Webb’s attempted defence of his colleague Jon Sopel was lame. He was just reporting what actually happened.’ Now with Trump, at least he’s off-message, he’s real, it’s actually happening, and you know BBC correspondents can sneer at it as much….’ They just refused to… there was a ban on anybody saying or doing anything interesting. The Blair lot imposed this boring message. What’s new, of course, is that it’s much more entertainment. PO: ‘Well, what, the mendacity, the lying, the cheating, the obsession with the press. Oborne was unfazed and rose to Webb’s challenge: ‘You can’t… you can’t possibly draw a moral equivalence between Saddam Hussein and George Bush Senior, can you?’ Likewise, in a 2001 BBC radio interview, an equally astonished Michael Buerk asked former UN assistant-secretary general Denis Halliday: ‘You seem to be suggesting, or implying – perhaps I’m being unfair to you – but you seem to be implying there is some equivalence between democratically elected heads of state like George Bush or Prime Ministers like Tony Blair and regimes in places like Iraq.’ (BBC Newsnight, May 21, 2004)

Webb’s incredulous response reminded us of a 2004 BBC Newsnight interview, when anchor Jeremy Paxman commented to Noam Chomsky: JW: ‘Are you saying that…are you seriously arguing that Donald Trump is a kind of extension of Tony Blair?’

Webb laughed in apparent disbelief at Oborne’s criticism and hit back: To directly challenge the propaganda stance of a BBC correspondent who had just been reporting – to declare that he ‘reported the Blair years very enthusiastically’ – was a remarkable breath of fresh air. This was a brave opening gambit by Oborne. Welcome to what’s been going on for the last twenty years. This just as much applied to the man that Mr Sopel admired so much when he reported it for the BBC, which was this sort of one-dimensional politics and obsession with the press. And I have to say that I was listening to Mr Sopel there who reported the Blair years very enthusiastically, and he was accusing Donald Trump of all sorts of things which he never accused Blair of, and Campbell: he only took one line of argument, he excluded the hostile press, he was obsessed by the media. PO: ‘Well, I thought it was great entertainment. JW: ‘What do you make of Trump last night?’ Justin Webb then began his interview with Peter Oborne: The BBC correspondent claimed that ‘everything about reporting on this presidency is unexpected and unpredictable’. (Sopel’s radio contribution was summed up in a piece by him on the BBC News website). Immediately before Oborne was interviewed, BBC North America correspondent Jon Sopel had delivered his verdict on US president Donald Trump’s ‘most extraordinary’ press conference the previous day. We have provided a transcript in what follows. His attempts to hide his discomfort by repeatedly laughing can be heard in this clip captured and uploaded to YouTube by Steve Ennever. It is fair to say Webb wasn’t expecting what happened. Such was the occasion last Friday (February 17) when the BBC’s Justin Webb interviewed political journalist Peter Oborne live on BBC Radio 4 Today. Very occasionally, the propaganda nature is clearly highlighted and can be enjoyed for its directness and the flustered BBC response it provokes. In a recent media alert, we noted the occasional tell-tale signs of uncomfortable truths that slip through cracks in the propaganda façade of BBC News.

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