Comparing GB News with Newsnight

For lots of reasons I've not seen much of GB News or the BBC for months, but I actually sat down today and watched last night's Newsnight on BBC Two and - live - this afternoon's GB News with Nana Akua.

Such a random snapshot proved useful because last night's Newsnight dealt with much the same topic as GB News's 'Great British Debate': the Rwanda/Channel-crossing migrants issue: so it made easy a simple exercise to compare and contrast them.

And the contrasts couldn't be clearer.

Nana's GB News debate saw Nana, the presenter, lay out the pros-and-cons of the debate, but she also declared her own hand. On the question 'Should illegal migrants be tagged like criminals?' she said:

'...But critics say that the plan treats those fleeing persecution as criminals...Well, they are, aren't they? They crossed the Channel illegally. Sorry, did I say that out loud?

She then interviewed Phil Brewer from the Human Trafficking Foundation, who disagreed with her. He argued that the tagging plan won't work and will impact badly on the mental health of the Channel-crossing people being tagged.

What was so pleasing here was that Nana didn't just let him talk but was clearly happy to let him do so, despite her not sharing his point of view. He wasn't interrupted or belittled. He was simply listened to. And he listened to her in return. And Nana left it up to GB News viewers to listen and decide too. 

It was all about listening to open-minded people with strong views listening with an open mind to each other.

Then came Kevin Saunders, former Chief Immigration Officer at UK Border Force, who was pro-tagging and, with caveats, pro-Rwanda option echoed Nana's sentiments. Nana didn't disguise the fact that she agreed with him. It was all in the open.

And Kevin quoted the Full-Fact approved stat that some 70 per cent of those crossing the Channel are fighting-aged men aged 18-40. Newsnight's Lewis Goodall, in contrast, ignored that and made more of the the Full-Fact approved stat that the large majority of 'asylum seekers' crossing the Channel are given asylum in the UK, thus showing that they aren't mere economic migrants.

Then on GB News came a discussion on the issue featuring comedian Leo Kearse and broadcaser Lois Perry. Nana continued to make plain her own views to viewers, but kept outlining both sides. Lois and Leo aired their views, sometimes disagreeing, sometimes agreeing, though they broadly agreed with Nana.

Standing back and judging, this was clearly a debate with a bias - a bias in favour of tagging and the Rwanda plan. But the bias was openly presented and the dissenting voice was treated no differently to the agreeing voices and given full freedom to make his points uninterrupted and in just as friendly a spirit.

Compare that to last night's Newsnight and you'll find yourself in a very different place.

The starting point here was a report from Newsnight policy editor Lewis Goodall. It used Lucy Halliday from Care4Calais, an opponent of the government's Rwanda plan, as a 'talking head'. Next came a sympathetic 'asylum seeker' who says he fled the Taliban in Afghanistan. And then a lawyer working for the 'asylum seekers', Jacqueline McKenzie of Leigh Day solicitors. 

It was one of those BBC reports that spoke with one voice on one side of the argument.

And then it was back to the Newsnight studio for Lubna Shuja of the Law Society, who sounded unsympathetic to the Rwanda plan, and former Labour home secretary David Blunkett, who also disagreed with it.

Watching Newsnight again, after a few months' abstinence, brought it home to me just how one-sided the BBC can be when it really puts its mind to it.

Though Mark Urban, presenting, struck a detached tone, everything else felt like a campaign video.

Lewis Goodall, reporting, came across as a man on a mission, a campaigner telling you what you must believe if you're a good person like him.

And that's what's so galling. Lewis Goodall, someone who uses long threads on Twitter to garner 'likes' from left-leaning types, gets to play the righteous voice of impartial BBC authority on Newsnight and Twitter. 

And Newsnight gets away with presenting the most one-sided airing of a matter of public controversy imaginable with no dissenting voices whatsoever. 

All at the public's expense.

Seriously, give me the honest bias and openness to other points of view of GB News any day over the narrow, preachy 'curating' of stories and opinions by the 'impartial' BBC.

Exam Question

Maybe we're in old-fashioned exam question territory here, but just imagine for a moment that you're an eager Twitterer and have tweeted or re-tweeted just the following tweets over the past couple of days on the Brexit question. What views should be seen as being imputed from your (four) tweets and re-tweets by examinees? (4 marks).

Inside Boris's mind

What is in Boris’s mind?               

"Take the vip from him! Why not?" 

That was from the sound-bite clip of Lord Sheikh that was shown at the head of Mark Urban’s Newsnight, which was great fun. Hysterical.

“After a couple of days of antisemitism, the Westminster pack has moved on to Islamophobia,”

 announced Mark Urban.  The Westminster pack? The BBC is going ballistic over it today, so make that the BBC pack.

Newsnight says the P.M. and Brandon Lewis think Boris should apologise. Lord Sheikh (or is that Sheikh Lord) demands that the whip is taken away from Boris, (or was it that the whip should be applied to his backside?) I can’t quite remember.

Tom Newton Dunn seems to think this is a deliberate manoeuvre by Boris, whom Jawed Iqbal describes in The Times (£) as “a cynical political opportunist” and not about the burka at all, but a much larger issue. (Even larger than a burka?) 

Two Shazias V one Laura.

The all-female studio guests consisted of two Muslims, one with a headscarf, and Laura Perrins of The Conservative Woman.

The three ‘Conservative’ ladies were in the studio waiting to speak. Two Muslims named Shazia, (one headscarved, one bare-headed ) and an immodestly bare-armed infidel named Laura Perrins. 

