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When Barack Obama was mocked recently for addressing a sixth grade class, and later a committee meeting, with teleprompters present, did the BBC report it? No.
When he was mocked recently for repeatedly mispronouncing “Navy corpsman” as “Navy corpse-man” at the National Prayer Breakfast, did the BBC report it? No.
When he was mocked recently for saying, “The Middle East is a problem that has plagued the region for centuries”, a line right up there with any Bushism, did the BBC report it? No.

But Sarah Palin jots a few words on her hand and already the BBC has responded with two news articles (neither of which finds space to mention Palin’s amusing “Hi Mom” response to the media frenzy). No doubt broadcast versions of BBC news have also covered the story with equal glee.

Unfortunately for all the rabid Palin-haters at the BBC and elsewhere, the repeated attacks on her don’t appear to be doing her any harm within the increasingly influential Tea Party movement. I like the House of Dumb description of Palin as Roadrunner and her detractors as Wile E Coyote:

Every single time they think they’ve totally nailed her, they somehow end up under the boulder while Sarah disappears in the distance.

Update 7pm. Some neat reactions from Monica Crowley and Sean Hannity and guests (hat tips Jack and John in the comments). And here’s an earlier Hannity on Gibbs.

And in related news, here’s Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler on the Jo Behar Show on Monday, showing us all just how much more intelligent she is than Sarah Palin:

ENSLER: Well, I just think the idea that she doesn’t believe in global warming is bizarre.
BEHAR: Every scientist at every note believes in it but Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in it.
ENSLER: And I think we just kind of have to walk around the world at this point and look at what is happening to nature and earthquakes and tsunamis.

Global warming = earthquakes and tsunamis. I wonder how many luvvie actresses who have appeared in Ensler’s play over the years have slagged off Palin for being stupid.

[I’m sure our old friend Scott will be keen to report this story in The Stage. Suggestions welcome for the headline. I’ll set things rolling with “The Vagina Dumbalogues” and “All About Eve (Stupid Bitch)”]

The newspapers are well-and truly laying into jailed Met Commander Ali Dizaei this morning; it seems that the world and his wife knew about his corruption and his bullying, but the Met sought to cover it up as best they could because they feared his chants of racism – and shared his ‘equality’ agenda. So of course did the BBC. They disgracefully made his pack-of-porkies autobiography Not One of Us Radio 4’s book of the week when it was published, despite its lack of obvious literary flair (to put it mildly!); and then there’s this gem of an interview by Andrew Marr soon afterwards. Here’s a small extract of the gut-wrenching exchange to illustrate how avid Marr and his cronies are to hear and air such claims:

ANDREW MARR: Just to be clear, you’re saying that the police are still institutionally racist?

ALI DIZAEI: Yes they are. We are less institutionally racist than ten years ago. Have we got a clean bill of health? No. Is it within our grasp? Possibly. And I think the reason this is very important, and I think politicians ought to really take this very seriously, because there is direct correlation in the way the police service looks in terms of this composition, and the way we deliver a service to our community.

ANDREW MARR: You have become Commander at the fifth attempt, which of itself suggests that you are abnormally tough and determined to keep going when other people might have given up long ago. Was it frankly humiliating to have to do, go through that process five times…

Just to make it absolutely clear: the Sunday Express page one story here about BBC pensions and climate change follows on from what B-BBC exclusively revealed on Monday.

What’s fascinating about how fast the warnming bubble is now bursting (in some quarters – not the BBC!) is that the MSM are now falling over themselves to follow up blogs like this – three months ago they didn’t give a hoot. But of course, in the world of the MSM, credit where credit is due is not a term they recognise.

Here’s a letter a colleague has just received from the BBC’s complaints unit. I reproduce it in all its glory so it can be fully savoured:

I understand you’re unhappy with the BBC’s reporting of climate change as you feel we’ve been biased towards the AGW’s point of view. The BBC is committed to impartial and balanced coverage when it comes to this issue. There is broad scientific agreement on the issue of climate change and we reflect this accordingly; however, we do aim to ensure that we also offer time to the dissenting voices.

