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President Obama's State of the Nation speech to the U.S. Congress was discussed on this morning Today programme.
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First came Mark Mardell's description of the speech with clips. Bizarrely, the Today programme website mis-described his report again (as they did yesterday): "North America editor Mark Mardell watched the speech with US voters." Well, listen to the clip for yourself. Where are the voters?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8484000/8484575.stm
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The discussion came at the end of the programme. James Naughtie presided. Who was invited? A Republican supporter and a Democrat supporter perhaps? A right-leaning journalist and a left-leaning journalist maybe? That would seem fair and proper. This though is the BBC, who find it quite hard to be fair and proper. First we got a Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland (or "Jonny", as Naughtie called him) - so that's the Democrat-supporting leftie taken care of. The other guest, however, was no Republican-supporting rightie but Gavin Esler's friend from Dateline: London Stryker Mcguire of Newsweek. Stryker is no partisan, but he too inclines leftwards (writing many articles for The New Statesman, Guardian and Observer). That's not balanced, is it? Especially when Naughtie himself was hardly a neutral, making noises supportive of Obama and raising tough questions only for the Republicans. If a pro-Republican reporter had been present, Naughtie could have asked him about the latter and found out how the party would respond to Obama's challenge. Instead, all we got was 'Jonny' attacking the Republicans. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/news/8484741.stm
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UPDATE
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For more of this please read DB on the Biased BBC website, who has noticed this too: http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2010/01/sotu-on-today.html
You can NEVER expect balance from Naughty.
ReplyDeleteIn one scene on the state of union impact from a mid-west town, the bbc World reporter, a young male judging by his voice, interviewed 4 young people having a party in a bar and watching the speech on TV. Guess what? All were female. So no balance there then. In their defence they were more articulate than in UK and they sat on the fence and did not give any big positive or negative statements, as the ambulance chasing bbc want.
BBC World also pulled the plug on the speech when Obama got into difficulties three quarters through his speech.