Did I hear a BBC newsreader call Santorum a 'socialist conservative'?

[alp227]

I guess that's what happens when you're from a democratic socialist country. Anyway I am listening to the BBC World Service right now and during the hourly bulletin the newsreader was doing an item about the Illinois primary. The primary summary was in the middle order of the bulletin (for midnight Pacific or 7am GMT) because right now French police are trying to arrest the school shooter. I heard something like "Romney beat his rival, the socialist conservative Rick Santorum"...that extra "-ist" wasn't necessary.

[intaglio]

1. They probably called him a Social Conservative

Wikipedia, with all it's limitations has a good definition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_conservatism

[LeftishBrit]

2. I'm sure it was 'social conservative'. The BBC often refers to him as such.

Actually it's a fairly mild term for him; 'social conservative' usually refers to the sort of person who wants to go back to the 1950s, not the 1350s.

Nobody, certainly not in the UK, would dream of calling him a socialist!

[DFW]

3. Maybe the BBC guy had seen a few Fox broadcasts

If so, he would have heard them calling Obama a socialist so many times that the word just stuck in his head.
If you took "Liberal" and "Socialist" out of the Fox Noise vocabulary, they would have 4 hours of dead air every day.