Flagship BBC programmes such as Newsnight, Today and our network news bulletins on BBC One have all included contributions from those who challenge the general scientific consensus recently and we will continue to offer time to such views on occasion. You might be interested in the views of former Newsnight editor, Peter Barron, who explored this issue in an online posting at our Editors’ Blog and explained some of the editorial issues it throws up.

I can assure you that we’re committed to honest, unbiased reporting and are determined to remain free from influence by outside parties, whether political or lobbyists. Our Charter and Agreement allows us independence from political pressure and the licence fee gives us independence from advertising, shareholder or other commercial interests. Impartiality forms the cornerstone of BBC News and Current Affairs and we’ve nothing to gain by weighting our coverage in political terms or by allowing influence from any other outside body.

I appreciate you may still believe the BBC is biased with regards the climate change argument and so I’ve registered your comment on our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that’s circulated to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers. The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content. Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.

Regards

Joe O’Brien
BBC Complaints

Thrown up yet? Note that the official line is still that there is a consensus. Laughable, if it wasn’t so serious a subject. Meanwhile, the Spectator has a cracking piece which shows how totally cuplable the MSM have been in not reporting ‘climate change’ – and ends on a note that the BBC should be responding to.

You know, it has to be time for one of these…

I felt the following article on the BBC website, “Why do people often vote against their own interests?”, based on the first of two radio programmes collectively called Turkeys voting for Christmas, offered an instructive example for the young writer or broadcaster who aspires to produce material for the BBC. I hope that a few selected quotes will provide some useful tips.

Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters.

Focus now, on that “appears to be”, for it is masterful. It – er – appears to be a marker of impartiality. But what it actually does is get that impartiality tick-box done and out the way with a quick, grey, forgettable phrase. The question of whether the appearance of obvious benefit is correct is not subsequently addressed; it is simply assumed.

Last year, in a series of “town-hall meetings” across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms.

What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.

At this point the radio programme has some people shouting. (Note for the style guide: people never shout at left wing demonstrations because of barely suppressed violence; they are just passionate.) The great thing about the phrase “barely suppressed violence” is that it suggests violence but you don’t have to provide any evidence for it. No one accused of being full of “barely suppressed violence” can disprove it.

But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform – the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state – are often the ones it seems designed to help.

The inclusion of the word “godless” here is exquisite. Godliness or the lack of it has not greatly featured as part of advocacy for or against Obama’s plans for healthcare. (In fact my personal impression is that most of those bringing religion into the issue are liberal Christians saying that Obamacare is what Jesus would do. Such rightwingers who have opposed Obamacare on religious grounds have mostly done so in the belief that it would mean more abortions.) The word “godless” functions merely as a probe to twitch the right neurons when mentally picturing those who oppose. Note that the two phrases on either side of “godless”, the two concepts that have indeed featured in the debate to a significant digree, are never analysed.

Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?

Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?

A lesser article might actually try looking at some potential answers to this question. For example, could it be because they suspect that the insurance companies are happy enough to take a bit of public abuse from Obama in exchange for a whole new pool of captive customers? However the author here knows better than to take that path. Note also that this sentence frames opposition to Obamacare as being a defence of insurance companies.

It might be tempting to put the whole thing down to what the historian Richard Hofstadter back in the 1960s called “the paranoid style” of American politics, in which God, guns and race get mixed into a toxic stew of resentment at anything coming out of Washington.

Admire the ju-jitsu with which the author gives us a pleasing whiff of paranoia by warning about that scary toxic stew of right wing paranoia which has been bubbling poisonously in the background for decades.

All that we have seen so far was merely the appetiser to this superb bit of technique:

If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.

It sounds so good, doesn’t it? It appeals to the disquiet that even the most liberal reader might have felt in reading the patronising BBC coverage of the tea parties. You think you are going to get a bracing defence of the tea partiers as being independent adults. This defence could be along the lines that even right wingers sometimes vote for what they believe is the wider good against their selfish interests, or it could be along the lines that they do not believe that what is claimed to be in their interest really is in their interest, and here’s why.

Of course no such argument is actually put forward. That might involve talking to these ghastly people and even worse, listening to them. Instead we have a portrait of the Republican voter as an overgrown teenager in a sulk against the grown-ups:

They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.

And then the rest of the article explains that they are idiots.

