Simon Schama tweets

Talking of the BBC's Sweden coverage, the famous Simon Schama took to Twitter just before 8 o'clock this morning to fulminate about...:

....a completely misleading report on BBC Radio 4's Today on Swedish elections as though SDs had become second biggest party - barely corrected at the end. 

I'll stick up for the BBC here because Gavin Lee's report was obviously an 'as-it-happens'-style piece beginning yesterday evening at the Sweden Democrats HQ as an early exit poll placed them second (with the SDs erupting with delight) and then returned there at the end of the report and in the early hours of this morning to say that the SDs had actually come third...

...and John Humphrys had after all introduced the whole thing by saying: 

The political face of Sweden has changed pretty dramatically in the past few years from a solidly socialist country one to where the far-right has challenged the old order. Many expected the populist Swedish Democrats to take second place in yesterday's elections. It didn't quite happen. They did take a big share of the vote, but the Prime Minister said he will not form a coalition with them. So what next?

So Simon Schama's complaint was itself rather "misleading", wasn't it? Naturally though, it provoked comments, such as this:

On the Today programme they made out that the SD had stormed to 2nd place then had to admit it came 3rd. 

Well, no, they didn't really do either of those things.

Anyhow, talk of Simon Schama reminds me of Harry & Paul's Story of the Twos and their tribute to the BBC's love for dark Scandanavian dramas:

The tussle in Brussels

As that last post shows, the BBC isn't always a monolith,

Indeed, Newsnight and The World Tonight also differed in the general tone of their reporting of David Cameron's deal with the EU: Newsnight added a little cynicism to the mix while The World Tonight eschewed cynicism entirely.

In fact, if I were given to hyperbole, I'd say that last night's The World Tonight sounded for all the world as if it had been written by the Number Ten press office (please listen from 8.01 onwards). 

Reporter Gavin Lee described "the tussle in Brussels" in terms that made it sound as if David Cameron has pulled up his shirt sleeves and prevailed against all opposition, and presenter Razia Iqbal kept talking up his achievements throughout.

It was all a little odd.

Razia Iqbal also interviewed people from both sides, live: the pro-Brexit Arron Banks and the anti-Brexit Dominic Grieve (who she subsequently had to apologise to for wrongly introducing as a former justice secretary).

The BBC doesn't want us to count, but: Mr Banks got about a minute and a quarter while Mr Grieve got nigh on five minutes (and was allowed to answer at length). That is some difference!

(Mr Banks was also swiftly dismissed with the words, "OK, Arron Banks, you've made your position very clear. Thank you very much indeed for joining us".)

Here are two of the questions the BBC presenter put to Arron Banks: 

The Prime Minister has quite clearly said that people should be suspicious...he said this tonight...of those who say that leaving Europe is the track to the land of milk and honey. Given what the Prime Minister has [the emphasis was Razia Iqbal's] achieved this evening, why are you still so keen to be out of Europe? 

One of the things we just heard from the people is the meeting this evening saying, you know, that we wanted control over our borders - there's all sorts of restrictions, significant restrictions on benefits going to migrants that David Cameron has won this evening. Surely that's welcome?

If the programme hadn't presented the PM's achievement in so uncritical a way earlier, this might just have been taken for proper devil's advocate interviewing.

And worse, she then put questions to Dominic Grieve which also contained within then the idea that the PM has achieved "concessions" and "significant progress":

Are you happy with what Mr Cameron has walked away with? 

But isn't that going to happen? Isn't that inevitable that in the end it doesn't really matter what concessions, what significant progress David Cameron has made, the bottom line will be a question of viscerally voting 'In' or 'Out'? And you heard Arron Banks and you heard those activists in the Grassroots Out report. These are people who are already thinking nothing he comes back with is going to be enough.

The second half of her interview with Mr Grieve was wasted trying to get him to speculate on what Michael Gove and Boris Johnson are thinking. He kept saying he didn't know and advising her to ask them but that didn't stop her from asking more questions in the same vein.

Reporting/Twittering

Incidentally, mentioning BBC reporter Gavin Lee (who's new to me) in the previous post led me (inevitably) to check out his Twitter feed - @GavinLee BBC.

Given the tenor of his latest report, his Twitter feed probably won't come as a surprise to you.

His latest tweets are all about the the kindness of those helping the migrants and the niceness of the migrants themselves (interspersed with cute photos of migrant children).

Reading it is like a potted version of the BBC's entire present output at the moment on the migrant crisis.

The BBC and the Little Dutch Boy

It's all getting a bit overwhelming, isn't it? The BBC's coverage of the migrant crisis, I mean.

The BBC is acting with the energy and ruthless indifference to nuance of a political party during an election campaign at the moment. They seem to be very seriously campaigning, don't they? 

And now they seem to be realising, it appears, that they aren't 'winning the election' (cue a furious rant from Simon McCoy over my use of words there?) they are giving every impression of desperately going into overdrive and sticking their fingers (Dutch-boy-like) into every leaking dike they come across. 

Others have spotted some telling examples of this today, starting with the latest BBC Trending piece by Mike Wendling (idea for a poem: "BBC Trending" half-rhymes with "Mike Wendling"), headlined This viral photo falsely claims to show an IS fighter posing as a refugee.

This is clearly meant as a 'Gotcha!', intended to counter widespread fears that lots of Al Qaeda/Isis/other Islamist nutters are entering Europe along with the other migrants/refugees. 

This refugee is, according to the BBC report, a commander from the nice moderate Free Syrian Army and hates Islamic State, Al Qaeda and Assad. AP reported it thus, and Mike Wendling believes them (on trust).

Unlike this particular senior BBC reporter, however, whenever I think of the nice moderate Free Syrian Army I think of that nice moderate Free Syrian Army commander who ate the heart of a fallen Syrian government soldier. So I'm not quite so reassured as the BBC seems to be by this story as a result.

A second example: The widespread raising of eyebrows that so many of these migrants/refugees carry expensive-looking mobile phone is met by a report from BBC reporter Gavin Lee, headlined The 'vital' role of mobile phones for refugees and migrants. 

The 'scare marks' around 'vital' there prove to be completely redundant. Gavin's report is unequivocal that mobile phones are vital for the migrants/refugees, and he's not exactly subtle about it either. He asks man called Mohammed: "Tell me about your phone and how essential they are for you to travel."

The BBC isn't doing itself any favours at the moment. It risks seriously alienating a lot of people.