Slightly off B-BBC topic – but why does this story – that someone in Edinburgh jumped on a car bonnet and damaged it – make the BBC news website, when a man beating a woman to death with a mallet does not ? The killing of Deborah Wheatley by Mark Goldstraw in 2001 was only reported by the BBC when Goldstraw was accused of four other killings.
What Makes BBC News ?
Bookmark the permalink.
Good question. Contrast the amounts of coverage given to two tragic racially-motivatee murders: Kris Donald and Anthony Walker.
Anthony Walker is just one step away from full canonisation – whereas Kris Donald is pretty much unheard of – especially in England.
Maybe it was a Beeboid’s car that was damaged – remember the time when Bruce Forsyth’s daughter’s dog was lost/kidnapped?
Shamefully it was all over BBC News programmes and BBC News Online like a rash. Quite disgraceful abuse of our public service broadcaster by the luvvies who work there.
As for Kriss Donald, the dreadful crime and subsequent court cases have barely been mentioned on the BBC in England. If the roles were reversed, e.g. an Asian 15 year old was randomly kidnapped, beaten, tortured and murdered by a gang of whites, the BBC would be all over it at every opportunity, wherever it happened in the UK. Again, quite disgraceful.
Maybe it was a Beeboid’s car that was damaged
That could be it. Certainly, Drummond Place is the sort of street inhabited by Scotland’s “great and the good”. You know, the kind of people who can easily afford and who ideologically support the TV tax.
“Maybe it was a Beeboid’s car that was damaged – remember the time when Bruce Forsyth’s daughter’s dog was lost/kidnapped?”
Clearly the most pressing issue is the safety of the Forsyth hound.
/says a prayer for the missing mutt
Similar odd priorities in our Flagship late night serious news programme to devote an interview to Madonna’s family affairs.
Let us keep our priorities in order. If the BBC never did anything than favouring one of their public faces (and I like Bruce Forsyth) on the news, they would count as saints, compared to the reams of daily, hourly, indeed almost constant and totally poisonous political lying which is their life and living. Bruce Forsyth is harmless; the silencing of the Kriss Donald affair is murderously political, and deserves to be examined with care by a criminal court.
284 hits for “Kriss Donald” on news.bbc.co.uk. What evil, silencing bastards they are…
Because other people hit on news which they have carefully buried away – as newspaper editors used to say – on page thirteen, the BBC has not silenced it? Is that what they think in whatever you live in?
I think this is well worth a posting and wider viewing: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6106398.stm Read it, especially the final paragraph and then do a Google search on the writer. plenty of stuff to chew on in just the first page of results!
Very interesting indeed…
Fabio P.Barbieri | 02.11.06 – 9:05 am |
I don’t think you have quite grasped what johnb is saying. Follow his link.
It shows that the BBC has posted something like 284 stories on Kriss Donald sincs his murder.
The idea that the story has been buried is rubbish. The news front page is updated many times a day. Stories go on and off rapidly. But the stories always remain and anyone who wants to follow the Kriss Donald story can….by using the search engine….or better…Google. The internet isn’t like a paper with a page 13.
Kriss Donald’s murder was reported on BBC 1 TV News the day ….or possibly the day after it happened. The story has been on Radio 4’s main 6.00 pm news at least three times. It was on News 24 last week.
BBC Scotland must have run it heaven knows how many times.
There have doubtless been a number of other murders in Glasgow since. How many of them have received a fraction of the 284 stories posted on Kriss Donald?
John Reith.
So why did I, who regularly (alas) follow BBC news, never hear of it until I started following such blogs as this? Is it perhaps because I live in London, and the national BBC leadership felt that such a story was too harsh for sensitive English ears to handle? “Burying it in the local news” is as bad as “burying it in page 13”, y’know.
Fabio P. Barbieri
According to this site there are around 850 murders in the UK per annum.
Most don’t get reported on the BBC website at all.
Kriss Donald has had more than 250 stories about him.
The case has been complex. There was a first trial of 2 defendants.
Then there were extradition proceedings to get other suspects returned.
Then a second trial of the other accused.
All denied murder, I think.
So a lot of the detail has been sub judice for a hell of a long time…..restricting what can be reported so as not to prejudice the second trial.
That said…..if you’d been listening to Radio 4 6pm news or watching the TV News on BBC 1 on the days the story was broadcast – you would have seen/heard it.