The first speaker was Shazia Awan-Scully, an ex-Conservative, who said there is a huge problem with Islamophobia in the Conservative Party. She blames those out-of-touch, middle-aged white men, whose principal concern is ‘don’t make trouble for the Party’. 

The next speaker,  Shazia Bashir, is still a Conservative councillor, but she thinks Boris should apologise. “We don’t have space for these kinds of comments. Disciplinary action is the way forward”.

Mark Urban turned to Laura Perrins to ask what was in Boris’s mind. She claimed she didn’t know - (a likely story!) - and deftly avoided answering that question by saying the burka issue was a debate that we need to have. Mark Urban wasn’t convinced. “What was in Boris’s mind, though?” he persisted, to no avail. For some unknown reason Laura remained tight-lipped about the workings of Boris’s mind, which as a non-Muslim and a Tory, she must know. Try as he might, Urban couldn't prise that fascinating secret information from her.

Before you go, some essential reading. If you haven’t already read it, it’s your homework.

BRENDAN O’NEILL

“What Boris’s shrill detractors are really demanding is that he respect everything about Islam. That he be unquestioning towards this religion. That he celebrate it and love it, unconditionally. But why should he? His responsibility, as a politician, is to never interfere with people’s religious freedom; he doesn’t have to like people’s religious beliefs. 

The attacks on Boris are a reactionary, illiberal assault on his right to be critical of certain aspects of religious ideology. People are not demanding that he support freedom of religion, because it is clear from his column that he already does. Rather, they are demanding that he bow and scrape before Islamic values and never criticise them again. This is a medieval demand, a war on heresy, dressed up as a progressive critique.

DOUGLAS MURRAY

“……..portions of the left have decided to counter what they regard as the ‘anti-Semitism card’ with the ‘Islamophobia card’. Of course there are other people hanging around with not very much to do who are very happy to join this bandwagon. ‘You criticise me for anti-Semitism? Fine – I raise you “Islamophobia”.’ 

“Thus somebody called Mohammed Amin who heads the ‘Conservative Muslim Forum’ told the BBC’s Newsnight yesterday, ‘This should have been a good article opposing the Danish niqab ban. But instead Boris spent about half the article slagging off Muslim women.’ The first part of which suggests that we’re all completely agreed that the Danes are wrong, and the second part of which is provable rubbish. 

Meantime the Labour party’s Naz Shah – along with Jess Phillips and others – has decided to try to escalate the ‘letter box’ comment. Ms Shah has even written to the Conservative Party Chairman, Brandon Lewis, insisting that the party put Boris Johnson into mandatory ‘diversity training’. I presume that this training is now so perfected that anyone who goes into it is guaranteed to come out saying that far from looking ridiculous, women in burkas are in fact mega-hot and total babes. We’ll see. In any case it would be easier to listen to talk of mandatory diversity training for ‘Islamophobia’ if it was not pushed by Naz Shah, who has a recent history of anti-Semitism so extreme that the modern Labour party suspended her for her anti-Semitism a couple of years ago. Which is quite a feat. “

JAWAD IQBAL

This piece is in The Times, (£) and it’s a bit of a mishmash. Make of it what you will.  

“Some dismiss Johnson as a buffoon but that’s a mistake. He is a cynical political opportunist who knows exactly how his remarks will go down with the Tory grassroots.”

Hmm. If you say so. He’s not happy with Boris’s critics, either.

“What should give pause for thought is the reaction from his self-appointed Muslim critics. They claim Johnson’s views are further evidence of the Tories’ wider “Islamophobia” and that the party must lance this boil by launching a formal inquiry.

Mr. Iqbal continues by criticising of Baroness Warsi ‘who has never been elected to public office’ and the Muslim Council of Britain ‘a group that in the past has faced allegations of holding extreme views.’

Incidentally, I see Janice Turner has retracted her description of Tommy Robinson as a girlfriend beater. It was false. 

At the bottom of the article, should anyone who originally read it happen to return for another go, this amendment has been added:

“This article has been amended. We wrongly referred to Tommy Robinson as a “girlfriend-beating football thug”. His 2005 conviction was in fact for assaulting an off-duty police officer who had intervened in a domestic incident. We apologise for the error.”

Of Balloon Sleeves, Sandwiches and 'Newsnight' Presenters

Marie Le Conte and that dress (camera angle probably just how she'd like it)

I was watching the discussion about UK politics on last night's Newsnight, which (thankfully) had less predictable guests than usual and, as a blogger about BBC bias, I (predictably) Googled the guests and found French freelance writer Marie Le Conte and her likeable Twitter feed. 

On that Twitter feed she told the world a very short story, which I thought I'd share will you (just for the sake of it):

A VERY SHORT STORY

Before... 

So I'm in Edinburgh for the Fringe, right. I'm dressed like someone who's in Edinburgh for the Fringe. Meant to come back tonight and go straight home. 

BUT! 

Got a phone call from Newsnight. Do I want to come on to talk about Macron and May? Yes I do! But I'm not dressed for TV. Fine, I'll run to H&M to get some black dress.

I go to H&M but the selection is piss poor, I'm running out of time. 

So. 

I pick up a wildly reduced flowery dress vaguely in my size, pay, run to catch the train.

It is now a few hours later, I am nearing London, I go put on the dress in the loo. 

Guys, guys. 

HAD YOU EVER SEEN BALLOON SLEEVES THIS BIG? 

I look like a minor Medici got into Florence Welsh's pants and what they produced was an Oompa Loompa raised in Kew Gardens... 

Help. 

Anyway tune in later to watch our discussion on what May and Macron can gain from this dinner but also maybe to watch me...accidentally take flight?

After... 

MY ACCIDENTAL BALLOON SLEEVES WERE MOSTLY OUT OF SHOT. Praise the lord!

