I decided to watch Sky News's coverage of the election of the new pope, Francis I (the former Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires).
Hosted by Colin Brazier, the coverage featured commentary from Alastair Bruce - the channel's go-to man for big national and international events. Mgr. Mark Harold of the English College in Rome and Austen Ivereigh of Catholic Voices were their guests throughout, providing perspectives on what was unfolding before our eyes. Background and descriptive detail were given with no apparent axes to grind. The election was viewed as an historic event.
Other reactions followed later. First came the Archbishop of Westminster, Dr. Vincent Nichols, followed by the historian Michael Walsh, two Croatian Catholics, a couple of British holidaymakers, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor and the left-leaning economist Loretta Napoleoni.
I also recorded the BBC News Channel, watching back through the same period later in the evening, thus witnessing history being made twice!
Jon Sopel presented for the BBC. At his side was the BBC's religious affairs correspondent Robert Piggot. Their guests throughout were Robert Mickens of The Tablet and Fr Tom Reese, former editor of The Catholic.
The emphasis was starkly different from that of Sky News. The BBC presented it as much more of a political event.
Plus there were plenty of very apparent axes being ground by Mr. Mickens and Fr. Reese, who of whom share a strongly liberal outlook, which they projected forcefully throughout the BBC's coverage. Mr. Mickens is famous for weeping with distress at the announcement of Cardinal Ratzinger's election to the papacy as Benedict XVI. (He didn't sound at all distressed by Cardinal Bergoglio's election). Fr. Reese is well-known for being ejected from his editorship of The Catholic by the self-same Cardinal Ratzinger. Neither are fans of the Pope Emeritus then.
It does seem to me to be highly revealing that the BBC chose two such prominent liberal Catholics to be their commentators for this historic event. Their shared perspective dominated the broadcast, especially as Fr. Reese was later replaced by another well-known liberal Catholic, Mgr. Roderick Strange. Like the others, he sounded relieved/pleased at the choice of Cardinal Bergoglio.
Later reaction was gather from Chris Bain of the aid agency Cafod, a less-than-impressed sounding Argentinian BBC producer called Julian (who described Cardinal Bergoglio as "controversial" for his views on gay marriage and seemed to rather take Jon Sopel aback with his negative tone), two Ecuadorian girls in the crowd, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, some more Latin Americans from the crowd, various other BBC reporters in Latin America, plus David Willey.
I'm glad I watched Sky News first. I prefer to watch history being made without being overwhelmed by a particular, partial, politically-minded, one-sided point of view. I'm afraid that's what we got from the BBC.
“UN disputes Gaza strike on BBC man’s house.” That was the header above Jon Donnison’s attempt to rationalise his latest unverified accusation against Israel and the dissemination thereof.
I’m dismissing it as “rubbish”. In fact I’ll make that The Heading.
Why dismiss it as rubbish, I hear you plead. For one thing, the caption: Jehad Mashhrawi's 11-month-old son Omar was killed in the attack on his house in Gaza, is still in place, though everyone but Jon Donnison and his fellow travellers now accept that it is most unlikely that there was an “attack”, at least not a deliberate one, and not by Israel.
Then there was the subheading within the piece, near the top: “Rubbish”. Why? Because way down the paragraph, “rubbish’ is cherry-picked from a quote from Jehad (formerly known as Jihad) Mashrawi, dismissing the UN findings as such. That was worth quoting, Jon, wasn’t it? Worth a whole subheading, obviously. I wonder which copy editor thought of using that particular one, and why, but it’s a good idea, if you want to get a message across. I like it.
Blunders.
Teflon-coated Jon Donnison has a habit of making reckless Tweets. His Twitter blunders are legendary, yet he appears to be indestructible. I wonder why.
As a general policy, do all the BBC’s Middle East reporters conspire with the editorial staff back home, frantically bashing out blue-sky ideas for spin, and creative, outside the box strategies for damage limitation, just like the in The Thick Of It.? What shall we say and how shall we say it?
At any rate, someone somewhere has decided to add an “Israel says” to whatever any Israeli spokesperson ever says, so the BBC can be seen to be fair for reporting Israel’s case while simultaneously casting doubt on the veracity of it. Someone somewhere has chosen to give the Palestinians plenty of ‘verbatim’, and some copy editor or other has managed to select the appropriate sub heading for maximum subliminal effect, and perhaps another higher up the chain has decreed that some random statistics about disproportionality are tacked on to any and every piece of news at any and every opportunity.
Blame.
So in a short sharp war - provoked, don’t forget, by continual acts of aggression by the Palestinians, a baby is killed. The victim’s father is one of the many Palestinians on the BBC payroll. He’s variously described as a photo editor, a cameraman, a journalist, a colleague, no-one seems quite sure, but knowing him personally makes this tragic incident seem all the more poignant and moving. So much so that blaming Israel is a done deal. No problemo. Any other scenario is unthinkable. Who, but a rabid Zionist would dare object?
He Only Knew How To Lie.
Donnison knows what effect his propagandistic emoting has, as he calls that image “iconic”. Like the al-Dura image, which was the catalyst for so much violence and anger, it was a deception. An image, not of reality, but symbolic; for some, that’s all it needed to be. Jon Donnison is a professional, so his grief doesn’t get in the way of his journalistic integrity, and he hastily produces a mawkish article entitled “He Only Knew How To Smile”. Apologies for ridiculing that title, but it kind of begs for it. Sorry sorry , but I can’t help bouncing it back. “He only knew how to lie,” says a voice in my head.
Pleased with his effort, he fires off a Tweet with a link to the BBC webpage that bears the emotive piece of journalism.
Cobbled Together.
He knew how to lie perhaps, but not how to Tweet. The tinyurls got in a muddle, and he inadvertently linked, with one click, not to the intended ‘He Only Knew How To etc., but to a blog that had also examined the tragic incident. Elder of Ziyon no less. Fancy that. Now we know that Donnison reads Elder, ignorance of the counter argument is no longer an excuse for one-sided reporting. In his article ‘Elder’ explained precisely why the conclusion was anything but foregone. He even suggested that circumstantial evidence rather indicated that responsibility for the death of baby Omar lay at the hands of one of those harmless rockets, which Hamas are known to have cobbled together from old bits of wire and chewing gum.
Regurgitated.
