A non-sarcastic post

A piece of news tonight...

...and a tweet from former BBC presenter/reporter Gavin Esler...

These two things have jointly spurred me on to totally re-think my world view.

In that spirit I wrote the following earlier this evening:

I see that Turkey's President Erdogan is giving the people of Istanbul a confirmatory vote on their recent municipal election.

That was supposedly 'won' by the opposition CHP (who funds them?) via the so-called ballot box. 

Some might say that Mr. Erdogan is simply re-running the election because he lost and that he's a bad loser and anti-democratic. But, despite all the evidence, that's surely nonsense. He's only re-running the election because he rightly thinks that the people of Istanbul deserve a people's vote and a chance to re-visit their earlier (wrong) decision.

All those anti-Erdogan types claiming that they are the democrats ought to be made to answer this simple question: How can anyone who claims to be a democrat say that re-running an election won by the opposition isn't democratic? What could be more democratic than holding another vote? 

And Turkish TV must stop giving airtime to the 'village idiots' of the CHP - the dubious Gulanist supposed "think tanks" and pseudo-experts among CHP MPs who simply haven't a clue what the implications of not voting for President Erdogan's AK party truly are. (Catastrophe for Turkey).

It would be truly democratic to ban them completely (especially as they are like the Nazis, despite being nothing like the Nazis) so that they can't mislead the public any longer, but excluding them from the airwaves would be a good start, and something a properly impartial media would and should do.

And, pace the BBC's John Simpson regarding the UK's EU referendum, Turkish media should provide "clear guidance about what to do" during public votes, to counter the "lies" of the likes of the CHP. The Turkish media certainly didn't give them clear enough guidance about the lies that were being told by the pro-democracy opposition. I suspect that if people had known the facts and had judged in a more balanced way the outcome would have been a bit different, yes. They let their viewers and listeners down.

*******

So, yes, inspired by former BBC man Gavin Esler, I myself now finally see that democracy means stopping wrong-thinking people from being heard, including 'elected' MPs guilty of bad-thinking.

Like his BBC programme Dateline London in its heyday, a true democracy should carefully control the range of voices allowed and ensure that bad-thinking people are either marginalised or excluded.

Bad-thinking is, by definition, bad. Gavin Esler is a good-thinker and knows what good-thinking is. Therefore, Gavin Esler must know what's right.

And if we disagree and think he's a not as good a thinker as he believes himself to be, well, we should just shut the flip up and simply accept his proposed ban on anyone who thinks too differently from him on the subject dearest to his heart from the BBC's airwaves. Because, obviously, Gavin's a good-thinker.

QED.

I was looking at him speaking at a Change UK rally on my widescreen TV and I gazed up at his enormous face on my screen. Over ten years of blogging it has taken me to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath Gavin's bright-eyed, biased TV persona. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two wine-scented tears are at this very moment trickling down the sides of my nose. But it's all right, everything is all right, the struggle is finished. I've won the victory over myself. I love Gavin Esler.

The i-word

Yes, it's that time again!...

Today's The World This Weekend discussed the migrant crisis in light of the EU summit about it and the "hard" policy of what Mark Mardell called the "newly militant" Italian government. 

It wasn't too biased (and Mark even used the i-word ['illegal'] once), but:

(a) The main report featured two pro-migration 'experts' (including Leonard Doyle) and a pro-migration Spanish socialist MEP 'balanced' by an anti-migrant figure from Italy's Lega, and the main interview was with a UN official.

(b) It was striking that the idea of placing migrants in camps around the Mediterranean, including across North Africa, was rubbished by successive speakers and that the BBC's Kevin Connelly said there were "ethical" issues as far as placing them in North Africa is concerned. 

(c) Mark Mardell twice made a point of stating that the number of migrants has fallen drastically since the height of the crisis, making it sound as if there's no longer a numbers problem. Each time he asserted that it's no longer a migration crisis but a political crisis:

• "Illegal migration into the European Union has, in fact, fallen dramatically by 95% since its height in 2015. So it's not so much a migration crisis as a political crisis about migration."
• "Again, it's an interesting point. The problem is going down in terms of numbers but up in terms of political salience." 

