Emily Maitlis is no media hero. She simply forgot what she and the BBC are there to do
JVL Introduction
Here, in opposition to those who have rushed to defend Emily Maitlis for her “objectivity”, Jonathan Cook offers a very different perspective.
He shows that she has no qualms about being partial, nor the BBC qualms about letting her be partial.
It’s fine to take apart those whom the establishment wishes to diss. But in this case Maitlis went too far – in offending the government and thereby frightening the BBC.
“The job of a senior journalist like Maitlis,” affirms Cook, “in a state-funded broadcaster like the BBC is […] is chiefly to reflect back to the political establishment its interests and worldview.”
It’s this failure she is being punished for…
This article was originally published by jonathan-cook.net on Fri 29 May 2020. Read the original here.
Emily Maitlis is no media hero. She simply forgot what she and the BBC are there to do
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Excellent blog which pretty much covers everything.
I too was disgusted by the behaviour of some of the media towards Barry Gardner – I do not think it was confined to Maitlis?
A small point – Maitlis claims she asked for the evening off .. and was not “forced to swap” after she was reprimanded
Of course, Jonathan Cook is absolutely on the money.
But I generally notice how far behind the curve is most criticism of the media coverage of the Covid ’emergency’.
The egregiousness of the BBC’s echoing of a establishment narrative was notable in the previous three years – as Cook points out. However, the lessons seem not to have been learned when it comes to understanding the current all-embracing narrative about a not particularly remarkable virus.
Those of us who did step outside the box in order to review accumulating evidence and the historical data know that, despite some unusual features, the decontextualized ‘shock-horror narrative’ that the Beeb has engaged in at the behest of the government is very far from the full picture.
Within this context, the Cummings, and parallel Ferguson stories, take on a complexion that is much more than just an exhibition of hypocrisy – a v-sign in the face of a nation frightened into imprisonment. It’s about the *real* underlying questions that the media and Emily Maitlis won’t go anywhere near in between the overwhelming excess of WWII patriotic programmming.
Most shocking statement this week was from Durham Constabulary, not a fag paper between them and cheap and nasty Tory party
While I agree with most of what is written up here, This article is preaching to the converted and it’s a complete waste of time. We all know that the BBC is not impartial, we all know what that propaganda exercises look like, what we want to know is what the plan of action is to hold them to account. This is the problem with the political left; we have no strategy, we criticize, but we are afraid of Revolution
Agreed with all what you write. I would like to add another angle to it. She calculatively made her opening statement that way, she knew that her reputation as a bbc journalist is very low (see the number for newsnight audience) by going strong and taking the high moral ground in some way to help remedy the deficit (a journalist of her ilk will use this wherever the situation permitting as an example of ethical journalism).
BBC have always been biased against Labour. That is why I prefer watching Channel 4 news. During the last election campaign there were many examples of bias like the humiliation of Jeremy Corbyn by Andrew Neil. Watching the Newsnight clip it reminded me of another Youtube clip when Maitlis interviewed Dennis Skinner: https://youtu.be/kNZoRtBoZVM
I thought that Maitlis was reading from an autocue. Would the text not have been written by an editor?
I complained to the BBC – fat lot of good that did – about Maitlis’s behaviour in the Gardiner interview. It wasn’t so much that she did all the things listed above towards Gardiner, but that she’d done none of them to Nadhim Zahawi who, just before, had been given free rein for several minutes to spout tendentious, spiteful bombast that simply begged to be challenged.