Saturday, October 20, 2012

Lately Newsround has been pretty good on covering racism stories. On Wednesday at 5pm, for example, it was introduced by Leah and Ricky -

Leah: It's Wednesday 17th October. I'm Leah and this is Ricky.

Ricky: You're live with Newsround. On today's show - Racism rears its ugly head in football once again. ....

Yesterday, the 8.17am bulletin began with the news about Jason Roberts telling footballers to protest against the lack of action to combat racism in the sport -

Leah: A top Premier League striker's urging black players to stop wearing 'Kick Racism Out Of Football' T-shirts during warm-ups for this weekend's games. Reading's Jason Roberts says he's ditching the T-shirts in protest at the organisation not taking a stronger stance against John Terry. The Chelsea captain accepted a four match ban for abusing Rio Ferdinand's brother Anton, yesterday.

Jason Roberts: The players are very frustrated. And, you know, if you're asking me, if players ask me about it and wearing T-shirts, they have. And I can only speak for myself - I find it very hard to wear a T-Shirt and to hold a banner after what's happened last year.

Although the John Terry racism story grew during the day, for some reason Newsround chose not to revisit the issue, either on the later TV bulletins or on their website. Two interesting developments were Roberto Di Matteo's coyness on John Terry's captaincy and Sir Alex Ferguson saying he disagreed with Jason Roberts. In the normal course of events football managers are freely given air time on Newsround, so it was doubly strange that this wasn't covered. But then it has always been difficult to fathom BBC editorial judgement.

Today, Newsround mentioned that Chelsea have "taken firm disciplinary action" against John Terry.

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