BBC bias and reverse ferrets

Bias by News Agenda Choice and Bias by News Prioritising are top of the shop on THE BBC's OFFICIAL FESTIVE FIFTY BIAS TECHNIQUES with good reason. 

The first is 'the biggie' - 'If we don’t report it, it’s not news' - but the second is often its partner-in-crime: 'Sometimes we can’t avoid reporting something but we can certainly give it very low priority. It only needs to appear for a nanosecond for us to be able to say that we have done our journalistic duty'.

I was reminded of that by how the BBC has been reporting the latest dramatic development in the story of the Steele dossier [an early high-profile element of the fake Trump-Russia collusion story]: the arrest and indictment this week of Igor Danchenko - a key source for the dodgy dossier - for allegedly lying to the FBI about his connections with the Democratic Party [his main source being a senior Hillary Clinton ally]. 

I've used TVEyes and scanned BBC One, BBC Two and the BBC News Channel. Both BBC One and BBC Two haven't reported it at all. 

Let's not forgot that the Steele dossier [which included the infamous claims about Donald Trump, a Moscow hotel, prostitutes and 'golden showers'] led BBC One's News at Six back on 11 January 2017, with then-BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood lending it credence. 

[Mr Wood even went on to write a Spectator piece in early 2018 headlined In defence of Christopher Steele and a piece last year [12 August 2020] headlined Was the ‘pee tape’ a lie all along? where he still attempts to stick up for Mr Steele's dossier].

Now, however, it's apparently not worth reporting.

That's Bias by News Agenda Choice. 'If we don’t report it, it’s not news'

Now for Bias by News Prioritising - 'Sometimes we can’t avoid reporting something but we can certainly give it very low priority. It only needs to appear for a nanosecond for us to be able to say that we have done our journalistic duty': 

This is a classic. The BBC News Channel did cover the story. They reported it just once, at 9.15pm on 4 November, and their coverage lasted all of 22 seconds. And that was it for the BBC News Channel too.

And: blink and you'll have missed it [as I did], but the BBC News website covered the story too. You won't find their report now unless you actively search for it because it's nowhere on the site's main pages [Home, World, United States and Canada], though it doubtless had its 'nanosecond' in the sun.

The BBC website report itself is striking for its sheer chutzpah:

A Russian analyst who worked on a dossier that made unsubstantiated claims linking Donald Trump to the Kremlin has been arrested in the US.

The Department of Justice charged Igor Danchenko, 43, with lying to the FBI.

He was detained as part of an inquiry into the origins of baseless claims that Mr Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.

The so-called Steele Dossier was used by the FBI to obtain surveillance warrants on a top Trump aide.

The document was held up by Democrats to paint Mr Trump as a Russian puppet, a narrative amplified in a feedback loop by most US media for much of the president's four years in office.

I believe that's called a 'reverse ferret'. 

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P.S. Now, here's another conspiracy theory for you - and it's unfolding as I'm writing this piece. 

A few minutes ago I went back into that second Paul Wood Spectator piece mentioned above - Was the ‘pee tape’ a lie all along? -  and the timestamp had changed to today's date...

Then the piece vanished...

And now it's back again with the original date...

 

I'm wondering: Has Paul Wood just sneaked back in and stealth-edited it?

A point of view

The sub-headline in my hard copy of this week's Spectator only makes it worse. Underneath the headline The brutality of the Beatles and above the byline naming the author - Paul Wood (of the BBC) - comes the sub-headline Why the Isis torture gang must return to Britain to stand trial.

That gives the game away. This is an opinion piece, an argument, as much as a report - though the reporting part of it is excellent, informative and grim.

Comments could be going better though. The general response can be summarised as 'Wrong. Let the Iraqis try them and hang them. They committed their crimes there. And it will save us the expense'. 

Another legal disaster for the BBC (and long-suffering licence fee payers), thanks to libellous BBC reporting

Corrections and Clarifications

Mr Speaker might well advise the BBC's Paul Wood to take a soothing medicament, or a sedative, or to take up yoga, or to practise zen, restraint and patience, or to become Buddha-like after the awful week he's had.  

Little did I suspect, after name-checking him on Monday as "the BBC reporter most intimately associated with the Trump-Russia conspiracy theories", that the 'bad news' for him from Robert Mueller's report (seemingly debunking much of his journalistic work over the last couple of years or so) would be followed so swiftly by this second heavy hammer blow:

The BBC's report doesn't name the BBC reporter in question but The Graudian's report does. And, yes, it was Paul Wood. 

[Bold lettering required!]

His BBC News website/BBC News at Ten reports of 23 May 2018 (claiming that the Ukrainian president bribed Donald Trump's lawyer for access to the US president) aroused the wrath of the Ukrainian leader.

Mr. Poroshenko then sued the BBC for libel in the British courts and won.