Anyhow, back to business (if we must)...

The discussion itself featured four guests. They looked at the plight of Theresa May's Conservatives and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour, with special reference to Brexit (as regards the former) and antisemitism (as regards the latter). 

I think it's fair to say that there was only one pro-Brexit voice on the panel and only one pro-Corbyn voice on the panel - so that's two 3:1 situations. Whether that somehow balances things out I'm rather doubtful...

...but at least the discussion was hosted by Mark Urban, who played a pleasingly understated role.

He didn't grandstand for personal glory but kept a low profile, letting his guests speak and debate among themselves. Nor did he target one guest for different (hostile) treatment because of their point of view. 

In contrast, just try Emily Maitlis on Monday's Newsnight. She hosted a Brexit-related discussion with three guests. The guest selection fell 2:1 against 'the hard Brexiteer' but that rather paled into insignificance in the light of how Emily treated her three guests. Only one of them got a barrage of challenging questions and repeated expressions of incredulity (complete with dramatic gestures) from the Newsnight presenter - and, no, it wasn't the man warning about the plight of the British sandwich after Brexit. Yes, inevitably, it was 'the hard Brexiteer' (Marcus Fysh MP) who was on the receiving end of this James O'Brien display of non-evenhanded interviewing from Ms. Maitlis.

Has Emily actually been possessed by the ghost of James O'Brien? Should Mark Urban bring in some holy water and get her exorcised?

Of course, that edition of Newsnight was the one Emily Maitlis introduced by saying that the Food Industry is telling the Tories that "no deal means no sandwiches". Yes, seriously.

Mystic Craig strikes again (maybe)

Talking of Marks at the BBC (as we were in the post now bumped up above this one!)...

One I trust vastly more than slippery Mark Easton - namely Newsnight's Mark Urban -  has been digging into the 'Corbyn=Czechoslovak spy' story. 

And, yes, as I result of what I've read from Mark (on Twitter) this afternoon, I'm going to go out on a blogger's limb and firmly predict (with no other evidence yet to to support it other than knowing what the BBC is like) that...

...drum roll please!...

...yes, Newsnight is finally going to report the story tonight - and, even more,  is actually 'go big' with it.

And why do I think that? Because Mark has sounded the 'All Clear' for the far-left Labour leader. 

Yes, from his digging, all's apparently coming up smelling of Bohemian, Moravian and Slovakian roses for Agent Cob...

• 1/3 spoke to some fmr British spooks about the Corbyn 'Czech spy' claim. They consider it nonsense, 'he had no secrets to give away' says one, E. Bloc officers in London 'had a pattern of exaggerating the importance of their contacts' says another
• 2/3 most intelligence agencies define an agent as 'under control', or 'taskable', say former spooks, & having had full access to Czech StB files post cold war, MI6 evidently do not consider Corbyn met that definition
• 3/3 one former case officer jokes Corbyn 'may have been naive in his contacts [with a Czech spook] but I'm not looking for any more evidence of his naivety'.
• p.s. British intelligence officers had the run of Czech & Stasi files at the end of the Cold War + Mitrokhin gave them the KGB's crown jewels. For many years they've had the evidence who betrayed what and to whom.

After its most respected reporter has now found the Labour leader innocent of being a Soviet bloc agent, shall we take bets on how long Newsnight will spend on the story tonight, having spent no time whatsoever on it up till now?

What do you reckon? No time at all? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? 15 minutes? More? 

Guido Fawkes, however, isn't sounding the 'all clear' and is continuing to do its own digging.

If Newsnight takes the impartial high ground and doesn't much a lot of Mark Urban's researches today, after ignoring the story for nigh on two weeks, I'll give them credit tomorrow. 

I really doubt they'll be able to contain themselves though.

We'll soon know.

Update: And the answer is: They didn't cover it. I'm about as 'mystic' as 'Mystic Meg' herself!

Hardliners

I've heard the term "hardliners" on the lips of BBC reporters over the past couple of days or so. It has been applied to two groups of people: those Iranians who are dead against Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe and those Brexiteers who want 'a hard Brexit'. Frank Gardner is one example of a BBC reporter who has been using the term about those Iranians, and Mark Urban is one example of a BBC reporter who has been using the term about those Brexiteers. Oddly, I've never considered either of those to be particularly hardline BBC reporters themselves. 

Another atrocity

I've been vaguely aware for a while, especially after reading about various atrocities in Pakistan and the hyperactive assault on ancient Sufi shrines in Mali, that Sufi Muslims (the mystical ones) have become yet another of the seemingly endless prime targets for vicious fundamentalist Muslims. 

Watching tonight's Newsnight on the horrific slaughter of Sufi worshippers in Sinai, apparently by Islamic State groupies, only confirms to me that this is yet another murderous problem provoked by the apparently inexorable spread of Islamic fundamentalism.

We'll doubtless be seeing it in the UK soon, following attacks on the Ahmadiyya and the Shia here.

Tonight's Newsnight also saw Mark Urban - one of the BBC's finest - firmly applying the brakes to one of Kirsty Wark's half-baked assertions. Kirsty boldly asserted that today's attack was unprecedented. Mark, evidently somewhat taken aback, replied that that's too sweeping a statement. 

In fact Kirsty's performance during that entire section felt disappointingly under-researched and knee-jerk (in a "London liberal outlook" kind of way). 

She seemed particularly keen to suggest that military aggression shown by the Egyptian authorities might have been (somehow) ultimately responsible for today's attack. 

