When I saw a headline on BBC News entitled UK Asians ‘do not feel British’ I was pretty shocked – did a majority of UK Asians really not feel British? If so, this was cause for alarm. On reading the article though, things were much calmer:
Over a third of British Asians do not feel British, a BBC poll suggests.
The research for the Asian Network discovered 38% of the UK residents of South Asian origin polled felt only slightly or not at all British.
Over a third agreed that to get on in the UK they needed to be a “coconut”, a term for somebody who is “brown on the outside but white on the inside”.
Yet 84% are satisfied with life in Britain and almost half think they have more opportunities here.
So, despite that fact that while almost two thirds of UK Asians do feel British, the BBC sees fit to scaremonger with a title that suggests most UK Asians don’t. This is lazy and disappointing journalism. If the Daily Telegraph came out with a poll that revealed 38% of the British public hated the BBC – but 62% loved it – would BBC News write an article entitled ‘UK people ‘hate BBC”?
Who knows, maybe they’d be dumb enough to.
Update: The article was changed this morning, so that the headline reads ‘Many Asians ‘do not feel British’. It also notes that the survey was among under 34s only, and adds a pie-chart detailing the results. See screenshots of the article before and after the change.
I’m glad that it was changed quickly, but it’s still disappointing that the original article was written so poorly.
mssv 