(d) It was also striking the difference in tone and content between one interview and the rest of the interviews. If you want to hear this for yourselves just listen to how Mark Mardell interviewed the man from the UN and compare that with how he interviewed the man from the League. I think it's undeniable that the tone was significantly softer with the man from the UN. 

As I say, it could have been worse.

P.S. The other piece was a report by the mighty Hugh Sykes from Turkey. As with other BBC reports I've seen in recent days it focused on the growing strength of the opposition to President Erdogan there. These reports have raised the possibility than an upset is possible. The thought has kept crossing my mind though that, despite all of this, that President Erdogan will probably win again - and by a far larger margin than these reports suggest.

That was only based on a gut instinct and the fact that these things hardly ever seem to go the way BBC reporters seem to think they'll go. The early results of the count are suggesting a landslide for Erdogan. So much for Hugh Sykes, it seems....though the gap is tightening. (Will I be cracking open a bottle of Turkish wine - not that I have one - and toasting Hugh after all?) 

Another introspective post...plus Hugh Sykes on Turkey

Going introspective again for a few minutes...

It is certainly true that impartiality can be hard to achieve, as Sue has always reminded me (in reaction to my far more rigid views on the matter). It's true because we humans aren't robots and because impartiality is a slippery concept and, as a result, it's far from unlikely that the BBC will keep on failing in that regard, even if they were always trying to behave themselves (which they most certainly aren't always trying to do!)...

...and it's also true that a broad, cross-BBC bias might inevitably come about (as it has!) if BBC employees tend to come from much the same demographic and mindset (as they do, often via the Guardian's recruitment page!).

[Ed - That's enough exclamation marks for now, Craig.]

Here's a question though: Should the BBC actually be actively biased, with all of our blessing, in favour of 'good' rather than 'evil', say? Or in favour of 'democracy' rather than 'anti-democracy'? 

(Of course, that depends on what people think is 'good' and 'evil', or 'democratic' and 'anti-democratic', as cultural relativists might put it. I think cultural relativism is very over-rated though).

I was wondering about all this in light of what I've heard of the BBC's Erdogan coverage in recent days - and especially after Mark Mardell and Hugh Sykes's latest discussion on today's The World at One. 

Now, Hugh Sykes certainly got himself wound up this lunchtime in bizarrely contrived comparisons with Brexit (springing, no doubt, from his own views on Brexit) and only just managed to save himself by adding "possibly snobbishly" to his closing, loaded remarks about the Turkish referendum result being a case of "the educated for No against the uneducated for Yes" (and where have we heard that one before?)....

....but the really fascinating thing about this World at One discussion was Hugh's tone. I've never heard him sound so flustered on air before. He was babbling (eloquently of course) in a highly excited fashion at times and was so strongly inflecting his phrases with heavy tones of (unhappy) incredulity that his true feelings about events in Turkey could hardly have come across any louder or clearer - including his obvious view that what has happened in Turkey has been shabby, undemocratic and, all in all, a very, very bad thing. 

And the thing is, from my point of view, that he's obviously dead right about that. It is a very, very bad thing, and he's absolutely right to be so upset (and biased) about it. (Erdogan supporters would naturally disagree about that).

So was Hugh being biased against 'evil' and in favour of 'good' here? If so, good on Hugh! 

And if Hugh and the rest of the BBC were consistent in being biased in favour of 'good' against 'evil', and in favour of 'democracy' against 'anti-democracy', who on earth could object to them being so? 

If they didn't engage in false equivalences between democracies (shall we say Israel perhaps?) and their totalitarian, terrorist enemies (shall we say Hamas perhaps?), wouldn't that always be the right thing for the BBC to do?

And what could be sillier than Lord Hall, say, telling us (as he notoriously did) that the BBC can't call Islamic State 'Daesh' because that's a "pejorative" term used about them by their opponents and, thus, that using it would mean the BBC taking sides? 

Once again, I'm thinking on my feet here (though actually sitting down): Shouldn't the BBC be biased against President Erdogan if most people can agree that he's 'evil' and 'anti-democratic'? 

