Calling for a sense of “perspective” and “proportionality” in coverage of British youth, the BBC’s Director-General, Mark Thompson, complained on Radio 4’s Today on Tuesday that you could get the impression from much media coverage that Britain was a “nightmare landscape of roving bands of drunken teenagers”.
The blunt truth is that, in certain parts of the country, the nightmare is all too real and the BBC has consistently under-reported it. Within 24 hours of Thompson’s interview the London Evening Standard was reporting that, in London alone, five children are injured in gun or knife attacks every day. “We know we have a challenge in youth crime,” said the head of the Metropolitan Police Violent Crime Unit, unveiling figures which showed that in an eight-month period 321 London children were injured in shootings.
Later on Wednesday, three teenagers were found guilty of murdering a man they kicked to death outside his home in Cheshire.
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