According to Radio 4's controller, Mark Damazer, the replacement for Ed Stourton on the Today show, North America Editor Justin Webb, is "one of the joys of the network".
Today editor Ceri Thomas said:
"Justin has always excelled on radio and has become a truly formidable North America editor for the BBC. "
"The chance to bring his foreign affairs expertise home to the programme was too good to miss."
This is the same Webb who oversaw the truly, embarassingly awful election night coverage for the BBC?!
I would love to know on what criteria they are judging him. Mateship? I've cataloged Webb's consistently Washington/MSM-centred, misleading and plain wrong (sometimes amazingly wrong) coverage over the past year. He was just another MSM journo spinning out the 'conflict' in the primaries and the general when by any reasonably criteria the result was known.
And his coverage of race in the election was cringeworthy.
I would also love to know how someone who consistently and rather snootingly ignored the enormous role of blogs in that election is going to fit-in with the now web 2.0-focus of the new Beeb?
My only conclusion is because Webb failed to hide his McCain-leaning sympathies that he'll fit in better with the Daily Mail leaning sympathies of Today.
Plus that I'll be avoiding the show come next September.
The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America. Frank Rich
Stars
Nate Silver. And fivethirtyeight.com (it's a trio that does it, not just Nate). Proven with their on-the-money final calls on the electoral vote and percentages. Traffic went through the roof and the MSM came calling. And if he doesn't get a 'Webbie' award, there's no justice. Rachel Maddow. A power butch dyke is now the most respected voice in US TV news. Wow! (as she might put it). Hillary Clinton. Glass ceilings well and truly shattered. Redemption in Denver and, later, Florida. YouTube. Ok, here's Huffpost's round up of the best. As Techpresident pointed out, just Barack's vids alone ammounted to $46m worth of free advertising. Techpresident. By far the best place to follow how the Internet MADE Obama. Cannot emphasise this strongly enough - he would not be President-elect without the Internet - and glad to (finally) see some acknowledgment of this gamechanging fact in the MSM. The web. Not only because without it there would be no Obama, and not just because of the bright light it shone on dirty tricks and lies (Arianna's point), but that the change it's brought will continue on - he himself has said that he wants to continue the momentum after he's elected and use the tools in government, this was in his half-hour infomercial. I'd also note that groups like moveon and sites like dailykos and huffpost will be used as tools to rally support for change. The dems don't have a filibuster proof senate majority so to get things like health care change they will use the web and all the tools. Here was Obama's email to his list post victory: "We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next."
Tina Fey. Who? You'll know soon enough. Here's her best SNL comedy sketch. Jon Stewart. Yes, he's a funny guy but his clip compilations were absolute political genius and skewered consistently throughout the campaign. Web news. Now the main source for the young and, as Pew just showed, now bigger than newspapers overall. Mike Gravel. Mad, mad, mad. Brought a touch of Dada to the campaign. Bless. Doris Kearns Goodwin. The historian always ready with an anecdote. The Onion. For their perfect satire of network news. Guiliani's drag. Remember that? And then he had the nerve to attack 'cultural elites' in Minneapolis? David Axelrod. "The past is not prologue we've shattered that". Romney's dog. Remember this? The one he tied to the car roof? Red State Update. Just crawl-on-the-floor funny pisstake on 'Appalachia', here they go on the dog:
Doofuses
The BBC. And it all came to a ignominious end on election night itself. Did anyone watch? I have documented how, frankly, biased the coverage was but it was all to one end, the traditional one of pretending it's closer than it is just to make a story where there isn't one. In the primaries it was 'Clinton still might win' - when she had no statistical chance. In the general it was 'McCain still might win' - when the polls said otherwise. One of the key things i spotted was just who BBC America editor Justin Webb linked to - the MSM, consistently. This isn't the sort of approach the beeb has preached about. "Here's the deal". The 'go to' line for far too many. Clinton. She redeemed herself but the depths she and her supporters lowered themselves to needs recalling. This included her extensive gay following. Oh, and Bill. The MSM in general. Keith Olbermann made this point well, if you look at McCain's gaffes vs Obama's it is clear that a different standard was being held. If Obama had made anything like as many (remember Lieberman wispering in his ear when McCain