Or would that give the BBC a blank cheque to pile on the opprobrium even more against anyone and everyone they consider undesirably 'populist' (from Trump supporters to Brexit supporters) - something that most people in the UK might not agree with the BBC about? 

And, given how they already behave, wouldn't they keep on cashing that blank cheque day in and day out, making their bias even worse (if you can imagine that)?

As ever, your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Anyhow, here's a transcript of that World at One discussion:

Mark Mardell: Within the past few minutes the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which has monitored the fairness of a referendum, has described it as being conducted in an "uneven" way, with a misuse of government resources. Our correspondent Hugh Sykes is in Istanbul. You've been out and about this morning, Hugh. What's happening?

Hugh Sykes: Not a lot. Very little triumphalism. There was a bit of that last night, people roaring around in their the cars setting off fireworks. A lot of subdued despondency. I think the reality of this is only just sinking in. It's a bit like the day after the EU referendum in Britain last year. Brexit suddenly came into focus the next day. So people are being thoughtful and quite quiet. But the No side are furious. I mean, that description "uneven" is to put it mildly, from their point of view. They say that Yes played so dirty that they should have won an enormous margin. The Yes campaign got massive support from the government and from television. Imagine the government in Britain only supporting the Leave campaign and marginalising all the people who wanted to stay in the European referendum. It was very comparable to what that would have been like here. And the president is supposed to be above the party here. He certainly wasn't.  His face was on huge banners and billboards alongside that the word 'Yes' in Turkey 'Evet', and the No campaign got hardly any television airtime. There were few, if any, No political broadcasts and dozens for Yes. And to cap it all...They must...they really were desperate at the end. They thought they were going to lose, the Yes side. The prime minister tried to smear No voters by saying that voting No would be tantamount to supporting terrorism. "You're with us or you're with the terrorist." That remind you of anybody?

Mark Mardell: But given that sense of powerlessness from the opposition. do they stand any chance of stopping that, even with the sort of support of the OSCE?

Hugh Sykes: Well, it's a moot point, isn't it? They are going to appeal to the Supreme Court. Will the Supreme court by the time they appeal have been stuffed with Erdogan supporters, and that it doesn't stand a chance? But the appeal would be about the the ballot form decision, this very strange (at the very least) decision by the Electoral Commission last night...said in the middle of the count that they'd accept ballots with no official stamp on them...they are supposed to be stamped, every single ballot...and ballots in unsealed envelopes...every ballot's supposed to be an envelope that's sealed. otherwise it's fishy, and if it's not actual fraud there's plenty of opportunity for it. There's a really bad cloud of doubt hanging over such a tight result. The leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP), Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, commented above all this, "You can't change the rules of the game in the middle of a match".

Mark Mardell: Doesn't sound much chance of a very divided society coming together?

Hugh Sykes: No, it's completely split down the middle. I mean, 51-49. It's not exactly a resounding victory for Yes. And if you look at the map there's a stark colour difference between the Yes places - Istanbul - sorry, I beg your pardon - beneath the No places - Istanbul, Ankara and prosperous industrial and tourism centres along the coast, the south coast and the west coast like Izmir - against the people of the hinterland, against Anatolia, characterised by some, possibly snobbishly, as "the educated for No against the uneducated for Yes."

Mark Mardell: Hugh, thanks very much indeed.

Making a point?

As noted by Marianne on the 'Erdogan and the BBC' thread, last night's BBC One news bulletin seemed determined to make a point about 'the problem with referendums', with John Simpson - no fan of our own recent referendum result - taking a particularly negative view of the process.

