Macron's 'win'

There was an interesting edit made overnight to the BBC's main report on the French general election. Early versions said that President Macron's “centrist Ensemble coalition has won Sunday's parliamentary elections”. The BBC has now removed that statement.

One after the other

Today's Sunday programme on Radio 4 conformed to type when discussing the Macron government's latest initiative to tackle Islamic radicalism in France. 

The segment began with a clip of a Muslim activist attacking it for being unfair to Muslims and followed it with an interview with an American academic who thought exactly the same, also disapproving of it.

Edward Stourton even inadvertently admitted as much saying, 'And what do you make of the point we just heard from [the Muslim activist], which is very close to what you're saying...'. 

And it was also very close to what nearly all guests say when they've invited to talk about Islam in France on Sunday, where uniformity of thought prevails - especially on these kinds of subject matter.

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The increasing 'woke' programme also did a feature on the transatlantic slave trade and St Helena and marked Racial Justice Sunday with a feature on racism in the Church of England and talked to a campaigner about it.

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Another regular element of Sunday is its heavy focus on particular countries. India is one such country regularly in its crosshairs, and the coverage of it is usually from the same angle - one of intense negativity towards the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP. Here a BBC reporter piled on  - nay, positively heaped on - the negatives. The feature attracted a passing comment on Twitter:

Linda Floyd: Discrimination of any religion always wrong & if that’s happening in India it is indeed wrong. However, I fail to understand why same condemnation isn’t directed at the dreadful discrimination of religious minorities in Muslim countries like Pakistan.

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.

Newsbeat disrespects Birmingham, Sopes exits the US, the BBC calls someone 'far-right', actual antisemitism rages, Big Ted and Little Ted criticise the Government and 'Genetically Impartial' former BBC bigwig Helen Boaden resurfaces - Various subjects

I

Oddly, except for passing through Birmingham New Street, I've never been to Birmingham, England's second city [after Lancaster]. 

Having read the Guardian today with their headline 'Three-quarters of BBC Newsbeat staff decline to relocate to Birmingham. Vast majority of youth news service’s 40 employees indicate they will not move to new base in Midlands' [the poor lambs want to stay in London] I'm now tempted to go there sporting a 'The BBC Doesn't Want to Live in Birmingham' t-shirt.

II

Meanwhile, and moving on...

Dame Jon Sopel, the BBC's North America Editor, has some breaking news, tweeting today, ''Some personal news: I’m off.. After 7+ fab years in DC, 3 books, 3 presidents (one kept me busier than others) it’s time to return to the UK and BBC mothership.'' 

This present US president should have been keeping him busy too, but I'm sensing that the loss of the thrill of the hunt and the fun of the easy applause for his endless sarcasm about Donald Trump has sapped the energy of his reporting recently and that the many, manifest failings of the increasingly unpopular and calamitous Biden-Harris administration aren't something he wants to chronicle, especially given Joe Biden's increasingly apparent personal difficulties. 

III

Staying in foreign parts...

Sometimes BBC bias makes life a lot simpler. The Wikipedia article on French presidential hopeful Eric Zemmour goes into agonies over how to label him. Is he 'on the right' or 'conservative right' or 'right-wing' or 'far-right' or 'radical right' or 'Gaullist' or 'Bonapartist'? Academics and media outlets disagree about how to describe him but the BBC has no doubts whatsoever. A single BBC News (UK) tweet last night contained the phrase 'far-right' three times. Anyone like him is always 'far-right' as far as the BBC goes. It's so simple.

IV

M. Zemmour has an Algerian Jewish background, so I'm not sure if the BBC would cast him in the next series of Ridley Road. The non-Jewish main actor who did appear in Ridley Road as a Jew, Eddie Marsan, has been targeted by antisemites thinking that he is Jewish. To quote The Kinks, it's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.

V

Meanwhile, The Times reports that Baroness Benjamin [Floella from Playschool] isn't happy about some publicly-funded schemes being at risk and wants the Government/tax payers to step in and cough up. She wants to protect BBC funding too. 

What caught my eye is that one of the schemes, the Audio Content Fund, is run by our old friend Helen Boaden, a former director of BBC News. 

Ah yes, 'genetically impartial' Helen! 

Reading the Wikipedia article about her brought back so many memories. including:

Boaden received criticism following the July 7 terror attacks in London when she issued a memo instructing BBC staff not to refer to the perpetrators as terrorists, arguing that the term "can be a barrier rather than aid to understanding". Former BBC reporter Martin Bell was one of those who condemned the memo, accusing the BBC of being "overcautious" and noting that the attackers seemed to meet the definition of terrorists. Writing in The Spectator, Michael Vestey suggested "it's almost as if the BBC is afraid of offending suicide bombers in the Muslim world".

