You could be forgiven for assuming that the Fawcett Society has full editorial control of the BBC flagship news programme Newsnight. The latest episode finished about two hours ago:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03pdgth/Newsnight_07_01_2014/

Around half the programme consisted of pieces that must have had gender feminists cackling over their cauldrons. The first piece (1:12 – 11:10) covers the story about the man and woman who pleaded guilty today to sending threatening tweets to Caroline Criado-Perez, and Jeremy Paxman interviews her at length. Needless to say she takes the opportunity to trot out her tedious misogynistic / sexist society speech we’ve heard so many times before, with nobody presenting counter-arguments.

But it was the second piece (22:08 – 33:54) that got a number of supporters and myself hopping mad. Newsnight has a long track record of following gender feminist narratives on domestic abuse/violence (DV) being solely (or overwhelmingly) a male-on-female phenomenon. And so it was again in this programme. Maybe to give some pretence of balance, one of Paxman’s interviewees was a man, but he kept to the same feminist narrative line, presumably because – on the evidence of this piece, anyway – his charity gets its income from supporting female victims and/or seeking to change the behaviours of male perpetrators. Then we had Polly Neate of Woman’s Aid who – of course – also never mentioned female perpetrators or male victims. Not one mention was made in the almost 12 minute long piece about most domestic abuse being reciprocal, or that in 70% of cases of uni-directional DV, the perpetrators are women.

We’re going to file an official complaint against the BBC in relation to the relentlessly biased coverage of DV on Newsnight. We have videos from previous episodes on our YouTube channel.

I end the day (1:40 am) with a request for donations. We’re putting more effort than ever into our work, and it would be good to get more contributions for the cost of my flights (£800 – £1,000) to and from Detroit in late June, where I’ve been asked to give a presentation about our work and strategies to the first international conference on men’s issues. You can make a donation here http://j4mb.org.uk/donate.

Thank you for your support.

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