'He who laughs last...': News Knight criticised for Manning joke
Sir Trevor McDonald - the eponymous News Knight - has caused hundreds of complaints to be sent to ITV and Ofcom (1,2). In an item entitled 'This Week's Racist and Dead', he cracked: "this week it's fat, narrow-minded comic Bernard Manning. I never thought he was a racist. I just thought he was a fat white bastard". Manning's partner is said to have been "very shocked" while a friend considered the joke "appalling". Ofcom no doubt will try to keep a straight face when issuing its bulletin on the matter, but you have to laugh...
3 comments:
i suppose in that case i can call trevor a boring unfunny black bastard ...and get away with it.......ace !!!!!
As discussed more fully elsewhere (Can the 'n-word' ever be innocuous?), I take the view that discrimination / persecution based on race / gender / sexual orientation, religious-affiliation and the like is unacceptable, but that as far as the use of language is concerned, context is everything. I'd like to distance MediaPaL from any inference of racism that any reader draws in the instant case.
Ofcom subsequently cleared ITV of any wrongdoing - see:
ITV cleared over 'racist' joke
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