All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
This week, a former member of the BBC’s own standards committee released a 19-page dossier to The Telegraph and government departments. Fed up with being ignored by senior staff, they documented fake news and systemic bias at the corporation. The most damning example: the doctoring of a Donald Trump speech one week before the election, editing it to suggest he was calling for violence when he’d said something entirely different.
The Telegraph began drip-feeding stories from the dossier, exposing misinformation at the BBC and the corporation’s own awareness of its shoddy reporting. Trans coverage featured prominently. The dossier reveals that trans stories are handled exclusively by the BBC’s LGBTQ desk—which refuses to cover “difficult questions about the trans debate”.
The BBC’s bias has countless examples. Here’s one that resurfaced this week. When Megha Mohan, the BBC’s ‘global gender and identity correspondent’, started at the corporation, she lied outrageously about the number of intersex people in the world. The BBC quietly corrected her but apparently never disciplined her. She then wrote to colleagues, instructing them not to platform left-wing women who don’t believe men are women.
At the time of writing, the BBC hasn’t given any detailed response to the contents of the dossier.
Wi Spa 2
The victim is a woman of colour, the villains are all white, the ‘transwoman’ is a sex offender. This is Wi Spa 2.
US singer-songwriter Tish Hyman had her gym membership terminated for complaining about a man using the women’s changing room. The man has since been identified as a violent convicted felon.
Source: Nutmeg’s Week: Martine Croxall, Tish Hyman; Helen Belcher