Tuesday 18 October 2016

Playing down


Rotherham

The latest guilty verdicts on eight members of a predominantly British Pakistani paedophile gang in Rotherham for abusing while girls as young as 13 received no coverage on yesterday BBC One's News at Six, and BBC News at Ten gave the story just 15 seconds:
Eight men have been found guilty of sexually abusing three girls in Rotherham between 1999 and 2003. The court heard how they sexualised their victims, some of whom were as young as 13 when the offences took place. The men, who were all from the town, will be sentenced next week.
And to illustrate the gang's unifying factor - being "all from the town" - BBC News at Ten showed us panoramic views of Rotherham.

Moreover, their online report (which quickly disappeared from the BBC News home page) didn't mention a significant detail from the news story which other media outlets (from the Guardian to the Daily Mail) - did mention: the racial (and possibly religious) element to the rapes.

One of the attackers, Sageer Hussain, told the 13 year-old girl, "All white girls are good for is sex and they are just slags."

It is entirely typical of BBC reporting that this element of the story got censored here.

2 comments:

  1. The BBC's main source of inspiration, the Guardian, actually did report extensively on this last night and made clear the origins of all but one of the accused. I'm not totally sure that the version I first saw has not been tamed down - one for the recovery software?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The R4 news referred to the guilty as "men". That's all they had in common. Just men being men. Ah yes.

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.