Correspondents Look Ahead - a look back

Having lived alongside BBC Radio ever since I was a (geeky) teenager, I seem to have been tuning into Radio 4's annual Correspondents Look Ahead for what seems like forever and a day - so long, in fact, that I can't even remember if it actually was  broadcast during my teenage years or not. Is my (middle-aged) memory playing tricks on me?

It's certainly been going on for a long time though.

The sharpest memory I have of the programme comes from the early 2000s and concerns the BBC's then Washington correspondent Matt Frei. 

For a few years, his sneering take on the Bush administration was a regular feature of the programme, and one year (I can't remember which) he confidently predicted that George W Bush would be a one-term president. 

Given that Matt barely ever bothered to disguise his utter contempt for President Bush, that incorrect prediction almost certainly sprang from his personal bias (i.e. wishful thinking on his part) and I listened for that sort of bias thereafter - and for more wrong predictions. 

Finally, as 2012 drew to a close, I thought it might be interesting to try and track this and see, as 2013 dawned, just how many of the predictions made on the previous year's edition had panned out correctly. 

You can read the results here. They show that most of the predictions made for 2012 had been wrong, often very wrong. 

Paul Mason, in particular, made some spectacularly off-target predictions, mostly based on his biased assumption (i.e. wishful thinking) that "people power" would cause uprisings across the world (including Iran, Israel and the U.S.).

Having published the piece before the pre-2013 edition of Correspondents Look Ahead, it appeared to have caught the attention of the programme's makers and my mockery of the section called 'Wild predictions' was duly paraphrased thus by Owen Bennett-Jones:

A rather unkind blogger put up a comment the other day saying we don't need any wild predictions on this programme because all the predictions are badly off-the-mark so it's not a necessary category.

And he ended by saying, 

I hope you enjoyed listening to that and agreed with some of it and kept notes or digital records so that everyone can be held to account.

Well, oddly enough, it was surprisingly hard to take Owen B-J up on that because, perhaps (just perhaps) because of  the filleting the previous edition had just received, the reporters on that pre-2013 edition were vastly more cautious than in preceding editions of Correspondents Look Ahead. 

Trying to find specific, concrete predictions to hold them to account to was much, much harder because they all seemed to be trying so hard not to say anything that could come back to embarrass them the way they'd been embarrassed over the previous edition of the programme. They'd started playing safe.

So, if the pre-2012 edition had been like shooting fish in a barrel, the pre-2013 edition was like trying to capture several dozen eels single-handed. 

And it's been pretty much the same ever since. The BBC clearly hates being embarrassed. (Who doesn't?)

That pre-2013 edition was so slippery and safe that only one cast-iron prediction stands out from it - the prediction of Lyse Doucet (and others) that Bashar al-Assad would fall from power before the end of 2013. 

The BBC was, at the time (as I see it) still in the throws of its naive enthusiasm for the Arab Spring and saw "people power" in Syria too and, as the BBC so often does in such situations, sided somewhat with "the people" against "the regime". If this bias existed (as I think it did, though not universally at the BBC), then it was hardly surprising that BBC reporters like Lyse Doucet might 'wishfully' think the Assad regime out of power and 'the people' into power.

Perhaps another bias (speculating aloud, on a laptop) - the bias against 'overstating' the danger posed by Islamists - led none of the BBC's ace reporters (or most of the mainstream media for that matter) to predict that the vast, competing swirl of variously unpleasant Islamists in Syria (and the region as a whole) might just possibly spawn a monster to out-monster all the other monsters (so far), namely Islamic State. 

This year's edition of Correspondents Look Ahead 'fessed up to having failed to foresee Islamic State (and Russia-Ukraine and Ebola) but last year's edition reflected on that wrong prediction regarding Assad, especially Lyse Doucet who, while generalising the matter beyond the BBC to the West as a whole, seems to sum up some of the biased thinking that pervaded the BBC's reporting of the story:

I think we look at them with the wrong lenses. I think in the West we look at it through the lenses of what we want to see. So for a long time we saw President Assad as a westernised leader with a British-born wife. Then we saw him in the mould of Colonel Gadaffi and Hosni Mubarak, i.e. about to be toppled. It is a police state, so it's very difficult to get to the heart of what's happening in Syria, and my view, in covering this closely, is that many western capitals have seen it through ideological lenses as well, coming out with statements like "Assad must go", "His days are counted". They're not counted, and he's not going anywhere any time soon. 

Well, I would say that I saw a lot of comments at blogs like Biased BBC (and made a few myself) criticising the BBC's sometimes rose-tinted take on "young" Bashar before the 'revolution' began, and Israel and the U.S. never looked at President Assad Jnr so sympathetically, so you can speak for yourself there, Lyse!

