Results tagged “BBC” from Birmingham Mail - Is It Just Me

Nice to the see the BBC are not letting anything a silly as public opinion or common sense get in the way of their US election coverage with a staff of 175 racking up the expenses on our money to cover an election in which we have no say or vote. And that does not include flying guests out for a BBC election night party in the land of the free (which relates to enslavement rather than cost) and home of the brave (which is the attribute needed to sign the bills). I suspect they will not be sitting in the Ryanair £8 seats for their journey - pass the canapes please . . .

As with the Olympics, when just about everything short of Saturday Kitchen was beamed from Beijing, the Beeb are always willing to grab a few handfuls of licence-payers dosh from their piggy bank and send as many people as possible off on what is a jolly.

I am not quite sure if the news has more gravatus read from Washington rather than Wood Lane but it does make you wonder about the BBC's view of news. We already know that anything that happens in Britain outside London is of secondary importance at best and it now appears a US election is more important than anything that could possibly happen at home. I suppose it helps to justify the President of a US TV Channel-style salaries our BBC leaders have engineered for themselves.

The fact that most of our well educated, politically aware British public would struggle to name more than a couple of cabinet ministers and many would struggle even on who Gordon Brown is - which is not a philosophical question - should give some indication of the general interest in US politics. I suspect we even have a frighteningly large part of the population who think Matt Santos took over from Jed Bartlet at the White House.

But that hardly matters. Why let a little thing like interest get in the way of a cracking trip to New York or Washington or anywhere else in the US of A we can think off that sounds fun.

Don't get me wrong. Whoever ends up in the Oval Office will have an influence on the world for the next eight years but that will depend more upon the shady characters in the shadows who have bankrolled the campaigns than the mouthpiece extolling the state of the nation. Whichever piper wins the tune has already been bought and paid for, with some of the same names, almost certainly, appearing on both receipts. Big business only backs winners - even it means a couple of billion each way on every horse in the race.

But I digress. Back to the old BBC where all the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments about moving Question Time to Glasgow seem to be forgotten as the production team rush off stateside for a programme with as much relevance as sitting in on an a Melbourne planning committee meeting. And as for the rest, the coverage, if you dismiss News 24, which , let us be honest, most people do, hardly warrants the numbers we are paying for to enjoy a free holiday with a bit of early Christmas shopping thrown in..