Thugs

One on the complainants on this week's Newswatch raised a similar point to one made by someone at ITBB a few days back. 

It concerned the reporting of Damian Grammaticas from a far-right protest in Brussels, including this passage from one of his pieces:

Police reinforcements arrived. Officers here are overstretched already by the terror alerts. The riot squad moved in. There were cheers. The thugs beat a hasty retreat.

The point made by the Newswatch viewer was: 

Your correspondent describes the protesters as 'thugs', which shows a bias and opinion that should not be expressed by a neutral news provider. The protesters may have a view not shared by the majority, but this terminology does the BBC no favours when reporting what should be a factual account of events.

The point made here was:

Interesting use of words by Damian Grammaticus on BBC News. Several times he referred to "thugs" from the far right coming to disrupt commemoration in Brussels. I've no problem with that description, given their behaviour was thuggish. But when has he or any other BBC reporter referred to Islamists or Leftists involved in similar scenes as "thugs". Never I think. In fact the BBC has a problem with even uttering the word terrorist a lot of the time - preferring "gunman", "militant" or "guerilla". There was a far worse event in Pakistan today - in which scores of mostly Christian children were deliberately murdered by Islamist butchers, but no such epithets were cast their way.

And that is surely the point. It's all very well for Damian Grammaticas to call white, right-wing thugs "thugs", but you won't hear him call Islamists or Leftists names like that.

More broadly, why is it acceptable for a BBC reporter to describe far-right Belgian protesters (if that's what they all were) with such a "pejorative" term when, famously, (a) the BBC opposes calling terrorists "terrorists" because it contains a non-neutral "value judgement", and (b) when Lord Hall refuses to allow the BBC to call Islamic State 'DAESH' on the grounds that it's a "pejorative name" and that, by seeing to take sides against IS, it "would not preserve the BBC's impartiality"?

In the words of that Jacobean play, It's A Mad World, My Masters, isn't it?