Here's a transcript, with the relevant bits in italics:

Newsreader: Good evening. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared victory in a controversial referendum granting him sweeping new powers. He said tonight that the country had opened a "new page" in its democracy. But opponents say the result amounts to one-man rule, with the President now able to abolish the role of Prime Minister and, if necessary, dissolve Parliament. It was a close vote, with widespread support for the constitutional changes in rural areas, but with many rejecting the proposals in the bigger cities, including Istanbul. Opponents are alleging voting fraud and say they'll challenge the result. John Simpson reports now from Istanbul.
John Simpson: Tonight, the victors were out in force, celebrating as though they had won by a big majority instead of by a whisker. In fact, here in Istanbul and in Turkey's two other largest cities, Izmir and in Ankara, the capital, the No campaign seems actually to have won. The worry is that the result has been too narrow to settle anything for good. The bangs aren't just fireworks. Those are guns being fired. The fact is that there is a big underlying level of nervousness and anger here, which, really, the result of this referendum, being so close, hasn't done anything to calm down. "Tayip Erdogan will be a world leader, God willing", says this man. "This is history, history!" However slight his majority in the referendum, President Erdogan has taken the decision to push through his far reaching constitutional changes and deal with any consequences.
President Erdogan: Today, the decision made by the Turkish public is an historic moment. This is not an ordinary decision. This is a not an ordinary day. It is a very serious change for Turkey's future."
John Simpson: Then he went out to speak to some of his supporters face-to-face. They chanted "Bring back the death penalty!" and he seemed favourable to that. His argument all along has been that only a really strong presidency can galvanise Turkey into being successful and wealthy. So he is getting rid of the old constitution's checks and balances, giving himself the power to hire and fire the country's judges, and he has made it possible for himself to stay as president until 2029. There had been one or two small opposition demonstrations but he's stamped down so hard on his opponents in recent years that they are reluctant to come out onto the streets in any great numbers. The Yes campaign may not have won the popular vote in the capital, Ankara, but tonight it held its celebrations, all carefully choreographed in advance. This has been indeed a day on which history was made. But it is likely to cut Turkey off further from its old allies in Western Europe and America. What we have seen today seems like a major change of course. 

Newsreader: Well John, this appears to be a fairly narrow victory. 52% to 48%. How is President Erdogan going to bring this country of 75 million people together?
John Simpson: Actually Clive, I really don't think that he wants to bring people together very much, after all he's won this narrow victory by demonising the opposition, stirring up quite a lot of anger and sometimes a certain degree of violence in the country. I don't think he's now going to say, "Alright, you've got a viewpoint which we are prepared to listen to." I think he's just going to carry on, forcing through as he forced the referendum through. As for the opposition, what do they do? Well, you would have expected them to be right here in Taksim Square in the centre of Istanbul, where there have been so many demonstrations over such a long period. There's absolutely nobody here whatsoever. It looks as though the opposition, for the time being, is simply stunned by their failure to win. Most people in the opposition thought that they would just make it. So what do they do? Well, I think a lot of people are going to leave the country, they will go to the West in different ways and I think they are going to sit there. The last big demonstration that happened here by the opposition here was in 2013. And that was followed by deaths and a large amounts of injuries and I think the hearts, the stuffing, has gone out of the opposition altogether.
Newsreader: OK John, many thanks for that. John Simpson there in Istanbul.

Of course, they may very well be right about this referendum and its result. 

Erdogan and the BBC

Listening to today's The World This Weekend was a little disconcerting. 

They began with Turkey and Recep Tayyip Erdogan's referendum on whether to make him, as Hugh Sykes put it, Turkey's 'Super-President' or not. 

As I've written before, it's struck me previously (whether rightly or wrongly) that the BBC used to give Erdogan a very good press, downplaying his early anti-democratic statements and previous Islamist declarations of intent, portraying him as an acceptable face of political Islamism, and, later, airing the case that Turkey's example might be a positive model for Arab Spring-struck countries to follow. But then, some time around 2013, Recep Tayyip seemed to fall from grace with the BBC. That came (it appeared to me) with the Geza Park protests, when crowds of liberal-minded Turks ('people like them') began flooding the squares of Turkey's cities and a woman in a red dress got tear-gassed. And, to my ears, the BBC's coverage has got ever less favourable towards Erdogan ever since. 

Now that, of course, might be because Erdogan has got worse and worse as time has passed rather than because of BBC bias. That's a possibility that shouldn't simply be rejected. 

What was so disconcerting about today's The World This Weekend, however, was just how far this has gone. 

