Lifted from the comments, a reminder, were one needed, that you don’t despise the media anywhere near enough.
In this case, it’s Flemish public television – not unlike our own BBC – and one guest’s realisation that any discussion of rising intolerance and a growing enthusiasm for violence against women must arrive at certain predetermined conclusions, regardless of the facts:
Eventually, a young editor sent me a brief PowerPoint presentation that had been circulating internally. To my surprise, every chart contained a bar for respondents of “foreign origin,” alongside the categories for age and education. Less surprisingly, that bar was often the highest of all. The internal presentation even drew attention to the elevated levels of intolerance among respondents of foreign origin—several times.
Then I noticed a marginal comment from a VRT editor that was clearly not intended for outside eyes.
It instructed the news desk not to report the breakdown by foreign origin, even though the data had been collected.
The seemingly routine attempt to deceive does rather invalidate the ostensible core function of this publicly funded organisation. It throws everything they do into question. How could one possibly trust them? It quite literally wipes out their credibility as a broadcaster. And by extension, any claim to public funding or favoured status.
In a saner world, it would be the end of them.
I say ostensible function because it’s not altogether obvious – to say the least – how one could reconcile some supposed broadcaster’s mission to convey the facts, and to bring into being an informed citizenry, with doing everything possible to prevent precisely that.
And doing so in a manner one might regard as practised.
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