And I recall reading plenty of posts and comments (including plenty from Sue) cautioning against what might come in the wake of the fall of Mubarak, Gadaffi and Assad. (Some of the comments from RGH at Biased BBC at the time outpredicted everyone over what would happen in Libya were Gadaffi overthrown before Gadaffi was overthrown) as we denounced the BBC for enthusing over the uprisings. (Ah, alas, they didn't listen to us bloggers!)

And as for "many western capitals" having "seen it through ideological lenses", well, Lyse, is that a beam I see in your own eye?

Most of the successful predictions on last year's programme were so vague (the economy will get a bit better) or so widely expected to happen (like Mr Modi winning the Indian election or Mr Erdogan becoming president of Turkey) that they don't really stand out as prize-winning predictions.

Among the bigger unsuccessful predictions, however, were (1) that John Kerry would help bring about a major breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (2) that talks with Iran would also result in a successful deal. Neither happened, and I'm putting forward both of those wrong predictions as candidates for bias-suggesting wishful thinking. Neither of them were 'fessed up to on this year's edition.

And, returning almost to where the post began, it was on the (then) upcoming U.S. mid-term elections that the BBC reporters got it most obviously wrong last year.

Both Mark Mardell and James Robbins predicted that it would be a bad year for the Republicans with the Republicans failing to take the Senate and the Democrats making gains in the House (though not enough to take it). They reasoned that the public had taken against the Republicans over the budget crisis of late 2013 and that they would punish them for that in November 2014...

Didn't happen. Bias. Wishful thinking. And, again, Mark Mardell didn't 'fess up to it.

As for this edition's predictions, well, we'll review those in a year's time. If we're still here. Which we probably will be.

On Twitter

Hope he doesn't mind me lifting this little Twitter exchange, but here's Biased BBC's DB reminding the ever-opinionated Hugh Sykes of his failings as an observer of U.S. politics:

@HughSykes @BBCMarkMardell "GOP midterms fail" Seem to recall the same BBC narrative pre-2010.
— DB (@4d2b) October 1, 2013

As DB himself puts it, "Wrong in 2010, wrong again".

“Have you enlisted Katty too?”

Oh, for David Preiser's take on this at Biased BBC (David is presently missing, presumed kidnapped. I suspect a police search of Mark Mardell's basement might restore him to us)...

The Times is reporting that Jay Carney, Barack Obama's official spokesman, has 'become the story' - something official spokesmen are famously not supposed to become. 

Republican critics are aghast that he and his wife, writer Claire Shipman, photographed in their kitchen in Washingtonian Mom magazine, have been found to have decorated their walls with two 'two framed Soviet-era propaganda posters, one featuring a female factory worker and the other a Red Army soldier with the legend in Russian asking, “Have you enlisted?”'

According to The Times, "the simple explanation for the posters is that the couple both worked as award-winning journalists in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union."

Still, it's got the American Right a-buzzing, and is (therefore) 'a story'.

David P would be especially interested in this because one of the BBC's least impartial journalists, Katty Kay, who heads the BBC's American outfit, is - in one of  those strange BBC twists of circumstance - the business partner of Claire Shipman. (They've just published another book together, which The Times mentions - without mentioning Katty).

Were he not AWOL from Biased BBC, I'm sure that David would be checking the BBC News website to check out his suspicion that the BBC wouldn't be reporting this story. He'd find, not to his surprise, that they aren't reporting it. 

He'd also be bound to be checking out Katty Kay's Twitter feed to see if she's keeping her gob shut - and, yep, she sure is , even though she's the top BBC presenter in the U.S. and knows Jay Carney very well, and knows Claire Shipman even better.

Of course, The Times is reporting it as if it's an out-of-season 'silly season' story. Which, in a sensible world, it would be. 

MSBBC

As this is the year of Newsnight at Is (well, at least until I get sick of watching it), let's continue where we left off with last night's Newsnight. 

After Ed Balls's big-boned face had filled our TV screens (and accursed be he who invented Widescreen), it was onto the BBC's Katty Kay for a State of the Union report on Barack Obama's record. 

Katty is the entirely natural face of the BBC in the U.S.A., being the anchor of BBC World News America. Commenters on right-leaning American blogs seem to hate her bias but love her English accent and her alliterative name. Katty Kay. Katty Kay. Katty Kay.

As fans of David Preiser at Biased BBC (like me) will know, Katty is the business partner of Claire Shipman, the wife of Jay Carney, President Obama's official spokesman. (Has any other BBC reporter ever had such high-powered connections as Katty Kay?)

Katty talked to Chris Cillizza of The Fix, an influential reporter with the liberal Washington Post reporter and political analyst on the left-leaning counterpart to Fox News, MSNBC. She also talked to Robert Gibbs, someone very close to Barack Obama from the very start of his political career - and, coincidentally, another of MSNBC's top pundits. Next came MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell. 

