More on the BBC versus John Redwood and a promise from me re Gordon Brown

I blogged recently about how the BBC covered John Redwood's policy announcements by showing the footage of him not correctly singing along with Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. Insulting and irrelevant to the story but indicative of the BBC mind-set. Helen Boaden has commented on this story here by saying "In retrospect we weren't right to use that footage again, which came from a long time ago". It did come from a long time ago, but the BBC mind-set is - John Redwood... ooh ooh there's that funny video of him making a prat of himself when he was Secreatry of State for Wales, let's show that it always makes me laugh and it will remind people of how horrible and strangely funny the Tories were and that they must vote Labour, especially now that lovely Gordon Brown is in charge...

The discussion at the bottom of that BBC page is interesting, I especially like James K's comment "Why do you include "The secretary of state for business, John Hutton, said the Tories were now more right wing than they had been under William Hague and Michael Howard" at all. It has no relevance to the story whatsoever. If John Hutton had said "The Tory Party is now the Fascist Party and also they beat their wives", would you have repeated that. You are biased and you simply cannot ever see it."


Also William Batterby's comments appeal to me "If I was a member of the Labour Party, I'd be entirely happy with the way you reported John Redwood's announcement, and I'd also be happy with seeing old footage of him making a fool of himself as that's waht I'd want to see. But I'm not. I'ma Conservative Party member (or 'Tory') so I don't like any of this and the story to me was seriously biased. And since I'm forced to pay you a large poll tax each year in order to own a television, I'd like to see you adopt an non-Party bias in your news reporting"


Roland Deschain wrote "Next time Gordon Brown makes an announcement, will you consider broadcasting pictures of him picking his nose? If not, why did you consider showing these pictures of John Redwood?"

This is a point that I have been making for a while and it does give me the opportunity to make this promise; from now on every mention of Gordon Brown on my blog will be accompanied either by a link to the video of Gordon Brown picking his nose or by a picture of the nose picking - here's both