In that light I wasn't at all surprised when Colonel Richard Kemp tweeted the following tonight about this particular Newsnight segment:

BBC churning out all these so-called experts to blame Egyptian security forces for ISIS attacks in Sinai. Trotting out many platitudes but no alternative to military solution.

Mark Urban tweets

Newsnight's Mark Urban remains one of the best and least predictable of BBC reporters. It's rare to find tweets like these on BBC reporters' Twitter feeds, so they stand out even more sharply and, therefore, are worth pointing out, even if only as exceptions that prove the rule:

What happened when four 'Newsnight' editors gathered around Evan's cauldron...

Beginning to catch up with Wednesday's and Thursday's editions of Newsnight, I'd just say that if you want to sample BBC bias over Brexit in full flow you only need to watch the opening discussion between Evan Davis and the four Newsnight 'editors' on Wednesday night's programme...

This, of course, came on the day that Mrs May became PM, and it began with Evan Davis talking of the "disconcertingly turbulent" last three weeks and how the ritual of the handover of power might have proved "reassuring" and provided "some calm at last". 

Leaning in, he added "but only up to a point"...

...before talking of the "national adventure" we are now embarking on and adding, with a chuckle, "For one thing Boris Johnson is foreign secretary!"....

....and this is the exact facial expression he adopted as he ended that thought:

Then his gathering of Newsnight editors began their review of the day.

Nick Watt was perky and jokey; Helen Thomas (shall we say?) less so. 

Evan asked the latter: 

The economy and the fiscal position...cos Theresa May was describing quite an ambitious kind of agenda...the economy may not be working to her favour for all that.

And Helen replied "No, absolutely" and talked (as is her way) of the "uncertainty", "a weakening economy" and "what damage has been done, what damage may be done...by Brexit". 

And then they turned to Boris. Evan kept chuckling and said, "Who would have thought it?" to Mark Urban. 

And Mark said that people on Twitter had found it "gagtastic" before adding that, as Mayor of London, "he had a rather unsuccessful trip to Israel and Palestine" before then saying "the best he can do" is to be ambassador selling the country to the world. 

Evan then stopped chuckling for a while and said:

Yeah. I mean, look, we need to talk about the Boris style of diplomacy. 

And he has history, doesn't he I mean, you know..just read you a couple of quotes.. 

On the Queen and the Commonwealth: "It supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies/ The tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles." 

Now, that was a long time ago, so you might forgive that. 

But, you know, just a couple of months ago his limerick about the president of Turkey: "There was a young fellow from Ankara/Who was a terrific wankerer/Till he sowed his wild oats/With the help of a goat/But he didn’t even stop to thankera". He won a prize in the Spectator magazine for that...er...poetry. 

I mean, are people outside of Britain..I mean, we all know Boris is Boris..will people outside Britain take him seriously?

Mark Urban replied: "They'll have to, in a way". 

And then - to much chuckling from Evan - he raised the much-mooted suggestion that the trio of Brexiteers (Boris, David Davis and Liam Fox" would take the rap if Brexit trade deals proved "too hard"....

...and he (Mark) sarcastically called them "those three experts", pausing before 'experts' to signal the implied inverted commas even more.

Then Chris Cook applied a little irony to David Davis and the article DD had written outlining his take on Brexit:  

He actually this week published an article on Conservative Home about his vision. And, I mean, I'm not a trade expert. I think whoever wrote that...it may not be Mr Davis himself...isn't a trade expert either. There are some fairly fundamental problems with it.

Chris then went on to rubbish it, describing one of DD's ideas (in Yes. Minister terms) as "quite ambitious", describing him as "very, very nonchalant" about another idea, and then saying he "talked an awful lot" about something else,...

...pulling the following face as he did so:

Evan chuckled again.

I very much doubt that a single one of those five BBC journalists voted to Leave the EU. And, if so (like there's any doubt!), it showed.

A thoroughly biased-filled BBC discussion from start to finish.

The BBC puts Mark Urban on the naughty step

Oddly, given what I've just written about Mark Urban's Newsnight report last night, it was his report on Wednesday night's edition which got him into trouble with the BBC.

The last time I checked the BBC Complaints 'Corrections & Clarifications' page, the BBC were apologising for saying that terrorist Richard Dart had been a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir (probably to someone from Hizb ut-Tahrir).

This time it looks as if the anti-Israel brigade have notched up another concession from the BBC:

Newsnight tweeted the decision yesterday:

Checking back through the  'Corrections & Clarifications' page archive for 2015, I've found three other Israeli/Palestinian-related decisions on each month's main page - two 'upheld' and one 'resolved'. 

All, like the above, went in favour of critics of Israel.

Is this because they all had a point (while none of the pro-Israeli complaints had a point)? Or is it because there's a serious pattern of anti-Israel bias within the BBC's Complaints process?

Having looked at those other three examples, they are exactly the kind of thing that, say, BBC Watch chronicles week in and week out (from the other side) - such as complaints that a guest's background wasn't described enough (so they seemed more 'independent' than they actually are) or that an interviewee was allowed to make controversial assertions and not challenged enough by the interviewer. 

And yet they all seem to get rejected while these anti-Israel ones, on no stronger evidence (and, I'd say, on weaker evidence), are 'upheld'.

All very suspicious, don't you think?

A poor 'Newsnight' report

Despite admitting to not having paid much attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the last few years, Mark Urban expressed his take on the causes of the present violence with remarkable confidence last night:

I think many of us had sort of forgotten about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the last few years mainly because events were going on of such intensity in Syria, Libya and other parts of the Middle East that they just tended to overshadow this long-running conflict.  

And, indeed, some on the right of Israeli politics used those events to say that now was not the time to engage in any meaningful transfer of territory or sovereignty to the Palestinians - the so-called 'two-state solution' in which this long-disputed land might be divided.  

