A Brexit Collection update

Regular readers may recall an earlier post on BBC Radio 4's Brexit Collection.

Radio 4's Brexit Collection is a gathering-together of Brexit-related programmes, presumably intended to act as a showcase for the station.

All the items were listed and described in that post and, taken in the round, offered such an overwhelmingly negative take on Brexit that I ended by writing:

My ruling? The exhibits exhibited here by the Defence are the most damning gathering of exhibits I've ever seen. The BBC has gifted the Prosecution. The verdict is beyond reasonable doubt: The BBC is guilty of bias. Case closed.

If you've reviewed them too (and are being fair-minded) I really don't think you could possibly disagree with that (if I say so myself). The overall level of overall bias (against Brexit) was absolutely astonishing.

Six more exhibits have since been added to the Collection (some of which we've already written about here at ITBB):

Emma Jane Kirby's Brexit Street reports for PM

David Aaronovitch's The Briefing Room: Why Did People Vote Leave?

Front Row's The Cultural Response to Brexit special

Anne McElvoy's How We Voted Brexit

Gus O'Donnell's Brexit: The Leavocrats

Gary Younge's East Europeans in Brexitland

All - except for (Remain-supporting) Anne McElvoy's fine and completely fair documentary - had an anti-Brexit bias.

Regular readers will know all about Brexit Street and its ongoing painting of untypical Leave voters as racist morons (one of the most skewed and wrong-headed pieces of BBC reporting in a long time).

They may also recall The Leavocrats as being an openly personal and very one-sided piece from a strong Remain supporter. 

Another strong Remain supporter, Gary Younge of the Guardian, got two half-hour programmes to focus on claims of post-Brexit racism, without providing much in the way of actual direct evidence. (David Keighley and Ken MacIntosh both slammed this colossal smear on Leave supporters over at The Conservative Woman.)

A further strong Remain supporter, David Aaronovitch of The Times, was more subtle on his two-part The Briefing Room (a companion episode looked at Remain voters), though his expert guests inclined towards Remain and towards a thesis which, controversially, connected Leave voters with people who wanted hanging and flogging (yes, both!). The Remain supporters got more time and much less 'scrutiny'.

And, finally, Front Row's discussion wasn't without a couple of Brexit-friendly (left-wing) guests (for balance!), but had a panel heavily loaded against Brexit....the worst, I'm ashamed to say, being Morecambe's very own Wayne Hemingway, who pretty much called for riots to keep us in the EU....and, not unusually for the BBC, an audience that was even more loaded against Brexit. It pretty much amounted to one big sigh about Brexit.

So, all in all, that's another avalanche of anti-Brexit-biased BBC broadcasting to swell the already vast snowy plain of anti-Brexit bias found in BBC Radio 4's Brexit Collection. 

Except for those two A Point of Views from Roger Scruton and John Gray, the whole thing provides clear proof that the BBC has a severe post-Brexit bias on the subject of Brexit, against Brexit.

*******

And it's a bias that evidently isn't fading with time....

The latest Radio 4 Brexit special (not yet included in the Brexit Collection) came via this week's In Business - the first post-Brexit edition of the programme to tackle the issue of Brexit.

And what angle did they choose?:

And, yes, it was largely negative about the Brexit vote and the possible consequences of Brexit.

Quite where the idea of 'BBC impartiality' can be found in the vast majority of this I'm at a complete loss to say.

Canary in the room

Talking of The Canary, I listened to David Aaronovitch’s “The Briefing Room” having seen that the editor of the Canary was on the programme talking crap about the evils of Zionism.

They’re discussing it on H/P as well. Go there now if you’d like to see a wide variety of opinions on the programme. 

I just thought the 28 minutes was too short. No time to be of much consequence. Although David Hirsh refuted the forced sterilisation story, it hung in the air  - and lingered there. 

I had to look it up to remind myself what had happened. It’s precisely the kind of story that Israel-bashers pick up and run with; they get away with it simply because they can. No-one can be arsed to check it out.

Transcription thanks to "Happy Goldfish"

(Kerry-Anne Mendoza 0:18:26) "The Comparison of Israel to Nazism or the atrocities of the Third Reich. What evidence is there for that? Well, what other state in the world do I know of in the present day has been behind the forced sterilisation of Jewish women? That would be Israel, It was applying Depo Pravera**, long-term contraceptive injections, to Ethiopian Jewish women. I think that's an anti-semitic act. I think it has horrific echoes of some of the atrocities, not all of them, some of the atrocities perpetrated by the Third Reich, and I think it's right to call that out. I would call that out in any state anywhere in the world where Jewish women or any other group of women were subject to forcible sterilisation to prevent some sort of racial dilution, which wasthe theory behind that process. Do I think it's helpful for people to go around willy-nilly attempting to bait Jewish people by calling them Nazis? Absolutely not. But do I think there issome evidential case for saying there are echoes here of some the worst behaviour that we have committed in Europe? Yes I do."

** Depo Pravera is a 3-month contraceptive

I see Sarah AB has crashed Gene’s post (I do that here sometimes, it’s very jolly) and she has contributed a fuller summary of the programme.

It was good to hear Owen Jones talking more sense than usual, especially when he demolished Kerry-Anne Mendoza’s Nazi comparison, and I was impressed by his seemingly heartfelt admission that it was up to people on the left (like him) to speak out. 

He has come in for a lot of flak from some of his followers for what they see as a betrayal. 

It’s a common problem - one isn’t entirely responsible for the excesses of one’s fans. In fact the excesses of one’s fans can act as an eye-opener, and can prompt one to reevaluate some of one’s lazier assumptions. 

As for Owen, I can’t help remembering his passionate condemnation of Israel over the death of the baby Omar  Mashhrawi  which crossed the line between rational and irrational by way of his stubborn refusal to recant, even after the institutionally anti-Israel UN found that Israel was ‘not’ responsible.

The new Owen almost smacks of a bandwagon hastily jumped upon; the boy Owen with a youth’s keen sense of smell, having scented a whiff of an imperceptible shift in the direction of that elusive moral high ground. 

Owen, when did you stop being antisemitic?

The elephant was still there of course. The lazy repetition of that phrase “What Israel is doing”, which is never challenged  - and the blind spot that looms so large that it reduces everything else to candy floss, an inability to acknowledge let alone confront  the Jew-hate that emanates from the Arab world and the Palestinians that the silly lefties have adopted as pets.