It seems that the world’s most pompous newspaper has got it wrong again. This column has regularly reported on the caricature of Britain which exists in the fevered imagination of the New York Times and its correspondents. According to them, the UK is a plague-riddled, rain-drenched fascistic hell-hole on the verge of democratic collapse where the trains don’t run on time and swamp-dwelling locals feast on legs of mutton. When it’s not denouncing Boris Johnson as a despot, it’s exploiting JK Rowling for subscribers or suggesting the UK’s vaccination plan amounts to pumping pensioners with a dangerous cocktail of Covid jabs.
The NYT was, until recently, headed by Mark Thompson, the former director-general of the BBC. Thompson, who served as the paper’s CEO between 2012 and 2020, (successfully) strived to increase global subscriptions – including, of course, in Britain. It seems that one strategy to achieve this goal has been to mirror what the Guardian did 15 years ago when it launched an online site, focused on America. By reflecting the fears of elite liberal opinion, the NYT has tapped into a lucrative market of fetishistic, self-loathing Brits, keen to read more about how their country is going to the dogs.
All the Brit-bashing makes for very entertaining reading – even if it makes a mockery of the paper’s new slogan ‘Independent journalism.’ Rarely though, does the paper admit that its coverage has been flawed: indeed its editors prefer to quietly correct their headlines once a piece has gone viral. But now the NYT’s podcast team has been forced to issue a humiliating correction on its controversial series on ‘Operation Trojan Horse’ about an alleged ‘Islamic plot’ to take over Birmingham schools in 2014. As part of its ‘investigation’, the NYT spoke to Richy Thompson of Humanists UK about the society’s role in passing on information from whistleblowers about issues of child safeguarding in Park View School to the relevant authorities.
Unfortunately for Thompson, the podcast team appear to have done something of a hatchet job on him. The hapless director was berated in one episode for not knowing sufficient details about the role of Humanists UK at the time of the 2014 scandal. These events of course take place five years before his 2019 interview. Judging by the correspondence now published online, the paper made little effort to warn or prepare him about the detail they wanted for their series. Thompson made clear to the presenters before the podcast aired that the Humanists independently corroborated the whistleblower accounts with other sources before publication. Yet the presenters alleged the Humanists published the claims without checking them.
Unsurprisingly, the Humanists have now published a 6,000 word online statement, demanding multiple corrections from ‘The Gray Lady.’ One has already been secured: in the original broadcast episode, the narrator claimed that: ‘Richy was dodging, equivocating. He said at some point, he was in touch with some other people from Park View, but wouldn’t tell us how many, or what they said.’ After the Humanists complained about misrepresentation, the NYT added an online correction:
An earlier version of this episode described incorrectly the details that Richy Thompson of Humanists UK disclosed about what he learned from sources at Park View School. Mr. Thompson said he talked to two or three other people who alleged instances of gender discrimination and homophobia at the school; it is not the case that he wouldn’t tell us how many, or what they said.
So, to be clear, he didn’t ‘dodge’ or ‘equivocate’ at all. And as the Humanists point out ‘this does not explain what was said originally in the podcast, so it is not possible to see how badly the podcast misrepresented the situation.’ Listeners are left with the impression that both the whistleblowers and the Humanists were motivated by Islamophobia, and so we should ignore what they have to say. Never mind the fact that the several inquiries into Trojan Horse draw on a multitude of other whistleblowers, including Muslim women. As Sonia Sodha of the Observer has pointed out:
This grossly understates the risks children were exposed to, with real consequences. One teacher implicated in the sex education lesson was later convicted for sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl he referred to as his ‘wife’.
There are other, er, creative liberties in the NYT’s narrative of the interview. At one point, for instance, the NYT podcast says the Humanist director ‘walked stricken from the room’. Unfortunately for the podcast team, the Humanists also recorded the interview too and the tape shows him returning to the room 47 seconds later and carrying on the conversation. Awkward.
Will this latest embarrassment force the NYT to upgrade its UK reporting? Mr S won’t be holding his breath.
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