We had a Hugh Sykes report from Turkey which featured three critics of Erdogan followed by a Mark Mardell studio interview with a fourth critic of Erdogan. Supporters of Erdogan were conspicuous by their absence. 

And there could have been a fifth critic - one of Hugh's friends - but she didn't want to be featured. 

Balanced it most certainly wasn't then.

And the even more striking thing about The World This Weekend's coverage was that it had an extremely consistent angle: that Erdogan is a "populist"...

...and, as we know, being a "populist" is rarely 'a good thing' for the BBC. 

Evidence? 

Well, there was Mark Mardell's introduction describing him as "arguably one of the  first leaders of a new populism now washing all over the world" and Hugh Sykes's report quickly asking "Is or was President Erdogan one of the first populists...long before Trump and Brexit?" before going on (near the end of the report) to explicitly answer this question by calling Erdogan "a populist president".

One of Hugh's Erdogan critics agreed that Erdogan was indeed was one of the first populists and "has become a very successful populist leader" (though he obviously didn't mean 'successful' to be take as praise for the president). 

The second critic said that "some of the narratives that Erdogan is using also very much sound like other populist leaders in the US like Donald Trump in America and the far right in Europe - conspiracies, nationalism, a strong leader and a very us-versus-them society". 

And at this point Hugh Sykes said:

If Erdogan gets his Yes vote he says he wants to bring back the death penalty. If he does that the door into the European Union will shut tight. My friend who's too nervous to talk to me on the record sounded a warning to all populists from the Turkish experience. If you encourage contempt for the educated elite you may end up sabotaging your country. 

That sounded (to me) like Hugh getting his own point across (about 'populists', including those who vote for Trump and Brexit)...

...an impression reinforced by the fact that this statement was immediately followed by Hugh's final Erdogan critic agreeing with his absent friend that populism's "demonising" of elites is harmful and that this is where the Turkish president "starts to resemble the populist leaders in Europe and America".

And Mark Mardell's studio guest (the closing Erdogan critic) then immediately echoed Hugh Sykes's many voices, beginning:

President Erdogan is following this manual of right-wing populism. So he constructs a fear of internal and foreign enemies with an us-versus-them rhetoric.

Now, I'm presenting what I think is a very clear case of BBC bias here (in the strict sense of the term 'bias'), and I'm doing so even though I am entirely on 'the BBC's side' here, praying that Erdogan loses and that he then goes on to lose the next election to his secularist opponents. But even if BBC bias sometimes echoes my own feelings (as it sometimes does) that doesn't, of course, make it right....

....except - and this is, perhaps, the big question here - if the BBC is doing what many of us would support it in doing, namely standing up for democracy across the world. 

Is that what the BBC are doing here? Seeing that Turkey is sliding into dictatorship and taking sides against the coming dictator? Or has Erdogan disappointed them by changing from the nice Islamist who bashes Israel into 'a new Trump'? 

(As you can see I'm thinking aloud here. Please feel free to help me work it out!)

Incidentally, this programme took me unawares. I was already intending to write something sometime over this weekend about the fact that such thoughts had already struck me earlier in the week, specifically during last week's coverage of Turkey on Newsnight when Evan Davis chose to characterise President Erdogan as an "authoritarian nationalist" rather than as an 'Islamist'. I thought at the time that suggested (to me) that Erdogan is now considered 'a bad thing' at the BBC. 

Evan's interview with Erdogan's chief advisor (an interview characterised by the Erdogan man repeatedly denying Evan's presentation of events in Turkey) was interesting, by the way, for the way it signalled just how unhappy Turkey is with the EU and just how much Brexit seems to be giving them even greater pause for thought about EU membership. Under Erdogan Turkey has become significantly more Eurosceptic. I'll avoid accusations involving 'tinfoil hats' by not suggesting that this could be another reason why the BBC might have fallen so far out of love with President Erdogan. 

