Readers may have recently seen the BBC article of the disproportionate impact suicide has on men, and I expect many were as confused by their coverage as I was. Although the article seemed to imply that thing had got worse for men, it also prominently stated that the rate of male suicide was "more than double" that of females.

Anyone with even a passing interest in such issues surely knows by now that men commit suicide at at least three times the rate of females in the vast majority of countries, with such contrasts especially common in reasonably "developed" countries. Therefore upon reading the article, one assumes the situation in the UK has much improved for men or that women have started committing suicide in much larger numbers than previously.

Hidden deeper in the article are the actual suicide figures for males and females, 4,552 men and 1,493 women, meaning the correct statement is "more than treble". The clear implication of the BBC using the statement "more than double" is that the quantity in question is NOT three times the rate, nor even approaching it, never mind more than this. Thus the BBC clearly downplayed the plight of men and misled viwers on the scale of the gender gaps in suicide rates.

In fairness to the BBC I contacted their correspondent Clive Coleman about his article, and it was fixed within two hours of my complaint. The excellent Newsniffer site shows us the history of the changes regrettably, Clive didn't bother to thank me for helping tackle BBC bias, nor apologise, nor even acknowledge my complaint (other than fixing the article), thus I'm exposing the history what occurred here for all to see. This is far from the first time I've successfully complained about BBC's gender feminist bias in an article, for example their horrific smear of Dominic Raab was even more disturbing case.

I strongly encourage others to contact BBC staff directly about their bias when possible, the format for email address is firstname.lastname@bbc.co.uk

Update - it's all worth noting that it's also misleading for the BBC to focus the begining of the article and gender differences on the raw figures for suicide, it's the suicide rate that is the key. There are almost 1.4 million more females than males aged 15+ in the UK (partly due to so many men killing themsleves), so whilst the raw figures for males are barely more than three times that of females, the actual rate is more comfortably exceeds three fold due to the female deaths being spread over a significantly larger population.

by John Kimble