But what's become clear in the past year is that having no peace process ongoing, no hope from a Palestinian point of view of overcoming the occupation, does actually lead to profound instability.  

And that's what we've seen breaking out into the open in recent weeks.  

That struck me as a remarkably one-sided view of things - blaming Israel, casting the Palestinians as the victims. 

*****

Was it typical of his report as a whole?

It began by showing Muslim worshippers being searched by Israeli police on the way into Friday prayers. 

Mark Urban said that there's always been "a political dimension" to events here, "with Israel claiming Jerusalem for its capital", but it's also "steeped in religion" and that, in recent weeks, "it's the sense that Islam's holy sites are in danger that has galvanised Palestinians". 

(Curiously, he didn't note that that "sense" has no basis in reality). 

Mark then said that "one of the notable things" about the recent violence is that "so much of it seems to have come from individual decisions", not from Palestinian (specifically Hamas) incitement. 

(The question of whether the incitement from Hamas, Fatah [including President Abbas] and various imams has significantly fuelled those 'individual decisions', as many have argued, was thus dismissed...and further dismissed by having the following 'talking head' dismiss it too...)

Palestinian leader Dr Mustafa Barghouti appeared (the first of the report's 'talking heads'.) He agreed with Mark's point, saying that the "uprising" has "a spontaneous nature". He blamed "oppression" and "occupation" for what's happening.  

(Dr Barghouti is one of the BBC's go-to people on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His loathing of Israel is only partly disguised by his slightly more liberal manner - at least as compared with other Palestinian spokesmen. He always denounces Israel though).

"There are elements of religious hatred on both sides of this", Mark continued...

...(engaging in a classic case of 'moral equivalence')...

...reporting on the attack on the Jewish shrine of Joseph's Tomb in Nablus. "At other times settler violence towards Arab neighbours has been the driver". 

(The examples used to bolster this case of moral equivalence juxtapose an act of violence against a building from the Palestinian side versus acts of violence against people {neighbours} from the Israeli settler side. Curiously none of the many recent terrorist attacks in Jerusalem got a mention here).

Israeli writer Ari Shavit, author of My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, was Mark's second 'talking head'.

(Mr Shavit is another of the BBC's go-to people on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He's a senior writer for Ha'aretz and a left-liberal Israeli voice. He is often critical of the Israeli government. Here he largely stuck to general points).

Ari Shavit said "this cannot go on" or it will get "more and more religious, more and more fundamentalist and more and more brutal". 

A clip of "a fiery sermon" - a bearded Muslim preacher ranting behind a got-totting Israeli policeman - was then shown.

(Quite what he was saying we weren't told). 

The Israelis, Mark continued, "swamped" the area with police, only allowing older men and women into Friday prayers and "effectively kettling" the young men outside. "We noticed though that the police also held back orthodox Jews, anxious to separate the religions", he added. 

(Good on Mark Urban for pointing that out! I'm not sure some of his colleagues would have done).

"Many have seen enough incitement recently to know religious violence could consume them, leaders and all, he continued".

Dr Mustafa Barghouti returned and agreed with Mark's question to him asking whether Fatah and Hamas will want to "catch this wave of violence" whilst also "fearing it". 

(His reply did little more than repeat the question as an answer. Both question and answer amplified the point made in their earlier discussion - that Fatah and Hamas are not responsible for the present surge in extreme violence).

Then (inevitably) it was onto Jewish settlements and Israeli's 'responsibility':

Israel has faced much criticism globally for building more homes on occupied territory and its leader for apparently giving up on the two-state solution during the last election, but he insists he is really for immediate talks.

(The use of the word "insists" there suggests an element of doubt about it. And a clip of Benjamin Netanyahu's reply to his colleague Lyse Doucet was played - minus Lyse herself, or Mr Netanyahu's put-down of her.) 

Then came an example of incitement...

....(showing Israelis being cruel to the injured Palestinian 13-year-old would-be killer of an Israeli 13-year-old - though, oddly, Mark chooses to call the 13-year-old Israeli boy "an Israeli teen" [which might suggest he was much older] and fails to specify that the injured Palestinian 13-year-old boy hadn't just been attacking the Israeli boy but trying to murder him)...:

Undermining any dialogue though is material like this showing a 13-year-old Palestinian being taunted by passers-by after being injured attacking an Israeli teen. Shared by the angry on social media it makes solutions that much harder.

It was then back to Ari Shavit of Ha'aretz to say that, though not a religious man, he really prays that such events will "wake" everyone up: "It's time for all of us to understand that we have been deeply irresponsible in dealing with this horrible, deep tragedy."

(At least Mr Shavit did provide a bit more information on that attack when he said: "When you see 13-year-old boys trying to murder other 13-year-old boys...it’s time for all of us to wake up.")

Mark Urban then noted that though there'd been no significant violence in Jerusalem that day, "four Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and Gaza...

...(without giving any details - such as that one of those was disguised as a journalist and tried to stab an Israeli soldier - which suggests they weren't all 'killed' by Israel as innocents). 

And all on the day the UN meets to try and drive "a concerted effort to stop it", Mark ended.

*****

As you can tell, this report struck me as poor - surprisingly so, given that Mark Urban is a fine reporter.

Maybe he should have been watching more closely over the last few years after all.

You cannot be serious!

Newsnight's Mark Urban opened his contribution to the programme last night with a remark that would had me spraying my laptop with cocoa if I'd been drinking cocoa at the time (which I wasn't as I don't drink cocoa). So please put down your own cup of whatever you're presently drinking before reading what he said:

I think many of us had sort of forgotten about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the last few years...

