4. Bias by Burying. If we don’t like a story we will bury it away somewhere like “News from Leicester” which you get to by navigating four or five pages on our website.
On Wednesday night I began drafting a post which ran as follows:
There's a new story that's being reported on the main page of the Sky News website tonight. It's also on the main page of the ITV News website. It isn't, however, anywhere to be found on the main page of the BBC News website presently, nor on the BBC's UK, though you will find it in the small print of the England page.
I didn't get round to finishing it though.
A reader contacted me that very night, however, and pointed out precisely the same thing.
He noted that, except for the above-cited 7-word mention of it low down the England page, this was a another case of the BBC burying away (publishing it on their Leeds & West Yorkshire local news page) a story about grooming gangs in Northern/Midlands town and cities.
"This follows on from their similar burying of the Telford grooming gang story in March (as covered by the Daily Mirror), and maybe various other instances - I've only started noticing this recently", he wrote.
Anyone new to the blog will find a lot more about the BBC's attempts to bury the Telford grooming gang story here. We posted 15 pieces about it.
This goes a lot further back than that and it doesn't just apply to these sexual abuse cases. I vaguely recall jokes about Buried in Berkshire some years ago, on Biased BBC blog, possibly. It may have involved a couple of Muslims and a row on a bus or something like that. Or was that Hidden in Hertford?
ReplyDeleteTrue. I think it was 'Buried in Berkshire'. I actually tried hunting through Biased BBC's archive yesterday to find that very phrase.
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