Before Donnison could correct it, an eagle-eyed viewer had captured the rogue tweet and blogged it on the Israelly Cool blog, thereby exposing the probability that Donnison was already well aware of the dubious nature of the case against Israel, but had chosen to dismiss the inconvenient factoids and fire his accusation regardless, sending it into cyberspace to be digested, regurgitated and implanted into the brains of the baying mob.
Apology.
Donnison’s immediate lunge for excuses of the kind he and his cohorts dismissed out of hand when they were justifiably made to dispute the Goldstone Report mark one was pure irony; he pleads that much of the initial evidence was gathered a) belatedly, b) was hearsay, and c) was taken from partial witnesses at face value. Perhaps, like Goldstone, the UN will backtrack. Who knows.
For additional ammunition Donnison cites various quotes from ‘the family’ and ‘human rights groups’, Israel’s lack of a denial, and finally if not definitively, a fanciful concept; the absence of Hamas’s ‘usual apology’.
If the absence of Hamas’s usual apology has certain implications for Jon Donnison, what are the implications of the absence of another even more fanciful concept, the lack of the BBC’s “usual” apology?
Anyone waiting for an apology from Jon Donnison will have a long wait. When the UN released the findings that proved him, if not wrong, then presumptuous and premature in his unequivocal condemnation of Israel over the death of baby Omar Mashrawi, Donnison resorted to the default BBC defence: “I am still right. It’s all the fault of the shifting centre of gravity type of thing.”
So, instead of the straightforward mea culpa of the kind that the wise people of the media agreed would have saved Chris Huhne, Donny cited the “It’s not me, it’s you” defence, which, for several reasons sounded remarkably familiar.
He has decided to cast doubt on the UN’s findings. The investigations were too little, too late, i.e. unreliable, he says. ( Where have I heard this defence before? Oh yes, after the Goldstone report, but in that case it was employed in Israel’s defence. Then, despite being initially pooh-pooed by the anti-Israel brigade and the likes of the BBC the doubts eventually proved valid)
So perhaps this time too there is something in that. Maybe the UN was slipshod, and came to the wrong conclusion. It’s not the most scrupulous, reliable, impartial body in the whole wide world. But why would it err in that particular way? The UN is hardly Israel friendly.
Again, in the scheme of things that’s neither here nor there.
The bigger picture is that as Donny himself says, “A photo of BBC video editor Jehad Mashhrawi cradling the corpse of his baby son Omar became one of the iconic images of November's short war.”
How did that come about, pray tell? Something to do with Donny and the BBC?
So using it as another weapon in the BBC’s Operation Besmirch Israel campaign is still
a-okay with Donny, UN findings or not.
No regrets. Je ne regrette rien. Not even a ‘sorry my latest Israel-busting bombshell went viral on the offchance’ And just to make sure no-one is in any doubt that Israel is guilty, even of things it hasn’t actually done, Donnison reinforces the message with a cluster of familiar, gratuitous little aftershocks.
“The UN report concluded that at least 169 Palestinians were killed by Israeli attacks during the offensive.
It said more than 100 were civilians, including 33 children and 13 women. The report said six Israelis were killed by Palestinians attacks, including four civilians.”
He might just as well have come clean, and admitted that in his opinion it doesn’t matter who has done what, because we know Israel is evil and anyway it does that sort of thing all the time. That’s what they said about al-Dura
I don’t know about authentic, but it is certainly a symbol. That’s why it’s important to keep the symbolism authentic, and not cavalierly inflammatory.
In the Spectator Owen Jones has defended his outburst on Question Time. His strategy was to blame the media. I was only going by their info, he claims. Well, not just ‘going by.’
It was his starting point, indeed. It was the inspiration from which fired off one of his ill-informed pernicious flights of fancy. My findings are that that one fell short.
The idea behind Dateline London, hosted by Gavin Esler, is a fine one. It gathers together four journalists from across the globe to provide a broad perspective on events at home and abroad. That's the sort of programme I like.
Unfortunately, the variety of nations invited is frequently not matched by any equivalent variety in the range of opinions on offer.
This week's edition was fairly typical. The panel consisted of four regular guests.
We had Ashis Ray, usually introduced as being the London correspondent of the Times of India but this time introduced as being from RayMedia (presumably his new venture). Ashis doesn't come across as being a great ideologue but his views are pretty much what you would expect from a left-liberal Indian: Keen on the centre-left Congress government of India, passionately dislikes the right-wing BJP opposition; regrets the poor showing of Labour in the Israeli general election and wants Obama to "get tough with the Israeli right"; critical of Cameron and Eurosceptic Tory right-wingers; defends Assange and WikiLeaks; is pro-India but not-so-pro-Pakistan; likes cricket.
Next was Marc Roche, London correspondent of the centre-left newspaper Le Monde - the French equivalent of The Guardian. Marc is known for his enthusiastic support for the European Union and his scorn for Eurosceptics, especially British ones. He's also known for his trademark rants against the "Anglo-Saxon model" of capitalism. Unlike Ashis Ray, he's most emphatically not an Anglophile. Despite that, Wikipedia tells us he's written for our very own Guardian and Independent - though not recently, so far as I'm aware. Marc is an ideologue and firmly on the left.
Yasmin Alibhai Brown of The Independent is also firmly on the left, being a self-declared socialist. She hates British Tories and right-wingers in general but fell out with Labour over its support for the Iraq War. Her views are sometimes highly controversial and always passionately expressed. Some would describe her in less charitable terms. She was the third guest.
The final panellist was the American journalist Stryker McGuire, formerly of Newsweek, now of Bloomberg. He's written many articles for the Guardian and a few for the New Statesman over the years, but that shouldn't mislead us. He tends to play his own personal political opinions fairly close to his chest on Dateline. Nothing I've ever heard him say leads me to doubt that he's mildly liberal in outlook, but he isn't an ideologically intense guest - unlike the left-wingers Marc Roche and Yasmin Alibhai Brown.
Now, what should stand out to you from that list is that there is a whole side of the political spectrum completely missing from that studio discussion.
Where are are the ideologically-committed right-wingers? Where are the ideologically-wishy-washy right-wingers even?
To put it another way, why is there not even one single right-wing voice on that panel?
That's a question I've asked many times over the years after watching editions of Dateline.
