I know it's unseemly to gloat, but...
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Mark Mardell got it wrong!: "It would be a grievous blow for Obama if this seat went Republican for the first time since JFK took it for the Democrats in 1953: especially as the result will come on the eve of the anniversary of his inauguration next week. I don't actually think they will lose the seat..."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markmardell/2010/01/the_ifs_of_the_massachusetts_e.html *
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Well, they did lose the seat in Massachusetts. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8466995.stm
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This was not quite on a par with Matt Frei's classic prediction (during a 'Correspondents Look Ahead' sometime during President George W. Bush's first term) that he thought Bush was likely to be a one-term president! But it is another example of BBC hope triumphing over good judgement!
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Mardell now promises to learn from his mistake (not that he's conceding that he made a wrong call of course): "It will be a part of my job in the coming months to try and discern what the mood really is." http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markmardell/2010/01/what_a_difference_a_year_makes.html
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Yes, indeed it will.
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But in the meantime why not just bandy about the 'p' word instead? (The 'p' word is a BBC bogey words). "Not for the first time the race to be the biggest populist on the block is on."
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******************UPDATE & AFTERTHOUGHT
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Paul Adams on Today's 7.00 News was presenting the Massachusetts result as an 'anti-establishment' one rather than an anti-Democrat one.*
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This could be a new line for the BBC to take whenever Democrats lose over the next few months (leaving open the nuclear option of playing the race card should they lose the mid-term elections in November).
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Going off the point a little (though not totally), this takes me back to the BBC's coverage of the 2004 European elections. This was when the BBC was most feverish in its hostility to the Iraq War. When the results came in from across Europe, Dimbleby and co. put all the swings against national governments who supported the war (in Italy, Spain, the UK etc) down to public opposition to their support for the war, but when the results came in from France and Germany, who strongly opposed the war, showing a similar swing against each national government, they did not put this down to public opposition to their opposition to the war but to an anti-incumbency mood in those countries. They were so hooked on their line that they couldn't see the staggering flaws in their logic. I spend quite a bit of the night shaking my head in disbelief. Were they merely being stupid or were they being deliberately disingenuous? Well, at least some of the people in that studio were certainly not stupid.
Obama raised expectations too high, Rome wasn't built in a day, problems worse than imagined, World recession, reactionary forces, rednecks , tea parties, blah, blah blah......... !!!
ReplyDeleteWhat was incompetent was the bbc news declaration from their man in Washington that one week ago no-one believed this was possible.
ReplyDeleteTWO weeks ago I had an email news statement stating the possibility of Brown succeeding in Massachusetts and daily emails on progress until ONE week later a this action became a probability. Now I know this might have been wishful at the beginning but now is true.
Probably these foreign correspondents are not supplying the information in that the bbc may practice a shoot the messenger policy - either that or the correspondents are not doing their job.
The USA is different to the UK (with Blair) in that it will not sit by while Obama talks the talk but cannot walk the talk - it will act.
One USA pundit predicted that if Obama won the Presidency, then it would be for one term only and it would be decades before another black applicant was put forward.
Hmmm looking more likely if he does not as his own party's Liberal press have advised - to try to do less more successfully.
That's an intriguing idea. Group-think can be scarily powerful (as I'm sure many of us know from our own work experiences) & maybe some individuals within the BBC's pool of American correspondents spotted the possibly of a Brown victory quite early but didn't dare say for fear of standing out against the crowd at the BBC. They surely won't want to keep getting egg on their faces though. There's an ounce of hope in that.
ReplyDeleteI am happy to stick with my prediction, made before Obama was elected, that he would be a worse President than Carter. My leftie friends here in the UK ( yes, I do have some ), have gone very quiet recently.
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