….sorry, FPB….here’s that link
http://www.murderuk.com/misc/stats.htm
JR
With respect, the comparison isn’t with all the other murders and the coverage they receive, but with the other murders in which there’s a clear rqace component. The Stephen Lawrence murder received probably more coverage than any other in years. The poor lad murdered in Liverpool by a bunch of white thugs got massive coverage too – his mother made a notable intervention.
In the case of Kriss Donald there has been nothing remotely comparable, no breast-beating about the rise of racist violence among Muslim youth and their failure to integrate with wider society. In the absence of any of the customary emoting from the Beeboids when a racist murder occurs, it’s impossible not to conclude that that the Beeb as an institution is harbouring racists.
john b:
284 hits for “Kriss Donald” on news.bbc.co.uk. What evil, silencing bastards they are…
john b | Homepage | 02.11.06 – 8:38 am | #
and 515 hits for “Anthony Walker”:
“Anthony Walker” site:news.bbc.co.uk – Google Search
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22Anthony+Walker%22+site%3Anews.bbc.co.uk&meta=
John b – your point was……? (explaining why these two gruesome murders are treated differently by the BBC perhaps?)
Thanks john b for your educative ‘284 hits’ link.
What do most of these links have in common? Mostly they link to “BBC NEWS/Scotland/…..” or “BBC NEWS/UK/Scotland…..” A few to “BBC NEWS/UK…..” Where’s the editorial? Where’s the “Have Your Say”? Oh that’s right, you have to leave “site.news” out of the search string to see those entries and then you get more like 1200 results. Problem then is that you also get all those entries regarding the BBC ignoring the Kriss Donald story. Which rather proves a point doesn’t it?
John Reith you’ve been shown to be a liar on this subject before, please give it up before you’re made a fool of again.
This poor lad was kidnapped, beaten, stabbed, set on fire before slowly crawling to his death. Probably THE most horrific murder I have heard of. Yet most people have not heard of him. These same people are all forced to pay for a TV licence to watch the BBC. So explain why they don’t know his name? Actually, please don’t, you’re a liar and you know damn well that there are far more articles about Walker than Donald on the BBC website, and the articles on Donald have always been buried.
JR: ‘there are around 850 murders per year… most don’t get reported at all’ In other words, count yourself lucky you’ve read about this on the BBC Scotland pages a few times…
JimBoB “So explain why they don’t know his name?”
Yes that is the essence. Hit counts, baloney. The murder has not been given the coverage required to produce mass awareness with the case.
All denied murder, I think, says John Reith as he tries to prove that the Kriss Donald racist murder has received coverage comparable to the coverage of a black victim of white racism.
So let’s ask the obvious question here. If there was such saturation coverage of the Donald murder, why is Reith uncertain of the major issue of whether his killers admitted to the murder or not?
It’s all bluff and bullsh*t. The BBC does not treat black and white victims of racist crimes the same way. Reith knows it, but he wont admit it.
“The killing of Deborah Wheatley by Mark Goldstraw etc”
Moving back on to the topic at hand, which is itself off topic, I find the earlier conviction for manslaughter baffling. Neither the BBC nor any of the newspapers I have read go into any detail about this conviction. It is said that he was sentenced to seven years in prison, and that he was released after half the sentence had been served, for the manslaughter of Ms Wheatley (by beating her about the head with a mallet).
I assume the finding was that he did not intend to kill her, merely beat her senseless – in which case seven/three years still seems a lightweight sentence – but I can’t find anything about the case anywhere on the internet. There are no Google results for “‘”mark goldstraw” “Deborah Wheatley” -samantha'” for example.
(time passes)
Ah, the Daily Mail has a story about it:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=413952&in_page_id=1770
Mark Goldstraw is described as a “heavy metal fanatic”.
“Goldstraw’s previous trial was told that he killed his married lover, Deborah Wheatley, who was eight years older than him, with a mallet, fracturing her nose and her skull in seven places.
He then stuffed toilet paper into her mouth, tied her hands and ankles with tape and hid her body in a cupboard at his bedsit in Park Road, Leek.
After concealing bloodstains by rearranging furniture, Goldstraw dumped the mallet in a bin and fled to Sheffield before handing himself in to the police.
A jury of eight women and four men took nine hours to clear Goldstraw of murder but convict him of manslaughter on the grounds of provocation by a majority of 10-2.”
You would expect such a story to make the national news, especially given the prurient and fetishistic aspects of the case (a blood-stained bedsit, a body stuffed in a cupboard, a heavy metal fanatic with a mallet) but no.