Let's see what kind of discussion this guest-list leads to by examining how the four guests dealt with the first topic up for discussion - British politics:
Yasmin Alibhai Brown started off, describing the Lib Dems as "tarts". She's deeply ashamed of having voted for them and never will again. She admires their localism, but "they've defended the indefensible policies of the Tories". She "will not vote for a tart". They should have "tempered the excesses of Iain Duncan Smith, for example".
The state of the economy is not good and George Osborne is in trouble, said Gavin Esler. Marc Roche said the Lib Dems have at least something going for them. A growth policy, including massive infrastructure spending, is needed instead of "cuts, cuts, cuts". Foreign skilled workers will be needed for that. "All of this is anathema to the Conservatives."
Ashis Ray agreed that infrastructure development and public spending is the thing to go in for. It "has historically worked". Vince Cable is the man with the plan, not George Osborne.
Yasmin, however, said Vince Cable has been "gutless" for not daring to take on Osborne. Stryker said that "in fairness" to Vince, the good doctor had said some things along the way, including a recent New Statesman article. What more can he do if the Conservative won't move?
What of Cameron's rapped knuckles from the OBR?, wondered Gavin. "Cameron was wrong," said Stryker. "But doesn't this happen with Cameron's speeches quite often?", he added. Yasmin smiled.
"Cameron's in trouble", said Yasmin. "The Tories are ungovernable". Cameron has "a quite right-wing core" and is "pretending" to be more left-wing than he is.
Marc Roche launches into a denunciation of Conservative attitudes to immigration. Britain needs skilled immigrants, he said. Cuts and cuts have harmed British labour. Immigrant voters have no reason for vote Conservative.
Not so, said Yasmin. Some Asian voters love Cameron for his "deep right-wing, low tax for the rich thing," but the Indians in India can see through him and his "anti-immigration talk." "He tries to be everything to everybody and then he turns out to be nothing to anybody."
Isn't this what you expect half way through a government? There's plenty of time till the next election, Gavin said. Ashis gave Cameron another year.
Stryker mentioned Labour, saying that no one had mentioned them yet. We don't know quite what they stand for yet, but "to give them credit where credit's due" they've got two and a half year's to go the next election too.
Yasmin brought up UKIP - "the ghastly, ghastly party". They will hound Cameron, she said.
Marc Roche joined in the attack on UKIP, who "correspond to a very dangerous trend in the UK population - to put all the problems on Europe or the immigrants. That is a real problem....".
"He had dinner with Rupert Murdoch, which seems to be a politician's right of passage", said Stryker about Nigel Farage to guffaws from Gavin.
We'll see what happens to UKIP in a general election, said Ashis, ending that part of the discussion.
As you can see, there were fleeting differences of opinion between Yasmin Alibhai Brown and her fellow left-winger Marc Roche but, all in all, this was as cosy and consensual a conversation about politics as you are likely to get: The Conservatives are wrong over the economy. More spending is the answer. Cuts are bad. There are good things to be said about the Lib Dems - basically anything they do to oppose the Conservatives. Immigration is good. UKIP are a ghastly, ghastly party.
What was missing was a Eurosceptic voice, a pro-Conservative voice, a UKIP defender, an opponent of mass immigration, a free-marketeer's opinion.... frankly anyone with right-of-centre political perspective. It's just not a broad enough range of opinions to have only 'from the centre to the left' represented politically, is it?
Nor is it enough for Gavin just to put in one or two devil's advocate style questions from outside of the panel's consensus from time to time. That's not balance.
As the BBC Editorial Guidelines say, "We must be inclusive, considering the broad perspective and ensuring the existence of a range of views is appropriately reflected." Well, it wasn't reflected on this edition of Dateline London. It isn't on too many other editions of Dateline London either.
Come on, Dateline. Let's hear from a wide cross-section of opinions every week. Broaden your pool of regular guests if you have too. It's so boring hearing four like-minded people reinforcing each other's points of view. Stop giving us an echo-chamber.
How many people trust the BBC in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal and its various self-inflicted traumas at Newsnight (including the smearing of Lord McAlpine)?
YouGov conducted a survey for Prospect magazine last month that gave some striking results.
The survey reveals that the BBC is the fourth most-loved British institution, behind the NHS (61%), armed forces (52%) and the monarchy (41%).
Good news for the BBC that, even though the figure for "Which are you most proud of?" stands at a fairly low 28% - which is only twice as much as the figure for "Which are you most ashamed of?", which comes in at 14%.
Less good news is that comparisons with previous surveys reveal a dramatic decline in support for the BBC in recent years. In 2003 the same question resulted in a jaw-dropping 81% approval rating for the BBC. The plummet from 81% to 28% over the last decade is a huge turnabout in fortunes for the corporation.
On the question of whether the BBC is biased in its coverage of British politics, the overall results show:
35% think it is "Fair"
17% think it's "Biased towards the left-of-centre"
16% think it's "Biased towards "establishment' views rather than left or right"
4% think it's "Biased towards the right-of-centre"
28% "don't know"
So 35% think the BBC is fair but 37% think it's biased - in some way.
It's interesting that so few people believe it to have a right-wing bias, but the overall number believing it to have a left-wing bias isn't that huge either, is it?
However, the survey then broke down those figures between Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters and found that the BBC has a real problem with Conservative voters, 34% of whom believe the BBC to be biased to the left and only 29% of whom think the BBC's coverage is fair.
(Wonder what UKIP voters would have said? I suspect the result would be even worse for the BBC.)
Is that the same with Labour voters? Very strikingly, no it isn't. Only 6% of them believe the BBC is biased to the right (and 5% of them say it is actually biased in favour of the left!) while 45% of Labour supporters find the BBC's coverage fair.
Lib Dem supporters give even more favourable results, with 50% saying the BBC's coverage is fair, though 17% of them believe the organisation to be biased to the left. Only 2% believe it has a right-wing bias.
So mixed results for the BBC then. And mixed results for all bloggers who believe the BBC to be biased and want something done about it.
Even as a long-term critic of the BBC I can forgive them an awful lot.
Like many a listener I choked up somewhat as presenter Paddy O'Connell choked up at the end of last week's Broadcasting House. Paddy had, like many listeners, been listening to an audio letter from the widow of a cameraman who had been killed in Syria whilst doing his job. Emotionally upsetting stuff which understandably upset Paddy, leaving him speechless for a while and barely able to finish the show.
