BBC EU editor Katya Adler has taken Brussels sympathies to new heights. She acts on a daily basis as the mouthpiece of the Commission and the Parliament, never challenging their unbending pro-federalist determinism.
But we wouldn’t know. Despite its lavish budget, BBC News’s EU reporting has a mediocre sameness and the ever-smiling Katya never seems to stray from her position in front of camera. Where she goes and who she interviews behind the scenes we never find out. Her accommodating and sympathetic account of the EU is all we poor fools in UK need to understand.
The BBC has had a ‘Europe’ editor in place only since 2005/6, a role created after Lord Wilson of Dinton – who conducted an inquiry into the BBC’s EU-related coverage at the behest of the former governors – found the BBC guilty in essence of bias by omission. Three people have held the post: Mark Mardell, Gavin Hewitt and since 2014, Ms Adler. Each went native.
To Mark Mardell’s new age of BBC Brussels cronyism, Katya has added her own sugar-coating as, charm personified, each night she has pushed the Commission’s perspective, forever ignoring or under-reporting its failings and corruption. How they must love her.
