Can someone tell them they are reporters not politicians?
“Get your views out of my news”
“contrary to what the BBC has been reporting, there may be many Egyptians saying “not so fast” to those who would push out the current regime, with no idea how to replace it”.
The BBC’s arrogance and incompetence never ceases to amaze. Its coverage of the Egyptian political crisis is not so much an exercise in reporting the truth, but a kind of political rally to support the crowds of demonstrators and urge them on to replace the eeeevil Mubarak regime.
“Get your views out of my news”, to coin a phrase. I fear that plea will fall on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, the assembled cast of BBC reporters, anchormen and “experts” in Egypt – there at our considerable expense – really seem to believe that whoever replaces Mubarak will be better, more open, democratic, and more or less just like us.
Realists know that what follows is almost certainly going to be worse.
The hopelessly biased Jeremy Bowen – liberated temporarily from telling us how horrible the Israelis are and that the Palestinians are more angelic than human, was assuring us a couple of nights ago that the Muslim Brotherhood was some kind of benign, elder brother of the nation, eager to help found a new era of openness and democracy. Last night, John Simpson, supposedly an expert in something or other but clearly not politics, appeared live after the Mubarak speech to tell us that it was all orchestrated by the Americans, only to do a collapse of stout party imitation minutes later when Mark Mardell in Washington said Obama thought Mubarak hadn’t done enough. Poor George Alagiah, shipped out from London to host the proceedings for some reason, looked most uncomfortable as he tried to sum up what his assembled experts were trying to tell us.
The BBC loves Arabs and hates Israelis, every regular listener/watcher knows that, and it forces the organization into some ludicrous postures. The BBC really seems to think that the assembled crowds, at least until Wednesday’s riots, were typical Egyptians, full of love for democracy and the rights of man. The crowds were probably hand-picked by the Egyptian Gallop Poll organisation and were a perfect mirror of the nation’s views. It never seems to occur to BBC operatives that this would be like going to the so-called one million man march in London against the war in Iraq, and expecting them to be a perfect cross section of Britain’s voters. This incidentally should have really been known as the march that 59 million Brits didn’t go to. Similarly, the BBC was telling us that a demo slated for Monday in Cairo would attract at least one million Egyptians. In the event they sheepishly told us that it was more like 500,000. In other words, the demonstration that 79,500,000 Egyptians didn’t go to.
And it’s not only the relentless bias, it is the relentless coverage of this story, where not much has happened since day one. The BBC is not alone in this. Even Fox News ditched important shows like Glenn Beck, Hanitty and The Factor, to show us live action from Cairo, where bearded dimwits were chanting something over and over and nothing was happening. Channel 4 sent John Snow to Cairo too. They must have more money than sense, but at least it’s not our money, right?
Meanwhile, it will be interesting to watch the BBC try and explain how, contrary to what it has been reporting in the last week or so, there are many Egyptians who are saying “not so fast” to those who would push out the current regime, with no idea how to replace it.
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