As I was flicking through the TV a few minutes ago, I caught a few minutes of a programme called Angry, White and Proud.
It didn't seem particularly enlightening, just following a few yobbish types as they chant racist football songs outside mosques. One sentence the narrator said however, completely caught me off guard:
As it's recently come to light that 1,400 girls were abused in Rotherham over a sixteen year period, the group decide to protest.
No further explanation. Cuts to the ads.
After the ads it showed some condemnation from a Muslim community leader, but the rationale is never provided by the the documentary. Instead, the tinfoil hat Special Brew brigade are shown gallivanting around Rotherham.
This is an example of the increasing timidity of the British media. Only if you were following British news six months ago would you understand that the motivation for them protesting was the fact that 1,400 girls were targeted exclusively by Muslim abusers deliberately because they were where white, for a period of sixteen years, with the informed indifference of the police. Whatever way you choose to interpret this scenario is up to you, but the very least that respectable documentaries should be doing is providing the main facts of the story, and factual the above story unfortunately is.
I can't fathom how this crucial detail was omitted from the documentary (nor how the whole Rotherham case managed to slip into obscurity so quickly, despite it's magnitude).
Sky showed the same attitude during the week. Interviewing a French journalist about the Charlie Hebdo ordeal, the journo says:
I'm very sad that journalists in the UK do not support us, that they betray what journalism is about by thinking that people cannot be mature enough to decide if a drawing is offensive or not because you're not even showing it.
She then pulls out the Charlie Hebdo cover and the cameraman panics and pans wildly away so as to not show it, while the Sky anchor begins to apologize profusely in case anyone watching was offended by something that they broadcast accidentally (thus proving her point).
Has anyone else noticed this extreme caution in the British media recently? What do you think is causing it? If the media refuse to deal with subjects just because they're sensitive, they completely fail in reporting things at all.