Is the BBC News feeling a little unwell?

Normally I quite like the BBC news because they adhere to very high standards of fairness and accuracy. Of course their role as Official State Broadcaster means that they have to give airtime to some hideous propaganda pieces but compared to their normal output these are so clunky and obvious they're easy to spot and ignore.

Recently though, with the economic downturn, I can't help but noticing their standards have slipped slightly. A case in point would be their coverage of Wednesday Prime Minister Questions. Gordon Brown used this weeks regular Q&A session to finally accept that the UK is heading into recession.

The BBC's flagship 10 o'clock News covered this by showing a short video tape of the speech in which Gordon Brown said;

"Having taken action on the banking system, we must now take action on the global financial recession. This is likely to cause recession in America, France, Italy, Germany, Japan and - because no country can insulate itself from it - Britain too."

The video tape was then cut short using a very sharp edit, allowing the program to cut back to the studio. Being in desperate need of a life I actually watched the entire speech live and saw that as Brown uttered the sentence "Because no country can insulate itself from it - Britain too" his fellow MP's responded by simply laughing in his face.

Another interesting aspect of the BBC's economic coverage is that rather then been focusing on the UK economy they seem to be focusing on other countries economic problems. On Wednesday they talked at length about falls on the Russian stock market. Last night they announced with something close to glee that the economic downturn had also hit developing countries such as Argentina, Pakistan and South Korea as if somehow the fact that Argentinians were poorer would somehow make Britain's poverty more bearable. The centrepiece of the report was that the value of South Korea's currency had dropped by a staggering 30% over the last three months. Of course what the report failed to mention was that the UK's currency had also lost about 25% of it's value.

It's almost as if the economic situation has got so bad that the BBC have given up reporting the news and have just started trying to convince the country as a whole that everything going to be OK and there's no need to worry. It's stating to remind me of the day the Iraq war began and my city responded by collectively going on strike, shutting down road and rail links, trashing the town hall and suddenly finding itself able to send the police into retreat by simply coughing in their general direction. Of course the big story on the local news that night was that a local animal rescue shelter had just seen the birth of a litter of fluffy puppies.

Bloody hell I knew the economic downturn was going to hit Britain particularly hard but I didn't think it was bad enough to shake the state to it's very foundations.