TIM WHEWELL TELLS A FIB

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When you become conscious of a particular angle that the BBC is taking on a world issue, you soon begin to notice just how much they push that angle, sometimes beyond the point of honesty.
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I've been tracing over the past few months (and have posted on it here at regular intervals) the negative way that the BBC has been reporting the austerity packages put in place to tackle the economic crises in certain European countries - first Ireland, now Greece. The emphasis has been put on the hostility of the public sector - and their unions - to spending cuts. We had all those reports from Ireland featuring the leader of the Irish TUC but ignoring all supportive voices for the Irish government's measures. Now we are getting Beeboid after Beeboid telling us about the strikes and violent demonstrations that are 'ravaging' Greece over public spending cuts, and implying that the austerity measures there are very unpopular.
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Time and time again experts from outside the BBC, especially from Greece, have been invited onto, say, PM or The World Tonight, and dropped in the fact that public opinion polls in Greece now show something like 70% support for the Greek government's austerity measures. They have never yet been asked about that by the BBC interviewer, they've always volunteered it. This shows that the demonstrators in Greece (violent and non-violent) are shouting for a minority of Greek public opinion.
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That being the case, why did Tim Whewell on last night's Newsnight say, "Tackling the country's massive public debt is so unpopular that some politicians want to deflect the blame"?
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Why did Whewell say such an untrue thing? Why are so many BBC reporters trying to say that the austerity measures in Greece (and before that in Ireland) are "unpopular" with the public?
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It couldn't be because they want to scare people here in the UK about 'swingeing cuts' could it?
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Whewell, incidentally, was behind one of the worst pieces of anti-Tory propaganda of last year: http://beebbiascraig.blogspot.com/2009/11/kaminski-again.html
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As a coda to all this, last night's The World Tonight reported from Iceland on the coming referendum and another of the BBC's biased reporters, Stephen Evans, said "The anger of the Icelandic people has global ramifications, particularly as Greece and Ireland contemplate swingeing cuts in public spending." 'Swingeing cuts' eh? There's that phrase again!

LULA'S THE ONE

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Following on from Jonty Bloom's paean to Brazil's socialist President Lula on the 5th November's edition of The World Tonight (http://beebbiascraig.blogspot.com/2009/11/world-tonight.html) fellow BBC reporter Stephen Evans was back there for last night's edition of the programme, doing much the same sort of thing .
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Lula may be a socialist, but he's following sound conservative economic policies and it's these (not socialist economic policies) that are helping fuel Brazil's "breakneck economic growth".
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Evans didn't put it quite like that, of course! He was keen to stress Lula's social policies: "I climb the steps to meet a single mother who's benefited from Lula's social programmes."
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All fair enough. It's what happened next that shows that Stephen Evans is a true BBC reporter: "Lula's critics on the Right say he's giving money to the poor who then vote for him - naked populism -, and also that benefits remove the incentive to work. The Left says that massive inequality remains, despite the programmes. Leda Paulani of São Paulo University."
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Leda Paulani is, naturally, of the Left and used almost exactly the same words Evans had just used to voice the self-same left-wing criticism.
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So, Evans outlines two types of criticism - criticism from the Right and criticism from the Left, but it's only the Left we get to hear from. Typical!
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Evans then flew above São Paulo and backed Leda's point, asking the helicopter-taxi driver "Is it good for the city if all the rich people are up there, and all the poor people are down here?".
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So Lula may be great, but he's still got more to do to please Stephen Evans and the Left.

SANTA FONDLES A GUN, AND STEPHEN EVANS FONDLES OBAMA

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The BBC is at one with American liberals in trying to associate those opposing Barack Obama's health-care reforms with dangerous far-right nutters on the fringe - in other words implying guilt by association. Nancy Pelosi's 'Nazi' gibes were only the most high-profile example of this liberal Democrat strategy but Stephen Evans's report for From Our Own Correspondent (Saturday 12 September) was still singing from the same hymn-sheet: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8250803.stm

Evans meets Glen Parshall, a Santa Claus lookalike "with an armoury of hundreds of guns with which he is surrounded and which he fondles with gentle care." The gun-fondling Mr Parshall is a libertarian "out-rider" who is keen on Thomas Jefferson's "The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" and who says of the Obama administration, "If they don't start conforming to our constitution, we may have to rise up in arms and take our country back," which Evans qualifies by adding "though he says that would be a last resort if elections did not do the job first."

Having presented this extreme figure Evans goes on, "Nobody argues that Mr Parshall represents great numbers of Americans, but that does not mean he is insignificant. Liberals say there is a dangerous atmosphere on the fringe. They point to the numbers of armed men who now turn up at healthcare meetings asserting their right to bear arms, sometimes wearing badges with the quote about "refreshing the Tree of Liberty" with blood." Liberals say this, and Stephen Evans says this - an uncanny co-incidence of interests!

An unfortunate illegal immigrant's plight is then described (to draw in sympathy for the Obama position) before Evan's coup-de-grace: "By the way, the sentence "The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" may have been written first by one of the great founding fathers of American liberty, but it was made famous, too, by one Timothy McVeigh. He, you remember, murdered 168 people when he attacked what he saw as a tyrannical federal government in Oklahoma City in 1995. It was the slogan on his T-shirt." And that's how the report ends. More guilt by association!

All of this is worth reporting & doubtless true - and, as I've said before, on this issue I'm much closer in sympathy to Obama than to his opponents. Unbiased reporting, however, means that the reporter's personal feelings ought to be irrelevant. That is where Evans falls down. Whether he and his liberal friends are exaggerating the danger, it's hard to say from here in sunny Morecambe. It's clear though that such stories can do nothing but harm to President Obama's legions of opponents and nothing but good for President Obama's supporters. This is evidence of bias.

HOOKING A SALMOND

The soft ride Jack Straw got on The World This Weekend contrasts starkly with the rough ride Alex Salmond got from Stephen Evans on Broadcasting House this morning.

Whereas Straw was not interrupted at all by Shaun Ley, Salmond was interrupted five times - and Evans heckled and tried to interrupt on several more occasions too.

Here are some of Evans's questions/comments to Mr Salmond:

"Perceptions don't look good, do they? The cat's out of the bag!"

"You were discussing Mr Megrahi with Westminster". (Salmond said, yes & I made an emergency statement about it in the Scottish parliament in 2007).

"But it's that phrase 'carve up' from it, it's that phrase 'carve up'. You were negotiating with Westminster to exclude Mr Megrahi specifically from it. The perceptions now don't look very good, do they?"

All well and good, but shouldn't these questions (or ones of similar force) be being asked of the Labour government too? Today's Sunday Times story was more about Labour than the SNP after all. And with similar sarcasm? Instead we get Shaun Ley, and his lovey-dovey interview with Jack Straw.

All this might lead us to think that the Beeb is trying to disguise Labour's major role in the Megrahi release & trying to stick all the mud onto the SNP instead.