Hmm, is a pattern emerging here?

Well, as Katty herself often guests on MSNBC (sometimes alongside Chris and Andrea), this seemed quite an intimate MSNBC circle...

...and it got even more intimate as, amusingly, Katty's report contained a clip of Katty asking her business partner's husband, Jay Carney, a question at a White House press conference - and it was as lifeless an exchange as any between two people pretending not to know each other could possibly be!

Still, we did get to hear from someone from the U.S. Republican camp - Michael Steele, former Sofa of the Republican National Convention. He launched into a highly critical assault on President Obama...er...he launched into a highly critical assault on the record of the U.S. Republican Party. 

Curiously, Michael Steele is now an MSNBC political analyst. The intimate circle is now complete!

Bingo!

Presented this way, this may sound like a case of extreme BBC bias, but Katty's report was surprisingly downbeat about Barack Obama's presidency. 

Yes, she may have said that the Republicans are in an even worse place, but I can't imagine Jay Carney being entirely comfortable with it. It chronicled many of B.O.'s failures. 

..unless, that is, it was part of what our Katty called the White House's 'reboot strategy'. 

Barack and Jay's White House certainly does seem to be engaging in a 'reboot strategy'. Call me David Preiser, but this report could easily be seem as part of it. 

Or, counterfactually, could it instead be called 'conspiratorial cogitation' which conversely counters the claim that Katty Kay could be colluding with Carney in a computer-comparison-connoting connivance to reboot Obama...and also (Jay...Kay)...to boost both alliteration and assonance as well? (One for Span Ows there).

Still, there followed a studio discussion which had a balance of guests: Jon Favreau, Director of Speechwriting for President Obama, 2008-13 (and, yes, that was exactly how Newsnight captioned him) and Leslie Sanchez, "Author and republican strategist" (as Newsnight's caption put it - and, yes, a 'sic' is needed after 'republican'). Both were suitably partisan.

Faith schools, Pope Francis, U.S. conservatives, the Central African Republic and the Buddha

Back to this week's Sunday on Radio 4, hosted by Edward Stourton.

What else was there besides happy memories from all concerned of Nelson Mandela? Well,  there was time for some of the usual sorts of thing as well.

There's usually some left-wing campaign that needs plugging, and this week's chosen left-wing campaign group was the Fair Admissions Campaign. They claim that faith schools discriminate against poor pupils. (It's part of their more general campaign to abolish faith-based selection completely in all state-funded schools). They are supported by various secularist organisations, unions, left-wing MPs, equality think tanks, etc. Kevin Bocquet went to - and challenged with their findings - a Jewish and a Catholic faith school (Quelle surprise!). We did hear from both sides of the argument during the report, but it was tilted towards the campaign by having the BBC's Gillian Hargreaves describe the Church defenders' responses with the somewhat dismissive word "utterances", by Kevin's open encouragement to Radio 4 listeners to check out the map on the Fair Admissions Campaign's website, and (almost always a sign of where the heart of a report on Sunday really lies) by giving the last word to a campaigner from the F.A.C. (the programme's favourite Jewish guest, Jonathan Romain).

No less surprising was another piece about Pope Francis, introduced with the words "Pope Francis has, by and large, had a very good press on this side of the Atlantic." (Well, yes, especially on Ed Stourton's Sunday - unlike his predecessor Benedict XVI.) 

This report, however, looked at the less favourable take on Pope Francis from some U.S. conservative Catholics, who aren't impressed with his anti-capitalist rhetoric or his apparently more liberal tone on certain sexual matters. It was presented by the BBC's very own Matt Wells, a reporter who sprays labels (like "hardline", "defensive" and "extreme") around like confetti whenever he reports on the doings of U.S. conservatives, yet never does the same when talking about U.S. liberals. (Funny that!) 

His three expert 'talking heads' were firmly on Francis's side (and the most pro-Francis one was, as usual, given the closing words of the report). Besides some guarded comments from one parishioner, the only voice from the critical conservative camp - the side we were meant to be hearing from - was Rush Limbaugh (a clip from one of his rants) - as if ranting Rush were really representative of that wing of Catholic opinion in America (especially as he's not even a Catholic!). Couldn't Matt be bothered to try to locate and talk to a less easily-dismissable U.S. conservative voice? Did he even try? Probably not. 

Typical biased Matt Wells reporting. 

In the course of the report though Matt played an extract from the Pope's favourite piece of music - the Et incarnatus est from Mozart's Mass in C minor. Good choice, Your Holiness!