Despite being explicitly criticised in the Pollard Report for handling the Jimmy Savile affair so casually, she continued to thrive at the BBC before leaving and moving on to the likes of the aforementioned scheme and - for some reason - the board of the UK Statistics Authority. You obviously can't keep an ex-BBC high-up down. There are clearly no barriers to her advancement.

Not yellow

I see that Andrew Neil is continuing to be 'the exception that proves the rule' as far as the claim that the BBC are almost entirely ignoring the ongoing gilets jaunes protests in Paris (and the accompanying French police violence) - at least according to some BBC critics on Twitter. He's tweeted about them again this weekend:

For over a year now, Saturdays in Paris have been marked by demonstration, fire and violence. This from the Place D’Italie quarter this afternoon. https://t.co/pEb3q4aHQ5

— Andrew Neil (@afneil) November 16, 2019

...except that the BBC's Paris correspondent Lucy Williamson has made herself another 'exception to the rule' today by penning a piece for the BBC News website headlined Gilets Jaunes: Anger of yellow vests still grips France a year on. It strikes me as a fair-mined piece. 

Andrew Neil says "You missed out the gilets jaunes in France"

Those from the anti-globalist (and/or anti-EU) side on my social media feeds regularly castigate the BBC for downplaying - almost to the point of ignoring - the ongoing, large, weekly gilets jaunes protests against the globalist (pro-EU) Macron government in France. 

Such people often accompany their complaints of BBC bias with troubling videos of excessive police violence against the protestors - violence which seem so shocking and so widespread as to be almost incredible in a modern Western European nation.

Such comments always make me think about whether I should seriously investigate this and then blog about the matter.

I'll admit here, in a spirit of transparency, that antisemitic elements with the gilets jaunes have made me squeamish about the whole movement, thus somewhat (but not entirely) squashing my early sympathy for them as being ordinary French people at the end of their tether.

So, is there really an ongoing semi-revolutionary tumult in France that the BBC is playing down, possibly for ideological reasons (i.e. because such scenes might be deeply unhelpful to the anti-Brexit cause in the UK)? Or are these protests nowhere near as signficant as their UK supporters claim, thus justifying the heavy lack of BBC reporting of the story? 

I have to say that I really don't know. I've tried to find out many times, but commentary on the subject is so sharply polarised, when it exists, that it's hard to be sure who to believe. Who's spinning a line? Who isn't?

The rumour that the BBC had a D-notice in operation preventing the reporting of the story widely circulated in the weeks after the protests began but the BBC rejected the claim and countered by pointing to a fair bit of BBC coverage of the gilets jaunes protests. 

It certainly wasn't a huge amount of coverage (to put it mildly) but, still, especially in the early days, that coverage existed and could easily be pointed to. 

So, yes, if you're being cyncial, the BBC had definitely covered themselves. (Some call this kind of thing 'watertight oversight'.) 

And, yes, I've been half-following this all year and my considered impression is that the BBC's coverage was fairly small-scale in the first few weeks and has becoming ever more low-key ever since. (Just search the BBC website for 'gilets jaunes' and you'll see the severe shrinkage in coverage laid out, in a rather difficult to read way.)

Again though, what is the right way to report the gilets jaunes story? What's the right way to 'get it about right'?

Answers on a fire-stained Parisian postcard to the comments field below, if you want. As you can sense, I'm all over the place on this one.

Meanwhile, here's the inevitable exception to the BBC rule that probably proves the BBC rule:

You missed out the gilets jaunes in France. https://t.co/uA2jSxOASB

— Andrew Neil (@afneil) November 2, 2019

The BBC and the gilet jaunes

Yesterday

Lord Hall cited the "entirely false"claim that the BBC is operating under a D-notice as far as reporting the gilets jaunes protests in France goes as his prime example of "fake news" but, nonetheless, the rumour persists.

So what actually accounts for the relative lack of coverage the French protests have received (especially in recent months when mentions of the 31-week-long protests have virtually disappeared from the BBC), despite the often astonishing levels of police violence being caught on camera there? Is it a deliberate editorial decision by the BBC? Is it evidence of bias?

Here's author of Economics Made Simple Michael Gow Tolson who tweeted this yesterday:

BBC has given more exposure to the Hong Kong demos in one week than they have the French gilet jaunes in the last 32 weeks. Tells you all about their pro EU bias.  

Several replies to him raised the D-notice rumour again, though one person offered another explanation:

As Macron has lost control then the French demos are so frequent they are boring to viewers and reader, whereas the Hong Kong situation is extremely serious for the biggest financial traders in the far east. The potential ramifications are awesome.