stuffed up to a camera in Iraq about who the enemy was?) he would have been toast. Joe the plumber. Simply an idiot. Matt Drudge. At the end he was touting his number's - but they'd been beaten months before by the web's new stars, led by Huffington Post. His major league screw ups and blatant bias can only damn his chief selling-point: that the MSM follows his lead. PUMAs. Clinton's 'loyalists' damned and screwed by Clinton herself. Until September they screamed the same anti-Obama rubbish as McCain ended on (see image, right). Capitalism. McCain condoms? Lieberman. And now comes the reckoning. Reverend Wright. When the shit hit the fan I actually listened to his speeches and he made a lot of sense. When he took his show to the national Press Club he was nothing but an egotistical showpony. Green screens. As in McCain's weird appearance in front of one. Should. Be. Banned. Voter suppresssion. Americans can but hope something will change but it likely won't, Robert Kennedy Jnr and many others leveraged the web to shine a spotlight on this year's suppression efforts. Plus Obama's teams were right-on-it. As I predicted, it counted for nothing in the end but it shouldn't take overwhelming numbers to just about win. (Plus to get on the ballot in the first place). Six hour waits. For a Brit, this is madness. But Americans haven't yet done anything about what is actually an international shaming Robocalls. Some reported getting literally dozens a day, more if you were unfortunate enough to live in New Hampshire. They got worse as McCain's campaign got more desperate and were the hollow centre to any claims he ran a 'decent' campaign. Holograms. CNN's election night tecnowizzadry just highlighted for me the emptiness of their core content. The journalism I watched? MSNBC. Plus they were actually tomograms and the presenters couldn't see them. Ralph Nader. There is always a space to the left of the Dems but Nader proved he's not it with his narcissistic final (?) run this time. To see how broke his political space has become check this interview where he calls Obama an "Uncle Tom". Palin. n'est-ce pas, and all she represents for the future of the GOP. As the bloodletting begins on the right, former speechwriter David Frum has a very interesting piece 'Republicans face fraught choice between two roads to revival' and the parallels with 1997 and the Tories are ripe. The argument is that they need to ditch the social conservatism. One good thing though? Because of her we met the brilliant Muckracker and his Mudflats bog - and now we now lots more about the weird and wonderful world of Alaskan politics.
And finally ...
Rachel Maddow's brilliant take on the funniest moments of the campaign:
And some of my posts from the past (arrrrgh .. ) year and a half:
This is exactly my point about the BBC's coverage: they are pretending to be neutral when what they're really doing is not telling you (the BBC's license payers) what's actually happening. And this goes back to the primaries.
Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder for The Atlantic on 'How does the media cover a race that is in fact one-sided?'
I heard a ridiculous piece on Radio Four this morning from a BBC correspondent about the racial aspects of this campaign. No, talking up the racial aspects. I will give him that he mentioned that the 'Bradley effect' (where racist people lie to pollsters) has been challenged by former LA Mayor Bradley's Campaign Manager but they still went on about it and it's likely impact. This is not decent reporting, it's Drudge level repeating of a disproved meme.
Black candidates run races every cycle for the Congress and for the Governor's Mansion, and academics have spent copious time dissecting those results. And while we've never before had a major party nominate a black man for President, we did just finish an exceptionally competitive primary campaign in which a black candidate ran against an extremely popular white candidate with more than 35 million voters participating.
As we have described here before, polling numbers from the primaries suggested no presence of a Bradley Effect. On the contrary, it was Barack Obama -- not Hillary Clinton -- who somewhat outperformed his polls on Election Day.
So why do we keep hearing so much about the Bradley Effect? Apart from the fact that it is a good way to fill column space on a slow news day, it seems that there are three or four reasons why the myth perpetuates itself:
Misunderstanding the Bradley Effect
Confusing Past with Present
Confusing Exit Polls with pre-Election Polls
Cherry Picking Result
For BBC reporters I would have to say: not just 'slow news day' but just not doing their job properly and - as the video implies - over compensating for what Blair and others have labeled anti-American BBC coverage.
The BBC's US Election correspondent Justin Webb's blog tells you all you need to know about the framing of the BBC's election coverage.