There was also a report from the Central African Republic where, as you may already know, the country's Muslim minority spawned first a rebellion, then a military coup and now a staggeringly vicious marauding Muslim militia (alongside Muslim mercenaries from Chad and Sudan) which began murdering, raping and looting on a massive scale, attacking Christians and Christian churches. Vigilante Christian militias formed in response, to fight back and defend both themselves and their churches. It's a desperate situation, verging (according to some) on genocide - and there's been more than enough of those in Central Africa over the past twenty years. 

That's the version of events that I've gathered from following the story over recent months. The account on Sunday gave an impression of the chaos wrought by the conflict there but gave such a scanty account of its origins that most Radio 4 listeners would surely have been left scratching their heads. If I'd been listening to this discussion between Ed Stourton and the BBC correspondent in the area, I'd have assumed that the problem began with the Christians attacking the Muslim population - especially as that's where the BBC reporter began when reporting the very latest developments, and that - now - both sides are as bad as the other. That's not a fair impression for them to have given us, as far as I can see. 

Still, at least the programme had an interesting feature that would have appealed to the programme's Buddhist listeners. As I've said a fair few times before, Buddhists (like Hindus and Sikhs) get a raw deal from Sunday. They rarely get any attention from the programme. (Sikhs fair worst of all). 

The programme discussed some intriguing archaeological discoveries about the Buddha, possibly pinning down the exact place of his birth in the gardens of an active shrine in Lumbini, Nepal and plausibly providing a much firmer date for his date of birth - some time in the sixth century B.C. Until now, that date has been subject to wildly diverging speculation. 

The work - a mixture of science and logic - was done by a 15-strong British team, led by Professor Robin Coningham of Durham University, so well done to them. Nothing is absolutely proven though, so it's far from being the end of the story. Still, it's good to see British academics giving our Buddhist friends some fascinating research. I'd love to know what they make of it out East. 

If Sunday didn't seem to be constantly looking through its own narrow, liberal lens and if it didn't give the impression of pushing various angles so often, think what an absorbing programme it could be.

As this has been a rather serious post, let's end with some Buddhist jokes:

Two monks were sitting in a cave. One was silent. The other one said, ‘I could have done that’.

Q: What happens when a Buddhist becomes totally absorbed with the computer he is working with? A: He enters Nerdvana.

A Zen master once said to me, ‘Do the opposite of whatever I tell you.’ So I didn't.

Congressmen (not) on BBC America

According to the right-wing website Trending Central the BBC has been caught out over its "pro-Obama bias". 

The evidence? A report from the Pew Research Center think tank comparing the coverage of the Syrian Crisis by Al Jazeera America, BBC America, CNN, Fox and MSNBC. 

One of the sections in the Pew report examines the use of sources cited by each media organisation. 

Trending Central notes that all the media outlets relied heavily on Obama administration officials as sources but adds that "the BBC failed to balance its reporting by consulting many representatives of the U.S. House of Congress, the lower house of which is controlled by the Republican Party":

While Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and even Al Jazeera relied upon Obama administration sources for over 50 percent of their coverage on the crisis in Syria, the BBC used just 40 percent. But Fox and MSNBC used 36 and 38 percent Congressional sources, while Al Jazeera and CNN used sources in Congress 16 percent of the time. The BBC came in at just 2 percent on this measure.

Clinching proof of the BBC's pro-Obama, anti-Republican bias?

Tell us what you REALLY think, Edward

There was an interview on The World at One today with Edward Lucas of The Economist which caught my attention. 

Discussing President Putin's carefully calculated two-fingered salute to President Obama in the New York Times, Mr Lucas gave the following appraisal of President Obama - and it's somewhat different to that given by, say, Mark Mardell or James Naughtie:

I think that Barack Obama's proved to be the worst American president since Jimmy Carter. Perhaps even worse than Jimmy Carter. It's a quite astonishingly bad mixture of a very chilly attitude to allies, appeasing enemies, a very calculating, dithering approach followed by impulsive decisions that aren't thought through.

Ouch! If I were Barack Obama, my ears wouldn't just be burning after that; I'd have tinnitus.

"A display of sober strength"

As some of our hard-earned money went towards funding James Naughtie's trip to the United States, I think we deserve some value for money from the Today presenter's reporting on the Syrian crisis.

[circumlocutory, adj. using or containing more words than necessary to express an idea. Synonyms: circuitous, diffuse, garrulous, logorrheic, long-winded, pleonastic, prolix, rambling, verbose, windy].

He was on first thing this morning (6.10) giving Today listeners his appraisal of Barack Obama's big speech last night.

"It was a very sober speech, and he laid out the case for military action, as he sees it - the justification, which he believes is there, for American intervention.

"He explained why he thought it was in the interests of the United States, in the knowledge, of course, that public opinion, as far as it can accurately be measured, is against him on that, and he left the Russian proposal very much to the end and indicated that he was interested in it, he wanted a peaceful solution, if one was possible, to this problem but indicated that chemical weapons were beyond the pale and if the Russian proposal didn't turn out to be what it purported to be then military action was justified and would follow. Congress, of course, would pause, he said. They would give it a chance.

