Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Gay or lesbian swan

Lizo was presenting Newsround on Friday 10 November. The fifth story that day asked what people look for in a girlfriend, before talking about a swan called Peter who seems to have fallen for a large swan shaped pedalo boat.

Now have a look at the web report of the story. Someone responsible for the webpage must have decided that the much larger "swan" looks rather masculine so must be a boy swan. And that means Peter must obviously be a girl swan. After all, gay swans are no more welcome on Newsround than any stories about gay animals or gay humans. Newsround does, however, like to report stories about animals falling head over heels in love with inanimate objects such as petrol pumps.
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Newsround stories

Newsround has covered around 540 stories on the weekday CBBC1 programmes between Wednesday 14 June - Friday 13 October 2006. The stories are broken down into eight categories:

Main news 15.8%
Kids/school news 15.4%
Sports news 19.1%
Celeb,music,films arts 20.8%
Environmental,climate 13.8%
Animals 6.6%
Sci/tech 5.7%
Other 2.8%

Stories about, or touching on 'bullying'- 30 June, 25 July (cyberbullying)
29 August (ChildLine), 14 September (animal bullying behaviour)

None of the programmes mentioned lgbt issues. As a result the ChildLine story was misreported.
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Newsround-bias blog hopes that Michael Grade will ensure that ITV remains forward-looking and inclusive.

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