The BBC is facing questions from two Sun columnists over its reporting of apparent mass coordinated sexual assaults on women in Germany.
The first reports emerged of attacks on more than 90 women outside Cologne railway station on New Year's Eve. There have since been reports of similar incidents at other German cities.
Rod Liddle wrote in The Sun yesterday:
What on earth is going on? Have German men taken leave of their senses? Have they gone mad?
That’s what you might have thought if you’d watched the BBC Ten O’Clock News report of this appalling incident. Huw Edwards covered the story in nine seconds flat.
He seemed utterly incurious as to why it had happened. And even less interested in who the perpetrators might be.
What the Ten O’Clock News — and others — didn’t report was exactly who these men were. They weren’t ordinary Germans who’d suddenly gone sexually berserk.
They were all North African or Arab immigrants. According to the police — ALL of them. The lot.
Writing today in The Sun former editor of the paper Kelvin MacKenzie said:
I first caught wind of the story on Radio 4’s Today programme, when after a three-minute segment it only became clear that these were migrant attacks in almost the last word of an interview with a German woman who had taken part in a demonstration following the attacks.
Right up until that sentence I had wrongly believed that these were German skinheads full of alcohol. Who on earth was editing that show?
And what about the BBC presenter Sarah Montague?
The BBC TV news didn’t think that this fact — for it IS a fact — was worth reporting.
Keep it schtum, Huw. Don’t want to alarm the natives. Don’t tell the whole truth because that might lead to an even worse crime . . . Islamophobia. Let them think it’s just ordinary Germans.
Exactly the same approach taken by our liberal elite over the sexual assault of underage girls by predatory Muslim gangs across our country.
The IPSO Editors' Code (which most newspapers, but not broadcasters, follow) states:
"Details of an individual's race, colour, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story."
A spokesperson for the BBC told Press Gazette that The Sun is wrong and that the corporation has talked about the ethnicity of attackers in its reports.
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