Why BBC doesn't call Hamas militants 'terrorists' - John Simpson
Why BBC doesn't call Hamas militants 'terrorists' - John Simpson
It's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn, writes the BBC's World Affairs editor.
I guess not strictly news - but with all of the vitriol I have seen in discussions on the Israel situation, that have boiled down to arguments over wording, I feel that this take from the BBC is worthy of some discussion.
Mods, feel free to remove if this is not newsy enough.
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Terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn - who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
Wasn't the BBC publishing articles that had a fairly strong anti-trans slant to them recently? It seems funny that the BBC would draw the line at a group that's murdered nearly 2,000 civilians, including infants, toddlers and children, all within just a few days, but is perfectly okay with suggesting that trans people are deviants who are going to ruin the moral fabric of society.
Got a link or a citation?
I'm almost certain I remember there being more """both sides are valid/we're just being informative""" articles about trans people more recently, but here's an example of one from a couple years ago that was so controversial it got its own Wikipedia article: "We're being pressured into sex by some trans women"
I've asked for examples of these articles, and nobody has ever been able to produce them.
It was an article that implied that trans women were coercing sex from lesbians.
Now the article was based on a poor premise to start with, "Do some \ do ?" is almost always going to be "yes" because there are bad people in basically every demographic. That doesn't mean we go around writing fearmongering articles about those groups. But it gets far, far worse.
The article was based on a survey of 88 women from a group called "Get the L out", whose entire purpose is trans exclusion. So heavily sampling bias to start, to say the least. The group, and the survey, also considered things like saying that trans women are women or can be lesbians to count as "being coerced into having sex with trans women", because implying that trans women are women means that they can be lesbians means that they are within the broader dating pool of lesbians, and to them that amounts to coercing lesbians to date men. Which is obviously absurd and not what a normal person would think of when hearing "coerce into sex". So the survey was deeply misleading and not at all what the headline implied.
The second main contributor to the article was adult actress Lily Cade. Who has admitted to sexually assaulting multiple women. Which makes her an odd choice for an article about sexual assault, don't you think? These assaults were known long before the article was written, and came up with a Google search. Odd that it slipped through the BBC's rigorous editorial process. Cade also went on a rant a few days after the article was published, where she called for all trans women to be executed, and called for several named trans women to be lynched. The BBC cut her contribution with a vague message not explaining why.
The BBC also claimed to have reached out to prominent trans women who speak about sex, and claimed that nobody agreed to speak with them. Which was proven to be a lie when Chelsea Poe, a high-profile trans woman who speaks about sex and relationships, revealed that she had in fact been interviewed.
Genuinely one of the most disgustingly biased pieces of "journalism" I've ever seen.
Part of the problem is that when you have a significant number of news sites fueling anti-trans hate, either directly or indirectly, it all starts to blend together. Nevertheless, here's an example from a couple years ago, though I'm almost certain I've seen similar articles more recently.