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European Sophistication

Liberal habit isn’t the only thing behind the BBC’s propagandizing for Obama. Some of it is the same laziness breeding simplification that hampers our own media’s international coverage (and for that, the BBC makes our gang of preening advocates look like a nursery riot). Watching foreign media get us wrong should alert us to how we’re getting them wrong. […]

Liberal habit isn’t the only thing behind the BBC’s propagandizing for Obama. Some of it is the same laziness breeding simplification that hampers our own media’s international coverage (and for that, the BBC makes our gang of preening advocates look like a nursery riot). Watching foreign media get us wrong should alert us to how we’re getting them wrong. I’m willing to bet that regular stateside viewers and listeners of the BBC groan inwardly, as I do, whenever the Beeb turns its attention to domestic US politics. Not simply because of the standard complex of obscuring biases that come into play, but because the broadcaster is so suddenly out of its depth. It’s as if there really is an intelligence knob on the set, and it’s been muted. For all the familiar criticism of American provincialism, for the rest of the West the US is a place understood through caricature and bromide. When race is a factor another veil of obscurity is willfully donned. It’s forever 1976 and Archie Bunker’s Queens in the slothful mind of many of our comfortably remote cousins.
But for pure aw-shucks cluelessness, you must read this charmingly obtuse article in Der Spiegel speculating on the possibility of a VP nomination for Condoleeza Rice (call it the Republicans’ token response to Obama), “one of the great talents in US politics”, who 

…has all of the traits that are currently spread between the two Democratic candidates. She is experienced and perceptive, she is black and female, and she is adept at giving courageous speeches.

At this point I’m actively hoping for this absurdity. As Derek Jacobi’s Claudius says in another BBC production, “let all the poisons in the mud hatch out.”

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