A report which appeared on the BBC News website’s ‘Lancashire’ page on January 4th caused something of a stir on social media.
The opening lines of the original version of that report by Lynette Horsburgh and Abbie Jones – titled ‘Sir Nicholas Winton: Woman saved by Holocaust hero praises new film’ and tagged ‘The Holocaust’ – read as follows:
On January 5th – apparently in light of the criticism on social media – an amendment was made.
As other social media users pointed out, in 2015 the BBC produced a report about Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines in which she was described as “one of 669 mostly Jewish children who escaped on a train in 1939 before arriving in London”. In 2009 the BBC had described her as “one of 669 Jewish children living in Czechoslovakia who escaped from the Nazis in 1939”. A 2015 BBC report concerning the death of Sir Nicholas Winton noted that “Sir Nicholas, then a stockbroker, arranged for trains to carry Jewish children out of occupied Prague”.
In other words, all the writers of this report had to do in order to avoid the omission of crucial historical fact regarding the identity of the “young refugees from German-occupied Czechoslovakia” was to take a quick look at previous BBC reporting.
