It is no secret that the BBC consistently reports on Barack Obama’s presidency in a manner that barely conceals overwhelming institutional support, and I rarely tire of documenting the failure of its feckless reporters to recognize publicly that the American and British political systems work fundamentally differently. (And that this really does matter.)

But even within the trend, yesterday’s BBC News article, which purported to explain the challenge to Obamacare in the Supreme Court, is a doozy, veering pointlessly between unforgivable laziness and downright bias, and never escaping either British presuppositions that make no sense in America or the personal views of its authors. (An example of its chronic laziness: It describes the controversial punishment for ignoring the individual mandate — the one whose categorization, i.e. is it a “tax” or a “penalty”?, was the topic of this morning’s oral arguments — as . . . a “tax penalty.”)

#more#In the piece’s “analysis” sidebar, Paul Adams, a “Washington correspondant,” demonstrates perfectly the habitual BBC reluctance to transcend widely held British conceptions about health care, the role of government, and America in general, and to cast the debate — both sides, of course — within a proper context. He wrote:

Even as the law’s early provisions have come into effect — to general approbation — the overall law remains profoundly contentious. It’s become a poster child for everything Republicans say is wrong about Barack Obama’s style of government.
Opponents of the act have managed to frame the debate over “Obamacare” (they also changed its name) into one about constitutional fidelity, religious freedom and the size of government.
The law’s actual purpose – to extend insurance coverage and put an end to discrimination based on pre-existing conditions or ability to pay – sometimes seem to have been forgotten.

Adams spectacularly failed to acknowledge that there might possibly be a link between the “law’s actual purpose” and the issues of “constitutional fidelity, religious freedom and size of government.” It seems to have escaped his notice that those concerns might be the product of the law, and not divorced from it. Clearly, what Adams is actually telling us is that he doesn’t think there is any legitimate opposition to the bill — certainly not on the frivolous oh-so-American grounds of “constitutional fidelity, religious freedom and size of government” — and that in his view the only basis on which one might legitimately reject the law is a lack of information, probably as an unfortunate product of Machiavellian “opponents” who have “framed the debate” in scary, sinister terms and distracted the American public from its charms.

Note also the claim that the law’s early provisions have been received to “general approbation,” which flatly contradicts the main story’s noting that “an opinion poll published on Monday found that 47% of voters disapproved of the healthcare law and 36% were in favour.” Again, what Adams actually means is that the law has been received “to general approbation” in his BBC newsroom and among the people he knows in Britain, which country’s National Health Service is its state religion. Statistics in America be damned.

In January, I wrote that,

I will never forget watching former BBC North American editor Matt Frei rendered literally speechless when, after the tragic Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, he couldn’t find anyone at the afflicted college to tell his cameras that firearms should be banned. One ugly consequence of this is that the British generally hold strong opinions about American politics, without the deeper framework around which to hang the swathes of information that they have been fed.

I spent the first 26 years of my life in Britain, and I watched the debate over — and passage of, Obamacare — from that fair isle. There was generally little point in listening to any of the coverage from the BBC (and British news outlets in general) because, as former BBC North America correspondant Justin Webb pointed out, the BBC considers America to have “no moral weight,” and thus to be unworthy of serious research. British people overwhelmingly support socialized medicine and consider their National Health Service to be a sign of national morality. They are thus naturally friendly toward anything in other parts of the world that appears to mirror it. That is their right, of course, but it is one thing for an average British citizen not to understand that America is a constitutional republic of enumerated powers with branches of government that are separated from one another and a healthy federal system to boot, and quite another for the BBC’s reporters to write about the country as if it were just a larger Britain, and “frame the debate” in those terms. (Indeed, the British predisposition toward government-run healthcare actually makes explanation of the differences between the two countries more, not less important.)

It is impossible to cover the United States without understanding its systems, and yet, as an American reader studying in Britain wrote to me,

the BBC does a good job of covering the horse race, but makes virtually no effort to explain primaries, the federal system, the constitution, and, especially detrimental for British viewers, the difference between the party system in the US and UK. Not ideologically, that is understood (to a point) but organizationally. This, in my experience, has a profound effect on the outlook of Britons.

My correspondant also wrote that “the BBC’s political neutrality stops at the waters edge.” I would dispute that it exists on dry land, but, that aside, it is clear once again that those in Britain seriously wishing to gain an understanding of a serious event in American history, in exchange for their forcefully extracted license fee, will have to look elsewhere. Given how good the BBC’s coverage of many other countries is, its reporting on America is a constant embarrassment. Ultimately, the British people lose out: The BBC has no desire to put them in danger of actually learning anything about America, and given the deep importance of mutual understanding between the two countries, that is a profound shame.