Paul has, thus, landed the BBC - and, thus, BBC licence payers - with the bill for the Ukrainian president's damages and legal costs.

Oh dear, what a falling-off! In his days of reporting from the Middle East Paul Wood struck me as being one of the BBC's best reporters. And now it's come to this.

A spot of serious soul-searching is obviously needed from the BBC's Paul Wood.

And a spot of serious soul-searching is surely also needed from the BBC. Did they encourage Paul here? Could it be a consequence of institutional anti-Trump bias at the BBC?

Also, such flagrant lapses seem to becoming significantly more common at the BBC, so the Corporation needs to stop being so insufferably complacent and get a grip. 

The Hollow Men

Anthony Zurcher?

T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men ends with his most famous lines of poetry: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."  

The Hollow Men of Lord Hall's mainstream media must have been thinking something similar when the news of the Mueller report's findings came through last night. 

The New York Times at least didn't try to sugar the pill for its readers this morning: 

So is this going to provoke some urgent soul-searching on the mainstream media's part? 

DB provided a very helpful screengrab of some of the Spectator headlines for pieces written by the BBC reporter most intimately associated with the Trump-Russia conspiracy theories:

I'm very intrigued to see what Paul Wood writes about it next. He's invested so much in ever-so-impartially giving the claims credence that his take on what went wrong with much of the mainstream media reporting on the subject - including the BBC's reporting and his own reporting - would be riveting to read.

Will such soul-searching take place?

I turn, as we all surely must do, to the beating heart of the BBC - the BBC's World Affairs Editor John Simpson. He's surely the weather vane for the BBC here.

And - alas, not unsurprisingly- we see him reaching for straws and rolling on regardless. 

Here are his twittered opinions on the matter so far:

• "Being (apparently) cleared of collusion with Russia may help Pres Donald Trump win re-election.  But Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal says even if there’s not enough evidence to prosecute him for criminal conspiracy, questions remain over whether Trump has been compromised."
• "Anne Applebaum, Washington Post: Russia made extensive efforts, through hacking emails as well as information warfare, to help Trump win in 2016. Members of the Trump campaign knew this in advance. Trump publicly called on Russia to release information that would hurt Clinton."

I suspect he's going to be highly representative of Lord Hall's mainstream media. 

Follow–through and Focus

Talking of the Spectator, the BBC's Paul Wood writes occasional articles about Donald Trump for it. His latest piece, What does the British government know about Trump and Russia?, hasn't gone down with the magazine's below-the-line online commentariat. They think it stinks of BBC bias. 

It's certainly a strikingly-written piece where every claim of wrongdoing (whether by Trump, or Arron Banks, or Russia, or the British government) is made to sound credible (sometimes with Paul Wood himself explicitly pronouncing it credible) but carefully caveated with 'some people say'-style get-out clauses. In the end, however, when you stand back from it a bit, it strikes you that not a single actual piece of the described wrongdoing has yet been proven. It's still all smoke and no fire.

And he's also quite capable of misreporting the President. One thing even some critics have conceded is that Donald Trump is following through on his election pledges and getting lots of them up and running. He recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved the US embassy there. He pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal. He withdrew the US from the Paris climate accord. He moved to renegotiate NAFTA. He pulled out of the planned Trans-Pacific Partnership deal. He introduced a travel bans for residents of several Muslim countries. He got tough with China on trade. He talked to Kim Jong-un. He got his tax cuts passed. He got his Supreme Court nominee accepted. He bombed Islamic State into oblivion.  Paul Wood, however, is sticking with the old line:

And Theresa May was the first world leader through the door of the Oval Office to see the new president. But whatever promises she wrung from Trump will depend on a follow–through and focus he has not shown. This is a president who could not get his own healthcare bill past a Republican Congress.

For a President with no follow-though and focus, his actions seem to show a lot of follow-through and focus.

A shower of sarcasm

The Spectator has a BBC foreign correspondent embedded with them, namely Paul Wood. 

You might remember him from the BBC's Trump 'Golden Shower' coverage (where he lent credibility to the allegations on BBC One's main news bulletins) or, if you're a Spectator reader, you might recall his unpopular piece speculating on whether Donald Trump might be assassinated (a piece entitled Will Donald Trump be assassinated, ousted in a coup or just impeached? that had all manner of Speccie commenters saying they were cancelling their subscription forthwith).

His latest Speccie piece speculates on the coming last days of IS's 'caliphate' (though he reckons what could come next will be "just as dangerous" - or "even worse", as the article's online headline puts it). It's an interesting, thought-provoking piece. 