I was all prepared to post a damning critique of his show last week but, on hearing that, forgave him and what I felt to be his and his programme's fairly blatant biases throughout the rest of the show. How could I slate someone who responded in such a decent and humane way to such a moving story? Paddy's response prompted articles in various newspapers and sympathetic responses from commenters in the threads beneath those articles. Understandably.
Today's Broadcasting Houseresponded to the many e-mails the programme received in the wake of this. Paddy was away, so Newsnight's Trotskyite economics editor and failed prophet Paul Mason stood in for him.
After an interview with the Bishop of Dudley (and no one else), where the government's benefit reforms were attacked as an assault on the poor and the vulnerable, and after a deeply involving and unusual interview with a victim of child abuse who is experiencing a variety of emotions as a result of police pressure and as a result of fearing the inevitability of media intrusion when the story he's involved in finally breaks into the public eye (as it will), Paul introduced an audio talk from a poet centred on last week's emotional climax. The poet used this platform to attack Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson, while he was in Mrs Thatcher's government, over his criticism of BBC bias. (That famous Brian Redhead moment).
Given Broadcasting House's tendency to provide a platform for such (unchallenged) left-wing points of view, I will admit that my newly-felt warm feelings towards the programme dipped a bit at that point. It smacked of exploiting Paddy's feelings for partisan, left-wing purposes. Still, I'm sure the programme's makers would say that it was merely the poet's point of view, not the programme's and not the BBC's. That they had given him that platform to say what he had to say seems, it appears, to be besides the point.
Returning to the Vicar of Dibley Bishop of Dudley, I saw a comment on a widely-read anti-BBC site this morning which complained:
Archbishop of Canterbury condemns benefit changes – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21731488 Why is this the BBC news website’s main story?!? One man’s opinion is not major news…
Well, the news that the man who is about to become the leader of the established Church in England has openly backed the denunciation by over 40 bishops (in a letter to The Sunday Telegraph) of a (popular) government proposal on benefit reform is news. Big news. It may be unpalatable news to committed Conservative supporters, but it is big news nonetheless.
It has been treated as such well beyond the confines of the BBC and the Telegraph.
It isn't evidence of BBC bias that the BBC led with the story. It isn't evidence of BBC bias that Broadcasting House led with the story.
Paul Mason did all that was required of him in interviewing the Bishop of Dudley. He didn't go beyond that, but did he really need to? He briefly gave the government's side of the argument in his questioning of the Bishop and allowed the Bishop to disagree with it at some length. The letter of impartiality was followed. Whether the spirit was followed is another matter, but the BBC can quibble its way to victory over that very easily.
I very much enjoyed (as Paul himself did) Paul's interview with Radio 3's Clemency Burton-Hill regarding the merits of the music of Justin Bieber. I know Paul is into music, and into classical music. (Hurray!). He strummed out some chord progressions from a Bieber song which echoed some found in one of Mozart's less-loved operas.
I also know - as I'm sure do you - that Paul is into lefty revolutionaries, things kicking off, people #occupying things, power to the people and all that. So, after his all-guitar-strumming, all-singing chat with Clemency, Paul - who I'd expect to be a fan of the deceased Venezuelan Bolivarian socialist revolutionary el presidente Hugo Chavez - discussed the controversial late leader with a couple of fellow lefties. One was the devoutly Chavezophile left-winger Doreen Massey of the left-wing academic journal Soundings, and the other was...well, the wonderful Nick Cohen, left-winger, independent thinker, Observer and Spectator columnist and Chavezosceptic. BBC balance in action.
I was listening carefully, expecting Paul to bias the interview in Doreen's favour (especially as he "saw" her "there" at the Occupy protest outside St. Pauls' Cathedral). He didn't quite. He provided instead a third, left-wing voice that didn't quite agreed with either of his guests - though he did intervene to back up Doreen with a sarcastic, far-left-style comment about the UK:
Doreen: "Let's take the media example though, now seriously, that Nick Raised. I went over, the usual innocent thinking 'free press' meant that the press wasn't controlled by the state. Absolutely right. Good point. Get to Venezuela and most of the press is controlled by corporate interests and the rich."
Paul: "Completely unlike Britain then."
Doreen: "Absolutely. Yes indeed. This is what I mean. We could learn from them".
Nick felt the need to say that he had to take "both" of them up on that. He then got into a bit of a tussle with Paul about what Paul was saying. Paul maintained he wasn't saying anything, only quoting what some leftists have said. Still, Paul challenged Doreen over Chavez's caudillo persona and his alliance with arch-human-rights abuser Ahmedinijad. Fair enough?
The press panel comprised "former Tory minister" Lord Kenneth Baker, space scientist and science communicator Maggie Aderin-Pocock and Schubert-loving sculptor Josie Spencer. Find left-wing bias in that!
The subjects? Chris Huhne and his ex-wife, the Extremely Large Telescope (fantastic name!) and the coming Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (even more fantastic name!), excitement about science, Lord Baker's mobile phone going off, the need for a long-term historical perspective, the need for engineers in the UK, the importance of education, the urbanisation of animals (such as badgers), Beppe Grillo, women losing their jobs after maternity leave and heart machines. All interesting stuff. Paul largely kept his views to himself (though we learned that he's not a fan of Silvio Berlusconi, thanks to an ironic aside about Berlusconi ruining Italy. Have to say, I never suspected he was a fan of ol' Silvio!)
Very unusually, the programme ended with a reprise of part of the interview with the Bishop of Dudley, attacking the government's benefit reforms for harming the poorest in society. That is, as the phrase "very unusually" implies, out of the ordinary. Broadcasting House doesn't usually do that. I've never heard it do that before. It did it here. Make of that what you will.
Paddy will be back next week. Thanks for listening. Update. Here's another take on the programme, from Tim Walker in the Telegraph:
Things have reached a pretty pass in a Left-wing BBC firebrand’s life when he only manages to make one licence fee payer feel outraged. Still, that was all Paul Mason achieved when he stood in for Paddy O’Connell on Broadcasting Houseon Radio Four.
The economics editor of Newsnight, who wrote a book that suggested the summer riots of 2011 were part of a “global revolution”, was as balanced as you would have expected. He had on “two Left wingers” to debate Hugo Chavez, etc. A BBC spokesman says, however, that the duty office received only one negative call. Even Peter Sissons, the scourge of the BBC, couldn’t be bothered to protest. The BBC pumping out Left-wing propaganda just doesn’t seem to get people up in arms any more.