"John Kerry is going to Geneva to see Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, on Thursday, and he said 'let's hope' but he gave no confidence that there would be anything other than, in the end, American military action. So it was a display, on his part, of what I think he would intend it to be - sober strength."

Reads like a White House press release doesn't it?

Not everyone thinks it was a speech of "sober strength" at all, as you will probably already know if you've been reading online newspapers and blogs and not just listening to Jim Naughtie.

Good value for money? Hardly.

Can we have a refund?

Who's a hawk, Mark?

David Preiser at Biased BBC is not impressed with Mark Mardell. To put it mildly. 

Quoting the BBC North America editor's latest blog post, David says "Even here the disgusting Mardell can’t help but let his personal bias cloud his reporting." [That "disgusting" being an allusion to MM's own description of Biased BBC.]

The sentence from MM's piece which has really got David's goat is "The hawks in Congress may not like this but many Democrats will". 

This, as you may be aware, follows the Obama administration's decision to - as Mark puts it - pause over Syria (as a result of President Putin outmanoeuvring them. Not that Mark says that, of course!)

A casual - or even a not-so-casual - reader would assume that those hawks are Republicans, and that the 'pause' is one in the eye for those Republican war-mongers.

As David points out, however, the hawks on Syria are predominantly Democrats. Republicans are, by and large, far more 'doveish' over Syria. 

The incontrovertible evidence to back up David's point isn't hard to find. Try the Washington Post for example.

Surely the BBC's top man in the U.S. is aware of that? So why did he put it that way?

For David, it's clear. Mark Mardell is "an absolute partisan", a "LIAR" and "a complete failure as a journalist", always more concerned about whether things look good or bad for President Obama than about anything else.

I find it hard to disagree. Do you?

Without hesitation, repetition, deviation, or repetition...

Psittacus naughtiecus

The second half hour of this morning's Today programme began with James Naughtie talking (from Washington) to Justin Webb about yesterday's remarkable events over Syria, when Presidents Obama and Assad both giving interviews to the U.S. media, John Kerry made a throwaway remark about Syria giving up its chemical weapons and Russia pounced on that remark to throw an almighty spanner into the U.S. administrations calculations by saying that Syria might indeed give up its chemical weapons, so there's no need whatsoever for strikes. 

From everything I've been reading in the last 24 hours, this has been reported as not reflecting well on either John Kerry or President Obama. Their diplomacy has been slated and Mr Kerry's remark has been widely seen as a massive 'gaffe'. 

So I was expecting James Naughtie to reflect something of that. I certainly wasn't expecting what he actually said:

"I was talking to Ambassador Nick Burns, who you know, very experienced American diplomat, a few minutes ago, and I said 'What about what Kerry said?' and he said, 'Well, I wouldn't call it a gaffe.' You know, what happened? Within three or four hours, the Russians said, 'Listen, we've got a plan'. Now if you look at it in that context, and given that this might suit Obama to have a longer diplomatic game to play, while he keeps the military pressure up...I'm not talking a game that goes on for months, but for weeks...then you can see it...maybe he didn't use the right words...but what it certainly hasn't done is to knock the thing off track. It seems to have opened up a new avenue, and from the point of view of a president who's having trouble on Capitol Hill that's no a bad thing."

Well, that's a paraphrase of what Ambassador Burns said, presumably. 

A master tactician. Apparently.

What followed shows James Naughtie continuing to pretty much regurgitate Ambassador Burns's views wholesale:

"What's going to be absolutely fascinating is that the president is going to speak to the American people from the Oval Office tonight, on Tuesday evening, and that is the moment when he'll try to synthesize these two things - the military presence, which he's undoubtedly trying to crank up on the other hand, but on the other his desire for something that does not involve American military action. The Russians will help in that and, as Nick Burns put it to me, President Putin has got every interest in being a deal-maker in this. That's him. If he can turn the hawkish America into a country that does a deal, well that's good for him, and it's very good for Obama, so who knows? The thing has taken a peculiar, an interesting, and, who knows, a hopeful turn."

Ambassador Burns's take is certainly an interesting one, that's for sure; but it's an unusual one, and a very helpful one for Mr Kerry and Mr Obama. They couldn't have hoped for a more charitable reading of events than that.

Why did James Naughtie simply repeat what Ambassador Nick Burns had to say? Why didn't he add any caveats to it? Why didn't he point out any alternative, less favourable takes on the Obama administration's behaviour? Yes, a pause might prove be a useful thing for the administration at the moment, a chance to catch its breath and get a grip, but that's only as the result of a lucky accident (getting played by the Russians), surely?