I not sure who Mark was talking about when he said "many of us". 

Surely he can't be referring to the bulk of his BBC colleagues - such as the dozens (literally dozens) of BBC reporters who trooped to Gaza last year, or the producers of From Our Own Correspondent who are so keen on story about the Palestinians, or the BBC World Service, or Radio 4 documentary commissioners, or BBC online editors, or the BBC's numerous obsessive twitterers? 

He went on: 

...mainly because events were going on of such intensity in Syria, Libya and other parts of the Middle East that they just tended to overshadow this long-running conflict. 

Given the BBC's saturation coverage of Operation Protection Edge (Israel v Gaza) last July and August and its relative lack of coverage of Libya since the 2011 military intervention there, I'm inclined (like Benjamin Netanyahu towards Lyse Doucet) to wonder whether Mark and I might not be living on the same planet.

Tuesday

Tuesday night's edition began with more coverage of the Conservative Party conference.

Feelings of déjà swept across me. The focus was on Europe and potential Tory splits - as seems to have been the focus (on and off) for the past quarter of a century.

My memory is failing me here but I'm pretty sure I read recently that someone big at the BBC had admitted that the BBC spent too much time concentrating on Tory splits during the Major years and had paid too little attention to discussing the substantive issue of Britain's membership of the EU itself. (Can anyone help with a source here?) My memory is telling me that the implication of that was the BBC would strike a better balance now.

[Update: Thank to David Keighley, I now 'remember' where I saw it. (David's memory is clearly much better than mine.)

It came from Roger Mosey, former head of BBC Television News, and still remains a striking read here: 
http://new.spectator.co.uk/2015/06/roger-mosey-and-the-questions-you-dont-ask-at-the-bbc].

Well, we'll see! Starting with this edition of Newsnight...

Yes, began Evan, the Tories are feeling chipper at the moment but they aren't masters of all they survey and "now have to walk across a mine-infested field called Europe". "The divisive issue could still split the party apart", he continued. Ah.

Then Allegra reported from the conference. "The Tory Party is right now obsessed about the EU referendum", she said at the start.  If David Cameron doesn't bring back significant concessions from Europe "a heck of a lot" of Conservatives will stop backing him. she said at the close. Ah.

As for other events, Theresa May's speech was, said Allegra, her "hardest line" yet on immigration. "She shocked people outside the hall by talking in very hard line terms on immigration", she added. Mrs May was out to "woo and wow" the Tory faithful, she explained.

Evan then interviewed a pro-European Conservative MP, Damian Green, and a Eurosceptic Conservative MP, Anne-Marie Trevelyan. Evan didn't forget to explore the 'Tory splits' issue:

Damian Green, as I look at the two of you standing their so friendly to each other, very peacefully, there's is no way, is there, you're going to be on the same side in any EU referendum.

Incidentally, the remainder of that question to Mr Green ran as follows:

I mean the Prime Minister's never going to get what Anne-Marie Trevelyan's asking for. She's asking the Germans and French to dismantle the EU basically.

As Damian began answering, Anne-Marie pulled a face and said, "No" (as if she felt Evan was misrepresenting her position). 

And Evan's closing question was: 

Anne-Marie Trevelyan, do you think the Prime Minister, just in a couple of sentences, do you think he can keep the party together with any kind of realistic deal. Come on!

So it was 'Tory splits' to the very end, wasn't it? 

And I'd bet the BBC's coverage will stay like that, just as in the Major years. Nothing will change.

Then Newsnight moved on, very briefly, to another big issue (from 'Tory splits' to 'Tory cutz'), though again hinting at a possible 'Tory split' here too (or at least that's how I heard it):

Meanwhile the other thing causing problems at the Conservative conference is the impending cut in tax credit entitlements for millions of low income families. working families of the kind the party says it now sees itself as the party for. Boris Johnson in his speech put himself on the side of those families today. 

A very short comment from Newsnight reporter Chris Cook followed before Allegra Stratton and Evan speculated about David Cameron's leader's speech the following day: 

It's going to be, I'm afraid to say, it's another bid for the centre ground. It's another bid for middle England.

And so (as she's been given an advanced copy of the speech) it turned out to be. (Why "I'm afraid to say" though?)

Then it was onto President Putin and Syria. 

Mark Urban's report used two talking heads: (1) U.S political analyst Cliff Kupchan on the Eurasia Group, who talked of Putin's "brass knuckles foreign policy". He said the Russian leader doesn't have an endgame and has "bought off a lot" (which I presume means "bitten off more than he can chew"); and (2) Dr Alex Pravda of Oxford University, who said that polls show 69% of Russians don't want to send troops to Syrian and there's even a 40/40 split on the issue of whether to send arms to Assad, 

An interview followed with former Obama advisor Dr Philip Gordon. Evan asked him what he thought Putin was up to. Mr Gordon said Putin is supporting Assad because of (a) his opposition to regime change nearer to home and (b) his fear of what would follow Assad's fall. Evan then said that Western policy is "in tatters, isn't it?" Mr Gordon said. yes, it is has pretty much "failed" and that we need to think again. He seemed open to working with Russia if Russia could help de-escalate the conflict.

Was there any bias here? All of the chosen experts sounded measured, though none sounded anything other than sceptical about President Putin's chances of success, or his motives in doing what he's doing.

Then it was onto the film that has got the left-liberal parts of chattering classes chattering (and if they're chattering then Newsnight is bound to be chattering too): Suffragette. 

