Over at Biased BBC, there's a discussion about
a BBC video about the 'child refugees' Mrs May had agreed to take from France at M. Macron's behest:
Was whoever edited the video told this would be a piece about immigrant ‘children’? There is a distinct lack of children in the footage. I counted three in the 3:12 minute piece. Two, were carried by an adult [0:09 & 0:15]. (Accept the child – reject the father?) The other was riding a bicycle while photographing?/video calling? from his mobile phone [0:44]. (Bought the phone – carried it from Africa?)
I guess ‘late teens (to give benefit of the doubt) refugees heading to the UK’ would be a less sympathetic headline. Mostly the footage showed adult men.
There was nothing (Did nobody think to ask?) about checking whether the children were actually children as claimed. Nor was there any definition of a child. From the POV of the British government is a 17 year old a child? Surely there are different problems than when dealing with a 5 year old.
BTW what’s with the blanked-out faces [2:57]?
It really is striking just how
un-childlike the 'children' in this video look. They look like adult men to me or at best, as
deegee says, like boys in their late teens, and it's very disconcerting watching the images of them whilst simultaneously hearing a commentary that repeatedly refers to them as "refugee children". Your eyes
aren't seeing what your ears are hearing so your brain (rather than you nose) smells something funny. It's the kind of thing that understandably and rightly breeds cynicism.
Now, reporter Emma Vardy does say in her report that "some newspapers" have previous raised concerns about the age of the children and that other concerns about the legitimacy of their claims to be Syrian refugees have proved justified, but the overall tenor of her piece - and her talking heads (one Conservative, one Labour) - did give the impression of accepting that these people are children. It isn't just "some newspapers" that doubt the age of these adult-looking men, Emma.
As to
deegee's final question, "BTW what’s with the blanked-out faces [2:57]?", well, I think we were being shown
the famous first batch of 'children' - the batch that proved so controversial in "some newspapers" because of the fact that some of the 'children' looked as if they were in their late twenties, never mind their early twenties or late teens (and,
it later turned out, many of whom
were men in their late twenties).
The reluctance to question whether these 'children' are children looks set to be a permanent part of UK public policy and the BBC again looks set not to raise any difficult questions about that.