Perhaps, if the first case had received widespread publicity, Goldstraw’s present lawyers could argue that he cannot possibly receive a fair trial, and get him off the hook. So perhaps fate has finally nailed Mark Goldstraw.
John Reith and john b
I have done a little bit more research and I find that if I use the BBC search facility _ see 35 pages for AW and only 7 for KD.
Google gives me 513 links for AW and 290 for AW.
You both seem to be “in denial” about the huge differences in coverage. Most english people I speak to have not even heard of Kriss Donald. Yes it really is that thin, the coverage.
Why not compare the actual TV time given to the AW and KD murders. At a guess 15hrs to 5mins.
AP,
I think that the amount of press coverage of this sort of case largely depends on the willingness of the victim’s family to publicise it.
Cockney – the amount of press coverage of this sort of case largely depends on the willingness of the victim’s family to publicise it
So the day after Anthony Walker’s death his mum and dad were on the media bandwagon trying to publicise this! That is bullshit and you know it.
Jack Hughes rueful red, PJ and others –
re: Kriss Donald
You lot don’t seem to understand how the BBC website works.
PJ | 02.11.06 – 12:15 pm |
“What do most of these links have in common? Mostly they link to “BBC NEWS/Scotland/…..” or “BBC NEWS/UK/Scotland…..”
Are you really so daft as to believe that internet users in England are in some way stopped from seeing these stories?
Of course they’re classified under Scotland – because that’s where the story relates to.
If you look at the Anthony Walker page you will find that most of the stories are “England/merseyside” in exactly the same way.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Anthony+Walker%22+site:news.bbc.co.uk&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&start=20&sa=N
Cockney is also right in saying a lot of the coverage depends on the family. Many of the stories about Anthony Walker relate to a charity set up in his name; a festival set up in his name; a memorial planned for his commemoration.
There are other reasons why Walker has got more publicity too. First, right from the outset Merseyside police and civic leaders were declaring this a racially motivated crime.
Of the 850 murders pa in the UK few are racially motivated. Racially motivated crimes get more publicity than ordinary ones. For obvious public interest reasons.
In the early stages of the Kriss Donald case, the Glasgow Police and local councillors were urging caution on ascribing a racial motivation for the crime. Some even denied it flatly.
Once racially aggravated murder charges were brought, that changed.
Another reason is that the Walker case was simple in legal terms – all wrapped up with only a few months between the murder and the perps being sentenced.
The Kriss Donald case, by contrast, has been more complex. First trial of 2 defendants. Extradition proceedings. Second trial.
The media are subject to strict controls on what they can say while a case is sub judice. From the moment charges are anticipated until the jury returns its verdict – all the BBC can do is to list the charges and report what is said in court day by day. It cannot mix in with that other stuff that it knows or launch Have Your Says or anything else that might prejudice proceeding.
The Walker case was sub judice for only a few months. The Donald case has been in this position from a couple of days after the murder ‘til now.
JR “In the early stages of the Kriss Donald case, the Glasgow Police and local councillors were urging caution on ascribing a racial motivation for the crime”
As the Muslim community would have been in front of the TV cameras usurping victim status from the Donalds?
John Reith,
Everything that you say may well be true, but let’s try to look at this from a different angle. Would the BBC ever give a white victim of a racist killing more air time than a black or Asian victim? The answer to that one is never in a million years.
Natalie,
This afternoon an Iraqi asylum seeker was sentenced to life for attempted murder. Previously this asylum seeker committed a knife attack in Hull, was sentenced and recommended for deportation. He of course wasn’t deported and went on to commit this further crime for which he was sentenced today.
The Hull Daily Mail, our local newspaper, managed to report the case at 15.46 on Friday. The local BBC’s website, BBC Humber is yet to report this incident despite the site being updated at 20.18 on Friday evening. It’s now 12.35am Saturday morning and the story remains unreported on the BBC Humber web site and I can’t find any mention of it on the main BBC News web site either.
Hull Daily Mail article: Link
BBC Humber Web Site: Link
This story was reported on the local BBC news bulletin at 10.30pm but was ‘buried’ in the middle of the bulletin with what I consider lower priority news stories preceding it.
Another local story relating to a mother who admitted the attempted murder of her child in a failed suicide bid made the BBC Humber web site and also the main BBC England News web site. Both cases were heard at Hull Crown Court today.
BBC England Web Site: Link
It begs a question why they have not reported such an important story on their web site and why it did not make the top story slot on this evenings news bulletin.