Katie Razzall talked to the film's director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan about why its story of the struggle for equality "is still current". Abi said that "basic pay inequality, appalling work conditions, sexual abuse and violence at home and at work, parental custodial rights" are "21st Century issues" - though Katie concentrated on more urgent matters, such as only one-fifth of the films being shown at the London Film Festival were directed by women. "In their industry equality is still a long way off," said Katie. 

And to end came an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. When I closely monitored Newsnight for a few months a year or two ago I found that Newsnight was unusually keen on technology and social media stories, so an interview with Mr Wales was par for the course (and he's always interesting).

This appearance, however, was more in support of a cause he's strongly campaigning for at the moment - the campaign to free Saudi pro-free speech blogger Raif Badawi, whose brutal public flogging by the Saudi regime has appalled many. 

Mr Wales was very critical of Saudi Arabia - and the West's "complicity" with it. He said that our horror at the brutality of the 'so-called Islamic State' should be matched by our horror at the brutality of the Saudis, who are at least as bad as ISIS in his view. 

Given that the final edition of Newsnight this week also dwelt on the human rights failings of the Saudis (and all the controversy over its recent coverage of Saudi 'war crimes' in Yemen), it's interesting that this edition pushed a similar point. Newsnight definitely seems to be on something of a mission to critically investigate Saudi Arabia at the moment. 

All power to Newsnight in that, I'd say - if their motives are honourable. Saudi Arabia deserves to be investigated by the world's media. (Hopefully they'll be taking on the Iranian regime next).

Praise for Caesar, then a dagger in his back

There could hardly be a greater contrast between Matthew Price's defensive reflections on the migrant crisis, stressing the human interest angle to the story, and those of Newsnight's Mark Urban (in his latest blog post, Five new reflections on Europe's migrant crisis), which take a much more measured and analytical approach.

Mark Urban is a fine journalist. I've long been an admirer of his. (Ah, Time Commanders!)

Plus, he doesn't always sounds as if he's in tune with 'received BBC opinion' either (which helps). 

I remember a recent edition of Today where the BBC's Central Europe correspondent Nick Thorpe and John Humphrys were of one mind, it seemed, over the ineffectiveness of the Hungarian fence. A mocking tone entered JH's voice during their short chat. So it could almost have been that discussion which Mark had in mind (though it probably wasn't) when he wrote:

While many people have argued that fences "will never work", the early signs are that Mr Orban's policy of sealing the Hungarian-Serbian border is already having the effect he wanted. It channels people to registration areas (from where they can continue to Germany or elsewhere) and dissuades others from trying to cross.

And the opening section of his piece seems to blow a huge hole in most recent BBC (and other) reporting:

Syrians are a small minority of those seeking refuge in Germany

While the tragedy of those fleeing Syria's terrible civil war has caught the popular imagination, such people formed just 20.1% of those seeking asylum in Germany from January to August 2015. 

If you add together the Balkan arrivals (from Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, and Macedonia) they amount to twice that, 40.2%. The figures for those granted refuge are quite different because many of the applications from Balkan countries are rejected. 

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that tens of thousands of people from relatively peaceful countries have joined the trek to Germany, which is seen as one of the most desirable places in Europe to live. 

To put it more bluntly: they are taking advantage of and increasing this crisis. Statistics (attached report in German) compiled by the German authorities show that while the number of Syrians went up by 177% during the first nine months of 2015 (compared with the same period last year), the rise from Albania was 631%. 

These statistics help to explain both why Chancellor Angela Merkel has faced growing internal dissent about an open door policy (even one that is just intended for Syrians) and tensions with neighbours Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. 

Well, that's something you very rarely (if ever) hear on the BBC, isn't it? 

If true, it's something that should have been very widely reported across the BBC. That it hasn't been surely says a lot about the BBC.

******

I only say "if true" because I don't know if it is (even though I'm strongly inclined to believe it is)...

...and because the following passage in Mark's article rings serious alarm bells with me about his reporting (for the first time ever):

One other point worth noting - the German asylum figures rather undermine Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban's characterisation of the migration as a Muslim one. 

Of course the stats don't give people's faith and Syrian or Albanian refugees are a mix of Christian as well as Muslim. But Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq combined amount to one third of the total, whereas people from either majority Christian or largely secular nations (ie Albania and former Yugoslavia) make up much of the rest. 

What troubles me here is that, in the only other example I've found of the BBC reporting this angle of the crisis - from another Newsnight reporter, incidentally (Secunder Kermani) - the BBC reporter stated, using German statistics, that "Kosovans and Albanians are together responsible for more asylum claims so far this year than even Syrians".

And if there's one thing I know about Albania is that it's a majority Muslim country (with - despite what Mark said - only a small Christian population) and that Kosovo is getting on for 100% Muslim. 

For Mark to be right, using the examples he used, there would have to be a staggering number of Serbs and Macedonians joining the exodus (though Macedonia has a large Muslim minority too, so that might not help his case!), completely overwhelming the Kosovans and Albanians (and Bosniaks)...or pretty much the entirety of Albania's small Christian minority and very few of its Muslim majority must be migrating northwards...

(...and his Newsnight colleague, Secunder Kermani, didn't mention Serbs and Macedonians at all in his report on 'asylum seekers' arriving in Germany...)

Or maybe Mark is relying on the 'missing migrants' from his percentages to boost his non-Muslim stats.

He cites 20.1% for Syrians and 40.2% for people from Albania and the former Yugoslavia, leaving (as the mathematically-gifted of you will realise) 39.7% unaccounted for - though a proportion of those will be, by his own account, Iraqis and Afghanis (so much more likely than not to be Muslim).

Are the rest - by my reckoning, taking into account Mark's 'one third' figure (for Syrians, Iraqis and Afghanis), some 28.4% [!]) - simply to be assumed to be overwhelmingly Christian then?

