BIAS AT EVERY TURN ON 'THE WORLD TONIGHT'

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2010 has not brought a lessening of left-liberal bias on The World Tonight if the first programme of the year is going to be typical. This was breathtaking at times. This is going to need some spelling out!!
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BLACKWATER AND THE LEFT
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First up for discussion was the case of the Blackwater security guards accused by the Iraqis of the unprovoked killing of civilians. A U.S. judge has ruled against prosecution and the Iraqi government is not happy about it. After hearing from the Iraqis and from Mark Hulkower, lawyer from the defence team, presenter Felicity Evans sought academic advice and turned to "David Cole, Professor of Law at Georgetown University." Professor David D. Cole is very much a World Tonight-kind of American academic, as he also functions as legal affairs correspondent for the self-described "flagship of the the left", The Nation (not that Felicity mentioned any of that, preferring to let us think that he was a non-partisan expert.) After Professor Cole, Felicity then turned to "Ruth Tanner, director of campaigns and policy at War On Want". I thought, very naively, that War On Want was just a well-known anti-poverty charity but it turns out that it's also a left-wing campaign group on a wide range of left-wing issues. Felicity said that it "has campaigned for stronger rules governing the actions of private security companies in places like Iraq." Ruth Tanner herself raged against "the privatisation of war" and "corporate mercenaries" and wanted all private security companies banned from all sensitive areas of the world.
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A LOT OF LEFT-WINGERS CALL FOR AN END TO THE ANGLO-SAXON MODEL

Next came a section on sustainable economic growth, which took the form of a guest-report. Felicity said, "We asked Andrew Simms, the author of 'Ecological Debt' and the co-author of 'The New Economics' for his ideas on a sustainable approach to economic prosperity and personal happiness." It's very rare for The World Tonight to grant anyone such a privilege. Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation (and frequent contributor to The Guardian and The New Statesman) was however granted nearly 10 minutes to report for the programme and make his left-wing case!! I'll give you a strong flavour of it.
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Simms began thus: "I'm on a cold London street and it's very early in the morning. I'm just about to meet possibly the greatest authority on the fate of the planet. It's Dr Rajendra Pachauri. He's the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and I want to ask him what he thinks of the Western life style with its television sets the size of swimming pools and its gas-guzzling urban 4-wheel drive cars." Dr Pachauri attacked our 'vulgarity' and said 'we need to stop' such levels of consumption. "So here's the problem, " Simms continued. "We've become obsessed with growth, competitiveness and consuming more stuff as an end in itself. Some at least, like Adair Turner, head of both the Financial Services Authority and the official climate change committee, are beginning to ask questions." Baron Turner (proponent, of course, of the Tobin Tax) wants 'government intervention' to tackle the issue.
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Simms 'Consumerism Bad, Citizenship Good' principle soon received further support: "According to academic Richard Wilkinson so-called "broken Britain" (as well as calling this Conservative phrase "so-called" he also said "broken Britain" in such a way as to show his disavowal of it) can be explained by the consumerism and unhappiness that walk hand in hand with the extreme inequality of aggressively competitive Anglo-Saxon economics." Professor Wilkinson is a co-founder of the Equality Trust.A change towards frugality is going to be hard on a personal level, as Simms had confirmed by his final talking head, Larry Elliott, economics editor of (guess where?) The Guardian.
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LEFT-WING PERSPECTIVES ON YEMEN
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The third part of the programme discussed Yemen with academic Ginny Hill, who has been on countless programmes over recent weeks. She is the BBC's 'woman who knows' on the subject. They almost always go to her (though yesterdays PM with Carolyn Quinn went to Keith Vaz MP instead!! He chairs a cross-party group on Yemen, obviously. What pie doesn't that man have a finger in?) Of course, Ginny also occasionally contributes to The Guardian as well, and al-Jezeera. For another (similar) point of view Felicity then turned to a Labour MP, Mike Foster, international development minister.
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FELICITY EVANS BATS FOR THE LABOUR GOVERNMENT
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After this barrage of left-liberal hot air, the final topic, economic forecasting, broke free from this Guardian-soaked world and gave us David Smith, economics editor of The Sunday Times (now there's a man and a newspaper you don't hear much from on the BBC!!), and the man he nominated economic forecaster of the year, Peter Warburton of Economic Perspectives. Even here, however, the Beeb's left-liberal bias was far from absent. Felicity Evans introduced the piece with these telling words: "The economist and liberal thinker J.K. Galbraith once said that the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." (J.K. Galbraith, most beloved economist of all left-thinking people! That's fair enough though, as it's a good quote.) Where Felicity showed bias was in her examples of errant forecasting in 2009 - the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyor 's underestimate of the rise in house prices and the Chartered Instituate of Personnel and Development's forecast overestimate of the rise in unemployment. Why pick those two examples? Because they show that the economy is doing better than forecast. And who does suggesting that help? The Labour government, of course. David Smith's first example, however, was the Treasury's wild underestimate of how much the economy would shrink in 2009 (1% they said, whereas it was nearer 5%). Why didn't Felicity Evans use that example herself? Because that wouldn't have reflected well on the Labour government? She ignored the point and, in her next question, steered the conversation back onto the lower-than-expected unemployment figures. Why? To help save the Labour government's blushes? Why else?
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Even by the biased standards of The World Tonight this was quite an edition to start the year with!!
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