Sunday is continuing to improve in its handling of Catholic matters. Today's edition was another Catholic-centred programme, in anticipation of the coming papal conclave.
As you will know if you've been reading this blog from the start, all the Catholic specials from 2011 and 2012 largely consisted of gatherings of Ed Stourton and his usual team from the liberal Catholic magazine The Tablet. Too many like-minded discussions resulted. This time, however, Samira Ahmed was the presenter and we were given a well-balanced panel consisting liberal Catholic Fr Thomas Reese, conservative Catholic Jack Valero and, from the mainstream of the Church, Sr Jane Livesey. A range of opinions resulted. Good!
The programme also featured David Willey reporting on the preparations in Rome and an extract from a new work of fiction by Sarah Dunant recreating the election of the Borgia pope.
There was also, inevitably (and wholly reasonably) a report from Kevin Bouquet on the moral standing of the Catholic Church in Scotland in the wake of the scandals of the last couple of weeks. We heard from Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith of the Catholic Herald, Barbara Dorris of the abuse survivors' organisation SNAP, Catholic parishioners outside an Edinburgh cathedral and leading Catholic theologian Prof. John Haldane. Again, a decent cross-section of Catholic opinion.
As you can see from that list, the long drought (i.e. complete absence) of any contributors from the Catholic Herald on the programme in 2011 and 2012 (in contrast to the large number of guests from its liberal rival The Tablet) is well and truly over. It was the overwhelming and unanswerable evidence of an imbalance (and the appearance of a conflict of interest) provided by this blog - as taken up by Damian Thompson and James MacMillan at the Telegraph and by other leading British Catholic bloggers - which sent the complaints pouring into Sunday. The BBC has clearly taken this on board and acted to remedy the situation - at least as far as Sunday is concerned. (You see, it can work!!)
Moving onto the Church of England, last week's edition began a series of three Letters to Justin in anticipation of the moment when Justin Welby becomes the new Archbishop of Canterbury. I wrote about the series last week. It seemed a good test of the programme's commitment to impartiality to see whether it chose a representative range of Anglican opinion:
This week's essayist was Sunday regular Canon Rosie Harper, a left-wing feminist from the liberal wing of the Church who used her talk to call for the Church of England to fully embrace her progressive values on social issues. Assuming the Sunday team are committed to the spirit of impartiality, next Sunday's speaker will be a social (and perhaps political) conservative from the other wing of the Church. The third and final speaker would then, presumably, be someone from the centre ground of Anglicanism. That would be the fair way to do it.
If something like that happens then Sunday will have shown that it values BBC's guidelines on impartiality and we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
If, however, they neglect to include a conservative Anglican speaker or if they feature a second firmly liberal Anglican who shares Canon Rosie's general outlook, they will have failed to meet the spirit of impartiality.
Well, this week's talk was from Bishop Michael Nazir Ali - a leading Anglican from the Church's conservative wing. So, so far so good!
All the programme now needs to do is to avoid giving next week's final Letter to Justin to someone like Giles Fraser (another voice from the Church's liberal wing) and that sigh of relief can well and truly be breathed!
You never quite know whether to take these sort of stories at face value:
BBC tells its staff: don’t call Qatada extremist
The BBC has told its journalists not to call Abu Qatada, the al-Qaeda preacher, an “extremist”.
In order to avoid making a “value judgment”, the corporation’s managers have ruled that he can only be described as “radical”.
...BBC journalists were told they should not describe Qatada as an extremist. The guidance was issued at the BBC newsroom’s 9.00am editorial meeting yesterday, chaired by a senior manager, Andrew Roy.
According to notes of the meeting, seen by The Daily Telegraph, journalists were told: “Do not call him an extremist – we must call him a radical. Extremist implies a value judgment.”
A BBC spokesman said: “We think very carefully about the language we use. We do not ban words – the notes are a reflection of a live editorial discussion about how to report the latest developments on this story.”
So did BBC journalists obey Andrew Roy's guidance or, following the BBC spokesman's assurance that it wasn't a ban, did they exercise their own judgement on that? "Extremist" or "radical" then. Well BBC, was the Telegraph having its readers on?
A search of the BBC News website (from February 2012 onwards) using the terms "extremist Qatada" brings up a mere 8 results, of which seven quote others describing Qatada as an "extremist" rather than describing him in such a way themselves. Only one off-message, anonymous BBC reporter uses the oh-so-unbanned word in a single report.
A search of the BBC News website (from February 2012 onwards) using the terms "radical Qatada" brings up brings up 157 results. As you will see if you click on the link above, the term "radical cleric" is used without quotation marks. Mr. Roy's guidelines have been followed to the letter. The ban-that-isn't-a-ban-(but-is-really!) has been implemented.
Abu Qatada, described by a Spanish judge as "Osama bin Laden's right hand man in Europe" remains, of course, an extremist. Just not according to BBC guidelines.
An own goal counts the same as a normal one in the end. The final score doesn’t differentiate. But in the world of anti-Israel advocacy, the origin of one deadly strike means it is lauded as a publicity triumph, while a deadly strike from differing origin turns the same calamity into a move-along-nothing-to see-here embarrassment.
In war any innocent victim, collateral damage, innocent life lost, baby, child, civilian, bystander, is a tragedy; but in the world of ‘politics’ some tragedies are more tragic than others.
This was publicised, inflated and exploited for one reason and one reason only. Because it was assumed that it would be universally and unquestioningly accepted that the perpetrators, the murderers, the child-killers, were the dastardly Israelis.
Despite all the doubts raised by ‘bloggers‘ at the time based on available evidence suggesting that this tragic incident was very likely caused by one of Hamas’s frequent own goals, their collective arguments were dismissed with a breezy ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they’.
Every drop of pathos was squeezed out of the story. The bereaved father was featured in various grief-stricken poses, resplendent in one or another of his trademark stripy jumpers, throughout the MSM, including the ritual corpse-parade that once seemed so incongruous, and to which we are now becoming accustomed.