Maybe the BBC is being impartial here. And has always been impartial over Erdogan. That's certainly what the BBC would say. I've heard enough of the BBC's coverage over the past decade or so, however, to say that I don't think they have been impartial and that, flip-flopping, U-turning, they've gone from being quite sympathetic to the Islamist Erdogan to being antipathetic towards the authoritarian nationalist Erdogan. And, from my own personal bias against Erdogan, that's fine by me - except that, wearing my 'objective BBC bias blogger' hat, it also isn't all right by me. 

Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated (if you've braved this post's tl;dr tendencies and made it all the way to the end). 

A conspiracy theory or a conspiracy?

There was a very striking 'audio essay' on this morning's Broadcasting House from American novelist and translator Maureen Freely (who also writes for the Guardian and Independent). 

Her subject was 'coups in Turkey', and she recalled previous coups - some of which caught up her left-wing family and friends.

This latest coup attempt, however, struck her as something very different from those previous coups:

Let's start with the military, which was pretty much decapitated seven years ago when Erdogan incarcerated its entire top echelon on treason charges he later dropped. 

How could a handful of officers operating inside the severely compromised force have dared to think a coup possible? 

Why, when they went ahead anyway, did they focus on the photogenic or the iconic - Istanbul Airport, the Bosphorus bridges, the National Assembly, the Monument of the Republic in Taksim Square? 

Why were the troops and tanks they sent there so few in number and so vulnerable to the angry mob?  

Why, while the coup was being live-streamed, did its leaders fail to show their faces?  

Why was no attempt made to capture Erdogan? 

How, amid the chaos, did he manage to FaceTime the entire nation before landing at an airport that had stopped all flights? 

Why by then was there an imam singing solidarity from every minaret?  

Why, after the coup was crushed, did the President urge his people to return to the streets? 

This was, of course, a call for scepticism, and she strongly implied that this was all far too convenient for President Erdogan in his ongoing attempts to crush all dissent.

Those questions, from what I've read and seen so far, are certainly pertinent ones.

******

The two other voices on BH who commented on the attempted coup (or should that be 'attempted coup'?) were UKIP's Suzanne Evans and Newsnight's James O'Brien, and both shared Ms Freely's heavy leanings towards a 'conspiracy theory' here.

Suzanne Evans said:

Since this failed coup on Friday night Erdogan's government have rounded up over 2,800 soldiers and put out over 2,700 arrest warrants for judges, of all people. And you just think, how did they manage to round up nearly 5,000 people so quickly? There are rumours circulating that Erdogan is not exactly unhappy with this coup, that he might even have had something to do with it. These kind of actions actually almost seem to fuel that idea......But whether it was or it wasn't [planned by Erdogan], what concerns me about this is that this will give Erdogan an excuse to clamp down and pursue an ever more extreme Islamist agenda.

James O'Brien said;

It is, you're right, hard to imagine that these rounding-ups could have been in direct response to an 'unexpected' coup, but I guess it's the slow dismantling of Ataturk's legacy.

******

Are Maureen Freely, Suzanne Evans and JO'B  correct in their suspicions? 

Was this whole. bloody affair a 'Black Ops' operation by the Erdogan government?

(If so, it was very black indeed, given the loss of life.)

I tend not to believe in conspiracy theories though. Should I start to here?

******

One thing I do know is that Radio 4 can't be accused of pro-Erdogan bias here. 

Reporting Erdogan

There was an interesting edition of Start the Week this week on the subject of 'Reporting War and Conflict', some of which focused on Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. 

One of the points made was that Erdogan is fighting a particularly 'dirty war' in the south east of his country and that the Western media has been largely ignoring it, despite many atrocities being committed there. Some of these atrocities have been so bad, it was argued, that if they'd happened in Syria they would have been all over the news. And, it was also claimed, this "disgraceful" under-reporting is happening despite countless reporters being based in Turkey, sitting looking over the border looking at what's going in Syria (or sitting looking at the migrants going to and fro between Greece and Turkey). 

Is the Western media (including the BBC) ignoring or downplaying the 'Turkey-Kurdish war' in south-eastern Turkey in order to stay on the right side of Erdogan? Of is that too conspiratorial?

