The BBC airbrushed Yusuf Islam from its sanitised account of the Jon Stewart rally. Will it also ignore Salman Rushdie's response, posted on Nick Cohen's Standpoint blog? This is newsworthy, is it not? Lucas Mendes is a New York based Brazilian journalist who writes a weekly column about US current events for a Brazilian audience. His articles often attack the American Right, and in particular the Tea Party movement (which he really hates). He works for the BBC. Here are the Google translations, Portuguese to English, of some of his recent columns for BBC Brazil. The translations aren't perfect, of course, but they're good enough to give a pretty full flavour of his views, all courtesy of Britain's "impartial" national broadcaster. October 28, 2010 October 7, 2010 September 23, 2010 The BBC's English-speaking US correspondents must be envious of Mendes - BBC Brazil doesn't bother with even the slightest pretence at balance. (I don't quite understand why the BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation is employing a Brazilian journalist to provide opinion pieces about America for Brazilian consumption.) [Apologies for a second blogpost on this subject but I was working on it when David Vance posted his one. Hope he and others don't mind if I put it up anyway.] [UPDATE. I mistakenly thought Finlo Rohrer was a female journalist (I used to know a girl called Finlo) but apparently that's not the case. Have updated the blog accordingly.] When BBC correspondent Finlo Rohrer reported on the Glenn Beck rally he made a point of mentioning the racial make-up of the crowd:
RALLY FOR SANITY (pt 3)
>> SUNDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2010
PS Just had this message from Rushdie: "I've always liked Stewart and Colbert but what on earth was Cat Yusuf Stevens Islam doing on that stage? If he's a "good Muslim" like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar then I'm the Great Pumpkin. Happy Halloween."
IMPARCIALIDADE
US Mid-Term Elections Live-Blog 2nd Nov
RALLY FOR SANITY (pt 2)
The audience at the rally was predominantly white, but there was the occasional African-American in the crowd, some Tea Party-aligned, others without symbols of affiliation.
Yesterday's Rally To Restore Sanity was at least as white (if not more so) but Rohrer's account of that event fails to say so. Here are some images of the crowd from the Stewart/Colbert smugfest. If you look carefully you can just about make out a couple of non-white faces in the centre of the top-right image:
Sunday, 31 October 2010
After that the media has systematically ignored the failure of Hoax'n'Change, glossed over the rise of the Tea Party and dismissed the rise of small-government anti-Obama voices as 'kooks' and 'racists'.
Tuesday sees the BBC's runaway love-in coverage hit the buffers of the US electorate, and we're going to live-blog the humiliation.
Shadowing the BBC's live broadcast, we'll be hosting a chat here which will also include a feed of the latest results. We'll be analysing both the results as they come in, and the BBC's reaction to them.
It'll start at midnight, and we'll be joined by readers from David's other blogA Tangled Web and also All Seeing Eye and a couple of others to be confirmed.
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