Homophobic anti-immigration BBC scare quotes
hackwatch | 19.08.2011 14:47
The corporate media is at it again. Today a gay man facing repression unfathomable to UK had his deportation delayed. The BBC headline?
'Gay' Ugandan asylum seeker's deportation deferred.
Scare quotes - inexplicably using quote marks around certain strategic words - allow the media to subtly undermine and ridicule people, groups and causes by attaching a subliminal air of untrustworthiness. Before you even begin reading this article, the BBC has implanted the suggestion that this asylum seeker's homosexuality is questionable. They offer no evidence for this whatsoever in the article.
The effects of this may seem negligible, but scare quotes are used daily by the corporate media to spin a story. The BBC cannot openly question this man's homosexuality as they have no evidence and their motivations are at best really really dark. Yet through scare quotes, they are able to plant the suggestion without having to bring up any evidence, as it is impossible to prove the intentions and reasons behind the marks. Fox News famously put scare quotes around the words 'The President' after a black man was elected in 2008, planting and maintaining the suggestion that he was in some way not president.
Why has the BBC done this? There are many possible reasons. A homophobic agenda? An anti-immigration agenda? A homophobic or anti-immigration writer/editor who escaped detection by others?
The full article can be seen here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-14579616
Scare quotes - inexplicably using quote marks around certain strategic words - allow the media to subtly undermine and ridicule people, groups and causes by attaching a subliminal air of untrustworthiness. Before you even begin reading this article, the BBC has implanted the suggestion that this asylum seeker's homosexuality is questionable. They offer no evidence for this whatsoever in the article.
The effects of this may seem negligible, but scare quotes are used daily by the corporate media to spin a story. The BBC cannot openly question this man's homosexuality as they have no evidence and their motivations are at best really really dark. Yet through scare quotes, they are able to plant the suggestion without having to bring up any evidence, as it is impossible to prove the intentions and reasons behind the marks. Fox News famously put scare quotes around the words 'The President' after a black man was elected in 2008, planting and maintaining the suggestion that he was in some way not president.
Why has the BBC done this? There are many possible reasons. A homophobic agenda? An anti-immigration agenda? A homophobic or anti-immigration writer/editor who escaped detection by others?
The full article can be seen here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-14579616
hackwatch
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