There was outrage and heartbreak in the United Kingdom last month upon the government's release of the Rotherham report, documenting in sordid and saddening detail the politically correct cover-up of mass sexual abuse and violence against children in the northern English town. Over a 16-year period, at least 1,400 children as young as 11 were groomed for sexual exploitation and gang rape by Muslims of Pakistani heritage, while local police and social workers looked the other way. The Media Research Center documented how the U.S. media have done the same thing, while also engaging in religious double standards.
But an interview with the reporter who first broke the scandal revealed that it could well have remained buried because of its inconvenience to progressive politics. Times of London reporter Andrew Norfolk first had to get over his misgivings that the awful facts of the Rotherham sex abuse would "be a dream story for the far right" in England, which has long criticized the lack of assimilation by newer Muslim immigrants.
The New York Times, one of the few U.S. media outlets to cover the story at all, reported in late August that worries about career-killings accusations of racism resulted in the abuse scandal being allowed to fester for over a decade -- though the paper predictably skipped the religious identity of the perpetrators:
The vast majority of perpetrators have been identified as South Asian and most victims were young white girls, adding to the complexity of the case. Some officials appeared to believe that social workers pointing to a pattern of sexual exploitation were exaggerating, while others reportedly worried about being accused of racism if they spoke out.
Related fears also touched Norfolk, the very reporter who in 2010 broke the story that led to the government's shocking Rotherham report. He unwittingly revealed how hard it is to move stories that make racially sensitive liberals queasy in a September 29 interview with the left-wing Guardian newspaper. Norfolk is characterized as an old-fashioned shoe-leather reporter, yet he confessed that he had to push himself to take up the sex-abuse story.
He admits that when he first heard details of the allegations by mainly white girls against largely British-Pakistani perpetrators -- during a speech by Labour MP Ann Cryer -- he didn’t want to follow it up. “Immediately I thought this is a dream story for the far right,” he says. Yet as soon as he started investigating in the autumn of 2010 he knew he would have to report on it: “We found clear evidence of a crime pattern that was not being acknowledged or addressed and which was having the most devastating impact on some of the most vulnerable, innocent people in our society.”
Indeed, although Norfolk eventually won plaudits for his stubborn coverage, his mindset is widespread in a media environment both in the U.S. and the U.K., where reporting on scandals inconvenient to the progressive worldview is either passively or actively discouraged, either through the failure of other media outlets to pick up the story, or outright censorship.
The Guardian showed its own labeling slant, pitting the "far right" versus supposedly un-ideological critics who tried to change the subject from one inconvenient to left-wing multi-culturalism.
After the first splash and four-page special appeared in January 2011, prompting the government inquiry, he was attacked both by those who felt he was unfairly targeting a minority community when the majority of sexual crime is carried out by white men and by those on the far right who felt he should write more about anti-white racism, two of whom wrote to tell him they wished him dead.