And even if they were, would that counter the clear evidence that I draw from Mark and Secunder's own stats about the other 70+%: that they are mostly Muslim?

So, is Mark Urban quite as immune to BBC 'received opinion' as I've always believed him to be?

Or am I missing something? (which isn't impossible.)

(Get your calculators out!)

Crying wolf, Newsnight-style

Just to further an earlier point (one I made four days ago, using sticky back plastic)...

Ian Katz's Newsnight seems to be becoming somewhat obsessive in labelling its features as "exclusives". 

I speculated the other day that this is probably because of the Savile/McAlpine fiascos and that Newsnight is now desperately trying to justify its existence by boasting as loudly as it can about every new 'scoop' that comes its way - however tenuous those claims to a 'scoop' may be.

Last night's Newsnight added the QED to that speculative point (or so I reckon).

It began with the increasingly familiar words:

Tonight, a Newsnight exclusive...

The 'exclusive' in question concerned an interview with a former British soldier who served in Afghanistan.

Kirsty Wark's opening presentation outlined what the ex-soldier had told Newsnight: that British forces in Afghanistan became "increasingly despairing that Taliban detainees were let go simply because there was nowhere to hold them".

This, however, is a story I've heard before - even on the BBC.

Rules of engagement imposed upon the British army (by the previous Labour government?) meant that rules had to be followed, even regarding murderous Taliban captives. Many a Taliban killer had to be given over to the Afghan authorities after a strictly limited period of time. The Afghan authorities then, apparently, let many of them go. 

That bit, however valuable, didn't seem particularly 'exclusive' to me.

The one bit that truly did seem new and genuinely 'exclusive'...and I feel a bit sorry for Mark Urban for having been dragged into Ian Katz's 'exclusive' obsession here...was that the former British soldier then made an allegation that the Taliban terrorist who laid the bomb which killed a female British soldier had been released by the British army as a goodwill gesture towards the locals during a Muslim festival and, thus, was now at large. 

Now, that does seem plausible I have to say, but the present government, as Mark Urban made clear, very strongly denies the ex-soldier's' version of events, saying that the Taliban fighter was handed over to the Afghan authorities and then convicted and given a gaol sentence.

As a result I was none the wiser as to which version of events (both credible) was correct. 

Shouldn't Newsnight have dug a good deal deeper here and attempted to find out who was closer to the truth before broadcasting this?...

...especially as the former British soldier (as Mark noted) is presently in dispute with the MoD over financial compensation for a bomb-related injury and post-traumatic stress...

...(which might not make him entirely impartial). 

Nothing that Mark Urban (as scrupulous as ever) said in his following studio chat with Kirsty Wark dispelled my impression that Newsnight was trying to make a lot more of this than was in any way justified by the facts. 

Was this really the exclusive Newsnight claimed it to be? Or just a very interesting interview with a former British soldier in Afghanistan that firmly reiterated some previously-reported things about the absurdities of the UK's 'respectful' rules of engagement, whilst merely adding a strongly denied claim about one specific incident?

I'm very much inclining towards the latter here (as you may have guessed) and am also re-making the point that Ian Katz and Newsnight ought to be much more cautious about engaging in hyperbole (about their reporting) on a daily basis. 

Hyperbole, after all, is closely related to the idea of 'crying wolf'. And we all know what happened to the (BBC) boy who did that.

Bosnia and modern jihadism

This is a ruminative post, written after reading a BBC online article by Newsnight's Mark Urban (written in advance of tonight's Newsnight). 

It's ruminative because I found Mark Urban's piece interesting and insightful, yet I've got issues. 

The piece is headlined Bosnia: The cradle of modern jihadism and makes a persuasive case that the war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s (rather than Afghanistan in the 1980s) marked the true starting point for the kind of brutal, Western-hating jihadism that we're all far too familiar with today.

A Saudi fighter who went to Bosnia at the time tells Mark that this was the moment when people like him decided that "there is a war between the West and Islam".

Mark details some astonishing stuff about the Muslim Bosnian (Bosniak) government's tolerance of such fighters at the time, and part of the ruling party's continuing ambivalence as regards the very high level of Bosnian Muslims going to fight for Islamic State. 

The curious thing is that I, getting my news pretty much entirely through the BBC at the time, saw the Bosnian War as a war between good and evil, victims and perpetrators. The evil perpetrators were the Orthodox Serbs and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic Croats. The Bosnian Muslims were the good guys, the victims, ever-suffering. BBC reporter after BBC reporter shared their pain.

I just don't recall the BBC reporting what Mark Urban is now reporting - that the Bosnian Muslims fought alongside foreign Muslim fighters (fighters who beheaded captured Christians), and that they committed atrocities too.

And from Mark Urban's report, it looks as if we still have a problem in the Balkans (north of Greece) - something I wasn't exactly conscious of either. 

The other thing I want to ruminate about is something that Mark Urban failed to note in his piece - one that counters the jihadi line - for, as I remember, the wicked West (NATO) intervened  militarily in the mid 1990s to attack the Christian Serbs and defend the Bosnian Muslims and then, in the late 1990s, to attack the Christian Serbs and defend the Muslim Kosovans. 

Present day Muslim hatemongers should remember that, and the BBC (including Newsnight) should repeatedly remind them of the fact.

"But its liberal values can be suffocating"

A very striking tweet from Newsnight's Mark Urban, captured by DB at Biased BBC:

Mark Urban ‏@MarkUrban018 Nov@rogermosey excellent piece in the Times. I share your view #BBC no longer dominated by left. But its liberal values can be suffocating.
 Retweeted by Roger Mosey