(LifeSiteNews) — In May, BBC boss Tim Davie announced in a speech that the British Broadcasting Corporation was ready to lead the way in rebuilding institutional trust by becoming a “global leader in trusted information” and “doubling down on impartiality, championing free, fair reporting alongside landmark investigative journalism, investing in BBC Verify and InDepth as well as increasing transparency and holding our nerve amidst culture wars.”
On July 21, the BBC ran this headline: “Wife killed husband with samurai sword, court told.” The report opened thusly:
A woman killed her husband with a samurai sword “stabbing and slicing him” more than 50 times before replacing the sword in its sheath on a stand, a court heard.
Joanna Rowland-Stuart, 71, was arrested and originally charged with murdering her husband Andrew Rowland-Stuart, 70, after he was pronounced dead at their home in Lavender Street in Brighton on 27 May 2024.
At Lewes Crown Court on Monday, the jury heard that Ms. Rowland-Stuart, who has been deemed unfit to plead, told police she had acted in self defence.
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It is in paragraph four that we discover that Rowland-Stuart is a man.
“Jurors heard that Ms. Rowland-Stuart, who is transgender, married Mr. Rowland Stuart, known as Andy, in a civil partnership in 2006,” the BBC reported. Its readers, however, did not hear that until we had heard Rowland-Stuart referred to as female five times (if you include the “Ms.” honorific).
Throughout their reportage, the BBC obediently referred to Rowland-Stuart as “she,” “her,” and “wife.” The real story – that a trans-identifying gay man butchered his partner – is thus obscured.
Joanna Rowland-Stuart was a man initially named John Stuart before he changed his identity; the court has since dubbed his samurai sword attack “unlawful.” The BBC, that “global leader in trusted information,” has attracted quite a bit of criticism for its decision to identify the killer as a “she.” According to the Telegraph:
A number of people contacted the BBC to complain. One wrote: “Using female pronouns to refer to a man is not accurate.” Another said: “The suspect is a man. When the public see the words ‘wife’ and ‘woman’ they will assume you mean an adult human female.”
In response, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit stated: “The BBC recognises the debate around sex and gender identity involves deeply held and sometimes conflicting views. The BBC’s approach, therefore, is to use terminology which is clear and appropriate to the context. Respecting an individual’s chosen gender identity does not mean the BBC is endorsing or supporting any side of the debate around transgender rights.” The ECU further noted that its decision to identify Rowland-Stuart as a woman was appropriate because the court had chosen to do so, as well.
Based on the response to the BBC’s article, it is fair to say, at the least, that their terminology was not “clear.”
Apparently what Tim Davie meant when he said that the BBC must “hold our nerve amidst the culture wars” was that gender ideology must be defended even as the transgender movement faces successive major defeats, from a U.K. government ban on puberty blockers for minors to the Supreme Court’s April ruling that the Equality Act’s use of the terms “woman” and “sex” “refer to a biological woman and biological sex” (as if there were any other kind, but we’ll take what we can get).
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The BBC and other mainstream media outlets have yet to recognize that the crisis of institutional trust has been, in large part, created by their acceptance of the premises of gender ideology. When they refer to male criminals as women, it instantly calls into question the rest of their coverage, because they are revealing that they interpret the world through a specifically ideological lens. When they deny that they are doing so, as the BBC did here, they compound the problem – because they reveal that they believe the premises of gender ideology are so uncontroversial that they are fundamentally a default position.
In fact, LifeSiteNews is one of the very few publications that refuses, as a matter of editorial policy, to refer to trans-identifying males as women or vice versa. To do so would be to fundamentally compromise the truth and thus invalidate the coverage. For readers to understand the story, they must be given the facts. And the fact is that Andrew Rowland-Stuart was killed by a man wielding a sword.
Until the BBC, and indeed the entire mainstream press, repudiate their adoption of gender ideology as a foundational premise of their coverage, they will not recover their credibility – and they do not deserve it.
