BBC G20 reporting left impression Brown had triumphed; reverse is the truth

Watching BBCTV’s NewsNight last night, and listening to BBC Radio 4 Today’s reporting on the outcome of the G20, were they being relentlessly wrong, or relentlessly corrupt? I can’t make up my mind. Both, is the probable answer.

NewsNight led its examination of what the G20 and our beloved Prime Minister Gordon Brown might have achieved with a long interview with Lord Samba of Rio (as The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer calls “Lord” Mandelson). Not surprisingly, Mandelson thought Brown had done a great job and saved the world.

If you want to shed some intelligent light on a subject, you don’t turn to a known perverter of the truth and fanatical partisan. The BBC had bombarded us with Brown speeches, followed by Barack Obama, then other assorted political leaders with axes to grind, all saying what a great triumph it had all been, then gave us Mandelson to tell us what it meant. If you had tuned into a U.S. news network like Fox, you would have been treated for hours to a long list of highly qualified views, of both the left and right, as to what had gone on in London, and what it meant.

Then NewsNight interviewed leftie nut-job George Soros. The fact that he agreed that Brown had done well helped normal people to the conclusion that the G20 was a total failure. NewsNight then offered the Brazilian leader with a name that sounded like Doolaly, you know, the racist fool who told Brown last week that the financial crisis was all the fault of blue eyed, blond men. I switched back to Fox while he was on.

NewsNight is supposed to be the flagship current affairs programme on our state controlled BBC, and this is all it could do with this most important event. The programme should have invited economists or the Tories to offer some critical view. There was a discussion at the end with NewsNight’s token panel said to represent Labour, LibDem and Tory views, but none of these people were remotely experts in economics.

Then on the morning after, Radio 4 news broadcasts kept saying that the G20 had agreed a huge trillion dollar spending plan to save the world, with the next sentence admitting that the money in fact would go to the IMF. In other words, all the spending would be for countries in financial difficulties which may need bailing out by the IMF in the medium to long term, not an emergency injection of cash as Gordon Brown said he wanted to kick-start the world economy. It sounded as though the BBC was deliberately misreporting what had happened to conform with the narrative that would please Prime Minister Brown.

I don’t actually believe that happened, so the only explanation is that, despite having a cast of thousands on the job at Docklands, they couldn’t bring themselves to divert from the script offered to them by the British government. What a bunch of incompetents and amateurs they are.