Practically every link is to the MSM (or the MSM's blogs). There aren't even links to sites like politico or Ben Smith or Matthew Iglesias or even Huffpost or others who you'll see driving the real news agenda through one glance at Memeorandum.
The news agenda in this election is web-driven in a way which Webb is clearly out of touch with.
Just a glance at the BBC's current headlines shows nothing but spin, which reflects MSM's angle.
US election takes a negative turn attempts to claim that the Obama campaign is just like the McCain campaign. It's not. McCain went negative and largely because he had no alternative. But this piece doesn't explain why McCain went negative. Candidates' possible running mates has Hillary at the top. Why? UK name recognition? No other reason I think. She has been long written out as a possibility in serious political coverage. Next is John Edwards, is this a joke? Bill Richardson? Whoever wrote this should be fired.
She weathered a storm of criticism following a comment she made about her husband's candidacy, saying that "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change".
Noticably, this was by Molly Levinson rather than Mr Bouffant Webb and she nailed this 'criticism ' to 'conservatives' and Fox. It's not brilliant but it's a darn sight better than Mr Webb. Give her his job.
My take? The Beeb's top correspondents are far too 'beltway' and consequently the whole operation is selling us, the license-paying UK public, a lemon in US election coverage. It often appears to a casual observer like me that they could just slob around with a family pack of Doritos and get their their leads from watching cable news and then feed that back to us. 'Job done'.
That is not journalism. That's lazy. Maybe the problem is further up the food chain in WhiteCity but, really, the final nail in any damnation of their election analysis is, again, shown up by Memeorandum - find me one blog post by Webb which any US political blogger has commented on. In terms of fresh thinking, he - and so goes the mighty BBC - are nowhere.
Joining Justin Webb and his BBC colleagues and most UK newspaper political correspondents in their refusal to accept that the Hillary campaign is over is Adam Boulton of Sky.
"None of our cases establishes an individual's constitutional right to have a 'fair shot' at winning the party's nomination," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court.
But the Supreme Court said there is nothing in New York's process that violates the Constitution. "Party conventions, with their attendant 'smoke-filled rooms' and domination by party leaders, have long been an accepted manner of selecting party candidates," Scalia wrote.
More broadly, the opinion said, "A political party has a First Amendment right to limit its membership as it wishes and to choose a candidate-selection process that will in its view produce the nominee who best represents its political platform."
The only way to do anything - and for politicos it's about securing, by blackmail, the vice-presidency or, conspiratorially, another run in 2012 for her - is the so-called 'nuclear option' of appealing today's ruling and taking that all the way to the convention in Denver. Where she would absolutely definitively be a dead parrot.
The other Monty Python reference making the rounds is The Black Knight from Monty Python And The Holy Grail.
Her chief black knight, Harold Ickes, threatened the 'nuclear option' today.
And that's why her unlovely supporters were chanting 'Denver! Denver!' after they lost today.
The real threat is that Hillary, Bill and some of their supporters who say 'Obama will Lose to McCain!' will deliberately ensure he does; a self-fulfilling prophesy. Even though Hillary has repeatedly said she'll work for Obama to win ('should I lose').
BBC's Justin Webb calls all this "a powerful if flawed case".
But Boulton and other British reporters, like their American colleagues who have been getting it wrong since they were surprised in Iowa then miscalled New Hampshire, have a real interest in prolonging the show. For it is a show.
The reality is it's been over mathematically since March and politically since even the media domination by Rev. Wright failed to dent Obama's electoral appeal. But that's all too predictable for our smug reporters on American politics and definitely not very entertaining.
I've posted before examining the pretty shameless ignorance and bias in the BBC's coverage of the presidential election. It is clear that all the the BBC Washington-based reporters Matt Frei and Justin Webb are doing, and have been doing for months, is regurgitating what the US Networks decide is important.
There are a couple of current major stories which those networks are deliberately ignoring and which Frei and Webb therefore ignore as well. I think both British license fee payers and Americans need to forget the idea - which is especially popular with Democrat Americans - that the BBC is somehow superior to the justifiably maligned US media in covering US politics, when in reality they have been reduced to being just another part of the 'beltway' circus.
