Category Archives: US presidential elections

Tea Party News The BBC Refuses To Report

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As the 2012 Presidential election gets underway (ugh, already?), it’s time for an update on what the Tea Party movement has been up to lately. The BBC has been utterly silent since begrudgingly admitting an influence on the 2010 mid-term results, so it’s well worth pointing out what they don’t think is newsworthy.

First, here’s some news which dispels the BBC’s accusations that the Tea Party movement’s primary motivation is racism:

Some Immigrants Turn to Tea Party

Lolita Mancheno-Smoak, an immigrant from Ecuador who once dreamed of becoming her country’s president, has found an unlikely home in the tea party movement.

When she launched her campaign for county school board last week at Brion’s Grille in Fairfax, Va., she was not alone — flanked by immigrants from Europe, Asia and Latin America who have joined tea party groups in the face of unrelenting criticism that the movement is isolationist and anti-immigrant.

How can this be? Mark Mardell even assured us that the whole anti-immigration issue was really about racism and nasty whites not wanting Hispanics coming in. But now Hispanics are welcomed in the Tea Party movement with open arms? No wonder the BBC doesn’t want you to know about this. This bit must especially cause a few Beeboid heads to explode:

Genaro Pedroarias, the national committeeman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly of Virginia, said the tea party is a natural fit for many of northern Virginia’s immigrants from countries like Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua.

“Most Hispanics who come to this country come here to flee socialistic and oppressive regimes,” said Pedroarias, who is Cuban. “They are some of the most vibrant members of the tea party.”

Lin Dai Kendall, who left Honduras when she was 33, blames the U.S. immigration system for persistent unemployment among those who are here legally. She’s part Chinese, part Spanish and part Hispanic and doesn’t hesitate to call President Barack Obama a Marxist.

“These people want to call themselves progressive; I call them regressive,” Kendall said. “What is immoral to me is standing there with my hand out waiting for the government to support me.”

Oh, dear, oh, dear. The BBC just can’t report this, or their entire Narrative will be destroyed. Now for some more Tea Party news the BBC won’t tell you about.

There’s a serious legal challenge to ObamaCare in the 6th Court of Appeals, and the Cincinnati Tea Party is on the scene. The lawsuit to prove that ObamaCare is un-Constitutional is working its way up to the US Supreme Court. The BBC has been mostly silent on the entire issue, and only barely mentioned when the challenge started in the Virginia courts, prompted by the Tea Party movement there.

As the movement moves from strength to strength, it’s affecting local elections in Utah.

The Tea Party is here to stay in Utah’s political races

Even the über-partisan HuffingtonPost says that the recent Republican vote against raising the debt ceiling is a response to Tea Party concerns. The BBC didn’t mention that at all in their reporting on the issue.

Here’s another Presidential candidate poised to become a favorite of the Tea Party movement, and another slap in the face of the BBC’s lies.

Is it cos he is black?

Many in the Tea Party movement apparently support Israel. There was a Tea Party-centric event at last week’s AIPAC gathering. The BBC forgot to mention that in between attacks on Netanyahu and praise for the President’s desire to take Israel down a few notches. I guess this makes Tea Partiers even more horrific to the Beeboids.

I could go on and on, but suffice to say that the Tea Party movement the BBC hid from you, disparaged, ignored, then attacked and slandered, is very much alive and well and moving to have a major influence in 2012. And the BBC is silent.

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Is it just me … ?

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Imagine it’s December 2000, and that Texas Republicans stand accused of auctioning off newly elected President George Bush’s recently-vacated governorship to the highest bidder. I can’t help thinking that would be the number one BBC news story for days if not weeks. There’s no way it would be squeezed out of the headlines by more euthanasia plugs or the government’s latest series of welfare reforms.

Of course, during the campaign, BBC correspondents would have shone a spotlight on the institutionalised corruption of the Republican heartland, with its long and dishonourable history. How exactly, they would ask, did George W Bush rise to the top of the most corrupt political machine in the United States ?

