Monday 12 January 2015

False equivalence



Today's 'chief correspondent' Matthew Price has appeared on Is the BBC biased? before.

We first encountered him (via DB at Biased BBC) recommending an article delegitimising Israel.

This morning's Today (around the 7.45 mark) featured a Matthew Price report from the Parisian suburb of Sarcelles. 

It was an elegantly-constructed piece, full of poetic touches. It described and equated two equally vulnerable communities in France - French Jews and French Muslims. Both want to live in harmony, but both are fearful now. Both have guards outside their places of worship. 

Everything in the report was clearly intended to suggest a parallel and equivalent problem.

What you didn't get from Matthew's report was any mention of the fact that it was French Muslims who targeted and murdered French Jews last week. 

In Matthew Price's defence you might say that that's too obvious to need stating, but the absolutely staggering thing about this report is that this omission wasn't the only omission. 

Unlike most Radio 4 listeners, I know - and, probably, you know - something about Sarcelles (Matthew's mint-scented, tense but harmony-seeking Parisian suburb), something that the BBC reporter completely 'forgot' to mention: It was the scene, only last year, of violent anti-Semitic riots by local Muslims chanting "Death to Jews" and "Slit Jews' throats".  

There's no equivalence, despite what Matthew Price says. Jews are under attack in France, and it's Muslims who are doing the attacking.

If you fancy defending the BBC here, please take a listen to that report and tell me where it informs Radio 4 listeners about what happened in Sarcelles last year, and then try to explain why Matthew Price failed to mention those anti-Jewish riots.

1 comment:

  1. It's a curious omission, considering that has to have been the reason Price chose Sarcelles in the first place. This is why DB's work and the collection of tweets is so vital to the case against the BBC. On their own the tweets don't prove anything other than the place is full of Left-wing tools. When combined with their reporting, however, it shows their form, and raises a legitimate concern about their personal ideology shaping their journalism.

    Going through various things over the weekend, I've come across more of DB's catches that never made it to the tweets page. I'm thinking of seriously updating my own list for other purposes.

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