On April 20th, the New York Times published an expose of how the Bush administration had a program of paid-by-the-government, Pentagon-approved "military analysts" to appear on TV to help sell the invasion of Iraq, and then put a positive spin on the occupation. Propagandists in other words.
"Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse - an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks," the newspaper said.
This is a good video excerpt.
Due to their refusal to comment, there's reason to believe the TV Networks were actually in on it. The analysts were sold as objective but were far from it. Not for nothing has the expose of this major propaganda operation been compared to the release of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
Hillary Clinton said it raises questions of "credibility and trust at the Pentagon", Barack Obama was "deeply disturbed" that the administration "sought to manipulate the public's trust." A Senate investigation has started.
Needless to say the story got absolutely no mention anywhere on those same networks, Fox News, CNN, NBC, CBS, and ABC, nor in newspapers.
Whatever one's views are on the media's proper role and its obligations to its viewers and readers (if any), this is a major story by any measure. These media outlets were either duped by the Bush administration and their own sources into feeding government war propaganda to their audience, or were knowingly complicit in doing that.
The fact that they simply refuse to account for their behavior -- hiding behind "no comment" walls of obfuscation or issuing cursory, empty statements -- demonstrates rather conclusively that they are in the business of doing everything except revealing relevant news to their audience. It's really the height of hubris, and unmistakable proof of their core corruption, that not even a front-page, lengthy NYT expose can cause them to address their central, ongoing role in uncritically disseminating government propaganda about the weightiest of matters.
Do I need to spell out how the use of propaganda in relation to misrepresenting the 'surge' might be of interest to the BBC's UK audience, given our Iraq presence and how tied it is to American actions?
The next campaign issue ignored by the BBC is the endless recycling of the Rev. Wright story and how this will affect the selection of the next American President - again, not something irrelevant to UK license fee payers - Vs. the complete silence over McCain's own "crazy preachers". There are several of them. You will have heard and seen Rev. Wright's "god damn America" on the BBC. You won't have seen either Rev. Falwell or Rev. Pat Robertson blaming 9/11 on America's "sins" or the others Reverands.
One is Rev. Hagee, a truly loony fundamentalist whose endorsement McCain sought, was "glad to have" and has refused to disown.
McCain needs, and therefore owes these people, to support his campaign, to send their flocks out to vote for him. That's why he actively sought Hagee's endorsement.
Here's a Montage of McCain's Reverends.
None of this is being replayed endlessly on US TV news. Therefore the BBC isn't telling us about Hagee et al. Most shockingly, even when McCain was, finally, asked about Hagee's attacks on catholics (because they'd understandably kicked up a fuss) on Network news - he's keeping the endorsement - the BBC didn't mention it.
The difference with Rev. Wright? These are white preachers who don't throw their arms around and yell in a way which the likes of the BBC's Justin Webb admit to having difficulty 'relating' to and which the American media is refusing to focus on, whilst Wright has now been a huge story for two months.
As Frank Rich explains in today's New York Times, there is a word for the sort of hypocritical double-standards we're seeing in US media coverage of the election - it's racism. And the BBC is unquestioningly bringing it to you.
I've been following the reaction to Obama's speech on race (which you can watch in full in this previous blog post).
The only polling done that I can find (for CBS) gave 69% of Americans who had heard or read about it giving it a positive reaction.
63% agree with Obama's views on race relations. Seventy-one percent say he did a good job explaining his relationship with Rev. Wright - the pastor of his church whose sermons have been edited and received blanket news coverage.
The only negative was when people were asked if Obama would unite the country 52% said yes. This is down from 67% last month.
Most voters following the events say they will make no difference in their vote.
Nearly a quarter of Democrats say the events have made them more likely to back Obama, while a similar number of Republicans say they are now less likely to do so. Three in four independents say the events make no difference, and the remainder are nearly evenly split between those more likely to support him and those less likely to do so.
As well, his overall poll numbers have returned to a lead over Clinton (via Andrew Sullivan)
Another Gallup Poll shows a 'Perceived Honesty Gap for Clinton Versus Obama, McCain'.
Nevertheless, reporters continue to assume a negative reaction for Obama (see the Times/BBC) and US Networks have continued to selectively edit both the original sermons by Rev. Wright as well as comments by Obama himself.
