News values

A perpetual quetsch here is BBC News's fixation on United States news, in particular political news. (Conspiracy theorists may assert that we are being softened up for the Conservative project to join UK to the USA like a transatlantic Puerto Rico, debased farming standards and all.) Perhaps we should be grateful for any break from Auntie's obsession with "the coronavirus", but there are good BBC correspondents all over the world including places where important things are happening and they are not being made use of. There are rare exceptions. There was a fleeting reference to the internationally-recognised Libyan government turning the tide against an Egypt-backed rebellion and there will be a feature on Radio 4 later this week about the continuing locust threat.

It has long been known that there is an extraordinary civilian death toll as a result of police action in the USA. (There is a recent comparative analysis here.) The recent homicide of George Floyd is not even the most egregious. However, there is a movement behind the mass protests following the Minneapolis incident which has swept the world. The main reason is no doubt the wealth of good mobile phone footage which has been made available to the media. It seems that, if there are no pictures, there is no TV news report. It may even be that Minneapolis residents, aware of their police department's extraordinary record of complaints against officers, were prepared to capture a case of police brutality as soon as it occurred.

Even so, the coverage of not only the murder but also the George Floyd obsequies seems obsessive. It has served to push down the news running order the continuing danger which health workers in England and Wales, largely from ethnic minorities, have been put in because of poor planning before the Covid-19 emergency and poor management during it.