Naturally, however, it drips with beautifully-crafted sarcasm against Ol' Trumpie: 

Donald Trump...came into office impatient to finish off the jihadis. As the country star Toby Keith sang at the inauguration, the new President nodding along: ‘You’ll be sorry that you messed with the US of A. Cos we‘ll put a boot in your ass. It’s the American way.’ During the primaries, Trump repeatedly claimed to have a secret, ‘absolutely foolproof’ plan to defeat Isis. This, it turns out, consists of telling the Pentagon to come up with something. The Department of Defense has been given 30 days to fill in the blank space under the heading ‘Secret Foolproof Plan’. The presidential order says: ‘The Plan shall include a comprehensive strategy and plans for the defeat of Isis.’

Is there a BBC reporter left who won't be sarcastic about the present US president? 

Fake or Fortune? with Fiona Bruce

Of course, the main story on tonight's BBC One News at Six concerned Donald Trump, those lurid allegations and the President-elect's press conference.

It dominated the early stages of the bulletin.

Having been at work today I've missed most of the action on this story but have gathered, from quickly reading around, that many news organisations chose not to take the golden opportunity provided by Buzzfeed to spray the gory details of the unverified story all over their news-sheets and that Mr Trump, at his news conference, paid tribute to much of the media for behaving so 'responsibly'.

I also gathered that CNN and the BBC were explicitly not included in that praise from President-elect Trump, with him calling "Fake news!" to a CNN reporter and saying, "BBC News, that's another beauty!", when the BBC's Ian Pannell introduced himself.  

It's intriguing that the incoming US president regards the BBC in such a bad light.

Ian Pannell's 'cheeky' question (following that dig from the President-elect) can be fairly summarised as 'If the false story turns out to be true will you resign?'

That won't, I suspect, have changed Mr Trump's mind about the BBC.

And tonight's BBC One News at Six included a remarkable piece from the BBC's Paul Wood, in which Mr Wood lent considerable credibility to those lurid claims.

Revealingly, Fiona Bruce introduced Mr Wood by saying that he's been following the allegations "for some months". 

Despite the odd not-exactly-fulsome caveat - such as saying that Mr Trump was "literally correct when he says this is unsubstantiated" - Paul Wood made it pretty clear that he thinks the evidence of blackmail tapes is strong because his sources have told him that "there's more than one tape; there was audio as well as video; it was on more than one date and in more than one place...". "An in addition to that", he said, there's not just the MI6 officer but also "a retired spy" and "the head of an East European intelligence agency" saying much the same thing.

Now, if - as per Ian Pannell's question to Donald Trump - it does turn out that this sensational shower of blackmail allegations is true after all, then the BBC will be up there with Buzzfeed and CNN in providing true news. 

If, however, it doesn't turn out to be true (and can be shown not be be true), then the BBC will be well and truly up to its neck in fake news -  though, naturally, guilty of purveying that fake news with all manner of unconvincing distancing nudges and winks (BBC impartiality of course). 

And if, as an unverified and maybe unverifiable story, the story remains unverified, then the BBC will be firmly in an extremely grey area between true news and fake news (where it seems to be now, to be fair).

Well, those are my initial impressions. They may well be wrong.

P.S. Anyone who has seen footage of the CNN-Trump incident will have spotted that the BBC News at Six edited the incident in such a way that it looked as if Trump was saying that the CNN reporter was being rude to him, whereas Trump was calling him rude for talking over a female reporter. 

The BBC would doubtless defend themselves by saying that they had no malicious intentions and by citing the demands of time - even though (a) the impression I suggested would be left in unsuspecting viewer's minds surely would have been left there by that editing and (b) the missing bit lasted barely seconds and could easily have been included.

P.P.S. There's much more from the BBC's Paul Wood tonight at The Spectator. He's sticking to his line.

‘Just fack off, you dirty people, roo-nin’ our ’oliday’

From Paul Adams to Paul Wood...

The BBC's Paul Wood has a piece on the Mediterranean immigrant crisis in The Spectator.  His language tells us a fair amount about where he's coming from. 

It begins:

A young woman in a headscarf stumbled over some rocks and onto the beach. She stood there, rigid, stunned, then burst into tears. A grandmotherly German tourist hugged her. ‘It’s over now, you’re safe,’ she said. ‘You’re in Europe.’

I don't think, however, that we're meant to approve of the lady with the Essex accent though, given the way Paul Wood mocks her way of speaking (and her hair):

On Lesbos, the boats’ arrival is a tourist attraction, people gathering on the road above the beach to watch. ‘Just fack off, you dirty people, roo-nin’ our ’oliday,’ shouted a peroxide blonde woman with an Essex accent as a group of migrants struggled over the lip of the hill onto the road. 

This is reporting that appears to adhere to Lyse Doucet's view of BBC reporting:

I do believe absolutely that we have to show compassion. Otherwise we would...I mean you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by what is happening in the wars of our time. 

There was certainly plenty of compassion...and anger in Paul Wood's Spectator piece.