"Hardline conservative Christian views"

Another lady I follow on Twitter was thinking what I was thinking on reading a tweet from BBC Radio 4's Sunday programme first thing this morning:

What we both thought was this:

Emily Buchanan's introduction really got the ball rolling:

Emboldened by Donald Trump presidency right-wing religious groups in the US are introducing bills in state legislatures promote hardline conservative Christian views. Last year they published a set of off-the-shelf 'model bills' promoting these right-wing Christian values, and this year one of those 'model bill' known as the 'In God We Trust bill is being introduced in several states in the US. Tara McKelvey has been to a town called Springfield in Missouri Ozarks to find out what's being proposed.

I'll let Fran continue the story:

• All the click bait words. ‘Right Wing’ ‘hard line Christians’ and horror at opposition to abortion. (Funny how that horror doesn’t extend to the foul details of abortion.)
• Ah. It’s about the sort of things we take for granted in the UK. Like having Bibles in school, or recognising that Christianity provides core values on which national values are built.
• So. Hard line Xian values = students praying, reading Bibles etc in schools without being taken to court - as they have been lately in the US.  Militant secularist views re separation of Church & State are highly disputatious. Christians are fighting back. Good. Good! 

All very 'Sunday'.

Some world of long ago past

For those who want a taster of Radio 4's Beyond Today without having to listen to it for more than a few seconds, this should give you an idea of what it's been like so far:

How has #MeToo changed American politics? 🇺🇸

BBC White House correspondent @Tara_Mckelvey offers a glimpse inside Donald Trump's presidency on the new #BeyondToday podcast

Listen now on BBC Sounds 👉https://t.co/kBs0wQ2E8y pic.twitter.com/QXFfUgv0jl

— BBC Sounds (@BBCSounds) November 9, 2018

Thumbs down for Gina Haspel?

I'd have thought that arch-feminist Katty Kay would have been delighted that a woman has been appointed to head the CIA (the first woman to head the organisation), but, alas, her Twitter feed has shown no interest in this feminist angle. Her lone tweet about Gina Haspel's appointment by President Donald J. Trump is this re-tweet:

And John Simpson has similar concerns:

And the following 'Analysis' on the BBC News website uses some telling adjectives:

A return to dark practices?

Analysis by Tara McKelvey, BBC News, Washington

The White House shakeup has profound implications - and particularly for the CIA. The agency's work is conducted with nominal oversight, and many decisions hinge on the discretion of the director. This morning the president spoke approvingly of the acting director, Gina Haspel, pointing out that she's a woman in a high leadership position.

As an intelligence officer, she was known for her harsh views: she ran a notorious black site in Thailand, a place where prisoners were waterboarded. She's now working for a president who's been ambivalent about the matter. He said in the past he wanted to bring back waterboarding. James Mattis, the defence secretary, convinced him otherwise.

The president could change his mind again - if Ms Haspel and other intelligence officials said they believed it was necessary. In this way the US could return to its dark practices of black sites and brutal interrogations.

It looks as if the BBC will be voting against Gina Haspel's appointment at the Congressional hearings...

...though actually, come to think about it, they don't have a seat in the Senate, so they can't. Oh well.

Only connect

A Dead Ringers joke about Libby Purves's Midweek on Radio 4 was that the sainted Libby would always manage to find some extremely convoluted way to connect all of her random guests (say an astronaut, a novelist, a stamp collector and a homicidal maniac) and thereby create a happy web of interconnectedness between them. 

Dead Ringers's Libby would doubtless have been delighted by a prominent feature on the BBC News website this weekend by the far-left Greek journalist Maria Margaronis entitled Savitri Devi: The mystical fascist being resurrected by the alt-right. It brilliantly manages to connect a Nazi (Savitri Devi) to Golden Dawn and Richard Spencer (no great stretch), and then to Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and Narendra Modi, linking them all in one wide web of mystical fascist evil.

Now, Maria is quite careful in her wording about Mr Bannon in particular (and, having Googled around, I can find nothing that directly connects him to the Nazi Savitri Devi. Can you?) but certain BBC journalists  - like the BBC's White House reporter Tara McKelvey - are being less cautious in response:

No, Tara, Maria didn't say that. She only very strongly implied it. (And that's not the same thing - at least legally-speaking).

