Mick Hartley

From the Glinner Update, and Nutmeg's week: We need an inquiry into Pride in Surrey. Worth reading in full, but here on the BBC:

Ireland was a high-profile figure who’d appeared dozens of times on BBC Radio Surrey, including at least once as a presenter, and on national BBC programmes such as BBC Breakfast. You might have thought that anyone getting a 30-year prison sentence for child rape might be a top story, let alone someone well-known who was embedded in various institutions.

But no. BBC News had correspondents in court ready to broadcast on LGBT issues at the time of his sentencing, but none of them attended his trial. One was there for the inquest into why a drag queen had died. It’s worth noting that BBC News has now covered the death of The Vivienne nearly 30 times since January, and when Ireland was convicted in March, BBC South East Today ignored the story and instead ran a piece about … a different drag queen who’d died. The other was for the attendance in court of a man accused of spreading slurry on the street a few hours before a Pride march was due to take place.

BBC News waited more than five hours to report on the story, didn’t put it on its homepage and didn’t tag it into any section other than ‘Addlestone’ and ‘Guildford’. The article, bizarrely, ended with a comment from Ireland’s lawyer that Ireland did not abuse his position at Pride in Surrey in order to commit the offences, which is at odds with what the judge said when summing up.

The lack of tagging meant that, for example, while the BBC News’ Pride section ran 50 stories in June (a tiny fraction of the total output about Pride produced that month by the corporation) none of them mentioned that two Pride organisers had been jailed for nearly 35 years for child sexual abuse offences. Stories it did cover included that a banner had been torn….

Have lessons been learnt from the Jimmy Savile affair? In short, no. No lessons have been learnt.