Category Archives: pro-Democrat

Katty Kay Tweets Political Endorsement

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The latest tweet from Katty Kay, BBC Washington correspondent and anchor of what’s left of BBC World News America, and the highest-profile Beeboid in the US:

First of all, Bloomberg is no longer a Republican, hasn’t been for years. He quit that Party and has been calling himself an independent since 2007 – which Katty knows for a fact – so the whole “bi-partisan” thing is false right away. Not only that, but as Katty also well knows, Bloomberg is a life-long Democrat who switched to Republican only so he could run for New York City mayor without having to bribe the Democrat machine in certain outer boroughs because he felt he’d stand out better among the Republican candidates. Quite frankly, Katty Kay is being dishonest when she calls this a bi-partisan ticket.

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UPDATE: Katty’s partisan ticket isn’t even an original thought. She’s merely regurgitating partisan opinion from her friends within the Beltway Bubble:

 

 

 

That’s the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker, btw.

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Just another biased display from perhaps the most hyper-partisan Beeboid in the US. Here’s Katty displaying her advocacy for Climate Change legislation with Mayor Bloomberg himself. And here she is just the other day on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (where she’s a regular panelist in her official BBC capacity) expressing her frustration with the lackluster message coming out of the President’s campaign. Why trust this woman on anything anymore? A complaint has been sent to the BBC, and since she does work in the US and report on US issues, they can’t give me the brush-off right away.

Note that this is an officially sanctioned BBC twitter account. The logo is featured prominently and there is no “views my own” get-out-of-bias-free disclaimer.

Over to you, professional journalists and media experts who defend the indefensible.

A DYMOND GEEZA!

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Here’s a rather wonderful instance of anti GOP bias from our old pal, Jonny Dymond in which he characterises Obama’s opponents as the Party of  “old white America.” Gosh, that sounds almost a tad…racist. It seems that Jonny has concluded that the Democrats have the election won so perhaps Romney, Gingrich and co should just give up now and keep Obama in the White House? No agenda being pursued here, clearly.

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YOUR TUESDAY EVENING MOMENT OF ZEN

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Meanwhile, over at BBC News online – another report about the MF Global scandal which fails to mention that Jon Corzine is a former Democrat governor and major fundraiser for Obama. And imagine how many times the word “Republican” would be screaming out from the headline and opening paragraphs of this article about the jailing of Tony Rezko if he’d been a GOP supporter (also check out the BBC’s ass-covering on behalf of the beloved Mr President).

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HERMAN MONSTERED

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Articles appearing on BBC News online about the Herman Cain [R] sexual harassment claims in the 5 days after the story first broke on Politico:

Herman Cain: Sexual harassment claims ‘baseless’
Herman Cain denies sex harassment claims
Herman Cain: A ‘high-tech lynching’?
Herman Cain: When in trouble, switch stories
Herman Cain ‘gradually recalls’ sexual harassment case
Herman Cain sexual harassment accuser ‘wants to speak’
Herman Cain, Clarence Thomas, and sexual harassment
Third woman claims inappropriate behaviour from Cain
Herman Cain accuser decides not to speak

Articles appearing on BBC News online about the John Edwards [D] love child in the 5 days after the story was first reported:

Zilch. The first BBC article appeared 18 days after the news first broke.

Articles appearing on BBC News online about the Anthony Weiner [D] pervy Twitter pic in the first 5 days after the story was first reported:

Zilch. The first BBC article appeared 10 days after the news first broke.

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Spot The Difference

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[Update added]

Two stories involving American politicians who have been embarrassed by photos on the internet. One was a little-known first-time candidate standing for the House of Representatives last year, the other is a prominent, well-known congressman who has been in the House of Representatives for over 12 years and has designs on becoming mayor of New York.

Apart from the fact that the BBC rushed to run the first story as soon as it broke in the States, and has tried desperately to ignore the second story for well over a week, can anyone spot a slight difference in the BBC’s treatment of the two? (I’ve provided some helpful clues.)


UPDATE. Here’s the report on Weinergate from the Today programme this morning. Spot the missing word.

Listen!

Richard Bacon, who is doing his show from New York this week, discussed the story yesterday and again there was no mention of the fact that Weiner is a Democrat.

It almost goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway – if Weiner had been a Republican we’d have heard about this story a week ago and his party affiliation would’ve been central to the BBC’s reporting.

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WELL THERE’S A SURPRISE!

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Regular readers of this blog will know that David Preiser, DB and myself (in the comments) have had our purely metaphorical cross hairs trained on Katie Connolly – the lead reporter at BBC Online’s Washington bureau – for quite some time now.

She was headhunted from Newsweek in the Spring of 2010 to head a new team that (we discovered) also included an enthusiastic Obama 2008 campaigner called Matt Danzico (remember ‘Llamas Heart Obama’?). We noticed that the new online unit began pumping out a lot of heavily-biased reports, generally favouring Democrat positions and undermining Republican ones. Katie Connolly was responsible for quite a few of those articles.

The unit seems to have gone oddly quiet in recent weeks and it now transpires that Katie Connolly has a new job. According to her updated strap line on Twitter she is now a Senior Project Director at the Benenson Strategy Group. They are usually described as Democratic Party pollsters but also help devise campaign strategies for a large number of Democrat politicians and trades unions, playing a major role in the 2008 Obama Campaign and even helping Gordon Brown during the 2010 UK general election. (That went well, didn’t it?) .

So a BBC reporter we’ve long suspected of being biased towards the Democrats leaves to join a firm of Democrat Party strategists.

Who’d have thunk it?

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WISCONSIN

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This is an update to earlier blogposts by David Preiser about BBC coverage of the troubled passage of deficit reduction legislation in Wisconsin (see here, here, here).