Moreover, what sort of reporting is this? Is it the biased reporting of someone who has a warm regard for the Obama administration? Or is it the kind of reporting someone does when they've only just arrived in a country and haven't got a single fresh insight of their own to offer? Or both?

Join the BBC, and see the world

Air stewards and stewardesses probably get to see less of the world than Today's globe-trotting James Naughtie. 

Recently back from Egypt - from where he filed a few award-seeking reports for a few days before returning to Blighty again - Today has now seen fit to dispatch its favourite frequent flyer to the United States, from where he can pontificate (for a few days) about Washington's response to the Syrian crisis, and then win an award for it (fingers crossed).

This sort of thing usually provokes a few complaints from never-satisfied listeners about BBC's profligacy, not that that ever seems to stop the BBC from doing it again.

It seems a bit profligate to me too, especially given that there's already a surprisingly large flock of BBC reporters busily squawking away in the U.S. capital, including North America editor Mark Mardell. 

Why O why O why O why (...ad infinitum...) do they do it?

Still, in Lucky Jim's case it might just be that this could be the last chance the poor man will get to enjoy a foreign jaunt at the licence fee payer's expense, as he's off tae Scotland soon to report on the independence debate up there, and he will nae be flying further than the Shetlands Islands for the foreseeable future.

********

Oh, and what insights did James Naughtie, hot off the plane yet already sounding as authoritative as if he'd been in Washington all his working life, give to his expectant listeners this morning?

Such things as:

"Republicans who control the House of Representatives, naturally, aren't looking at this solely through the prism of the Middle East. For many of them, particularly those who are associated with the libertarian Tea Party movement, or threatened by it in the districts, it's unthinkable to help Obama in his hour of need." 

What a cynical, partisan bunch those Tea Party-aligned Republicans are! People who clearly would never do the right thing if it helped their political opponent. (So unlike the Democrats, of course).

Or at least so I'm led to believe by this particular impartial BBC reporter/mind-reader.

The window James Naughtie has into men's souls, without even knowing them or having talked to them, is surely the reason why the BBC sends him hither and thither, with our financial support, to report on all the major news stories of the day.

Now back to you, Sarah.

Who's dithering over Syria?

Biased BBC David Preiser has been patiently pursuing Mark Mardell, the BBC's North America editor, over the latter's agonised response to President Obama's twisting and turning over the issue of Syria. David's charge is that Mark Mardell is a very biased reporter who allows his opinions to show throw in report after report, and that he often acts as if he were Barack Obama's official defender-in-chief. 

I have to say that if there's one area where BBC bias is particularly clear it's over its coverage of U.S. politics and that David's posts and comments carefully demonstrating why that's the case have long been one of the highpoints of Biased BBC for years. The case he's been making against Mark Mardell seems to me to have been sealed long ago. 

For a chronological take on David's most recent posts and comments about Mark Mardell's reporting of the U.S. administration's stance on intervention in Syria, please click on the links below. (They go backwards in time).

7 Sept - http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/09/07/syria-crisis-raises-question-of-mark-mardells-bias-and-accuracy/

6 Sept - http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/09/04/open-thread-54/comment-page-2/#comment-313495

4 Sept - http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/09/04/six-ways-the-bbc-gets-it-wrong-on-the-president-congress-and-syria/

3 Sept - http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/09/01/mark-mardell-cheerleader-in-chief/#comment-312217

30 Aug - http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/08/30/mark-mardell-whats-so-special/

29 Aug - http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/08/29/open-thread-friday-2/#comment-310985

29 Aug - http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/08/27/open-thread-tuesday-2/comment-page-2/#comment-310872

28 Aug - http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/08/27/open-thread-tuesday-2/#comment-310493

27 Aug - http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/08/24/another-open-thread/comment-page-2/#comment-310362

25 Aug - http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/08/24/another-open-thread/#comment-309975

23 Aug - http://biasedbbc.org/blog/2013/08/23/friday-open-thread-18/#comment-309499

David's writing about Syria reminds me of a series of comments I put on Biased BBC two and a half years ago in response to one of his critiques of Mark Mardell's less-than-impartial dithering over Libya, which shows that 'twas ever thus with Mark's reporting. 

You might also enjoy reading this trip down Memory Lane for its description of a little run-in I had with the BBC's blog moderators.  

1. Craig says:

   March 18, 2011 at 9:44 pm 

   Well, the moderators over at Mark Mardell’s blog are taking their sweet time deciding whether to publish a comment I put on there at midday today. It was never published and the message ‘This comment has been referred for further consideration’ has been up ever since.
   
   It was just a recycling of some comments I’ve made on David’s last couple of posts. What ‘house rules’ can it be breaking? Is it just censorship?
     