Trying to check this out a bit, it does appear (to me) that some of the strongest claims of Turkish atrocities against the Kurds derive from reports from RT (Russia Today). Despite (and maybe also because of) Seymour Hersh's strong backing for the claims, that raises a few doubts in my mind. 

My impression (rightly or wrongly) is that the BBC's coverage of Turkey under Erdogan used to be quite favourable. I recall the impression being given over many years that his AK party was 'mildly Islamist' and a sort of Turkish Muslim equivalent of Germany's Christian Democrats (a comparison I heard several times). Then PM Erdogan became an Israel-bashing 'champion of ordinary people in the Arab world' and during the 'Arab Spring' BBC programmes about, say, Tunisia's Islamist Ennahda party would suggest that such Arab Islamist parties were trying to follow the 'moderate' model of Erdogan's Turkey. My impression (again rightly or wrongly) is that the BBC only fell out of love with Erdogan when crowds of anti-Erdogan 'people like them' began flooding the squares of Turkey's cities in 2013 and a woman in a red dress got tear-gassed. Their coverage appears to me to have become somewhat more critical thereafter.

In the days when 'people like us' felt that the BBC was forever 'shilling for Erdogan, we'd post comments demanding to know why the BBC wasn't reminding us that the now-Turkish president once told a newspaper, "Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off". As Erdogan is now 'stepping off' the tram with a vengeance (and 'we' are all thinking 'Told you so!), maybe the BBC will find itself having to use that quote after all, again and again and again.

Paul Mason and the Salford Popular Front

Readers of this blog may recall the post BBC Correspondents Look Back...In Embarrassment where I was, as the programme's presenter Owen Bennett Jones was to jokingly put it a week later, somewhat "unkind" about four of the BBC best-known reporters and their powers of prediction. 

The BBC reporter who came off worst was Paul Mason. All but one of his predictions for 2012 turned out to be wildly off the mark. I had some fun with all his disastrous predictions...plus the spectacularly wrong ones he'd made for 2011 and 2010. He didn't dare make any predictions for 2013!

This Marx-like inability to predict the future accurately wasn't, however, the most striking thing about his appearance on the New Year 2011/12 edition of BBC Correspondents Look Ahead; no, far more remarkable was the way he kept shoehorning his revolutionary fantasies into discussion after discussion. It descended into pure Wolfie Smith-style absurdity as the programme proceeded.

On the likely fate of the Assad regime in Syria, after all the other reporters had argued their cases sensibly enough, he leapt in to give listeners this "insight" about the Syrian conflict:

"There is this other elemental force, isn't there? People power!"

I didn't think much of that insight then, and I think even less of it now! For a top BBC reporter to say something so silly about the Syrian conflict beggars belief, doesn't it?

The following discussion of the "Arab Spring" was then interrupted by Paul's intervention to bring up the Occupy protests and predict "the urban poor" moving against the system in the United States during 2012 - another complete fantasy on his part!

Then his involvement in the discussion about the possibility of air strikes on Iran basically amounted to predictions of "the unrest of a generation" and an "uprising youth" in Iran during 2012 - which also turned out to be another figment of his revolutionary imagination.  

Then there was his contribution to the discussion on the Middle East, which was to bang on about the "street protest movement" in Israel and insist "But it's not over" when, actually, it was!

He even predicted unrest in North Korea in 2012.

To quote my own mockery of "former" Trot Paul Mason's performance here:

Not in 2012 it didn't, Paul. And you're sound like a stuck record now. Power to the people! It's kicking off everywhere! Occupy, occupy, occupy!

I'm dredging this back up here because something of the revolutionary fantasist, so evident in this programme, is making itself felt in Paul's reporting from Turkey at the moment. 

David Preiser at Biased BBC is firmly on Paul Mason's case over this, here and here. 

David describes the BBC man as being "hungry for revolution", which is precisely how the offending article sounds to me too. Please have a read of it: Analysis: The hopes that blaze in Istanbul. It's quite something!