Wouldn’t they ?

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An alternative view

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The great thing about guest columns on the Beeb’s website is that they allow different voices to give their take on the big events of the moment – voices we might not normally hear, such as this piece by [democrat, arch-Obama supporter and] “social commentator” Nancy Giles. So, instead of the usual left-leaning commentary on the significance of Obama’s win on race relations in the US that we’re used to, the Beeb treats us to some full on left-wing commentary on the significance of Obama’s win on race relations in the US. What a fantastic idea!

STILL SWOONING

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I know that BBC coverage of the US election has been well covered by my colleagues here on B-BBC but I just wanted to say a few things myself.

Whilst on holidays last week, I tuned into SKY, CNN and the BBC. They were all pathetic cheer-leaders for The One but whilst CNN was poor, Sky managed to be even worse but the BBC managed to win the race for MOST Biased news channel insofar as it really only focused on Obama. McCain was as rare a sight on BBC coverage as Gordon Brown in Glenrothes! I could not bear to watch the BBC coverage yesterday but I did force myself  to watch the 10 0′ clock news tonight and instantly regretted it – the BBC is still swooning over Obama. I watched some sycophantic coverage suggesting that Democrats may well be moving into a permanent majority, no less. Those pesky white Americans are going to be a minority by 2050, the report thrilled, so the bad old days could be behind us! We also had images of Obama cultists scribbling best wishes on a tatty piece of cardboard defacing the Mall in Washington -funny thing is when Bush won in 2000 and 2004 I can’t quite seem to recall the same glowing aftermath in the Beeb’s coverage then, can you?

Post match analysis

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With the election finally over, let’s take a moment to review the Beeb’s coverage before we move on. This is possibly one for the train spotters, but it’s important not least because of the Beeb’s claim that individual examples of bias aren’t persuasive as they are trying to achieve balance over time. How the Beeb does so is anyone’s guess, as there’s no evidence they monitor it. However, let’s be radical: let’s assume they’re not lying. So let’s look at the coverage of the election (okay, from the moment Palin was selected) on Justin Webb’s blog. And let’s take with the treatment of Palin. To anticipate a few preliminary objections:

  • Why Webb? Well, he’s the North American Editor, so it seems reasonable.
  • Why the blog? I don’t think the Beeb’s going to let me have all the tapes of Webb’s broadcast coverage. And, frankly, I don’t want them. But not to worry: we know that the same rules regarding impartiality apply, so the blog entries should, if Webb’s doing his job, present a balanced and impartial view.
  • Why Palin? Webb’s blogged on her a lot, which means there’s a decent sample. And she’s someone on which there are significantly differing views, which we should therefore expect to see reflected in the coverage. As Webb puts it, she is immensely grating on those who do not like her, but immensely pleasing to those who do.

So let’s look at the balance:

As for Sarah Palin! Her creationist views are bound to become an issue (can you really have a president who denies basic truths about the world?)

So Webb’s coverage of Palin begins, and with characteristic style – ignoring the fact that, as the Beeb’s admitted, she’s not a creationist, and that she’s not running for president. I’m going to chalk that one up as a negative comment.

However, I’m going to exclude those comments that are neutral – and I’m using the term loosely. Comments such as these:

As well as these posts: on the pregnancy; agreeing she is not the new Eagleton; and his entry about lipstickgate.

So what’s that leave us with? Well, here are the postive comments, such as they are:

  • Palins Punches: I liked the parliamentary-style jabs at Obama and they have peppered the news coverage, though I still think she is skating on thin ice.
  • America’s Answer to Thatcher: with that quote about being grating or pleasing (I’m trying to be generous)
  • Two posts about Palin getting more cheers than McCain: Disappointment? and Regan, Clinton, W and Obama. These really seem like digs at McCain, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.
  • And an admission that She is not the harbinger of some dark witch-burning retreat into superstition and irrationality.

