THOUSANDS upon thousands of anti-lockdown protesters gathered outside the BBC headquarters yesterday and chanted ‘shame on you’ over the corporation’s coverage of Covid. The noise must have been kept out by shut office windows, however (though there’s got to be a Covid regulation against that!) since there hasn’t been a peep on this march – or the many others which took place across the rest of the country yesterday – from the news team.
I appreciate that ‘escaped cattle spotted grazing in gardens’ and ‘a lost whale – 6,000 miles from home’ are two very important stories, deserving of a mention on the BBC News homepage under the banner ‘Must see’. But surely the huge gathering (100,000 in London alone, according to some) against the Government’s continued obsession with lockdowns deserves a sliver of attention. After all, the pro-Palestine protests have had their fair share of coverage.
At least when anti-lockdown protests were last omitted from the BBC’s ‘news’ bulletin, its ‘disinformation reporter’ was on hand to say the marchers were ‘heavily into fringe beliefs and online conspiracies’. An acknowledgement of sorts – but we didn’t even get that this time around!
It’s not just the BBC at fault. The Mail, Reuters (which, in fairness, did both cover the anti-vaccine passport protests in April) and other outlets have remained silent too. The most I have been able to find is one sentence on the Guardian’s ‘Coronavirus live’ page (probably one of the least-viewed pages on the site) pointing to a tweet from one of its reporters.
‘Several hundred’ people, according to this bright spark. Give me strength.
