RACE RERUN

Further to my earlier post about the BBC’s obsession with racism in America, Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent (13.20 in) has served up yet another piece on the subject which goes over much of the same ground already covered this week by Mardell, Connolly and Esler. For this one the BBC invited Guardian columnist Gary Younge, the tiresome left-wing race obsessive, to do the honours. (You may recall that Younge’s brother Pat, the new chief creative officer of BBC Vision, recently demanded that TV bosses be sacked if they fail to meet diversity targets. Perhaps they should follow Radio 4’s example and employ members of the Younge family to help tick the boxes.)

Younge went over the Wilson/Thurmond connection for anybody who missed it when Mardell, Connolly, and Esler brought it up. He also took aim at Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Fox News. Pretty much what one would expect from a left-wing commentator like Younge, in fact. In a recent column for The Nation he described the tea party protestors thus:

Annoying, bizarre, incoherent, divisive, intolerant, small-minded, misinformed, ill informed and disinformed… the proportion of the country with whom there is no real means of engagement. These are the birthers, Swiftboaters, climate change skeptics, Obamaphobes and Palin-tologists–the base. They live in a politically parallel world where everyone they know believes the same as they do.

Savour the irony of that last sentence, coming as it does from a left-wing Guardian columnist who has just been employed by the BBC to echo the same views on “racist America” that numerous other BBC correspondents have already expressed. He continues (emphasis added):

They don’t like established facts, so they come armed with their own. The left has such people too, but they are marginal. With no news channels to promote them or Congressmen prepared to advocate for them, their views rarely reach the mainstream.

How about that Bush/Hitler poster in the BBC newsroom? How about MSNBC?

Would a right-wing columnist who made similar observations about loony left supporters of Obama ever be invited to do a piece for From Our Own Correspondent? Has a right-wing columnist ever be asked to do anything on From Our Own Correspondent, full stop?

Another point about Younge’s article in the Nation. He discussed the case of Kenneth Gladney, a tea party protester who was hospitalised after “a fight broke out”. Younge conveniently failed to mention that Gladney was beaten up by pro-Obama thugs from the SEIU. And in an unusual departure for Younge, he also neglected to mention that Kenneth Gladney is black. A left-wing journalist who smears conservatives and plays the race card when it suits but leaves it in the pack when it doesn’t fit his agenda. Just the kind of guy the BBC likes.