   For the record, this is the comment:
   
   This latest blog post is just extraordinary. What a volte-face from Mark!
                                                  
   Answering his own question from the other day about whether President Obama had been “dithering” or “deliberating” – of course he’s been deliberating, despite what the critics say! – Mark presents a thorough-going justification for all Obama’s actions. Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, couldn’t have put a more positive gloss than Mark does here.  
                                                                         
   That the UN resolution is much tougher, ‘at America’s insistence’, than anything those “gung-ho”, “sabre-rattling” Brits and French were asking for, apparently, is a good thing, because it’s “practical”. Mark may have been pretty openly opposed to military intervention in Libya up till now but (a) because his beloved Obama’s policy and (b) because it’s gone through the sainted U.N. (hated by all those nasty conservatives), suddenly it’s a sensible policy.
                                                    
   Mark’s other blog posts have left it very clear where this particular “impartial” BBC reporter stands on the issue at hand. Or did, before the president finally revealed his hand in favour of the policy Mark previously seemed so opposed to.
                     
   Evidence? As well as the give away use in one post of “it may be grown up, it may be sensible in the long run”, i.e the U.S. administration’s apparent opposition to military intervention in Libya, in an earlier post Mark wrote:
   
   “A no-fly zone probably wouldn’t help the rebels an awful lot. But that is not its purpose. It would ease troubled souls in the West and satisfy those who feel something must be done without being over concerned about the consequences or logical implications of that something.”
   
   In other words, Mark was openly arguing that it was the wrong policy, merely useful for soothing a few restless, reckless. illogical Western consciences. It’s a “gesture” that is “more about self-validation than problem solving”. The French and the Brits are “gung-ho” over the policy. They want “Top Gun over Libya”, unlike the “earnest” Obama and his “concerned” spokesman, who don’t. Sorry, didn’t. 
2. Craig says:

   March 18, 2011 at 9:44 pm 

   An earlier post puts Mark’s position just as plainly, though he pretends to be reading the president’s mind:
   
   “I suspect the Obama administration sees it as rather a distraction, dramatic and headline-grabbing, but neither as effective as putting legal and financial pressure on Gaddafi’s henchman, nor as urgent as easing the crisis on the border.”
   
   In the article before that – the one about “Cameron’s no-fly zone fervour” – Mark openly criticizes the British prime minister’s “sabre-rattling”:
   
   “Mrs Clinton’s testimony made it clear she thought America should lead the world through what she called “smart power”.
                
   The UK still has to get used to a world where that doesn’t always imply smart missiles.”
                   
   (Very little of this squares with impartiality of course.)

                              

   What a difference a day makes!

                                            

   Nick Watt of the ‘Guardian’ writes that this UN resolution is a diplomatic triumph for David Cameron, who played a key role in the lobbying of the deeply divided US administration. 

                                              

   Wonder what Simon21 makes of all this.
   
   

   Craig says:March 19, 2011 at 7:20 am 

   Well, the mods published it sometime overnight, after at least ten hours of ”further consideration”. By that time a new Mark Mardell new post had been up for some time and was getting comments. If I’m being cynical, I would say they waited till the old thread ran out of stream and then, because it was safe to do so, published my highly critical comment. If that’s the case it’s a pretty shabby (if clever) way for BBC moderators to behave.

Ignosce mihi, listener, quia peccavi

Biased BBC's David Preiser has been patiently and painstakingly laying out the latest scandals to self-inflict the Obama White House for many months now. His readers tend to be forewarned about most major U.S. stories which don't initially seem to interest American-based BBC reporters (for whatever reason). His readers are also rarely surprised when these stories finally break and take the world by storm. 

Those scandals - which may also have been registering on the BBC's radar for quite some time, though the BBC seems not to have noticed them out of the corner of their (biased?) eye - have, in the last couple of weeks, grown so public and so threatening to the Obama administration that even the BBC's North America editor (you know, the one who doesn't seem to be aware of Canada's existence) has, it appears, felt obliged to post about them - as David himself has pointed out. 

David will probably raise his eyes to Heaven, I suspect, at the blurb on the website for today's From Our Own Correspondent, headed with the mock title 

Conspiracy!

Correspondents' stories from around the world: a field day for conspiracy theorists as the White House stumbles in a fog of political scandal.

Ah yes, those "conspiracy theorists"! 

Who's the correspondent pushing the "conspiracy theorist" angle, introduced with an ironic smirk (reformed in sound) by Kate Adie? One Mark Mardell. (Yes, you know - the one who doesn't report from Canada very often - to put it mildly!). 