As well as Jon Donnison, whose article rebranded the name ‘Jihad’ to a more benign ‘Jehad’, Owen Jones was another passionate disseminator of moral outrage, using the incident as inspiration for a histrionic outburst on Question Time during which he elevated the tragic father to ‘BBC journalist‘, and by sheer force of personality appeared to vanquish the other panelists’ feebly spluttered, ill-informed attempts to appear even-handed.
It doesn’t matter. A dead baby is a dead baby. He’s equally dead whichever side fired the missile. The crime is that the whole Israel/Palestine conflict is misunderstood by the media, then misreported by the media, deliberately misrepresented by the media, and in effect prolonged, exacerbated, and exploited by the media.
This one episode encapsulates everything that is wrong. We are given our information by partial, biased, ignorant people who unquestioningly accept and regurgitate the speculation, rumor and wishful thinking that emanates from unreliable Palestinian sources, while they remain permanently suspicious, distrustful and selective in reporting the words, deeds and intentions of the characteristically truthful and judicious Israelis.
Let’s see if the media is as interested in reporting the news that the UN seems to agree with the ‘bloggers’, the ‘they would say that’ers and the defenders of Israel, and see if there is as much fanfare over this journalistic failure as there was when everyone thought Israel had killed another baby.
But just as they excuse all these the failures, such as the predicted Israeli ‘move to the right’ which never happened, but which they decided wasn’t wrong after all (because of a perceived difference in the ‘centre of gravity’) no doubt they’ll say that all Hamas rockets can ultimately be attributed to “Israel’s failure to make peace”, so at the end of the day the dead baby is still Israel’s fault.
This pattern seems to have repeated itself over the “two buses” fiasco. If you haven’t read about it already, it’s another ‘pick up a rumor and run’ situation. It’s a Rosa Parks de ja vu all over again, Jim, but not as we know it. No-one has been forced to sit at the back of a bus. No-one has been forced to take a special bus. No-one has been discriminated against.
It’s just an extra bus service for Palestinian workers to get to their destination more conveniently.
Even Donnison knows that the Palestinians are pleased with the bus, but his Twitter buddies have almost turned me into Richard Ingrams. It’s just that as soon as I see a Muslim-sounding name I seem to guess there will be some sort of anti-Israel sting in there.
The workers seem to like the buses, but Faraz Hassan and Co just can’t seem to handle it.
Let’s recap. We have an incident. We have a report. We have publicity. We have opinion. We have condemnation.
We have a low key retraction. We have no report. We have no publicity. We still have the same opinion. We still have the same condemnation.
This morning's Today ended with a discussion about immigration.
The BBC has often been accused of being squeamish about the issue, if not actively pro-immigration. A majority of the British public have concerns about immigration and top BBC figures have previously admitted to failing to get to adequately report such concerns.
Spotting an immigration-related discussion on the Today live page, I thought I'd give it a try to see how the BBC is dealing with the issue now - being into such madcap experiments. Unfortunately, there's no permanent link to the discussion, but you can hear it here (at around 1.55.00) for the next seven days.
The discussion, hosted by Evan Davis, featured David Goodhart, who Evan introduced as the director of think tank Demos and contributor to Prospect magazine, and Marina Lewycka, author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. I've never read Marina's books, so I can't comment on her work. (I probably should correct that omission as she sounds to have a knack for the fine use of English). Her views (as revealed in this discussion) are strongly pro-immigration and scathing of those who question the levels of immigration to this country. As for David Goodhart, I would have added "left-leaning" to the phrase "think tank Demos". David is usually independent-minded and, even when he's wrong, interesting to listen to. Radio 4's Analysis uses him as presenter from time to time. Here he provided the point of view that accords with Labour's new admission that the public are right to be worried about the issue. Still, inviting a pro-immigration author and the founder of a left-leaning think tank to take part in a discussion about immigration is the sort of thing that gets the BBC a reputation for being "left-liberal" in outlook.
Still, how did the discussion go?
Well, I was was somewhat taken aback (despite my memories of Evan's previous forays into the issue) by Evan's introduction, which - were Evan Davis not an impartial BBC presenter and, thus, genetically incapable of bias - sounded for all the world like a bog-standard Guardian sigh at the predictability of politicians for daring to play the "populist" immigration issue. #sigh (as they say on Twitter).
How did he ("sigh") introduce the piece? Well, he began...
It's been another week in which the two main political parties have been talking about immigration. They're not seeking a populist arms race, you understand(/sarc).
This "sigh" is typical of BBC presenters, in my experience. (If only I could now produce evidence to nail that!)
Evan continued...
But there has been talk of a "crisis" in the benefits system on the Tory side, with migrants claiming benefits, and the suggestion of an enforcement clampdown on the part of Labour. For a country that is said to be at ease with globalisation this aspect of it is, perhaps, not the easiest.
He introduced his two guests and then said:
The purpose of getting you on is to talk about whether this is..whether the debate here is one that it is in a sense a rational debate that we're having or a more irrational one, whether the politicians are responding to genuine public concern or, perhaps, whipping it up in a populist way.
A balanced question with antitheses, or a question loaded towards the second proposition in each case? Given Evan's earlier sarcasm, the question could only have one answer: It's populism.
Now, David Goodhart turned out to present the point of view that mass immigration isn't necessarily a good thing while Marina stuck to sticking it to those who aren't in favour of mass immigration, denouncing them as hysterical. That is the BBC's justification. They offered a balance of opinions - one 'pro' and one 'anti'.
Evan had a little dig at the "metropolitan elite" with their cleaners who are removed from the concerns of the general public - a thought Marina found "very, very true" before satirising those critical of immigration again. Oh my, though, how Evan laughed at Marina's mockery of those anti-immigration types!
"Point made. Marina we have to leave it there," he chuckled. Cue the pips.
Another reason why many (usually right-wing) people believe there to be a problem here is that they've...read (as I used to read) blog-posts (on right-wing blogs) pointing out a particular Labour Party activist in the audience asking one of the main questions. Someone had recognised them.
