Through the medium that has come to define his presidency, with three tweets Donald Trump sent the world's media into a frenzy.



In a direct attack on four Congresswoman of colour this week, Trump — who is seeking re-election in 2020 — suggested that Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”.

His words — later co-opted by his supporters as a menacing “Send Her Back!” chant at one of his rallies — provoked a wave of abuse and death threats against Omar, the only politician of the group who wasn't born in the United States, and raised concerns for her safety.

Media outlets were forced to grapple with how it should approach its coverage of the racist remarks and the aftermath. Some responded with clear editorial direction, while others were criticised for tiptoeing around the issue.

The response from the BBC, Britain’s influential publicly funded broadcaster, was to try and keep out of the fight.

While the Washington Post’s editor Marty Baron wrote about why the newspaper would be calling the racist tweets “racist”, the New York Times was called out for a piece which referred to “Trump’s racially-infused politics”. It prompted Comedy Central’s Daily Show to make a “Trump Racist Euphemism Headline Generator” to mock the way some media outlets treated the story.

At the BBC, which has impartiality rules and a commitment to balance, executives decided against putting out any organisation-wide editorial advice. Instead, every programme and editor-journalist was entrusted to cover it as they saw fit.

“BBC News output has left the audience in no doubt about the nature of President Trump’s tweets and the reaction to them both in the US and in this country,” a BBC spokesperson told BuzzFeed News on Friday. “Editors and correspondents have made decisions in the normal way about how to describe the tweets and explain the wider political context.”

BBC viewers and listeners may have picked up on, or been confused by, the different ways the Trump story was reported across its TV, radio, and online platforms this week.

A listener to Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday morning would have heard presenter Nick Robinson refer to Trump’s “racially-charged tweets”. A viewer of the BBC TV’s News at 10 would see US correspondent Nick Bryant call it a “racist attack” linked to Trump’s white nationalism”. A visitor to the BBC News website, would have read the tweets were “widely called racist”.

Several of these instances drew immediate criticism from within the UK media. The Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabotty reacted to the BBC Today programme referring to the tweets as a “dog whistle” and “racially charged” by tweeting, “journalists should call things what they are”. The Muslim Council of Britain’s Miqdaad Versi said the BBC website’s decision to deploy quote marks around the word “racism” on its homepage was “extremely poor”.

