News management

As discussed on an earlier thread, it was noticeable, on waking up early to the news of the latest murderous 'This is for Allah' outrage, that the BBC and Sky and ITV were under-reporting the cries of 'This is for Allah' from the murderers, which they apparently shouted as they repeatedly stabbed a girl.

This was despite the fact that two eyewitnesses (one called Eric, another called Gerard) had separately told the BBC that those were the very words cried - one around 00.30 am, the other sometime within the next couple of hours. 

It took many hours, till around 7.30 am, for the BBC News website's main report to begin reporting those cries and until around 8.55 am for the BBC News website's 'London attack: What we know so far' page to be updated to include details of the cries. 

Now, the BBC News Channel had been repeating clips of the Eric and Gerard interviews, including their mention of the cries, throughout the night, though without commenting on them or otherwise referring to them until after 7 o'clock (like the BBC website) when the cries began being briefly mentioned by BBC reporters and presenters. 

So the BBC clearly made a conscious decision to downplay those 'This is for Allah' cries in the early hours of its reporting of this breaking news story. It only featured them in a clips on the News Channel and the BBC News website chose not to report them at all in its two main website reports. 

Whether they were right to downplay the cries until they'd been even more widely verified is one I'm not sure about, but to completely censor them - as the BBC News website's main reports did - was surely taking that way too far - especially as it was two BBC interviews which first broke that news.