The BBC’s primary concern appears to be ensuring its audience understands that US conservatives may have overstated the case.
By GEORGE GILBEY
The BBC’s Global Disinformation Unit’s recent investigation into Christian persecution in Nigeria is a masterclass in how to bury a massacre under methodological dispute. While the BBC agonises over whether 3,000 or 7,000 Christians were killed in eight months, the dead remain dead. Their churches remain burned. Their families remain displaced.
Yet the BBC’s primary concern appears to be ensuring its audience understands that US conservatives may have overstated the case.
This is journalism as misdirection: find the weakest sources, dismantle them thoroughly, then treat that as sufficient grounds to dismiss what Britain’s own government has called a crisis approaching genocide.
The BBC investigation opens with Donald Trump threatening to go “guns-a-blazing” into Nigeria. Trump makes a perfect target for BBC scepticism – with his tendency to be bombastic, crude, prone to exaggeration – but he also commands the world’s most powerful military and the largest foreign-aid budget. His reinstatement of Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” for religious-freedom violations had concrete diplomatic and security consequences.
Make Trump the story, and you need not engage with the substance behind it. Paint US conservatives as hysterical and you can ignore what drove their concern. The technique works because Trump is also an easy villain for the BBC’s audience. But it substitutes theatre criticism for investigative journalism.