BBC coverage of America matches their Brexit output. Useless.

By Pete North - January 20, 2021

Though Turbulent Times generally regards American politics as a noisy distraction it’s still worth keeping tabs on – not least because the toxic identity politics dogma of the American left usually infects the weak of mind here in the UK. It is partly why the current iteration of the Labour Party is unelectable.

But it’s also telling about our own media which lavishes no end of attention on something that only indirectly effects us at the expense of things that directly affect us in the here and now. I’m both puzzled and concerned that so little attention is given to the unfolding consequences of leaving the single market.

It also helps us get a read on the state of the BBC. It was my misfortune to have to go out in the car this afternoon so I caught John Sopel on Radio 4. BBC analysis is third rate. As far as they’re concerned it’s a huge sigh of relief and back to normal (the good guys are back in charge). They’re going to miss Trump insofar as he provided them with entertainment, and something to get their teeth into, but now the Dems are back in, that journalistic curiosity will die the same death it did under Obama.

From the BBC we get no hint of the ugliness lurking behind the Biden puppet. They’re oblivious. This is not business as usual. As much as Biden will undo pretty much everything from the last four years, they’re on a vengeance trip.

Dictatorship wasn’t going to come to America in the form of a populist like Trump. It was always going to come from the left and from within the establishment. This trend has been in motion for over a decade.

In this Trump has played right into their hands. He’s given them an excuse to crack down and they’ll take steps to ensure their power is never interrupted again. Hilary Clinton tweets “Congress needs to establish an investigative body like the 9/11 Commission to determine Trump’s ties to Putin so we can repair the damage to our national security and prevent a puppet from occupying the presidency ever again”.

Basically the plebs can’t be trusted to vote the right way in future so “appropriate” measures will be taken. They’ll beef up security around Washington to milk events of early January for maximum theatrical effect. They’ll have the Pentagon open files on even moderate conservatives and they’ll play the guilt by association game. If the right then engages in protest they’ll deploy the National Guard without hesitation. As Mary Harrington puts it, “liberal revulsion for totalitarian regimes was never about their methods as such, just the moral framework in whose name those methods were employed”.

Having weaved the narrative that Trump’s rise was a product of white supremacy they then have the pretext to impose all their critical race theory dogma along with the quasi-socialist policies that go with it it. All the while cable media will give them a free pass for every abridgement of liberty and act of censorship all in the name of saving American democracy.

Social media giants will dig in too. Facebook posts will be monitored in real-time. Every keystroke assessed and posts will simply vanish before they’re even posted. A digital DDR. It is hugely ironic that Clinton should call Trump a puppet president when their administration is fronted by a senile old man who doesn’t even know what room he’s in. As soon as he’s bedded in, the woke extremists will move in like vultures on a goat carcass and he’ll sign whatever executive order is put in front of him. This is going to be the ugliest term in American politics in living memory.

Meanwhile on the right we shall no doubt begin to see acts of right wing domestic terrorism. Thanks to Amazon, Parler has now set itself up outside of US jurisdiction on Russian servers. Russia won’t interfere but they won’t lift a finger to stop it either. Far from pulling back from the edge of anarchy, if this administration is what it smells like then America is one step closer to low grade open civil war. If the woke doctrinaires ever take power, America is finished as a free and functioning country.

Whether you take this analysis or not, for the BBC to blithely retail that normality has been resorted and America can start to heal is a complete misreading. Sopel sounded very much like a casual observer with only a passing familiarity with US politics (telling us nothing we didn’t know) – underscoring my view that the issue with the BBC is less the soft bias as the superficiality of it. Listeners know more than their highly paid hacks – and anyone paying attention knows damn well this isn’t over by a long shot.

The reporting we’re getting is about as superficial and two dimensional as what we saw over the course of the referendum and in all the critical public debates since. Everything is reduced to simplistic binary narratives, all the nuances are missed, and the people who are supposed to know what’s happening will be the very last to realise. Even when our media can be bothered to give an issue their attention, they may as well not bother for all the value they add.