Paul gets very involved in drawing parallels between what's now happening in Turkey and the Paris Commune of 1871. The spectre of "Commune"ism is haunting Turkey apparently. He also brings in Occupy and the "Arab Spring". He finds left-wing nationalists (Ataturkists) and anti-globalist protesters ("Communists, anarchists, democrats"). What he doesn't find though are "the workers". It may be kicking off, but it ain't a revolution till the workers turn up, he says. As David Preiser puts it:

So it’s significantly larger than Occupy, but with broader support as with Tahrir Square, and “everyone” is there in Istanbul. Yet Mason says it’s all meaningless until the sainted “workers” show up.

The so-called “Arab Spring” didn’t start out as a workers’ rebellion, did it? His darling Occupiers were mostly not workers, either, and it’s pretty dishonest to act as if the Occupy movement was a workers’ rebellion of some sort. Is this the only prism through which Newsnight’s economics editor can see things? 

I can't resist adding David's parting barb:

I think it’s time we changed Mason’s job title from Newsnight economics editor to something more appropriate for what he does. Should we call him the BBC’s “It’s All Kicking Off” editor? BBC Revolution editor?

Now, does this article (echoing his Newsnight report, which is also featured in the online piece) really tell us more about Paul Mason's left-wing revolutionary fantasies than about impartial realities? 

To test this out, I tried a spot of internet browsing, sampling at random a number of other articles featured prominently on Google News. Reading them has opened my eyes even further. 

If, as I hope you have, you read Paul Mason's article, you may be a little taken aback at how different a picture these extracts paint to his:

Many of the young protestors admitted that they had little idea what they were protesting, though they joined in the cries calling on the government to resign. "We are here because we are bored," laughed Arlen, a high school student who, holding hands with her friends, looked on from a relatively safe point. Barkhan, a young man who was in the front line against the police chanting "shoulder to shoulder against fascism" offering a different perspective. "Of course we are protesting against police violence," he said, "but there is a ridiculous situation here when some of the guys here are using too much violence against the police."

                                         Anshel Pfeffe, Ha'aretz

They belong, as perhaps does the woman in red, to the ranks of young, articulate women who believe they have something to lose in Erdogan's Turkey. They feel threatened by his promotion of the Islamic headscarf, symbol of female piety.

Many of the women point to new abortion laws as a sign that Erdogan, who has advised Turkish women to each have three children, wants to roll back women's rights and push them into traditional, pious roles.

"I respect women who wear the headscarf, that is their right, but İ also want my rights to be protected," says Esra. "I'm not a leftist or an anti-capitalist. İ want to be a business woman and live in a free Turkey."

                                        Alexandra Hudson, Reuters 

The protest was unusual in that it brought together young and old, the rightwing and leftists, and nationalist Turks and Kurds. They complained of issues beyond the planned shopping centre from government policy on the war in neighbouring Syria to new curbs on alcohol and a recent row about kissing in public.

                                        Constanze Letsch, The Guardian

Aysegul Atesdagli, 25, a master's degree student at Istanbul University, had been at Taksim two nights before and couldn't go to work Saturday because she was sickened by the tear gas. "Right now, there's no right wing or left wing in Turkey, no religious or non-religious," she said. "I have seen some (religious) women in (head scarves) in the protests. It's beyond any ideology right now."

                                         Rhonda Abrams, USA Today

This clearly isn't quite the left-wing "Occupy-movement-awaiting-the-workers" revolution that Paul Mason is presenting in his excitable article. It seems to be a lot more complicated than that. It seems, indeed, that Paul really is projecting his ready-made left-wing revolutionary fantasies onto a complex situation. Again.

Is that why all of Paul's late 2011 predictions of continuing street protests in Israel, of youth uprisings in Iran, of 'people power' in Syria and the rising up of the poor in American turned out to be so wide of the mark? Was he simply projecting his ready-made left-wing revolutionary fantasies onto those complex situations too and, as a result of this deeply biased starting, found that all of his predictions of revolution crumbled to dust? 

Seriously, is this what we expect or want from a senior BBC reporter?

...and, less seriously, shouldn't the BBC take up David Preiser's suggestion and rename Newsnight's economics editor its It's All Kicking Off editor? I, for one, think it should.