And on the negative side:

So, on balance, and over time, do you reckon that Webb thinks Palin would have: made a brilliant VP; been an awful one; or do those rules on impartiality and his professionalism make it just impossible to tell?

Bad Racism, Good Racism

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Bad Racism, Good Racism

The BBC are worried about the Bradley effect.

The theory goes that some white voters tell opinion pollsters they will vote for a black candidate – but then, in the privacy of the polling booth, put their cross against a white candidate’s name.

And the fear among some supporters is that this could happen to Barack Obama on 4 November, when the country votes for its next president.

Now if it were true, it would indeed be sad. But what’s this ?

Other polls, meanwhile, suggest that white Americans have steadily become less reluctant to vote for a black person in the last few decades.

A recent Gallup poll suggested that 9% of Americans would be more likely to vote for Mr Obama because of his race, compared with only 6% who said they would be less likely to vote for him.

Brings a whole new meaning to ‘less reluctant’, doesn’t it ?

You could use the Gallup evidence to write a BBC piece suggesting that McCain is the victim of racism. I wouldn’t wait up for it though.

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This and That

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This and that

  • Blognor Regis, writing about the BBC’s “Time Shift 8: How to be a good president”, says he does not go in for hate, but

    …then I take a look at this motley crew, the same old same old rapid response talking head squad, ready to pontificate on anything at anytime, only five minutes from this television studio: Jonathan Freedland is helped by distinguished contributors including James Naughtie, Shirley Williams, Douglas Hurd, Simon Hoggart and Bonnie Greer. Celebrating the diversity of opinion there I don’t think.

 

  • David Friedman wrote about how the BBC reported a story concerning a worldwide improvement in the child mortality statistics:

    …the Lancet reports that, worldwide, the child death rate has fallen by 28% since 1990. Breaking it down by region, “deaths in western and central Africa have fallen by just 18%; in sub-Saharan Africa the figure was 21%, while in eastern and southern Africa it was 26%.”

 

How does BBC headline the story?

Huge split in child death rates

Beneath the headline, in boldface type:

“Progress in cutting the number of deaths among children under five is still ‘grossly insufficient’ in some parts of the world, Unicef has warned.” The picture that accompanies it is of two black children, one crying and one looking grim.

The actual news is that things are getting better. But that is not the impression that the headline, the introduction or the picture is designed to give.

I switched from CNN to BBC as a source of online news in response to CNN’s extraordinarily biased reporting of the FLDS case in Texas. BBC is not as bad—you only have to read to the bottom of the article to get the relevant information.

  • I see that after being cramped for so long by having to pay lip-service that tedious Charter obligation to be impartial, the BBC’s Justin Webb has finally drawn the “Get Out of Impartiality Free” card. Now that he has drawn this card, he, a BBC journalist paid by the BBC to write on the BBC website, can describe one of the American vice-presidential candidates in the terms detailed in David’s earlier post:

    And yet the Palin world-view – essentially ignorant, unable to name a single paper read – is not the view that a nation facing an economic catastrophe, complex and international and baffling to most minds, is likely to choose … to hear Palin screeching on about Reagan must be painful to many Republicans who knew him.

    Or he can described her in the terms detailed in Hugh’s post, namely as:

    the woman rational, educated Americans regard with ever-increasing horror.

    The other name for this card is the “Blog”card.


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A silver haired boost for Obama?

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Following DV’s post below, the topic of Joe Biden raises its head. The title above is borrowed from this BBC story (the question mark is added). In it they describe Biden as “a silver-haired veteran of American politics”.

This would be an unimpeachable description of Biden were it not for one little detail- it’s not real hair. Well, not as those unaffected by hair loss know it, anyway. I don’t know what conclusion to draw from this- we live in a world of appearances that are ever more manipulable, but it seems to me our cynicism about this has not caught up with the technology of appearance and that opinion-makers take advantage. Not that the BBC would cooperate in any of that. Oh no- they’re impartial don’t you know?

You can check out Biden a little more as nature made him here.

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