Media double-standards over Wisconsin have become so blatant that even a left-leaning blogger on Huffington Post, Lee Stranahan, has expressed his distaste:

Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about the death threats against Republican politicians in Wisconsin?

…Ignoring the story of these threats is deeply, fundamentally wrong. It’s bad, biased journalism that will lead to no possible good outcome and progressives should be leading the charge against it.

Just before writing this article, I did a Google search and it’s stunning to find out that the right wing media really isn’t exaggerating — proven death threats against politicians are being ignored by the supposedly honest media. If you’ve never agreed with a single thing that Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly et al have said about anything, you can’t in any good conscience say that they don’t have a point here. Death threats are wrong and if a story like Wisconsin is national news for days, then so are death threats.

Quite so. If Tea Party followers had made death threats against Democrat politicians, and had gone to their homes to terrify their children, we can be sure that the BBC would’ve been all over it, ramping up the coverage with every fresh act of intimidation. I know this, readers of this blog know it, and BBC journalists, if they’re honest with themselves, must know it too. And we’re talking actual death threats here, not some vague perceived potential for violence of the sort imagined by BBC correspondents when reporting on the Tea Party movement.

The reason for this is simple enough. “It’s bad, biased journalism”, as Stranahan says. The BBC’s highly partisan coverage of American politics reflects the political leanings of its staff. As such, negative stories about Democrats and their supporters are either ignored or downplayed. This is in sharp contrast to the eager reporting of similar or less significant events which are used to bash the American right.

If any BBC journos disagree with my conclusion I’d be happy to read an alternative explanation for their news blackout over the Wisconsin death threats. Comment, email, blog, tweet. Anything.

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New White House Press Secretary

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The BBC reports:

The US vice president’s communications director Jay Carney has been named as the next White House press secretary, to replace Robert Gibbs.

With unusual modesty the BBC doesn’t report that Jay Carney is married to ABC correspondent Claire Shipman, co-author of a blog and book with BBC US correspondent Katty Kay.

How many negative stories have you seen or heard about Joe Biden on the BBC while Carney has been his director of communications for the past two years?

Not many, I bet.

Just sayin’, is all.

Update 10.30pm: Mention of Shipman now added to BBC report, the Kay link not so much.

Update January 28, 3.50pm: Katie Connolly has added a glowing profile of Jay Carney, and Katty gets a mention in the penultimate paragraph (h/t Craig):

Mr Carney’s wife is also a celebrated journalist, ABC correspondent Claire Shipman. Ms Shipman is the co-author of Womenomics, an examination of the economic contributions of working women, with the BBC’s Katty Kay.

The Connolly article includes this insight:

Journalists who once sniggered over gaffes made by the garrulous Mr Biden have, at Mr Carney’s encouragement, focused more on his contributions to the Obama administration.

And the BBC has been more obedient than most.

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AMERICANA GUEST HOST – RICHARD WOLFFE

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This week’s edition of Americana on Radio 4 will be presented by regular MSNBC political analyst Richard Wolffe. His political leanings are so obvious that earlier this week Craig Ferguson mocked him on his talk show (via Newsbusters) :

CRAIG FERGUSON: You’re a Democrat, aren’t you?

RICHARD WOLFFE: I am a journalist.

FERGUSON: A journalist? Much the same thing, isn’t it?

A Democratic Party supporter and a journalist – well, they’re certainly one and the same thing at BBC America.

Just yesterday Wolffe was on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews attacking Sarah Palin. He even once had a spell as leftie nutjob Keith Olbermann’s stand-in (until conflict of interest issues arose). And now he’s a guest host for the BBC. An effortless transition from one left-leaning news organisation to another. (You can be damn sure nobody at the Beeb ever considered asking a right-wing contributor from Fox News to present Americana.)

As if the choice of Wolffe isn’t bad enough, his main interviewee is foil-hatted fruitcake Gore Vidal. Ooh, I wonder if he’ll say something outrageous and controversial. Yawn.

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SPENDING REVIEW

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If you’re getting your information about the US midterms only from the BBC you are no doubt aware that Republicans are outspending the Democrats by millions of dollars. Yesterday’s report by Katty Kay on campaign funding focused almost entirely on Republican spending (there’s a very brief mention about union support for Democrats, but the thrust of the piece is clear – Republicans and their supporters are trying to buy the election. See short version here, longer version here). When Matt Frei blogged about the subject he name-checked only Republican candidates.

Hang on though, what’s this? Politico, 26 October:

To hear top Democrats tell it, the party is being wildly outgunned this year in the fight for campaign cash as Republicans rely on outside groups to funnel money to GOP contenders.

But the numbers tell a different story.

It’s true that conservative third-party groups are outspending their Democratic rivals. But the Democrats still have a sizable cash advantage in their party committees – making this year’s elections a lot more of a fair fight than Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi let on.

And this? New York Times, 26 October:

Lost in all of the attention paid to the heavy spending by Republican-oriented independent groups in this year’s midterm elections is that Democratic candidates have generally wielded a significant head-to-head financial advantage over their Republican opponents in individual competitive races.

The Times article also points out that Democrat-supporting third party groups have now begun splashing the cash around big-time:

Last week, for example, [America’s Families First Action Fund] spent $362,000 on a television ad attacking Steve Southerland, the Republican challenger to Representative Allen Boyd, Democrat of Florida.

None of this fits the BBC’s narrative, therefore it is ignored. They’re not going to let the facts get in the way of their relentless anti-Republican propaganda.

Update. Check out Matt Frei’s chat with Jimmy Carter. Not a single assertion by Carter is challenged. It’s like one of those obsequious 1950s political interviews (“Is there anything you’d like to say to the British people, Minister?”). Pathetic.

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