One by One

Reading this article at BBConline one has to try to follow the tortuous logic of a journalist trying to justify after the event the BBC’s skewed approach to the news, in this case to ‘Questions of Murder’. As Dumbjon points out, the notion of challenging authority doesn’t apply when the BBC agrees with that authority- when, for example, the race-based news quota method is applied.

Anthony Walker died, and that’s sad, and I have a different feeling about what priorities should be employed concerning such cases from the floundering BBC journalist who drew the short straw of attempting a Beeb apologia. I feel that all cause celebre murder cases should be left to the few gutter press publications who can really thrive on them. There should be no Danielle Jones, no little Rorys, no Holly and Jessicas etc- and no Anthony Walkers- on the BBC, and thus less likely to be such a style of journalism in the rest of the media. Instead there should be some dedicated continuous coverage of murder cases on a daily basis- complete with court records, legal diaries, verdict analysis etc (I suspect this would really be the reintroduction of certain features of coverage which have been dropped over the years). If the BBC want their moral leadership role (which they pride themselves on in bringing ‘social value’ to the British people) to count for them in the debate over their future, that’s what they should do.

And meanwhile, they might consider fitting this kind of information somewhere into their grand moral compass:

‘these murders need to be set out one by one, in all their horror, describing their nature and affirming that which is too often forgotten: Saddam was one of the worst tyrants in history and it was urgent to rid the Iraqi people of him.’