Muslim manifesto?
Your success at the ballot box does seem to herald a shift rightwards in Germany. Do you see that as something that is...healthy?
Mr Cremer got the full 'BBC treatment' there. And we've had the full 'BBC treatment' over this story too.
First was a piece from Fergal Keane about a Bosnian town where Serbs massacred Muslims during the Balkans War.
It was pure Fergal Keane - emotive, somewhat finger-wagging.
I know it's cynical of me but the phrase 'award winning' and its cousin 'award-seeking' just keep coming to mind whenever I think of Fergal Keane reports like this.
Then came an American journalist talking about gun control.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the issue, what's pretty much guaranteed on From Our Own Correspondent is that this journalist would most definitely not be anti-gun control. That would never happen. Here the speaker was in favour of gun control and, of course, blamed money, the NRA and the Republicans for it not being enacted.
The other two pieces were 'and finally'-type affairs. One about a boat on Lake Malawi, the other about a BBC reporter who lives in France and had a favour done for him by a left-wing mayor/deputy he likes - or something like that.
Reporting from Tunisia, he clearly felt the hand of history on his shoulder:
If you ever wanted an example of how the past can lay claim to the present, it's here and now.
Sad voice. "The problems of unemployment, of lingering police repression, continue to cause alienation among many young men". There are "people looking purposeless" in poor districts - the kind of people drawn to the call of jihad.
Of course, it's easy to be cynical. Fergal also found some interesting responses: He spoke to a campaigner against jihadism who was angry at the Tunisian government for failing to take notice of the ongoing warnings of anti-jihadi protestors about the terrorist threat; and a crowd rushed towards him, having seen he was a Westerner, to offer their condolences. One man said, with deep passion, that Tunisia should be a place for everyone, "even the Jews".
However...
One of the ways that bias in any kind of reporting could be monitored (it's recently struck me) is to check out how the report ends. What message does it choose to end with? What final thoughts are left lingering in the listener's ear?
Well, this is the message that Fergal chose to end on. It came from the imam of the local mosque:
I don't think there are any religious reasons behind the act. I think those young men were lured by money and tempted by money more than by anything else. They were brainwashed and I don't think they were aware of what they were doing.
Well, I do think there might have been religious reasons behind the act. Knowing that they would almost certainly be killed after carrying out their atrocity, I'm not convinced by the imam's "lured by money" excuse. And I very much doubt they weren't aware of what they were doing in going to Tunisia's national museum, fully-armed, and slaughtering every white face they could see.
I suspect Fergal Keane chose to end his piece with that absurd statement from the imam because it puts across a couple of messages that he, Fergal Keane, also wishes to put across: (a) that such terrorist atrocities have nothing to do with Islam, and (b) that there are reasons (unemployment, poverty, police repression - the examples he cited earlier in the report) which might explain why these alienated, purposeless young men go off beheading, shooting tourists, slaughtering shoppers, raping women, persecuting followers of other religions, chucking gays off buildings, etc - which is a very 'nice', liberal way of looking at things but probably a long way away from being anything like the whole story.
Mark Lawson compares the two News at Tens - the one on BBC One and the other on ITV - and finds that the BBC wasn't the serious, straight, analytic one. The BBC programme was more populist in feel, full of simplistic gimmicks and 'operatic' turns from its star reporters (Fergal Keane and Robert Peston), and contained 'news items' which then turned out to be little more than plugs for upcoming BBC programmes.
I'll quote a different section to Alan, as it struck me as particularly good and introduced me to the splendid term 'fergal keaning':
Thursday night anchors Mark Austin and Mary Nightingale at the ITN desk and Sophie Raworth alone in the BBC studio had the same lead story – the terrorist attack on the museum in Tunis – with identical UK-based spin: the killing in the incident of a British tourist. Each had also got a journalistic big gun there in time to report live: Rageh Omaar for ITV and Fergal Keane for the BBC.
Omaar employed the standard sombre tones and vocabulary of tragedy reporting – “the peace of a Tunisian museum shattered by gunfire” – but his rival showed why the term “fergal keaning” is now used by some to refer to the sound of Irish lamentation. “Today the fearful aftermath,” Keane noted, of “the new age of international terrorism”. He made priests at gravesides sound cheerful in comparison.
ITV used two bits of Omaar to “doughnut”, as the jargon has it, a London-made package about the methods of Islamic State terrorists. The BBC wrapped two chunks of Keane around an interview with a local man who claimed to have known one of the gunmen and observed his turn towards extremism.