That's obviously true about the Hong Kong demos, but are the French demos really "boring", and is that really the reason why the BBC is barely reporting them these days?

Alas, having seen plenty of videos of police violence there, I don't think "boring" is le mot juste, and the BBC never really gave the protests the concentrated prominence given to, say, anti-Trump protests in America. So if that alternative explanation quoted above has some truth to it, it's certainly not the whole truth. 

French protests covered by the BBC

P.S. That same BBC News website article features coverage of protests in Paris. Not by the gilets jaunes of course, but environmentalist protestors. There's even a photo of the French police being mean to them:

"trouble in the banlieues of Paris"

A comment from esteemed blogger  Daphne Anson citing two pieces about  anti-Chinese sentiment in France prompted me to have a further look. 

The Telegraph piece by David Chazan, is a  report about a demonstration that took place in August. The Chinese demonstrators were demanding protection from “muggers who they say prey on them because they are seen as easy targets.”

Chazan gives this fatal incident the passive treatment: 

“The death of a 49-year-old Chinese tailor after being badly beaten in a robbery earlier this month has lent new urgency to the long running complaint that Asian immigrants are systematically attacked and robbed in the French capital.”
[…] 
“……Chaoling Zhang, the father of two who died on August 14 after being punched to ground in the north-eastern suburb that is home to some 4,000 Chinese immigrants. No arrests have been made over the attack.”

(The BBC did report the incident at the time) 

“The father-of-two had been attacked by three men while walking with a friend, a police source said.”

The BBC’s recent article by freelancer Kevin Ponniah A killing in Paris: Why French Chinese are in uproar was published on 26th October 2016 and includes the following passage:

“During a recent trial of three youths accused of 11 attacks in a three-month span in Aubervilliers, the defendants insisted the ethnicity of their targets was just a coincidence. But when interrogated by police, they reportedly admitted to seeing Chinese people as "easy targets" with money on them.”

So it seems that the police did make some arrests. The BBC’s piece describes the killers of “Zhang Chaolin", a 49 year old Chinese tailor as  “three teenagers” and all reference to ‘ethnicity’ is confined to the term “ethnic Chinese”. Kevin Ponniah deals with the tribulations of various ethnic Chinese individuals and the wider issue of anti-Chinese racism in France. He focuses on a Paris suburb, apparently a kind of Chinatown, Aubervilliers, which he describes as:

“A working-class and immigrant-heavy area, home to more than 1,200 mostly Chinese wholesalers, Aubervilliers is an important European textile centre. Buyers come from far and wide to haggle over Italian-made coats and Chinese-made shirts.”

Here is a nice piece about Aubervilliers, “Europe's made-in-China clothing capital.” 

In stark contrast to the BBC’s standard reporting of murdered ‘nameless’ Israelis, the article gives the victims of French anti-Chinese racism the ‘full Palestinian victimhood’ status without any mention of the ethnicity of the perpetrators.  As Daphne Anson says, this leaves the impression that the anti-Chinese racism is coming from the indigenous “white” French.

The Telegraph has this, albeit somewhat buried in the depths of the article:

“Community workers say many muggings are committed by members of other minorities living in the area, generally of Arab or African origin.

Paris officials corroborated the figures but declined to identify the robbers by ethnic origin.”

A link takes you to this Telegraph report about trouble in the banlieues of Paris from 2005. 

"A country in flames… French cities teeter on the edge of anarchy"

But is this *“NTDWIist” attitude unique to the BBC?  I Googled, and came up with several pieces from France 24 which were just as evasive.

France 24 - lots about the victims, nothing about the perpetrator.

Reuters, a similar story, but the piece did include this ‘random’ information:

“Tourist traffic in Paris has dropped significantly since attacks by Islamist militants last November, leading to sharp declines in sales for luxury goods makers but also for the capital's retailers, hotels and restaurants.”

Googling ‘Aubervilliers’ produced this: European 'No-Go' Zones: Fact or Fiction? Part 1: France

Soernn Kern. January 2015.

“Another township of Seine-Saint-Denis is Aubervilliers. Sometimes referred to as one of the "lost territories of the French Republic," it is effectively a Muslim city: more than 70% of the population is Muslim. Three quarters of young people under 18 in the township are foreign or French of foreign origin, mainly from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. French police are said to rarely venture into some of the most dangerous parts of the township. 

The southern part of Aubervilliers is well known for its vibrant Chinese immigrant community along with their wholesale clothing and textile warehouses and import-export shopping malls. In August 2013, the weekly newsmagazine Marianne reported that Muslim immigrants felt humiliated by the economic dynamism of the Chinese, and were harassing and attacking Chinese traders, who were increasingly subject to robberies and extortion. The situation got so bad that the Chinese ambassador to France was forced to pay a visit to the area. 