UPDATE: There are some very good comments to this post. Please take a look in particular at the comment from Martin. You know the anecdote in the article about how Bush responded to Gore’s sober figures with nothing better than a silly little crowd-pleasing quip? It turns out, if you go to the source (as I should have thought of doing myself), that Bush went straight on to give some figures of his own.

It’s endlessly fascinating to watch how the BBC wriggles and turns to ensure that it keeps churning out ‘climate change’ lies. One technique used with obdurate single-mindedness is to report only the views of those who agree that there is ‘consensus’. Thus when the government’s chief scientist, Sir John Beddington, says that’s the case, that’s what the BBC reports. Never mind the latest revelations about the IPCC lies about the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035; never mind that Bin Laden is now using ‘climate change’ as a basis for the need to wreck the Western economy (I wait with bated breath to see how the politicians who support climate lies spin that one); and let’s also ignore that it was propaganda from Greenpeace (and WWF), rather than scientific research, that underpinned the IPCC latest report.

Let’s get on instead with wasting vast amounts of BBC licence fee payers’ money – £1.74m of it – on sending 177 BBC boys and girls to Glastonbury. That’s what our public service remit is all about!

For Mark Mardell there was only one word to describe Obama’s SOTU speech, and boy did he use it on the Today programme: “striking phrases… striking phrase… striking passage… the words were striking” (that last one appears on his blog, too). His colleague Paul Adams preferred a different cliché, telling the Today audience it was Obama’s “most important speech to date”. Of course it was Paul – they always are. Later in the programme Jim Naughtie discussed the speech with two commentators, both from pro-Obama publications – Newsweek’s Stryker McGuire (check out the response to the speech from the magazine’s Obama-worshipping Senior Editor) and the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland (or “Johnny” as Naughtie called him – nice and cosy).

Note to Today editor – other viewpoints are available, please check internet for details.

Update. Craig made similar observations before I did.

State Of The Update 2: It’s always about him, just like every other “most important speech” he’s given.

Richard Black is a willing conduit here for some furious back-peddling and spinning; that the IPCC totally false prediction that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt by 2035 was “only one mistake”. Oh yes? What about this?

One of the great greenie apocalyptic lies is that flooding is on the increase because of ‘climate change’. Every time a river breaks its banks, Richard Black and his cronies mutter with smug satisfaction that it proves yet again that the science is ‘settled’. Their main partner in crime in this alarmism is the so-called Environment Agency, who have been proudly trumpeting – with full BBC assistance – a new report purporting to show that unless we cough up an extra £1bn a year in flood defences, we are all going to drown. As usual, in such BBC reporting, there’s not a flicker of a mention of factors such as building on flood plains or – shock horror – that it has always rained in the UK, sometimes quite a lot.

A few minutes browsing on this rather neat little archive shows that not only has Britain frequently experienced floods, but also that they were happening long before BBC greenie panic merchants fingered CO2 as the cause. I was particularly chilled by this, from 1770:

The accounts that have been received during the course of the present month…of the floods in several parts of the Kingdom, exceed any thing of the kind that has happened in the memory of man. The cities and towns situated on the banks of the Severn have suffered very great distress; those on the Trent have suffered still more; the great Bedford Level is now under water; horfes, mills, bridges, in almost every brook, have been borne down; but the most affecting scene of all happened at Coventry, where the waters in the middle of the night came rolling into the lowermost street of the town, and almost instantaneously rose to an alarming height. The poor there, fill the houses from top to bottom; those who occupied the lower apartments perished immediately…

And this, from a couple of years earlier:

The heaviest rain fell at London and the country round it that has been known in the memory of man. It began in the evening, and in a few hours the waters poured down Highgate Hill with incredible violence; the common shores in several parts of the town not being able to carry off the torrent, the adjacent houses were filled almost to the first floors; immense damage was done, and as it happened in the night, many were awakened from sleep in the greatest consternation. The Serpentine river in Hyde-park rose so high, that it forced down a part of the wall and poured with such violence upon Knightsbridge, that the inhabitants expected the whole town to be overflowed…

I noted especially the rather sonorous apocalyptic tenor of the newspaper reports; would that BBC journalists could command such lyricism to leaven their contemporary leaden reports of doom.