I once read such a post and decided to see if I could use Google to check out an audience member in Cardiff - one who had asked a sharply-political main question sarcastically attacking UKIP. He had the air of a political type to me, yet here he was appearing as an ordinary member of the Cardiff public being rude about Mr. Farage. (The edition featured Nigel Farage). As he had a very unusual name up popped an identical name to his on Google. That identically-named man was a (failed) Labour local election candidate - not in Cardiff but in Coventry. A co-incidence of names? Possibly. Well, Google Images also showed a photo of the very same man from the Cardiff edition of Question Time at a social gathering, in Coventry. Aha! I didn't progress it beyond that after my e-mails to the local Conservative association (enquiring if they knew whether the Coventry Labour activist was on that particular Question Time edition) got absolutely no response. It almost certainly was him. Anyhow, that was enough to convince me of the "urban myth", being only too ready to make the extra leap of faith into believing that his presence in Cardiff - at Labour's request? - was somehow also with the BBC's connivance. Looking back, that was a leap too far but it was a suggestive 'discovery' nonetheless. I was highly suggestive at the time.
Well, it's happened again - and once more it's thanks to the world of blogs that we know about it.
As this Thursday's Question Timefrom Dover ended the eagle-eyed denizens of the social media began tweeting and blogging about the girl in the audience who had so passionately challenged Diane James - the UKIP candidate in the Eastleigh by-election and a panellist on that evening's programme. The audience member in question was Amy Rutland, who tweets as Rutters101. Rather naively, she seems to have failed to anticipate that 'spotting the Labour plant' is pretty easy in the Age of Twitter - especially when you choose to tweet about your own appearance on the programme "rip[ping] into the disgusting UKIP woman".
For, lo and behold, it turns out that she is no ordinary member of the public after all. She's a Labour Party activist; in fact she's the Regional Policy Co-ordinator for the Labour Party in Kent no less. It used to say so on her Twitter and Linkedin profiles. She panicked after the news of her involvement with the Labour Party broke, however, and deleted all those Labour references from both profiles. Unfortunately for her, bloggers screen-grabbed her original Twitter profile before she changed it (and before she protected her tweets), and the cached version of her Linkedin account still shows her affiliations. Oh Amy!!
It also turns out that she had spent that very afternoon with Labour's shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg, who was also on the Question Time panel with Diane James, and with Clair Hawkins, the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate in Dover. She'd tweeted about that too.
It certainly isn't entering into conspiratorial thinking to suggest that the fact that both Amy Rutland and Stephen Twigg were going to be at the same Question Time recording that night was bound to have come up at some stage during their afternoon chat, as it would have been a very peculiar conversation in the circumstances if their shared plans for the evening weren't discussed!
Similarly, it is hardly unreasonable to suspect that when a Labour shadow minister, a prominent local Labour activist and the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate in Dover get together they are bound to have discussed the hot topic of UKIP and its growing threat to their party.
Does that prove that Amy Rutland was indeed 'a Labour plant'?
Clair hasn't got back to Grumpy Cockney on that one yet.
Amy Rutland may well have been there, alongside the other members of the audience ("some Labour, some not"), in her own right and may indeed have chosen to attack UKIP entirely off her own bat. It's impossible for us to know what she discussed with Stephen Twigg and Clair Hawkins. We can only guess and assume. I choose to guess and assume that they did discuss the possibility of her challenging Diane James. You don't need to be a cynic or a fan of The Thick Of It to suspect that possibility!
You will notice, if you watch the programme, that Stephen Twigg takes up her attack on UKIP "scaremongering" and that the camera focuses on Amy as she vigorously nods her agreement with him. You will also notice Stephen Twigg, without batting an eyelid, saying "But I just, going back to my original point, hope that they [UKIP] will not engage in some of the tactics that we heard about from the questioner in the audience." ("The questioner in the audience" indeed! As if he didn't know her!! Damned dodgy politicians!!! How can you ever trust 'em?!?)
It would be interesting to know what proportion of an average Question Time audience are party activists. Clair Hawkins recognised other Labour people from this edition's audience. Was the girl in blue on the front row who backed up Amy and Stephen Twigg's "scaremongering" charge against UKIP another Labour Party activist? What about the teacher sitting two seats away from Amy defending immigration and attacking the government's education policy (while the camera focussed on Stephen Twigg vigorously nodding his head as she spoke)? Another Labour activist? How many Conservative, UKIP, Lib Dem (etc) activists were there in that audience? Is there a disproportionate number of Labour activists? If there is, is that because Labour is a party of dirty tricks and gerrymandering, or simply because ordinary Labour Party members are more politically active - and more physically active (in the sense of being bothered to get off their backside, go to a BBC recording and raise their hands to make a point) - than their counterparts in other parties? .
None of my statistic efforts can answer that. Only the Question Time researchers can supply the answer to that.
Please check out their online application form. It asks about which party applicants to join the audience support and whether they are a member of a political party. It asks a lot more besides. If the makers of Question Time wanted to rig an audience they could easily do so by exploiting those questions. They say they don't, of course - and James Delingpole, for one, believes them, if you remember. I don't disbelieve them myself either.
According to the BBC, the programme aims to ensure that the audience reflects the general political make-up of the voting public. An element of potential bias arises because the selection process is carried out by a BBC team and must, inevitably, depend to a certain extent on the subjective judgements of a collection of individual BBC employees. If, as is often assumed about BBC employees, they tend towards the Left side of politics far more than they do to the Right, their choices may unconsciously reflect their beliefs quite often. The rigging could be quite unintended but nonetheless very real. (I suppose the answer there is for the Question Time team to select itself on the same basis - ensuring a balance of Right and Left!!)
Moreover, party activists can very easily circumvent those questions by filling them in dishonestly, however - if they so choose. A Labour Party activist could pretend to be unaligned, or a UKIP supporter, or whatever - if they so choose. An unscrupulous political party could gerrymander Question Time audiences on a regular basis - if they so choose. And there's very little the BBC could do about it if they did so choose (except cancel the programme altogether!) Is Labour gerrymandering Question Time, or are these cases just isolated examples that mean nothing much?
There remain more questions than answers here. Plenty of smoke, only a small amount of fire. Still, this is precisely the sort of thing that makes a lot of people suspicious about the Labour Party....
....and about Question Time and the BBC.
Suspicions about Question Time and the BBC sometime imply or boldly state a very serious charge - active collusion between the Labour Party and the BBC. I don't believe that the makers of Question Time bus in Labour Party activists or that they deliberately intend their audiences to consists of an excess of Labour Party activists, however much it may seem like they do. As I've discussed this at length before I won't go over the same ground again.
