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.
That article has been edited multiple times due to an influx of complaints. A fuller timeline can be found documented in videos here: https://youtu.be/b4buJMMiwcg
The original article is based on poor premises, elevates the voices of explicitly hateful people, mislead the reader to a false conclusion that trans women are coercing lesbians into sex, platformed a known sexual-assaulter who called for the execution of all trans women. And finally the BBC also just straight up lied about if they interviewed trans people for the article.
It’s genuinely a terrible piece of journalism that the BBC should be utterly ashamed of.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/b4buJMMiwcg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
From the wiki:
…On 31 May 2022, the BBC released rulings from the Head of the Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) that stated that the article was a “legitimate piece of journalism overall” but that it had breached the BBC’s standards of accuracy in two ways. Firstly, the headline “gave the misleading impression that the focus of the article would be on pressure applied by trans women” when the actual article focused to an equal degree on “internalised pressure experienced by some lesbians as a result of a climate of opinion … within the LGBT community”.[5] As a result, the title of the article was changed to “The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”.[7] Secondly, the head of the ECU found that the coverage of the Get the L Out survey “did not make sufficiently clear that it lacked statistical validity”. The wording of the article surrounding the survey was subsequently altered.
I’m aware of the history of the article. The original article was significantly worse, as my comment stated.
But even above that, the article still should not have seen the light of day. It was based on a terrible premise to start with. A similar article would not have been written about other marginalised groups, and if it had it would have rightly been lambasted as absurdly bigoted. The BBC does not write articles like “do people of X race commit crimes?!”
And the fact that the BBC found Lily Cade to be a worthy contributor, even after they were informed of her history of sexual assault, raises so many red flags.