PADDY HAS NO TIME FOR CERTAIN STORIES

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Talking of Broadcasting House, I've recorded a fair few instances now of pro-Labour bias on the part of the programme's presenter Paddy O'Connell. This one from today's edition is less clear-cut perhaps.
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The story of the day, the Labour cabinet ministers 'stung' by The Sunday Times and Dispatches, was missed out from Paddy's opening presentation at the start of the programme's paper review. I thought 'aye, aye, there he goes again!' But the issue did come up.
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Paddy said, "Alain de Botton, all papers are picking up from a joint Channel 4/Dispatches investigation. You want to review it. Go ahead." He didn't sound too enthusiastic though.
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Before any further discussion could begin, Paddy intervened to say, "And I will just put before our listener what the MPs have said. Patricia Hewitt said she made it plain she'd only work in this way after she was no longer an MP and Stephen Byers wrote an e-mail saying he'd overstated his case, but you've stated yours and you've reviewed the paper for us there so let's leave that if you don't mind, just for the sake of time at this point."

What raises my suspicions here is that the programme's paper review has a somewhat rambling structure and time pressures are not usually insisted upon so soon after a topic has been brought up or before the topic has been discussed by the whole panel. Moreover the paper review went on for four more minutes and spend much of it discussing the fashions of the 1970s. Amusingly Zandra Rhodes's final contribution was this: "...against the headline that's in The Sunday Times which says 'Gordon's doing Sweet BA because of his pay-off from Unite's cash.'" That brought another response from Paddy, this time saying "right, well we certainly haven't got time to go there!" Funny that!
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(For everything else I have on Paddy O'Connell, please click the label at the bottom.)
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