In the early hours of Thursday a huge fire engulfed a building site in Peckham, in south east London. It quickly spread to the flats nearby where hundreds of people had to be evacuated, many in their nightclothes. A large number of these flats were badly damaged or destroyed.
By midnight the story had disappeared from BBC radio news. This morning, my "quality" newspaper, The Guardian, made no mention of it at all.
It found room for the problems in the playground of the rich, Dubai. It managed to dedicate half a page to this dreadful Belle de Jour woman. Not even half a column inch for Peckham.
The floods in Cumbria a week ago are still in the news. Peckham hasn't even made it in.
Peckham is a deprived and densely populated inner city area with a multi-cultural population.
Make of it what you will.
Thankfully - and miraculously - no one died.
... but some have been hospitalised from breathing in smoke - apparently it was an accident waiting to happen because they were timberbuilt
ReplyDeleteactually i just saw Belle de Jour (Dr Brooke Magnanti) interviewed on The Book Show - a very intelligent and eloquent woman
what do i make of it - i'm not saying it's right, but likely 'cos it's just a localised incident
There was a small article in The Sun but nothing much. It was the lead story on BBC breakfast yesterday, but I don't think they mentioned it this morning. I put it down to it being because it was local to London and assumed it was being covered more there.
ReplyDeleteMaybe there just wasn't enough tragedy in this story for the reporters to lick their chops over. Perhaps if there had been a hundred fatalities, they would have given the story more coverage. Very sad, but that's my guess.
ReplyDeleteWe were getting live coverage on the television news reports.
ReplyDeleteI think snark it the nail on the head.......
ReplyDeleteI often wonder why some kidnapped children stories grip the nation and others go unnoticed except by the local press.
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