Earlier this month the BBC’s Director of Global News Richard Sambrook admitted that the BBC should have given more coverage to the story about Obama’s wacky green jobs czar Van Jones.
Since then, another scandal embarrassing to the president – this time concerning the Obama-supporting community activist group ACORN – has registered little more than a tiny blip on the BBC news radar.
Today revelations have emerged about the National Endowment for the Arts, a publicly funded agency which is supposed to be politically independent. Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood has evidence that arts groups funded by the NEA have been co-opted into promoting Obama’s political agenda. As with Van Jones and ACORN, if something similar had happened under Bush BBC journalists would have wet themselves with excitement. I don’t expect headline coverage for these stories, just recognition that they are important in the context of American politics and that they help explain more fully the increasing disaffection with Obama’s administration. The BBC’s simplistic approach to the US political scene (old, nasty, befuddled, racist whites standing in the way of enlightened progress) reflects the prejudices of correspondents and promotes those prejudices to the world. I for one do not recognise the picture of the American right portrayed by the BBC and would like to see more balanced analysis.