Just another day on Twitter.
Sky News's political editor Faisal Islam sends out a tweet about Brexit and receives a racially abusive tweet in reply telling him that he "could return to your native land, or go to Europe!" (and I'm guessing that man didn't mean Manchester). In response, an astonished Faisal Islam tweeted, "Quite regular this stuff now..thought all left behind in 1980s. On personal basis - I don't care. what must be going on generally - terrible".
One of the striking things about this unpleasant Twitter encounter is that Newswatch's Samira Ahmed used it to return to her favourite hobby-horse:
There are two things to say about that: Firstly, by linking things in that way, she's implicitly blaming the likes of Nigel Farage for that racist tweet, and, secondly, while so doing, she's trying to hide her own views behind those of her Newswatch viewers. Degrees of separation ought to fool no-one here about that, as she has repeatedly complained herself about the amount of airtime Nigel Farage is given.
I'm waiting for Samira tweeting her complaints about the amount of air time given to the unelected, (un)populists that have been so prominent on the BBC in last week or so ... Blair, Cameron, Balls, Milliband D., Campbell A.,
ReplyDeleteI've posted this before but it's a stat they don't seem to register- Any accusations levelled at UKIP that the BBC give them too much coverage because they only have 1 MP should be put in the following context;
ReplyDeleteUKIP got 12.6% of the vote in the 2015 election and 1 MP
Lib Dems got 7.9% and 8 MPs
SNP got 4.7% and 56 MPs