Back to Amy Rutland. Her tweet"Don't miss out on Question Time tonight, you'll see me rip into the disgusting UKIP woman! -- Amy Rutland (@rutters101)"was made immediately after the programme was recorded. Question Time is recorded 'as live' and then broadcast to the nation shortly after. This has misled some commenters into assuming that she tweeted before going on the show, thus 'proving' that she knew she was going to be called by David Dimbleby and, thus, 'proving' BBC collusion in the attempted ambush of Diane James. They were mistaken on that point.
However, there's conscious collusion and unconscious collusion. Even if we accept (as I accept) that the makers of Question Time didn't have a chat with Amy and her Labour Party colleagues beforehand and arrange with them (and David Dimbleby) her ambush of UKIP's Diane James, there are questions about how her intervention was handled:
Was she given a lot more time than usual to make her attack?
Why was she allowed to re-ask the same question and make so many other points?
Was it not highly unusual for David Dimbleby to sit back and allow her to enter into a personal debate with Diane?
Did David Dimbleby side with Amy by continually trying to put Diane off and by re-making Amy's points for her? ("Exactly. Thank you David", she said after one particular helpful intervention!)
Why did it seem like a two-pronged attack on UKIP (by the Labour Party and the BBC)?
Did the camera keep lingering on her, again and again, too often, as others spoke? (She was shown nodding her head vigorously as Stephen Twigg denounced UKIP's scaremongering).
(Except for the last question, as the clip is too short...) please judge for yourselves:
Diane James handled the two-pronged attack well enough. Plus Melanie Phillips then launched a vigorous defence of the UKIP point of view that blew Amy's over-emotional, increasingly off-the-rails 'critique' of the party out of the water. Neither could have known at that stage that she was a leading Labour activist in the area, so neither could have thrown that point at her.
The interesting thing, as so often, is the audience response. My theory (as announced before) is that the Left's tendency to be more extrovert and public than the Right in their expression of their politics (all those demos, marches, etc) often results in lots of whooping, cheering, ostentatious clapping and booing - and lots more points - from their side in a typical Question Time audience while the Right usually sits quietly, listening. The impression is given, therefore, that the audience consists almost entirely of left-wingers.
If you listen to the whole programme, however, you will notice the reaction to Melanie Phillips's response to Amy Rutland. The audience applause is strong, showing that there must be quite a sizeable chunk of shy Righties in that audience, daring to clap - and clap loudly! It was stronger than the applause Amy got.
OK. So what does this all add up to? We've got more evidence of Labour activists posing as members of the public on Question Time. We've got evidence of a Labour politician failing to disclose that he knows the questioner he's agreeing with, whilst shamelessly pretending not to know her. We know the Labour questioner and the Labour panellist got together with each other that afternoon. We know they reinforced each other's points that night on Question Time. Amy Rutland is not just an ordinary party member. I think, therefore, that the 'Labour plant' accusation is a reasonable one.
Beyond that, we've only got suspicions and questions about the BBC's part in this. A girl puts up her hand and looks eager to speak. David Dimbleby calls her to speak. She attacks UKIP. He interrupts the UKIP speaker twice as she tries to reply to force her to deal with the questioner's insulting point about her party being "disgusting" and allows the questioner to make additional point after additional point, again reinforcing them. He allows it to go on for nearly three minutes. He elsewhere drolly refers to the UKIP question as "Ukipery". Bias?
You'll have to watch the programme yourself to decide. There's no rush. It will be available for a year. If you spot any more Labour activists, don't forget to tweet or blog it to the world. If there are shenanigans going on around Question Time, the social media will probably be the place that breaks the story.
Friends of Israel will probably be aware of Adam and Hadar's excellent CiF Watch, which keeps a careful eye on the Guardian's (mis)reporting of Israel.
Hadar is busy these days with the just-as-excellent BBC Watchso I'm intrigued to see how Adam will report the Graun's latest CiF offering from terrorist Samer Issawi of the Democratic Front for the
Liberation of Palestine, in which the hunger-striking Mr Issawi presents himself as a noble fighter for freedom against Israeli 'occupation' .
Google - well CAMERA actually - reveals that he is being very coy in that article about the crimes that led to his 30 year sentence - including firing on Israeli civilians in a number of separate terrorist attacks.
The Guardian is being just as coy in giving him a platform without informing its readers of these facts.
It's reading things like that which make you thankful for CiF Watch.
As we approach the moment when Justin Welby becomes the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Radio 4's liberal religious current affairs programme Sundayannounced that it would be presenting three audio essays over the coming weeks anticipating the moment.
Did you see what I did there? I wrote "Radio 4'sliberal religious current affairs programme", even though I'm well aware that BBC Radio 4 would deny that the programme has any standpoint - liberal or conservative - and that they would also say that the programme conforms to BBC standards of impartiality.
I don't really accept that though (well, not in the way they mean).
So, time for another test of BBC impartiality. This is to see whether the three people chosen to present the Sunday talks reflect a fair range of Anglican opinion.
This week's essayist was Sunday regular Canon Rosie Harper, a left-wing feminist from the liberal wing of the Church who used her talk to call for the Church of England to fully embrace her progressive values on social issues. Assuming the Sunday team are committed to the spirit of impartiality, next Sunday's speaker will be a social (and perhaps political) conservative from the other wing of the Church. The third and final speaker would then, presumably, be someone from the centre ground of Anglicanism. That would be the fair way to do it.
If something like that happens then Sunday will have shown that it values BBC's guidelines on impartiality and we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
If, however, they neglect to include a conservative Anglican speaker or if they feature a second firmly liberal Anglican who shares Canon Rosie's general outlook, they will have failed to meet the spirit of impartiality.
If I were writing a parody of Sunday based on my assumptions about their liberal bias, I'd have them follow Canon Rosie Harper with Frank Field and Giles Fraser! Or...with Giles Fraser and Inayat Bunglawala!...or...with George Pitcher and Giles Fraser!...or...with Ruth Gledhill and Giles Fraser! (Giles Fraser and Canon Rosie Harper sing from very much the same hymn-sheet, so there's no way an impartiality-bound Sunday should be sending him an invitation.)
As it's Sunday and time to be charitable, I'll be positive and hope that Sunday doesn't betray a liberal bias and instead gives us three contrasting Anglican points of view over the next three weeks.
Clair Hawkins 
GrumpyCockney 