As a viewer, I wondered how the crew in Tunis could be completely certain that a stranger found so rapidly and speaking in translation phrases of a generalised kind – the guy used to “drink and gamble” with them before being “radicalised” – really had known the terrorist well. But presumably the BBC’s news managers were happy with the guarantees given.
The closing words of tonight's Panoramawere "Love at the heart of politics can only make for a better democracy".
They were spoken, perhaps inevitably, by Fergal Keane.
There was sad music and hopeful music. And love. Lots of love. Plus Fergal cooing over a baby (belonging to a struggling single mum, naturally). And then more love.
The programme was the first episode in a four-part series called 'What Britain wants'. And what Britain wants, it seems, is love - a love that can come from family, from community, from social/political activism, from Islam.
The report came from the east end of London and, inevitably, touched on immigration. Immigration has brought "a real energy" to the area, Fergal told us. But, sadly, there's always been intolerance. There were the blackshirts in the 1930s, and now there's tension between "Islamist hardliners" and "nationalist far-right groups".
Looking on the bright side though, there's always political activism. Think of the anti-Iraq War protests, said Fergal. Look at 38 Degrees, putting love at the heart of politics.
And love can effect mainstream politics too, he said:
And there's hardly a more profound example of the power of love in a political campaign than this: a campaign that went to the heart of British ideas about love and family [the campaign for gay marriage]. Pria and Paula got married in Hornchurch, east of London. Until recently they were denied a right taken for granted by the rest of us.
Then, to the strains of Arvo Part's Spiegel Im Spiegel(music much beloved of BBC documentary makers hoping to tug our hearts), Fergal continued:
In family, community, society, we've seen how love in its different dimensions can be a powerful unifying force. This young woman loves her religion and she loves Britain...
[Can you guess what's coming next?]
But there are some who feel alienated by the way she dresses and make assumptions about what she represents.
Cue Rabia, dressed from head to toe in a niqab, with only her eyes showing:
I'm born here, and I feel that I belong here. There's no reason why I wouldn't. But sometimes I do feel there's intolerance towards me and the way that I dress. It honestly is on face value [sic].
What shows Rabia as being different from certain other Muslim girls from her neck of the woods (the kind who might use their half-term holiday to fly off to help others behead non-Muslims) is that she invited a Holocaust survivor to speak at her local college. You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, Fergal was telling us - especially if that cover is a niqab.
And Rabia returned later to call for tolerance. And Fergal talked again of the need for love - as potentially-lonely old folk danced and laughed with friends, and hearts were warmed.
Altogether now: Love is in the air. Everywhere I look around. Love is in the air. Every sight and every sound...
If you follow matters Israeli you will probably be aware of the wide range of political opinions within that unique Middle Eastern democracy. You'll probably also be aware that some positions are less popular with the Israeli public than others.
Knowing what you do of Israeli politics, what would you make of a BBC programme about Mossad that only featured:
Knowing what you do of where the bulk of Israeli public opinion lies, would you say that was representative?
Well, I certainly wouldn't.
That, however, was precisely the cast-list of today's episode of Fergal Keane's Terror Through Time: Mossad, the Wrath of God - a short potted history of the Israeli security agency.
The result was, by and large, fairly predictable: a portrait of Mossad as a ruthless, sometimes cruelly fallible organisation, complete with unfavourable takes from a pair of Palestinians, a modicum of hand-wringing from the three liberal-minded Israelis and an largely disapproving overarching take on the organisation courtesy of Fergal Keane...
Fergal Keane's Radio 4 history Terror Through Timearrived at WWI today, specifically Britain's wartime promises in the Middle East.
Much as might be expected from Fergal Keane, it was a tale of wicked Western imperialism, British duplicity, unlucky Arabs, well-connected Zionists, and hard-done-by Palestinians.
There were three 'talking heads':
James Barr, historian, author of A Line in the Sand and an expert on Anglo-French rivalry in the Middle East.
Avi Shlaim, anti-Zionist historian at Oxford University and regular writer for the Guardian's Comment Is Free.
Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and critic of Israel.
So, besides Mr Barr (who concentrated on the Anglo-French rivalry aspects of the story), the expert guidance sought by Fergal Keane for this episode of the series consisted of a left-wing, anti-Zionist Israeli historian and an Edward Said-influenced American professor with Palestinian roots...
...which are just the kind of experts you would expect Fergal Keane to seek out, if you suspected him of having an anti-Israel bias.
