Following on from the previous follow-up post, tonight's BBC One News at Ten gave the same story a bit more coverage.
Though the introduction was as linguistically evasive as what had gone before...
A man has pleaded guilty to plotting a terrorist attack in central London, and raising money to fund terrorism. 26-year-old Lewis Ludlow from Kent had planned to hire a van and target pedestrians on Oxford Street, at Madame Tussauds and at St Paul's Cathedral. He said he'd hoped to kill up to 100 people. He'll be sentenced in November.
...there followed a short interview with the BBC's Daniel Sandford, which began:
Well Jayne, this has always been a very unusual case. Lewis Ludlow is an awkward-looking white convert from Rochester in Kent who converted to Islam at the age of 16 and was quickly drawn into the world of the well-known radical extremist, Anjem Choudary. He used to appear on demonstrations with Choudary's supporters, always looking slightly out of place, and he recorded a YouTube video saying he'd once been a Nazi but had converted to Islam after Muslims had been friendly to him online after a bereavement.
There's some very interesting language there, don't you think? It's much less condemnatory in tone than Emma Murphy's ITV piece (transcribed in the previous post), which stressed the terrorist hopeful's "religious zeal" and quoted him at length expressing that (Islamic) religious zeal of his, with holy hate in his heart.
It's almost as if Daniel was presenting him here as a weak, white, former Nazi weirdo who fell for Anjem Choudary after Muslims were kind to him - and as something outlandish.
And it's interesting that the "Muslim convert" phrase used so widely elsewhere (see previous posts and across the media) here becomes "white convert".
Plus there's no mention of the murderers of Fusilier Lee Rigby, to whom this murderer is linked (a link widely cited elsewhere).
And the BBC bulletin again presented its viewers with the image show in the previous post.
I see that Sky, like ITV, is not doing what the BBC is doing and is instead using images that show the would-be Islamic terrorist against Arabic script and a black Islamist flag:
Even Channel 4 News tonight used that image.
It seems that only the BBC is sticking with:
That must be a conscious decision on the BBC's part.
Sandford is an appalling toer of the PC line! "A very unusual case"? Not at all! I can think of at least four cases in the UK of converts to Islam carrying out, or trying to carry out, such attacks.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Sandford of course misses out the crucial link here...Sandford tells us the man converted to Islam, aka as "the religion of peace" according to the BBC, so how can conversion to that religion possibly be linked almost immediately to terrorism? Of course, the last thing Sandford wants to suggest (your job's on the line Danny Boy!) is that conversion to Islam can lead to someone being motivated to commit terrorism...that just doesn't fit the overarching BBC narrative. So what we get here is just a huge gap.
Then, clearly from the way Sandford presents it, we are supposed to be amazed that a Nazi can convert to Islam...why? Tens of thousands of German Communists converted to Nazism - that was no problem for them. Tens of thousands of Jihadis fought with the Nazis in WW2. Many Nazis found important government-service roles in Islamic Arab countries after WW2. Personally, I am not at all amazed.
And yes "pick the pic to fit the narrative" is a golden rule of all journalism. Why else would the BBC choose the much less newsworthy pic, except it served their narrative designed to put the populace to sleep?