James Kirkup James Kirkup

The BBC’s failure to report gender identity accurately

‘Blackpool woman accessed child abuse images in hospital bed’.

It’s a good headline, in that it catches your attention.

But there are two things making it an effective headline, at least in the sense that it gets attention. One is the notion of someone looking at child porn in a hospital – that’s a shocking thing, and as they sometimes say in American journalism schools, ‘news is a surprise.’

The other important part of the headline is the word ‘woman’. We don’t often associate women with crimes like viewing images of child abuse; the idea of a woman doing so has a bit of ‘man bites dog’ news surprise to it.

So, I can see how the BBC News website editors decided on that headline for a report about Julia Marshall who, on 14th July, was sentenced to nine months in jail over what a judge called a ‘vast’ collection of over 80,000 child abuse images.

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