The BBC's North America Editor Justin Webb posted the following about Wright:
"The fact that he is shouting in the clips, and swaying about, does not do him any favours."
Which is astonishing, given that this is how black pastors preach: something you'd assume he would know about and understand. This sort of comment reflects the tenor of the BBC's coverage of Obama and Wright and is also to be found in some of the broadsheets.
Some commentators have noted that the real reason that Wright's comments continue to dominate TV News coverage of Obama - despite, for example, a lengthy speech last week further explaining his position on Iraq - is because they need the Democratic race to continue for their own reasons.
Despite there being little chance that Hillary will win, the media needs the conflict and is unwilling to call the reality: baring acts-of-god, Obama will be the Democratic nominee. Plus, it's a statistical tie with McCain vs Obama (post 'race speech' polling).
Politico:
Journalists have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.
One important, if subliminal, reason is self-interest. Reporters and editors love a close race — it’s more fun and it’s good for business.
Just this week, Clinton made the bizarre claim that she had to run to avoid sniper fire when visiting Tuzla in Bosnia with her daughter in 1996. This, well, lie, has received no play at all. However some have rebelled over the 'loop' on Rev. Wright and Obama.
CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 looked at the actual tapes of Wright, rather than the excerpts and discovered that one of the most quoted excerpts, made just after 9/11, was actually Wright quoting somebody else, a former Ambassador.
“I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday did anybody else see or hear him? He was on FOX News, this is a white man, and he was upsetting the FOX News commentators to no end, he pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, he pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he was silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true, he said Americas chickens, are coming home to roost.”
They said:
His sermon thesis: 1. This is a time for self-examination of ourselves and our families. 2. This is a time for social transformation (then he went on to say they won’t put me on PBS or national cable for what I’m about to say. Talk about prophetic!)
The Washington Post provided more context by highlighting similar comments made by Martin Luther King:
Listen to what King said about the Vietnam War at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Feb. 4, 1968: "God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."
And imagined what would have happened to King's campaign if today's technology had existed then.
Even on arch right-wing News Channel Fox News, the 'loop' so outraged two anchors that one upped and left and another berated his fellow anchors.
On another channel, the 'loop' was challenged by someone whose comments surprised many - Mike Huckerbee (comment @ 3' 20" — notice the lead male with his arms crossed):
In their reaction to Obama's historic speech - the tenor and content broke new ground for any leading American politician, black or white - much of the media, both in the USA and UK, appears a/ ignorant of Black America and b/ determined to continue to pump up the Democratic primary election for their own reasons.
I'm posting the whole of Obama's truly great speech yesterday addressing race. It has been filtered and cropped, so watch the whole thing (it's 27 minutes).
Mainly the cropping by our media is in terms of how it will affect the election and mainly, it has to be said, by BBC journalists who simply cannot relate to black experience. The BBC's Justin Webb posted the following, which illustrates this:
I can well understand that the black folk memory of America is hugely different to the white version but is this what black people really think? Is that what they were thinking five days after 9/11?
So he knows it's there but doesn't understand why? Which American history did he study? This ignorance is blatant and pathetic from someone paid a lot by our lead broadcaster to cover America.
Matt Frei cherry-picked his media reaction, the GOP's meme about Rev. Wright:
He did not denounce the man, "who has been like family to me". It was an honourable omission. But it may have killed his campaign.
This is 'buying-in' wholesale to that meme and failing to report what Obama actually said. What is the difference between 'denouncing' Wright's views and denouncing 'the man'?
These BBC journalists are taking their - frankly - lazy lead from people like these NBC (MSM) journalists:
... who describe Rev. Wright's "hate speech" (an opinion, not a fact) and - pointedly - ignore another religious leader backing a candidate: Rev. John Hagee and John McCain. Hagee is not just violently anti-gay but anti-catholic. Again, just like the US MSM, the BBC has also completely ignored that story.
Their 'take' on Obama's speech is also very different to the broadsheets. The Guardian and the Independent perhaps predictably, but both the Telegraph and the Times have much better reports - the Telegraph actively rejecting the GOP's meme.
It’s a message of reconciliation and a post-racial future that many Americans will want to hear.
Watch Obama's speech (or read the full text). Ignore the BBC's 'reporting'.
@PubSecBloggers