In response, the Socialist mayor of Aubervilliers, Jacques Salvator, suggested that the violence could be halted if Chinese companies would agree to hire more Arabs and Africans. The Chinese countered that Muslims do not work as hard as the Chinese, that they are more demanding, and that they complain too much, according to Marianne.
After local officials refused to act in the face of increasing Muslim violence, the Chinese threatened to "call on the Chinese mafia" for protection. Muslims responded by launching a petition to have the Chinese expelled from the area. 

Also in Aubervilliers, the magazine Charlie Hebdo reported in 2012 that the town hall was obligating non-Muslim men who want to marry Muslim women to convert to Islam first, even though France is ostensibly a secular republic. One such man, Frédéric Gilbert, a journalist, was told: 

"You can convert in any mosque in three minutes. All you need do is to repeat 'with conviction and sincerity' this sentence: 'I recognize that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet,' and the Imam will agree that you have converted to Islam.’”

Well I never. 

My friend, a fusspot, once deconstructed a burger he was suspicious of, only to find a beetle-like corpse within. 

“Seek and ye shall find” said a onlooker, disapprovingly.  In other words it’s your own fault;  if you’d been less picky and just eaten it you’d have been none the wiser.

Is this what I’ve just been doing, seeking and finding, and if so, would we have been better off none the wiser?

*NothingToDoWithIslam-ist 

'The World Tonight' - and last night, and the night before...

Continuing to review the past week's editions of BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight, I want to surf my way over the choppy waters of the last five days and see how often the shark of bias lurks beneath, ready to bite off the leg of impartiality. So to speak.

19/11/2012

Besides the Israel-Gaza conflict, this edition looked at Burma in the light of President Obama's visit to the Asian nation. Is the West seeking to draw Burma away from its traditional ties to China? Carolyn Quinn spoke to Josh Kurlantzick from the American think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, about the country's foreign relations. It was an interesting interview. 

Then there was a report by James Reynolds on anti-Assad Syrian refugees in Turkey. They don't like Bashar one bit. There have been repeated accusations that the BBC has been far too embedded - literally and emotionally - with the Syrian rebels. This report won't have undermined that impression (however unfair it may be). Its themes were the plight of refugee children, the badness of the Assad regime, the eagerness of the rebels, the unease of the Turkish state. 

The impending rebel seizure of Goma in Eastern Congo (DRC) was next up for discussion. Gabriel Gatehouse talked to Carolyn. The under-reporting of the various wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the last couple of decades remains one of the scandals of modern reporting. Compare it to the saturation coverage of events in Gaza or the West Bank. Deaths in the DRC since 1996 appear to have topped the 5 million mark (at least) - an extraordinary tally of human suffering. It tells you something that when you do a simple search on the BBC News website, the 'News' results bring up 6,793 results for "Congo" (with includes results for the other Congo - Congo Brazzaville - too) and   14,984 for "Israel". If you assume the figure to be 5 million dead in the DRC over that period and compare it to the figure (14,500) given by Wikipedia for deaths in the Israel-Palestinian conflict since 1948 (i.e. over a far longer period) you find that the recent wars in the Congo have killed some 370 times more people - in other words, VASTLY more. The BBC, of course, has been far from alone in under-reporting the plight of the Congolese and massively over-reporting the 'plight' of the Palestinians. Still, a myriad numbers of wrongs doesn't make a right. That is all a preamble to saying 'Well done!' to The World Tonight for giving up under five minutes of Monday's edition to the story. That said, they spent 16 minutes on Israel-Gaza (over 3 times as long). 

The programme ended with a report from the BBC's Guy De Launey on the growing friendship between a U.S. stealth fighter pilot (Dale Zelko) and the Serb artillery operator (Zoltan Dani) who shot him down in 1999 - the subject of a documentary called 'The Second Meeting'.  We heard from the two men and the director. Interesting. 

20/11/2012

As well as the women bishops and the Gaza sections (reviewed in earlier posts), Tuesday's edition discussed Afghanistan. Paddy Ashdown says Western nation-building has failed in the country (said host Ritula Shah). There have been failures galore, but there has been some good done...by the European Union. Paul Moss reported on the EU's involvement in training the ill-reputed Afghan police force. The Afghan people are grateful. The EU trainers are pleased with their work. The EU's top man in this field is pleased too. Where the US and Britain have failed, the EU is succeeding it seems. That was one of the messages of that report, I think. It's very rare to hear a positive report about Western intervention in Afghanistan. Interesting that it reflects so well on the European Union, isn't it?