Anyhow, Maria and Tara aren't the only ones busily connecting things at the moment. There's a piece at the Guardian by Carole Cadwalladr today which almost as brilliantly manages to connect "Trump, Assange, Bannon, Farage" in "an unholy alliance". 

Reading it, I believe the headline writers seriously undersold the piece. The headline should have read, "Cambridge Analytica, Trump, LBJ, Assange, Bannon, Bigfoot, Farage, aliens, Putin, Leave.EU, the Loch Ness Monster...bound together in an unholy alliance". 

An invite to the Newsnight studio is surely winging its way to Maria and Carole as we speak, and it's surely safe to say that the late, lamented Libby Purves (still thankfully very much alive at The Times) wouldn't have had to work too hard to harmoniously connect them.

Of Shoes and Shirts

Two Kates

Stephen Daisley's Spectator piece on the hypocrisy of some feminist journalists over Melania Trump is well worth a read. It begins:

Stephen cites a number of spiteful American examples, but if you want to see some first-class British journalistic sneering and tut-tutting at Melania then just take a look at last Tuesday's The Papers on the BBC News Channel (from five minutes in) where a couple of media Kates can be seen sniping away at the First Lady over her choice of shoes with not-so-merry abandon. 

And the BBC presenter, Clive Myrie, joined in the sneering too. ("Interesting attire...She put her flats on...They were quite shiny...Well, how often does one get to go to a disaster zone?"). 

Kate 1 was wearing an old-fashioned black top with white polka dots. Kate 2 was wearing a gender-neutral white shirt (as befits someone from the Huffington Post). Clive was wearing a BBC dark blue suit with a striped blue tie and white shirt.  None of their shoes were visible under the table. 

The BBC's very own White House correspondent Tara McKelvey, accompanying the Trumps on Air Force One, used her Twitter feed to report the latest presidential visits to Texas and Louisiana, sending regular updates and photos. Among the updates were:

Tara's BBC website report on the Presidential couple's tour of the hurricane-hit areas is quite complimentary about the President's own performance (albeit in a slightly sneering BBC way), with lines such as this:

Still, on the Trump-o-meter scale, the things he said and did on Saturday - and earlier in the week too - did not seem all that bad.

I can't see what shoes she had on when she wrote that though. Nor did she even bother to tweet a photo of her own shoes either. I can't help feeling that was an opportunity missed on her part.

"Two jurors cried after the verdict was read. So did I."

Following the death sentence returned on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev by a U.S. federal jury, the BBC's chief reporter on the story, Tara McKelvey, has written an interesting piece for the BBC website describing the mixed emotions at the sentence in "liberal Massachusetts".

She herself admits on Twitter to having wept when the verdict was read out:

Two jurors cried after the verdict was read. So did I. Jahar Tsarnaev was led out. As we left the room, a clerk said, "Have a nice day."

— Tara McKelvey (@Tara_Mckelvey) May 15, 2015

Other journalists at the BBC simply think the jury's decision was a mistake:

The extremists are winning.. :( Death sentence for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev http://t.co/ftD7Q5IrUi

— Steph Hegarty (@stephhegarty) May 15, 2015

Update: And talking about our Steph...

Alan at Biased BBC has been doing some digging. I knew she was recruited to the BBC World Service from the New Statesman, but I'd not found what Alan has found - a piece written (in January 2011) after she became a BBC WS journalist (in May 2010) where she expresses her fears about losing her job at the BBC World Service and excoriates the (then) coalition government from a very left-wing position.

For her the BBC World Service is the part of the BBC that "continually addresses the displaced, the marginalised and the poor", but...

Many will argue that the World Service is a relic of its colonial beginnings. It is far from that but that is what it will become. Until now the service has been unimpinged by the corrupting forces of the market. In the next few years however programmes will look to sponsorship from multi-national organisations and NGO’s to the detriment of independent reporting. If the World Service is to survive it will only do so by becoming a tool of corporate colonialism exporting the ideals and propaganda of those with money on those without.

The coallition (sic) government will continue to thump about quashing every public institution it can, tearing apart the welfare state, selling schools, forests and anything they can feasibly attach a price tag to. The World Service is just another casualty in what is already an old but painful story.