Have a listen to Mark's report. His style remains superb. Let me, however, (in an ever so slightly sarcastic fashion) paraphrase it for you: 

Ha, ha, those conspiracy theorists! Sane people believing crazy things. I met a conservative Tea Party guy once, in a field with sheep, being paranoid! Prat! Uh-oh though, it turns out the sheep guy was right and not a prat. The sane people weren't believing crazy things after all and he wasn't paranoid. I was wrong. [He didn't say 'David Preiser was right', but he should have done!]

"In America crazy can be true". The IRS's trawl "is clearly biased against the Right". President Obama denies knowing about it. I believe him, as "there's no evidence". The Department of Justice has been unjust [against the Right]. The Associated Press has been raided. More "intimidation, than investigation".

[As David Preiser told us, long ago...]  the scandal over Benghazi, where "militants" killed four U.S. dipomats and about which conservative critics of the MainStreamMedia [MSM] have been jabbering on about, has been growing too. Yes, it is [through grinded teeth] "largely the case" that the MSM [naming no names, Mark Mardell of the impartial BBC?] has been ignoring this ...but here the President-of-Presidents is a victim here: "The trouble is, that from the very get-go, the President's critics eagerly build on the uncertain evidential sands a tottering tower of such Baroque design that anyone [like me, Mark Mardell] simply looking for facts is a bit put off". Those stupid websites mentioning the President's Muslim-sounding middle name, Jeez!!! The facts look a bit more "prosaic". [Assume a 'prosaic' voice to put a favourable gloss on the administration's spin]. "But in hyper-partisan America there's little mileage in reporting a dull, old-fashioned careerist cover-up."

Some are bound to see "patterns in the clouds, wispy facts". That's the American way. Reds under the beds. Alien cover-ups. Tin foil hats. Watergate, ah, Watergate! Conspiracies can be real. Oh dear, I [Mark Mardell] have had to reconcile myself to that flippin' t-shirt cliché that says, "Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you". I suspect these events will have "a real political importance" in a country where both political sides lack any empathy toward each other and that those who believe the administration is out to get them will be reinforced in that belief, in this "Disunited States of America".

Despite what seems to me to be yet more evidence of Mark's instinctive tendency to feel sympathy for Barack Obama, he is at least admitting (again and again) that he got it wrong. 

Indeed he did. 

I've learned more from David Preiser at Biased BBC (a mere blog - with issues!) than I've ever learned from Mark. Mark, like 'the MSM' in general, ignored these scandals and dismissed those whistle-blowing them as tin-foil-hat-wearing, conservative, sheep-knowing right-wingers. They were wrong. David P was  right. David is never shy of admitting his (rare) mistakes. It's good to see the BBC's rather-more-highly-paid Mark Mardell following suit.

To repeat an old catch-phrase of mine, thank goodness for the internet!

Out with the old...

...and in with the biased!

In my #Occupy post I recalled an edition of Sunday that struck me as providing clear evidence for a 'yes' answer to the question 'Is the BBC biased?'

That was this year's New Year's Day special .

The programme's website lays out the cast list:

"On this special New Year Edition of Sunday, our Presenter Samira Ahmed discusses the role of religion in politics with guests Canon Giles Fraser, Andrew Copson from the British Humanist Association and Inayat Bungalwala [sic] of Muslims UK." 

There was a fourth guest too - "Rosemary Hollis, an expert on Middle East Politics from City University London" -  who contributed to some of the discussions.

For those who accuse the BBC of simultaneously holding a number of specific biases - pro-secular, pro-Muslim, pro-Left, etc - that's something of a cast list from Hell. Giles Fraser is, of course, a left-leaning Anglican (and now a lead writer for The Guardian); Andrew Copson is a left-leaning humanist (and a columnist at The Guardian and The New Statesman) and Inayat Bunglawala is a controversial Muslim apologist (who writes mostly for The Guardian). As for Rosemary Hollis, well, we've met her before. 

David Cameron and the UK's Christian values

Only Giles, Andrew and Inayat joined Samira Ahmed (who pens the occasional piece for The Guardian too) for the first discussion - a reaction to David Cameron's December 2011 speech marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible saying that we shouldn't be afraid to say that we're a Christian country, shaped by Christian values:

"Third, we are a Christian country. And we should not be afraid to say so.

Let me be clear: I am not in any way saying that to have another faith – or no faith – is somehow wrong.

I know and fully respect that many people in this country do not have a religion. And I am also incredibly proud that Britain is home to many different faith communities, who do so much to make our country stronger.

But what I am saying is that the Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today. Values and morals we should actively stand up and defend." 

Can you guess in advance what a secularist, a left-leaning Anglican and a Muslim apologist, all Guardian writers, would make of David Cameron's speech? Do you think they'd like it and agree with it, or not?

Samira Ahmed's first question tackled David Cameron's statement that 'we're a Christian country shaped by Christian values' head on': 

 "Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Society, what do you make of that assertion?" 

A very revealing word that, "assertion".